Memory costs are increasing dramatically. Both RAM and hard disk drive prices have exploded over the past year. At Cloudflare, we run several massively distributed storage products (including our famous CDN) that rely on making efficient use of the memory we have deployed so we can continue to serve all of our customers. With this in mind, we prototyped a way to expand effective cache capacity. By encoding eligible assets with Zstandard inside Pingora , the architecture trades a minor CPU increase for significant storage and cross-data center bandwidth savings. We have been prototyping a system called Cache Transcoding, which I built during my internship at Cloudflare as part of the 1.1.1.1 Intern Program . When an eligible response enters the cache, we encode it using Zstandard, or zstd, before writing it to disk. We keep that compressed form while the asset lives in the cache and moves between data centers via Tiered Cache , then decode it before serving the response to the client.…