The Network as the Application Platform
The way we discuss the Internet tends to obscure how it actually works. Nobody says, "I'll fetch this from a server using the Internet as a middleman." We treat it as a monolithic utility—a single thing that connects us to content and services. This abstraction is the goal of the "network is the computer" philosophy, and it is exactly what Cloudflare aims to deliver with its global network.
The intent is to remove all the operational concerns from the equation. Developers should not have to think about caching content in a specific data center or deploying code to a location called "the edge." Instead, they should see a single platform that bundles a CDN, a WAF, DDoS protection, Zero Trust security, and scalable compute. If you write the code, the platform handles distributing it across the planet.
This represents the logical conclusion of an evolution that began with writing assembly for bespoke hardware, progressed through physical machines and virtualized operating systems, and has arrived at serverless. The underlying hardware and operating system are irrelevant; you deploy the code, and the network puts it wherever it needs to be.
Because Cloudflare's infrastructure is distributed globally, any application deployed on it is physically close to end users. That proximity translates to performance and low latency. A forthcoming demo is a perfect illustration: a game where a phone acts as a controller and the host computer receives input through the network. The function of the network is to serve as the connective tissue for the entire experience.
Over 350,000 developers are already building on Cloudflare Workers. While the network is the core of the business, the platform extends to the more mundane parts of the company—the marketing site, the dashboard, the APIs, and the developer docs. These are all pieces of software that must be maintained, and Cloudflare practices dogfooding to build its own products on its platform. Since Workers debuted in 2017, teams have accelerated their velocity by using it for more than just compute.
Serving the Full Stack
Storing data is a prerequisite for most applications. During Birthday Week, R2 Object Storage was introduced to cover that base, but it is just one type of data store. The future of the platform relies on offering a broader set of storage and database primitives that developers can access without leaving the network.
The front end is not being neglected either. Cloudflare Pages solved the problem of static site hosting, but the next step is to merge the development experience of the front end with the power of the backend. There are also plans to address multimedia needs—video, images, and payments—which are all common components of modern web applications.
The focus, though, is on the developer experience as a whole. It should be satisfying to write, deploy, and manage code, from the first line to the production push. The community that gets built with these tools is a key metric of success: 2.5 million applications have been built so far, and a week of spotlights will feature those community members and their work on the blog as well as on Cloudflare TV.
The announcements coming in the week ahead sketch out a vision of a full-stack development environment that runs on a global network. If the goal is to allow software to communicate with low latency over a distributed system, the crucial phase is giving developers the tools to build the applications that will run there. This week is about offering the pieces to do exactly that.
