We could save petabytes of cache storage with Zstandard and Pingora

Cloudflare is implementing a Cache Transcoding system using Zstandard compression within its Pingora proxy to reduce storage and bandwidth costs across its CDN infrastructure. By compressing eligible text-based assets (HTML, JSON, CSS, JavaScript) before storing them in cache, the system achieves an average reduction to one-third of original size with minimal CPU overhead, translating to petabytes of effective additional cache capacity. The compressed assets remain in that form while moving between data centers and are only decompressed when served to clients, creating ongoing storage and bandwidth savings with a one-time encoding cost.