First and foremost, this is a nice recruitment post. Not that it’s devious in any way.<p>While Cloudflare has introduced many industry disrupting features, the pace of innovation isn’t that fast if you look a bit deeper. For example, it only took like three years or longer for domain registration to be available for new domains (it was only transfers until then). The reason given for this on a HN comment was a non-answer. If you visit the forums on Cloudflare, you’ll also see different kinds of billing related issues that, while they may be a bit complex, are not responded to as well as one might expect.<p>Nevertheless, Cloudflare is doing a lot of stuff that will prod the competition to wake up (or just let them die).
Cloudflare has a dizzying pace of product development that seems to be unmatched even among the large cloud providers.<p>I suspect in the next 12-24 months they'll have an entire edge solution that is superior to all 3 of the top cloud providers in cost, performance and features.<p>Workers is nearly there. They are missing some kind of global database, instrumentation and a few other small features before Workers is truly unleashed.<p>If Cloudflare were smart, they'd scoop up Fly.io. The two would work together like peanut butter and jelly on the edge, and the big 3 would simply have no response to the potent combination of a great product at a great price.<p>My favorite thing about Cloudflare is the "trojan horse" pricing strategy. By selling core functionality like security and CDNs cheap, it enables engineers to build on it for side projects and to experiment. Those engineers then go to big companies and pitch it to their managers, which provides Cloudflare with an internal advocate from the bottom-up. It's a genius strategy, and they get the added bonus of looking like the good guys (most generous free tier going around).<p>(disclosure: long $NET)
In the honor of this comment about Stripe 3 years ago : <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16880635" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16880635</a><p>We've reached peak Cloudflare glorification.
Cloudflare's take on cloudfare's pace of innovation. I am curious if it's highly innovative built with strong engineering fundamentals with breakneck product delivery to a large audience of clients or if poorly architectured in an antiquated programming language and not achieving product-market fit? As per other commenter said - nice recruitment post.
I was hoping that it was an article by a third party as I have actually been interested in the rate at which they have been releasing new products and tech.<p>The comment about eating their own dogfood and the development of Workers makes me wonder if anyone at AWS uses AWS
So it turns out that Cloudflare was the <i>'smart'</i> train to board after calling it two years ago [0] and buying it on IPO day gave anyone who boarded it (including me) 900% returns.<p>Now they announced more updates in the pipeline which justifies the valuation. Always providing great shareholder value as usual.<p>It was only just getting started to go much higher.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20707306" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20707306</a>