Cloudflare is getting closer and closer to AWS territory

Cloudflare (NET 1.57%) it does much more than speed up and protect websites. The company’s global network, which now spans over 330 cities worldwide, places approximately 95% of the global Internet-connected population within 50 milliseconds (ms) of a Cloudflare data center. Cloudflare has released a large number of features, products and services since its inception that leverage this network and eliminate pain points for customers.

I’m going after the developers

Increasingly, Cloudflare is pushing deeper into the developer services market. The company is not a traditional cloud provider like Amazon Web Services. While developers can create virtual servers and choose from hundreds of other complex products on AWS, Cloudflare has kept its focus on releasing products that make developers’ lives easier.

Cloudflare Workers was one of the first additions to the company’s developer platform. It allows developers to upload pieces of code to Cloudflare’s network, putting that code close to end users.

Entire web applications can be built on Workers, and Cloudflare takes care of all the nitty-gritty details like scaling. Developers don’t have to worry about figuring out what resources are needed or where their code should run. It just works.

Cloudflare has released other products that integrate with Workers, including an image optimization and delivery service, various artificial intelligence (AI) products, and several storage and database solutions. A developer can build a complete application — database and all — on Cloudflare’s platform, albeit with some limitations.

The biggest limitation is the inability to run containerized workloads. A container takes an application and all of its dependencies and bundles them into a complete package, allowing the application to be run almost anywhere. A single virtual server can run a large number of containers, and cloud platforms such as AWS provide container services. AWS’s Elastic Container Service allows developers to run containers without the administrative burden of managing servers.

In cases where an application requires a third-party dependency that is not compatible with the Cloudflare Workers platform, a developer should look to a more traditional cloud computing provider. This lack of container support could be one thing that keeps enterprise customers from getting on board with Cloudflare’s developer platform because it doesn’t tick all the boxes.

Bringing containers to Cloudflare

Last week, Cloudflare announced that it is working on a container platform that will eventually allow customers to run containers on its global network. There’s no release date yet, though Cloudflare has indicated 2025 for wider availability beyond a small number of testers. The goal is to free developers from most of the typical concerns about running containers, including where to run them, how many to run, how many resources to allocate to them, and how to balance traffic between instances.

The Cloudflare container platform was born out of necessity. The company has built and released products like Workers AI and its browser rendering service, both of which use the under-the-hood container platform, as well as other Cloudflare products. Ultimately, the company built its own container platform instead of using an existing solution to solve all the problems it needed to solve.

Once running containers is an option on Cloudflare’s platform, the company will become a much stronger competitor to traditional cloud computing providers such as AWS and platform-as-a-service providers. The PaaS market is expected to grow to over $164 billion by 2026, and Cloudflare’s container platform opens the door to more of that market.

As Cloudflare’s developer platform becomes more capable and able to handle a wider variety of workloads, the company will become a bigger threat to traditional cloud providers like AWS.