What’s missed from the post is that Cloudflare for many years now has felt that they are a “Cloud 2.0” company.
And AWS/GCP/etc are “Cloud 1.0”.
They believe that AI Agent will fundamentally change the internet, and it’s hard to fault them for seeing it that way when their own stats shows that bot/agents account for the majority of Internet traffic.
As such, going all in on AI fits into their thesis of being “Cloud 2.0”.
alberth
Hard disagree. Sure their docs are bad, and it's sometimes buggy. But to me cloudflare is actually innovating and trying to offer "new" infrastructure. Durable objects and workers are super cool. R2 has free egress, isn't it insane that they could pull that off?
If what you want is a VM to run postgres then there are other offerings that would be much better.
Not saying they aren't evil though, they probably are, but the infra stuff is cool.
aleda145
> There was a time Cloudflare just made the internet better
There wasn't. Cloudflare is a cancer grown too big. And it was always positioned to become one, the middleman between users and the Internet.
It is already painful to browse web sometimes using the non-"standard" tools (that is, not a Chrome with Google account signed in, not an EU/US residential IP). What if tomorrow Cloudflare checks will require attested and signed browser binaries?
reisse
I think like with most large companies that still ship new stuff:
it gets a bit more complex for customers to figure out what the good nuggets are and what to ignore for now
same @ google, aws and so on
(I usually rely on opinions of people i trust to find the 'javascript — the good parts' version of large offerings)
the other extreme would be not to try and ship new stuff which is also risky
difficult to find a balance and probably a good idea to over-index on momentum and new stuff
while investing enough in hardening and improving the stuff that sticks
tosh
> Examples? Ok -> Let us look at data storage.
> They got D1 (SQLite serverless), Durable Objects with their own SQLite, KV, R2, Queues, and Hyperdrive to speed up external Postgres or MySQL.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't see this as confusing:
- D1 is SQLite on cloud, their go-to relational database
- Durable object is the cousin of durable execution (via actor model instead of saga)
- KV is for caching like Redis (sub-ms read latency)
- R2 is S3, R2 SQL is Iceberg + Athena (for OLAP queries)
- Queue is SQS
- Hyperdrive is bridge to allow CF worker to use native Postgres/MySQL driver (since v8 isolate cannot maintain persistent connection)
I've built some stuff on top of CF, and the data ecosystem is actually useful.
hasyimibhar
I have to say: Yes, there is a lot of velocity from Cloudflare pushing out AI-adjacent features as of late.
But also: What they've doing with Workers et al. has made them a platform for fully-fledged apps and deployments. I personally love the ecosystem and use it for all of my projects now. It's like the perfect blend of ease-of-use and DX of Heroku, and breadth of services of AWS / GCP. Well, maybe not quite AWS or GCP, but that's kind of the point -- they've created an opinionated system of "objects" that are all highly extensible to the point where in my opinion you can pretty much deploy anything you want on it.
It took me a bit of time to learn the "Cloudflare way" of doing things, but once I started making on it I saw just how flexible (and low cost!) everything is.
sarreph
It sounds like a blog post in support of a slowdown for product releases. But the reality is there are multiple companies trying to capture the attention of the same market.
Maybe 2 years ago it would’ve been acceptable to release the product internally, slowly add features, dogfood it, then open to public a year later. But now someone else will release the same product within a month, get sticky customers, and most likely won’t switch.
It’s much easier and faster to release features, so once anyone sees a competition gaining some attention, they just copy the same feature. Which, i think, is fair.
It’s easy to blame the org, but the market is extremely competitive right now. Kind of race to the bottom, except the hardware parts, which have different constraints right now.
tokioyoyo
This is definitely as opinionated as an opinion piece can go. Worth mentioning I don't use CF anywhere or care about it... but my employer does.
I can really only remember one catastrophic outage. It involved some part of CF that had no redundancy, and the incident was followed by a pretty whiny blog about a data center.
That's pretty much it. There were other minor outages but I'm not aware that it affected business.
