Cloudflare Workers and Containers add inbound TCP connections and gRPC support

Cloudflare has added inbound TCP connections and gRPC support to Workers and Cloudflare Containers for Agents Week. The new features are currently available in private beta, accessible via application.

The key features are as follows.

• connect(socket): In the Workers runtime, you can directly receive inbound TCP sockets forwarded by Spectrum and read from or write to them.
• Bidirectional connection with Containers: A Worker can forward a socket through a Durable Object to a container's gRPC server, supporting full bidirectional, full-duplex communication.
• Providing and calling gRPC APIs: Workers can provide unary and server-streaming gRPC APIs or call gRPC servers. Developers write code using gRPC-Web, and Cloudflare automatically converts the requests into gRPC format.

Sockets can be forwarded between Workers or between a Worker and a Durable Object. A Durable Object can connect this to its own container's TCP port, controlling the entire network path from client to server.

This expansion targets applications where latency between the client, model, and support services is critical, such as real-time voice assistants and AI-based dictation. gRPC is an RPC framework based on HTTP/2 and TCP, widely used in such real-time infrastructure.