This post is also available in 简体中文, 繁體中文, 한국어 and 日本語.
Forrester’s New Wave for Edge Development Platforms has just been announced. We’re thrilled that they have named Cloudflare a leader (you can download a complimentary copy of the report here).
Since the very beginning, Cloudflare has sought to help developers building on the web, and since the introduction of Workers in 2017, Cloudflare has enabled developers to deploy their applications to the edge itself.
According to the report by Forrester Vice President, Principal Analyst, Jeffrey Hammond, Cloudflare “offers strong compute, data services and web development capabilities. Alongside Workers, Workers KV adds edge data storage. Pages, Stream and Images provide higher level platform services for modern web workloads. Cloudflare has an intuitive developer experience, fast, global deployment of updated code, and minimal cold start times.”
Reimagining development for the modern web
Building on the web has come a long way. The idea that one might have to buy a physical machine in order to build a website seems incomprehensible now. The cloud has played a major role in making it easier for developers to get started. However, since the advent of the cloud, things have stalled — and innovation has become more incremental. That means that while developers don’t have to think about buying a server, they’re still tasked with thinking about where in the world it is, how to add concurrency to handle increasing traffic, and how to make them secure.
We wanted to abstract that all away. Our aim: to reimagine what things might look like if developers could truly just think about the application they wanted to build. Leaving the scaling, speed, and even compliance, to us.
Of course, reimagining things is always scary. There’s no guarantee that taking a new approach is going to work — it usually requires a leap of faith.
It’s been gratifying to see developers flock to our platform — and the applications they’ve been able to build, free of scalability and latency constraints, have been phenomenal.
It’s also gratifying to be named a Leader in Edge Development Platforms by Forrester — one of the preeminent analyst firms in the industry. We feel it really does provide industry recognition to the approach we bet on four years ago.
Cloudflare is the most differentiated among all the vendors evaluated
We received a differentiated rating in the following criteria:
- Developer experience
- Programming model
- Platform execution model
- “Day 2+” experience
- Integrations
- Roadmap
- Vision
- Market approach
While being able to build our platform atop Cloudflare’s network gave us an advantage in eliminating latency from the start, we knew that wasn’t enough to compel developers to think in a new way. Since the release of Workers, we have relentlessly focused on making the experience of building a new application as easy as possible at every step of the way: from onboarding, through day 2, and beyond.
This approach extends beyond tooling, and to how we think about additional services developers need in order to complete their applications. For example, in thinking about providing data solutions on the edge, we again wanted to make the distributed nature of the system just work, rather than making developers think about it, which is what led us to develop Durable Objects. With Durable Objects, Cloudflare can make intelligent decisions about where to store the data based on access patterns (or compliance — whichever is most important to the developer), rather than forcing the developer to think about regions.
As we expand our offering, it’s important to us that it continues to be intuitive and easy for developers to solve problems.
We’re just getting started
But, we’re not stopping here. As our cofounder Michelle likes to say, we’re just getting started. We recognize this is just the beginning of the journey to bring the full stack to the edge. We have some exciting announcements coming in the next couple of weeks — stay tuned!