Multi-Tenant Telemetry at the Edge: A Cloudflare Workers Architecture

How we built a globally distributed, multi-tenant telemetry ingestion pipeline using Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects, and OTLP-compatible endpoints.

The Challenge

Building a telemetry platform that serves multiple tenants with:

• **Global low-latency ingestion** - logs from edge locations worldwide
• **Tenant isolation** - no data leakage between tenants
• **Scalability** - handle burst traffic without cold starts
• **Cost efficiency** - pay only for what you use

Architecture Overview

Our edge ingestion layer runs on Cloudflare Workers with:

1. **Workers for HTTP/OTLP ingestion** - receives logs via HTTP or OTLP protocol
2. **Durable Objects for tenant state** - tracks per-tenant rate limits and configuration
3. **Queues for processing** - decouples ingestion from processing
4. **R2 for log buffering** - temporary storage before downstream processing

Key Design Decisions

OTLP Compatibility

We implemented OTLP HTTP/JSON support directly in Workers, so existing instrumentation libraries work without modification. This was critical for adoption.

Tenant Isolation via Durable Objects

Each tenant gets a Durable Object that: - Enforces rate limits - Validates API keys - Maintains tenant-specific configuration

Edge-Native Processing

Heavy processing (parsing, enrichment) happens in the next layer. Edge Workers focus on: - Fast acknowledgment - Tenant routing - Basic validation

Results

• **P99 ingestion latency**: <50ms globally
• **Tenant isolation**: 100% - no cross-tenant data access
• **Cost**: 10x cheaper than centralized ingestion for our workload