Despite the disclaimer I think the author should explain precisely how "AI product mindset" or whatever is actually translating to bad outcomes.
nzeid
> Too many ways to do the same thing, none of them great
They want to eat at the AI table, given that they are not producing models or GPUs and not building datacentres, they try with the product. But we are still in the early stage so it's not clear what will work and what not, so they have to try as much as possible.
vb-8448
Great read. Exact pinpointing of my feelings about CF lately.
comments (10)
And AWS/GCP/etc are “Cloud 1.0”.
They believe that AI Agent will fundamentally change the internet, and it’s hard to fault them for seeing it that way when their own stats shows that bot/agents account for the majority of Internet traffic.
As such, going all in on AI fits into their thesis of being “Cloud 2.0”.
alberth
If what you want is a VM to run postgres then there are other offerings that would be much better.
Not saying they aren't evil though, they probably are, but the infra stuff is cool.
aleda145
There wasn't. Cloudflare is a cancer grown too big. And it was always positioned to become one, the middleman between users and the Internet.
It is already painful to browse web sometimes using the non-"standard" tools (that is, not a Chrome with Google account signed in, not an EU/US residential IP). What if tomorrow Cloudflare checks will require attested and signed browser binaries?
reisse
it gets a bit more complex for customers to figure out what the good nuggets are and what to ignore for now
same @ google, aws and so on
(I usually rely on opinions of people i trust to find the 'javascript — the good parts' version of large offerings)
the other extreme would be not to try and ship new stuff which is also risky
difficult to find a balance and probably a good idea to over-index on momentum and new stuff
while investing enough in hardening and improving the stuff that sticks
tosh
> They got D1 (SQLite serverless), Durable Objects with their own SQLite, KV, R2, Queues, and Hyperdrive to speed up external Postgres or MySQL.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't see this as confusing:
- D1 is SQLite on cloud, their go-to relational database
- Durable object is the cousin of durable execution (via actor model instead of saga)
- KV is for caching like Redis (sub-ms read latency)
- R2 is S3, R2 SQL is Iceberg + Athena (for OLAP queries)
- Queue is SQS
- Hyperdrive is bridge to allow CF worker to use native Postgres/MySQL driver (since v8 isolate cannot maintain persistent connection)
I've built some stuff on top of CF, and the data ecosystem is actually useful.
hasyimibhar
But also: What they've doing with Workers et al. has made them a platform for fully-fledged apps and deployments. I personally love the ecosystem and use it for all of my projects now. It's like the perfect blend of ease-of-use and DX of Heroku, and breadth of services of AWS / GCP. Well, maybe not quite AWS or GCP, but that's kind of the point -- they've created an opinionated system of "objects" that are all highly extensible to the point where in my opinion you can pretty much deploy anything you want on it.
It took me a bit of time to learn the "Cloudflare way" of doing things, but once I started making on it I saw just how flexible (and low cost!) everything is.
sarreph
Maybe 2 years ago it would’ve been acceptable to release the product internally, slowly add features, dogfood it, then open to public a year later. But now someone else will release the same product within a month, get sticky customers, and most likely won’t switch.
It’s much easier and faster to release features, so once anyone sees a competition gaining some attention, they just copy the same feature. Which, i think, is fair.
It’s easy to blame the org, but the market is extremely competitive right now. Kind of race to the bottom, except the hardware parts, which have different constraints right now.
tokioyoyo
I can really only remember one catastrophic outage. It involved some part of CF that had no redundancy, and the incident was followed by a pretty whiny blog about a data center.
That's pretty much it. There were other minor outages but I'm not aware that it affected business.
Despite the disclaimer I think the author should explain precisely how "AI product mindset" or whatever is actually translating to bad outcomes.
nzeid
They want to eat at the AI table, given that they are not producing models or GPUs and not building datacentres, they try with the product. But we are still in the early stage so it's not clear what will work and what not, so they have to try as much as possible.
vb-8448
decide1000