| Good article, I feel people don't spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff. The gap here for me is that AWS, GCP, and the like are perfectly equipped to build infra "from the edge in" as well. It's just not an advantage for Cloudflare -- I'd actually argue that AWS has the comparative advantage in building "from the edge in" given the clip at which they can turn out datacenters. With the new Outpost model as well, I don't see too many hurdles for AWS to just start deploying their whole feature set in any old colo, in any old country, in a matter of months. They do have to set their minds to it though. At the very least, they should definitely have their storage services in every country with actual data locality laws. I'm sure I'm missing something, but on the infra side I don't see what Cloudflare is better at in this regard. I'd also argue that AWS storage migration is just as good or better than Cloudflare's offering here. I won't comment on how users perceive/value each service because I don't use either much. What I definitely DO agree with, is that infra "from the edge in" is a major threat to existing public cloud business models. At the point where you have your whole stack portable from colo to colo (or, gasp, as a dAPP), it starts to sound more like public cloud as a library, rather than as a centralized managed service. Open source communities, unbundlers, and new-age cloud companies together will have a field day building 'library' versions of common cloud services and I think Cloudflare will pair nicely at that point. The question is when that becomes a reality. |
You’re clearly more versed with AWS than I am but I think that if you compare them at this level, you could argue that all the big cloud providers could easily compete with Cloudflare and crowd out their proposition.
But this possibly overlooks the (in my view) very unique execution style of a Cloudflare compared to “Big Cloud”.
I do worry about their ever growing reach across vast portions of the internet, but, I keep coming back to Cloudflare and taking up more of their feature set because they make me so damn productive, and unlike all the other cloud providers, the learning curve is very minimal and their products are a pleasure to use.
I have huge respect for AWS and Azure, and use them both for production workloads where needed, but I’m weary of their complexity and bloat. Cloudflare is an absolute breath of fresh air in comparison.
My only criticism of CF’s execution is that it can seem a bit “scatter gun” sometimes. Eg Cloudflare Registrar still doesn’t support .co.uk domains years after its launch - which somewhat undermines that offering. They sometimes launch things and then seem to neglect them and start working on something else.
To end on a bit of a tangent: the one thing I really wish they would turn their creative minds to is reinventing the whole CAPTCHA concept. Given their reliance on captcha and what an utterly fucking awful experience it is to try and identify all the buses in 9 grainy low res photos, I think it’s about time CF invented something better!