So like everything else in the networking space it's a mess of overloaded terms with multiple meanings and tangled concepts all trying to hit as many buzzwords as possible...?
Yes and no. I think Cloudflare has advantage here of not being that mess of overload. They dont have the legacy cruft, the legacy customers. They purposely ARENT trying to be everything (by supporting all identity providers but not being one. By not being an MDM.)
I feel the same way about Cloudflare as I did about Velocloud. When Velocloud came out, their pitch was that they WERENT "WAN optimization." They purposely werent compressing the data on the edge to squeeze a couple extra bytes down a tiny pile. By starting from the ground up, and not transforming a legacy product, they kept their hardware costs down. They didnt need the extra horsepower to do things that werent necessary in a modern paradigm. Instead they offered a unique cloud service that made their product a bit different than the rest, and at a lower price.
Cloudflare here has that same competitive advantage of being able to design everything from first principal, with no regard for how things were before. Maybe even moreso.
As a potential customer, I guess I am supposed to hypnotised by all these silly names and acronyms but instead I just keep thinking "Just show me the code". Names seem to serve as a way for the authors to avoid telling us exactly what the software does, instead referring to what the software "is". Horribly imprecise and the source of endless arguments. The disagreements in this thread are but a tiny example.
This is nothing new and during the dot-com boom I think the naming nonsense spread to websites, in addtion to software. Software people have been obsessed with wacky names as long as I can remember.
I find this so repulsive and unworkable (e.g., name conflicts, needless keystrokes) that on personal computers I actually name programs I write for myself using an alpha prefix and a numerical suffix. For quick reference I keep a separate index of what each program does. Every program has a unique, sequential number in its name. Every name has the same number of characters.
I feel the same way about Cloudflare as I did about Velocloud. When Velocloud came out, their pitch was that they WERENT "WAN optimization." They purposely werent compressing the data on the edge to squeeze a couple extra bytes down a tiny pile. By starting from the ground up, and not transforming a legacy product, they kept their hardware costs down. They didnt need the extra horsepower to do things that werent necessary in a modern paradigm. Instead they offered a unique cloud service that made their product a bit different than the rest, and at a lower price.
Cloudflare here has that same competitive advantage of being able to design everything from first principal, with no regard for how things were before. Maybe even moreso.