Cloudflare Tops Forrester's Edge Development Platform Evaluation
Forrester has released its New Wave evaluation of edge development platforms, and Cloudflare has been named a Leader. The company's positioning in the report reflects the bet it placed on edge computing when it launched Workers back in 2017. Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Jeffrey Hammond highlights Cloudflare's "strong compute, data services and web development capabilities," noting that Workers KV provides edge data storage while Pages, Stream, and Images offer higher-level platform services for modern web workloads. The report also calls out an intuitive developer experience, fast global code deployment, and minimal cold start times.
The Evolution Beyond the Cloud
The shift from physical hardware to cloud computing solved the problem of buying servers, but developers still had to worry about where those servers lived, how to scale for traffic spikes, and how to secure them. Cloudflare's thesis was to abstract all of that away entirely, letting developers concentrate purely on the application code and leaving scaling, performance, and compliance concerns to the platform.
That approach required developers to trust a new paradigm, but adoption has validated the strategy. The applications built on the platform have demonstrated that developers are willing to embrace a model free of traditional scalability and latency constraints.
Differentiation Across the Board
Cloudflare received differentiated ratings in several evaluation criteria, including developer experience, programming model, platform execution model, day-2+ experience, integrations, roadmap, vision, and market approach. The underlying Cloudflare network eliminates latency from the start, but the company has focused on making every aspect of the developer journey straightforward since Workers launched.
That focus extends beyond tooling into the services developers need to complete their applications. The development of Durable Objects, for instance, came from the desire to make distributed data storage just work without requiring developers to think about regions. The platform makes intelligent decisions about where to store data based on access patterns or compliance requirements, whichever matters more to the developer.
No mention was made of when the full report is available for download, but the recognition underscores the progress made since the initial bet on edge development was placed four years ago. More announcements are reportedly on the horizon as the company continues to push the full stack to the edge.
