Cloudflare DO Facets in practice: cold-wake and boundary cost
Cloudflare's Durable Object Facets shipped on April 13, 2026[^beta]. Cloudflare's framing is that they're "essentially free." That's accurate at the infrastructure layer — same V8 isolate as the parent DO, no extra billing line, no separate Worker. However, from the cold-wake and per-call latency perspectives, it's not zero, and I needed to know by how much.
While building Nebula, I wanted to host a per-tenant typia parse-validator close to each tenant's write DO. Facets were the obvious choice, but I wanted real numbers before committing. This post is what I measured: cold-wake contribution and warm RPC boundary cost. For the non-facets-related benchmarking results — throughput, gate semantics, and what I had to unlearn about Durable Objects under load — see the companion post: What I got wrong about Durable Object throughput.
