As you read this you are using the Internet. Stop and think about that for a minute. We speak about finding something “on the Internet”; we speak about “using the Internet” to perform a task. We essentially never say something like “I'm going to look for this on a server using the Internet as an intermediary between my computer and the server”.
We speak about and think about the Internet as a single, whole entity that we use and rely on. That’s behind the vision of “The Network is the Computer”. What matters is not the component parts that go into “the Internet” but what they come together to create.
That’s also the vision behind Cloudflare’s network.
We don’t want anyone to think about “caching content on a server in a Cloudflare data center” or “writing code that runs on (something called) the edge”. We want you to simply think of it as a single, global network that provides a CDN, a WAF, DDoS protection, Zero Trust and the ability to write infinitely scalable code and have it just work.
Scaling software is hard, and almost no programmer wants to spend their time worrying what will happen if there’s high demand for the thing they’ve built. That’s our job. You write the code, we’ll make it scale everywhere on the planet. Just deploy to our network.
To do that we’ve followed the trail that started with people writing assembly language for a machine they’d constructed themselves, via machines they bought and installed operating systems on and on to virtual machines running those OSes. At the end of the trail is serverless: don’t worry about the underlying hardware or operating system. Just write code and deploy it.
Because Cloudflare’s network is everywhere on the planet and close to every end user, any code you deploy is also close to your users. Physically close and network close. That means you get high performance and low latency. We’ll see more on that this coming week, where someone built a game that uses a phone as a controller with the game running on a computer, yet the communication between controller and game computer goes through our network. Mind. Blown.
So you have code that can be deployed globally, held securely by Cloudflare and accessed with very low latency from anywhere. What are you going to write on the Cloudflare network? Come join over 350,000 developers using Cloudflare Workers to build the next new thing.
It’s been joked before that Cloudflare has a blog, and maintains a network as a side hustle to have content for the blog. This is of course ridiculous, we don’t maintain a network to have content for the blog, we maintain a network to power a blog :-)
Jokes aside, while many of our efforts do go towards the network, there are many other critical pieces of software that are core to Cloudflare’s business: our marketing site, our dashboard, our APIs and user configuration, developer docs and all the infrastructure that makes Cloudflare Cloudflare.
We’re avid believers in dogfooding, and have talked on this very blog about the ways in which we build Cloudflare on Cloudflare. Since the release of Workers in 2017, many of our teams have been able to accelerate their velocity by building on Workers. But, compute alone is not enough.
This week, as we do in our Innovation Weeks, we’ll make a series of announcements to help paint a vision for how we see the future of compute, and giving our developers the tools they need to build their next application on our network.
We’ll start with the perhaps most fundamental building block — data. Earlier this year during Birthday Week, we announced R2 Object Storage, enabling developers to store, well, whatever they want, providing another crucial building block. But there are many other types of data stores developers may need access to, ourselves included!
Going from the backend to the frontend, last year, we announced Cloudflare Pages, the best way to build static sites. But then we thought, why stop there? We’re excited about some announcements to bring the backend closer to the frontend than ever.
What did we miss? Video, images, payments? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.
Oh, and of course, the most important part of creating an application is you — the developer! We want to ensure you can not only build the fastest, most secure application, but have fun doing it. From the very first line of code you write, to the first push you make to production, we want you to have the best experience possible wrangling your code.
The best part about building a developer platform is seeing what you build with it — we’re excited to shine a spotlight on our community members, and the spectacular applications they’ve built with us (2.5 million and counting!). We’ll be featuring them on our blog, as well as Cloudflare TV. Hope you join us for the week ahead!