How do you diagram a Cloudflare Workers architecture?

This is the shape of a full application on Cloudflare’s developer platform. The Browser loads the static half from Pages, the dynamic half runs in Workers, and each request touches one of three stores: KV for config and sessions, R2 for objects, D1 for relational data.

The pipes carry the argument. A Worker does not fan out to every store on every request; it reads the one the request needs. Watch two passes of the animation and a different branch lights each time, which is the round-robin a choice plays. Braces would draw a broadcast, and that is the most common way an edge-architecture diagram overstates what a request costs.

The second line is the reply. Workers -> Browser retraces the route back through Pages rather than drawing one long arrow home, so the outbound request finishes before the response starts its way back. Order is the thing an edge diagram most needs to show, because the entire pitch of this platform is what happens between those two passes.

What the diagram cannot claim: geography. Workers run in hundreds of locations and this drawing has no way to say so. Every box here exists once, while the real deployment exists everywhere. The animation shows the request’s order, not its distance. If the reason you chose Cloudflare is the map, no flow diagram will show you the map.

Also not drawn: a Durable Object coordinating stateful work, and a Cloudflare Tunnel reaching back into private infrastructure. Both have icons and both draw. They are left out because this page shows the request path of the common case, and the common case is stateless.