At Cloudflare, we believe in the power of open source. It’s more than just code, it’s the spirit of collaboration, innovation, and shared knowledge that drives the Internet forward. Open source is the foundation upon which the Internet thrives, allowing developers and creators from around the world to contribute to a greater whole.
But oftentimes, open source maintainers struggle with the costs associated with running their projects and providing access to users all over the world. We’ve had the privilege of supporting incredible open source projects such as Git and the Linux Foundation through our open source program and learned first-hand about the places where Cloudflare can help the most.
Today, we're introducing a streamlined and expanded open source program: Project Alexandria. The ancient city of Alexandria is known for hosting a prolific library and a lighthouse that was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The Lighthouse of Alexandria served as a beacon of culture and community, welcoming people from afar into the city. We think Alexandria is a great metaphor for the role open source projects play as a beacon for developers around the world and a source of knowledge that is core to making a better Internet.
This project offers recurring annual credits to even more open source projects to provide our products for free. In the past, we offered an upgrade to our Pro plan, but now we’re offering upgrades tailored to the size and needs of each project, along with access to a broader range of products like Workers, Pages, and more. Our goal with Project Alexandria is to ensure every OSS project not only survives but thrives, with access to Cloudflare’s enhanced security, performance optimization, and developer tools — all at no cost.
Building a program based on your needs
We realize that open source projects have different needs. Some projects, like package repositories, may be most concerned about storage and transfer costs. Other projects need help protecting them from DDoS attacks. And some projects need a robust developer platform to enable them to quickly build and deploy scalable and secure applications.
With our new program we’ll work with your project to help unlock the following based on your needs:
An upgrade to a Cloudflare Pro, Business, or Enterprise plan, which will give you more flexibility with more Cloudflare Rules to manage traffic with, Image Optimization with Polish to accelerate the speed of image downloads, and enhanced security with Web Application Firewall (WAF), Security Analytics, and Page Shield, to protect projects from potential threats and vulnerabilities.
Increased requests to Cloudflare Workers and Pages, allowing you to handle more traffic and scale your applications globally.
Increased R2 storage for builds and artifacts, ensuring you have the space needed to store and access your project’s assets efficiently.
Enhanced Zero Trust access, including Remote Browser Isolation, no user limits, and extended activity log retention to give you deeper insights and more control over your project’s security.
Every open source project in the program will receive additional resources and support through a dedicated channel on our Discord server. And if there’s something you think we can do to help that we don’t currently offer, we’re here to figure out how to make it happen.
Many open source projects run within the limits of Cloudflare’s generous free tiers. Our mission to help build a better Internet means that cost should not be a barrier to creating, securing, and distributing your open source packages globally, no matter the size of the project. Indie or niche open source projects can still run for free without the need for credits. For larger open source projects, the annual recurring credits are available to you, so your money can continue to be reinvested into innovation, instead of paying for infrastructure to store, secure, and deliver your packages and websites.
We’re dedicated to supporting projects that are not only innovative but also crucial to the continued growth and health of the internet. The criteria for the program remain the same:
Operate solely on a non-profit basis and/or otherwise align with the project mission.
Be an open source project with a recognized OSS license.
If you’re an open source project that meets these requirements, you can apply for the program here.
Empowering the Open Source community
We’re incredibly lucky to have open source projects that we admire, and the incredible people behind those projects, as part of our program — including the OpenJS Foundation, OpenTofu, and JuliaLang.
OpenJS Foundation
Node.js has been part of our OSS Program since 2019, and we’ve recently partnered with the OpenJS Foundation to provide technical support and infrastructure improvements to other critical JavaScript projects hosted at the foundation, including Fastify, jQuery, Electron, and NativeScript.
One prominent example of the OpenJS Foundation using Cloudflare is the Node.js CDN Worker. It’s currently in active development by the Node.js Web Infrastructure and Build teams and aims to serve all Node.js release assets (binaries, documentations, etc.) provided on their website.
Aaron Snell explained that these release assets are currently being served by a single static origin file server fronted by Cloudflare. This worked fine up until a few years ago when issues began to pop up with new releases. With a new release came a cache purge, meaning that all the requests for the release assets were cache misses, causing Cloudflare to go forward directly to the static file server, overloading it. Because Node.js releases nightly builds, this issue occurs every day.
The CDN Worker plans to fix this by using Cloudflare Workers and R2 to serve requests for the release assets, taking all the load off the static file server, resulting in improved availability for Node.js downloads and documentation, and ultimately making the process more sustainable in the long run.
OpenTofu
OpenTofu has been focused on building a free and open alternative to proprietary infrastructure-as-code platforms. One of their major challenges has been ensuring the reliability and scalability of their registry while keeping costs low. Cloudflare's R2 storage and caching services provided the perfect fit, allowing OpenTofu to serve static files at scale without worrying about bandwidth or performance bottlenecks.
The OpenTofu team noted that it was paramount for OpenTofu to keep the costs of running the registry as low as possible both in terms of bandwidth and also in human cost. However, they also needed to make sure that the registry had an uptime close to 100% since thousands upon thousands of developers would be left without a means to update their infrastructure if it went down.
The registry codebase (written in Go) pre-generates all possible answers of the OpenTofu Registry API and uploads the static files to an R2 bucket. With R2, OpenTofu has been able to run the registry essentially for free with no servers and scaling issues to worry about.
JuliaLang
JuliaLang has recently joined our OSS Sponsorship Program, and we’re excited to support their critical infrastructure to ensure the smooth operation of their ecosystem. A key aspect of this support is enabling the use of Cloudflare’s services to help JuliaLang deliver packages to its user base.
According to Elliot Saba, JuliaLang had been using Amazon Lightsail as a cost-effective global CDN to serve packages to their user base. However, as their user base grew they would occasionally exceed their bandwidth limits and rack up serious cloud costs, not to mention experiencing degraded performance due to load balancer VMs getting overloaded by traffic spikes. Now JuliaLang is using Cloudflare R2, and the speed and reliability of R2 object storage has so far exceeded that of their own within-datacenter solutions, and the lack of bandwidth charges means JuliaLang is now getting faster, more reliable service for less than a tenth of their previous spend.
How can we help?
If your project fits our criteria, and you’re looking to reduce costs and eliminate surprise bills, we invite you to apply! We’re eager to help the next generation of open source projects make their mark on the internet.
For more details and to apply, visit our new Project Alexandria page. And if you know other projects that could benefit from this program, please spread the word!