Cloudflare

Cloudflare is an integrated cloud services provider that offers serverless platform Cloudflare Workers (CW). CW was initially an internal solution to build apps and to enable the “Cloudflare Teams” product line. CW has gained traction commercially since its launch in 2017, with around 20,000 developers building applications on it as of Q2 2020. Moreover, more than 2 million applications had been launched through CW, by November 2021.

The platform comes with built-in edge storage, leveraging the company’s 250 geographically distributed edge servers (as of November 2021). The company launched a private beta of Cloudflare Workers Unbound (CWU) in July 2020. CWU proposes to be a far cheaper alternative than competitors, including AWS Lambda (75% cheaper), Google Cloud Functions (52% cheaper), and Microsoft Azure Functions (24% cheaper). In November 2021, Cloudflare launched new tools and integrations for developers to connect their existing databases (such as MySQL, MongoDB, Prisma, or Postgres), to help developers manage data when building serverless apps.

Cloudflare also provides the “Cloudflare App Developer Fund” in partnership with Venrock, Pelion, Venture Partners, and New Enterprise Associates. The fund is aimed at providing resources to developers to build serverless apps using CW. It intends to accelerate investment in the serverless ecosystem, and provides an added incentive for developers by showcasing apps to venture capitalists (VCs) and other investors. In May 2022, Cloudflare partnered with Deno, a distributed systems provider for JavaScript, and individual contributors of Node.js, an open-source web app development project, to create API-based interoperability standards that enable developers to write code between Deno, Node.js, and Cloudflare Workers.