About this talk
This talk introduces Cloudflare's developer platform, highlighting its capabilities for building applications efficiently without the need for extensive configuration. The speaker discusses how developers can achieve high velocity and seamless end-user experiences through serverless compute options such as Cloudflare Workers. He emphasizes the importance of automatic high availability and security features, explaining that applications can be deployed globally without worrying about server management or scaling. The speaker also shares a success story from a company that improved its deployment process dramatically by adopting Cloudflare's services, noting that the platform allows developers to focus on creating valuable features rather than being bogged down by infrastructure concerns. Overall, this session aims to inspire developers to embrace Cloudflare's platform for modern application development.
Full transcript
I planned for you the most awesome demo where we built an AI app from zero. But my MacBook will not show on this display. We tried everything. So, here's me, no slides, no laptop, no nothing. Still, I want to share with you how you can go from nothing to scale in no time with Cloudflare. Who of you know Cloudflare? Raise Show of hands. Okay, that's quite good.
That's like 60%. Who of you knows that Cloudflare has a developer platform where you can run serverless compute, data? Show of Way fewer people. Okay. Let's change that. Cloudflare has a modern cloud platform. And you might be wondering, okay, is that CDN/DDoS protection provider that does this? They're 15 years too late to the cloud game. What's going on? Why What are they doing? Well, let me share
with you. What we're building is what we call a modern cloud platform, and we focus on two things. Number one, we want to increase developer velocity. So, long story short, my demo, if I had my laptop, I'd done this like 10 times. I go from having nothing to something deployed on the internet in 14 and 1/2 minutes, roughly, right? Um a full-stack website where you have basically
have your Next.js running. There's an LLM involved. All of that end-to-end on Cloudflare. There's no other origin. It's end-to-end on Cloudflare. The second thing that we do is to say we want to drive better end-user experiences. Now, you might be wondering, okay, that's an ambitious goal. Increase developer velocity, increase uh better user experiences. How do they do that? Well, it's three things that happen. well, um we
have all the fundamental building blocks that you actually need that you need to build applications. So, whether that's serverless compute, we have a serverless compute platform called Cloudflare Workers. We have database on storage options, whether that's object storage, a SQLite database, key-value store, all these kind of things, orchestration layers, queues, inference um service with Workers AI. You can run 40 different models on Cloudflare Workers without any
ever provisioning anything. And that's not it. We not only have the LEGO bricks, we also say, "Hey, we want to automate your decision-making." And that for me is the standout feature. Because typically, if I want to build an application, there is so many decisions that we have to do before we can actually run this in production. And I'm not distracted by that at all. That's just normal.
That's for me a normal Thursday. so, typically, you have to think, "Okay, cool. Where are my end users? Okay, which region do I pick in my cloud provider? How do I ensure that my application is highly available?" So, I'm thinking about, "Do I do multi-availability zone? Do I do go multi-region? How does automatic failover work? Does my load balancer do that? What about my health checks? Okay,
what if Is there Is there any third-party dependency that I need to account for? Do I have to back up for that? What's my RPO?" So many different things to think about. Then you say, "Okay, great. My application Ideally, we have users for that application. But what if we have too many users? Oh, no, I need to scale." Okay, so how do we do scaling actually? Do
we do horizontal scaling, vertical vertically scaling, auto scaling groups? How does it actually work? Okay, then I need a load balancer that does this. Ooh, lots of decisions before you even have written a single line of code. What Cloudflare does is we say, "Hey, our developer platform comes with high availability, my laptop is in Ooh, fancy. High availability and security out of the box. What does that
mean? I'll give you a few examples. Number one, high availability. Cloudflare is running a global network, right? We have this network because we are the CDN provider, this global CDN provider, and also security provider. We run in 330 cities around the world. It's one region. We call this region Earth. Not EU Central one, it's region Earth. If you hit deploy on your project, guess where your code
is getting deployed? Region Earth. So, your code does not only run in one region, not only in one availability zone, not just in one cluster, it runs in 330 locations around the world. Now, one of our data centers could go down, right? For a multitude of reasons. There might be a power outage, there might be a networking issue, could be But then you have still 329 data
centers to go, and we run an anycast network. If you're familiar with networking, that means we advertise our data centers using the BGP protocol. If the data center is down, we stop advertising and it has automatic failovers. So, your application is highly available. You don't have to think about that. Cloudflare thinks about that. Scaling. Everything we do in our developer platform is serverless. That means it scales
to zero. You have no traffic, you pay for nothing. You have 1 million users? Good for you. Your credit card hopefully is attached to your account, then also good for us. But it scales automatically. There is not even a configuration option. If you Google Cloudflare Eurovision, there's a blog post from roughly 2 years ago how we scaled the Eurovision's voting on Cloudflare. At peak, we had 2.4
million requests per second. And that scaled up from zero, and there is not even a configuration option in our UI to configure scaling. It just happened. And then afterwards, back to zero. No one noticed anything. It just happens out of the box. You as developer, you don't have to think about that. Why would you? Why why why should you do that? We have the data. We see
