| > 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. 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! |
I would definitely argue the first point here, but not the point about crowding out. You said it yourself, there's totally room for a Cloudflare to win on UX/DX, and other areas like cost. This is the strategy the CEO mentions when he's quoting Christensen, and coming up from the bottom to compete with the big dogs. It's also why AWS will make more in a day than Cloudflare does in a year though, for now..