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by jonathanlydall 151 days ago
Cloudflare seems to exclusively offer "serverless" products, which rules out applications like Postgres (or any other "standard" database technology).

Why don't they just offer "managed Postgres"? This is because their infrastructure is as homogenized as possible so does not offer hosting of arbitrary services or software, the only customizable code made available to customers are things like workers which are deliberately constrained (in execution time, resource usage, etc) to, again, allow them to keep all their infrastructure as homogenized as possible.

Most of their other products are to provide supplementary capabilities to workers.

For example, their durable objects are comparable (in terms of technical approach, problems they solve and trade-offs) to AWS's DynamoDB or Azure's Cosmos DB. These products are distributed by nature and work very well for certain kinds of projects and not so well for others. They're also fully in-line with the generally homogenous infrastructure that Cloudflare is engineered to work on.

In summary, Cloudflare has essentially homogenous infrastructure globally and is able to make their extensive edge infrastructure available to customers for customized applications by constraining it to "serverless" offerings. For customers that can work within the trade-offs of these serverless products, it's an appealing product.