Cloudflare Makes Pingora Rust Framework Open-Source

Back in 2022 Cloudflare announced they were ditching Nginx for an in-house, Rust-written software called Pingora. Today Cloudflare is open-sourcing the Pingora framework.

Cloudflare announced today that they have open-sourced Pingora under an Apache 2.0 license. Pingora is a Rust async multi-threaded framework for building programmable network services. Pingora has long been used internally within Cloudflare and is capable of sustaining a lot of traffic while now Pingora is being open-sourced for helping to build infrastructure outside of Cloudflare.

The Pingora framework is described by Cloudflare as:

"Pingora provides libraries and APIs to build services on top of HTTP/1 and HTTP/2, TLS, or just TCP/UDP. As a proxy, it supports HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 end-to-end, gRPC, and websocket proxying. (HTTP/3 support is on the roadmap.) It also comes with customizable load balancing and failover strategies. For compliance and security, it supports both the commonly used OpenSSL and BoringSSL libraries, which come with FIPS compliance and post-quantum crypto.

Besides providing these features, Pingora provides filters and callbacks to allow its users to fully customize how the service should process, transform and forward the requests. These APIs will be especially familiar to OpenResty and NGINX users, as many map intuitively onto OpenResty's "*_by_lua" callbacks.

Operationally, Pingora provides zero downtime graceful restarts to upgrade itself without dropping a single incoming request. Syslog, Prometheus, Sentry, OpenTelemetry and other must-have observability tools are also easily integrated with Pingora as well."

Cloudflare's announcement of Pingora going open-source includes an example as well for building a load balancer using it. Pingora in its pre-1.0 phase does not yet have API stability and Cloudflare currently has no plans for non-Unix based operating system support.

The Pingora Rust code is available on GitHub.