how many requests are coming in. We see your CPU load. Why should you have to take care of that, right? So, that's what we do there. And last but not least, if you know Cloudflare, oh, nice picture. Uh if you know Cloudflare, then you know we are one of the leaders in the cybersecurity space. So, that means, hey, we will definitely make sure that what you deploy
out there also is protected by default. So, that means we have our best-in-class DDoS protection that comes with it. Web application firewall, rate limiting, making sure that bots stay outside, all these kind of things, same interface, same platform where you deploy, you just It takes six clicks. I know that because we would have done that on my demo if I had my laptop to basically go from,
hey, I deploy my application to I say protect my application. It's the same platform. Cool. So, that's Cloudflare's vision for developers, making sure that you have high velocity and you have better And if you embrace that philosophy, you can build modern app level applications in no time. And why is that important? Why does that matter for you? Well, I've deployed applications on other providers myself. And before
I write anything that's user story, what I do is I provision resources. I set up my developer environment. My developer environment doesn't look like my future prod or deployment environment whatsoever, no matter how hard I try. I spend time writing IAM permissions and trying to make sure that I actually have the permission to do get anything going. Most likely I'm using another tool that tries to abstract
that away from me. And I have to configure stuff like choosing a region, choosing scaling, doing all these configuration things. But that doesn't add user value. Like no one I'm not choosing Uber or Lyft because one manages their configuration better of their cloud provider. I mean like I don't care. I care about their features. I care about their products, right? And you're not adding value. You're just
doing the same stuff that everyone else needs to do to get something going. So what Cloudflare is trying to build to say, "Hey, how about we build a modern cloud that focuses that you get shipping, that you get going, and that you deploy in no time." I don't know whether you guys know for instance Myprotein. It's a company that have many many brands also Pebbles and so
on and so forth. One of the biggest direct-to-consumer um brands out there is called The Hut Group. It's the company that does this based out of the UK in Manchester. And I can tell you a story. I work with them quite a bit, by the way, because this talk track was a little bit uh different than I anticipated. I'm Mark. I'm the guy on the picture, not
as pretty as I am on that picture. I'm a solutions architect at Cloudflare, so I talk to a lot of people for my daily job. And they come to me with problems and I try to help them. That's the part where the solutions in my architect thing comes in, okay? So they say, "Hey, we have the following. We have 60 brands out there. And those operate in
40 countries. So effectively we have like a lot of different domains out there. Every brand manages their stuff independently of each other. We are the platform team. We help them. And we're just not fast enough, right? In our traditional setup to get a new version of the website out and going, us provisioning everything is going to CICD, we basically deploy that, we ramp that up slowly and
so on and so forth. It takes a day. Just imagine your feedback loop as a developer to see something in staging is That's really bad if you just like have a tiny thing that's wrong, you fix it again, it takes another day. With us, they said, "Okay, let's move to Cloudflare's developer platform." And actually, in their deployments now take end-to-end on staging 30 minutes. They have had
calls from engineering managers saying, "You know what? Our backlog is empty because we increased our productivity so much that we actually done with the features that the PMs have for us. That's it." Now, think of Black Friday, right? The one season where it really matters. You know how much time they spend per year just on load testing for Black Friday? I can tell you, close to 3
months. On Black Friday and Cyber Monday themselves, the CTO himself typically comes in at 3:00 a.m. to make sure that they are in this battle room and make sure that everything works. This year was the first year on Cloudflare, was the first night the CTO did not come in at all, stayed at home because he knew Cloudflare handles for the Eurovision Song Contest 2.4 million requests per
second. That is five orders of magnitude away from the traffic we have, so most likely that's a blip for Cloudflare, and it was. So, and 100% uptime, it just worked. And that is the vision that we try to really push for at its best, right? Developers moving fast, developers not thinking about scaling, about high availability, it just working and your cloud provider takes care of it. If
all of this is new to you because you've never heard of Cloudflare's developer platform, you're not alone. I saw a lot of people not raising their hand. I hope you understood and understand now a little bit more what we at Cloudflare are trying to achieve. I really, really wish that we see each other again. I bring a functioning laptop, okay? So I can actually code because I
promise I like try to do this like 10 times is actually quite good. I'm a little bit proud of it. Um so check that out. But we're here today and tomorrow. It's literally straight out here. It's It's like seven uh F, so seven Felix. And I tell you this, not only will I be there and the whole team and you can ask us questions and I can
show it to you on my laptop. I'm happy to do this demo for each and every one of you. If you come by with the booth, I'll have to put 20 different applications by tomorrow. That's fine. But also cheat at 4:00 p.m. at our booth, there will be drinks. If that If the first part didn't convince you, the second part should have convinced you. So we'd love
to talk to you. We'd love to see you. I'm really sorry that I had technical issues. I apologize for that. Um I'll just reuse the same talk in 2025 or 2026. By then and most likely AI will not be the buzzword, so I might have AI agents in there, but you get the gist. Thank you so much for listening. I much appreciate it and see you at
the booth, Cloudflare booth 7F. Thank you so much.
