In 2011 we launched the Cloudflare Apps platform in an article that described Cloudflare as “not ... the sexiest business in the world.” Sexy or not, Cloudflare has since grown from the 3.5 billion pageviews a month we were doing then to over 1.3 trillion per month today. Along the way, we’ve powered more than a million app installations onto our customer’s websites.
For the last 6 years Cloudflare has been focused on building one of the world’s largest networks. The importance of that work has not left as much time as we would have liked to improve our app platform. With just 21 apps, we knew we were not delivering all that our marketplace could offer.
About six months ago, we were introduced to the team at Eager. Eager was building its own app store for installation onto any website. They impressed us with their ability to enable even the most non-technical website owner to install powerful tools to improve their sites through a slick interface. Eager’s platform included the features we wanted in our marketplace, like the ability to preview an app on a user's site before installing it. Even better, Eager had a powerful app creation SDK that made it easy for developers to create new apps.
Eager’s co-founders, Zack Bloom and Adam Schwartz, have impressive experience building the very type of tools they are looking to help users install. Together they’ve built projects that have earned more than 60,000 stars on GitHub (a strong measure of a project’s popularity). Initially we considered integrating Eager’s product through a partnership, but it quickly became apparent that we didn’t just want to partner with them, we wanted to join forces. Today we’re excited to formally announce that Eager has become a part of Cloudflare.
Eager has focused on making things simple for a non-technical audience, but the team is entirely technical, composed of engineers and designers. All of the team members have joined Cloudflare to form the core of the new Cloudflare App development team. They are already integrating Eager’s app store into Cloudflare, replacing our current app marketplace with a next-generation app platform. We plan on growing this team in the coming months as we invest more heavily in this part of our business.
While a handful of outdated apps will be discontinued, the majority of current Cloudflare marketplace installations will be migrated onto our new platform, seamlessly. A developer preview of the new app store will begin for app creators in January of next year, let us know if you‘d like more information. The app platform itself will be released to our customers in April of next year and we couldn’t be more excited.
Starting today, Eager will begin to sunset its current platform, but apps previously installed on customer sites will continue to function indefinitely. The Eager website will be spun down in early 2017, with its users invited to migrate to the Cloudflare platform.