What does Cloudflare do?

Why developers and product teams use Cloudflare

To understand Cloudflare, you need to understand a Content Delivery Network (CDN). It's a network of geographically diverse servers across the world where you can store your static assets – like website pages, photos, etc. – instead of building data centers yourself. You just put your static assets there, and they take care of serving users from the data center that's closest to them. Which means faster apps.

Cloudflare's core product is just that - a big, fast CDN. The kicker, though, is that they implement it in a kind of funky way - via a middleman tactic.

Instead of giving Cloudflare direct access to your static assets - like you might do with Netlify or Vercel - you use them as a DNS, or a Domain Name System. That means that you trust them to route your domain - something like technically.dev - to your actual servers. The first time someone makes a request from their browser to your site, Cloudflare acts as a middleman, and forwards that request to your servers. They then cache the response (i.e. the static files) in their network, replicate it across their hundreds of data centers, and deliver that the next time a user asks for it.

Why investors care about Cloudflare

Perhaps the most interesting part of Cloudflare's CDN is that while the core responsibility is to serve static assets to users really quickly, they've also added a few killer features on top that make the product more compelling - the basis of which is security. Cloudflare's CDN protects your site against DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service attacks, where attackers try to take down your site by hitting it with a ton of requests.

Over time, they've added adjacent products like serverless workers, load balancing, video streaming, and serverless storage. Cloudflare has proven there's massive demand for their platform approach to networking infrastructure.