Forrester names Cloudflare a leader in edge development platforms

Cloudflare has been recognized as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Edge Development Platforms, Q4 2023, receiving the top score in the current offering category. The evaluation, authored by Principal Analyst Devin Dickerson, highlights Cloudflare’s platform as providing the building blocks for full-stack distributed applications while abstracting away the complexity of distributed systems.

More than one million developers are building on Cloudflare’s Developer Platform, which includes Workers, Pages, R2, KV, Queues, Durable Objects, D1, Stream, Images, and related services. The platform is designed to let developers deploy globally distributed full-stack applications without becoming experts in distributed systems or cloud infrastructure configuration.

Workers make the network programmable

A key differentiator noted in the report is the interoperability between Workers and Cloudflare’s programmable global CDN, combined with a deployment model that uses intelligent workload placement. Workers run across Cloudflare’s entire network and expose APIs to read from and write to local cache, with CDN context available directly on the request object each Worker receives.

This close network integration lets developers build, protect, and connect globally distributed applications without targeting specific regions. Smart Placement automatically runs each Worker in the location that produces the best overall performance, whether closest to the data or closest to the user. Hyperdrive pools database connections so Workers worldwide can reuse them when querying PostgreSQL, sidestepping the scaling problems that typically complicate serverless database access. Cron Triggers support up to 15 minutes of CPU time for compute-intensive background work.

Distributed systems without the expertise

Forrester’s reference customers consistently cited ease of onboarding, with developers who had no prior background delivering workloads across the globe in minutes and production-quality applications within a week. Several platform capabilities support this:

  • Deploying a Worker distributes it globally behind the scenes, yet developers see a single application they can run and test locally using the same open-source JavaScript runtime used in production.
  • Building a Durable Object for coordinated real-time state produces a distributed application programmed entirely in JavaScript with web standard APIs familiar to front-end developers, with no need to manage RPC protocols or infrastructure.
  • Cloudflare Queues adds message enqueuing and batch processing with just a few additional lines of JavaScript in an existing Worker.
  • Connecting a GitHub repository to Cloudflare Pages automatically sets up a continuous build and deployment pipeline with preview URLs.

Several factors explain why teams onboard so quickly. Workers rely on web standard APIs that front-end developers already use daily, with Cloudflare a founding member of the Web-interoperable Runtimes Community Group (WinterCG) and committed to cross-runtime interoperability. TypeScript types are published for all APIs, and the Wrangler CLI and dashboard editor—itself powered by VSCode—both support TypeScript compilation. Popular open-source frameworks are supported, and a growing set of Node.js APIs are natively available in the Workers runtime, allowing existing libraries to run on Workers.

Expanding into AI workloads

Forrester’s report notes that Cloudflare’s roadmap positions it increasingly well to take on public cloud hyperscalers for workloads, with a vision that extends beyond the edge.

Workers AI now provides GPU inference as an integrated part of the developer platform. As of mid-November, Workers AI Inference runs in over 100 cities, with plans to expand to nearly every city where Cloudflare has a presence by the end of 2024. Developers can build applications using the latest open-source AI models without provisioning infrastructure or paying for unused capacity. Direct deployment from Hugging Face to Workers AI is being extended to support a wider model set.

Beyond model inference, Cloudflare is making the WebGPU API available from within the Workers platform. Upcoming work includes a new approach to secrets management across Cloudflare products, improved observability, and better tools for releasing changes. The report is available for download from Cloudflare.