> There was a time Cloudflare just made the internet better

There wasn't. Cloudflare is a cancer grown too big. And it was always positioned to become one, the middleman between users and the Internet.

It is already painful to browse web sometimes using the non-"standard" tools (that is, not a Chrome with Google account signed in, not an EU/US residential IP). What if tomorrow Cloudflare checks will require attested and signed browser binaries?

Hard disagree. Sure their docs are bad, and it's sometimes buggy. But to me cloudflare is actually innovating and trying to offer "new" infrastructure. Durable objects and workers are super cool. R2 has free egress, isn't it insane that they could pull that off?

If what you want is a VM to run postgres then there are other offerings that would be much better.

Not saying they aren't evil though, they probably are, but the infra stuff is cool.

What’s missed from the post is that Cloudflare for many years now has felt that they are a “Cloud 2.0” company.

And AWS/GCP/etc are “Cloud 1.0”.

They believe that AI Agent will fundamentally change the internet, and it’s hard to fault them for seeing it that way when their own stats shows that bot/agents account for the majority of Internet traffic.

As such, going all in on AI fits into their thesis of being “Cloud 2.0”.

I think like with most large companies that still ship new stuff:

it gets a bit more complex for customers to figure out what the good nuggets are and what to ignore for now

same @ google, aws and so on

(I usually rely on opinions of people i trust to find the 'javascript — the good parts' version of large offerings)

the other extreme would be not to try and ship new stuff which is also risky

difficult to find a balance and probably a good idea to over-index on momentum and new stuff

while investing enough in hardening and improving the stuff that sticks

Cloudflare failed pre-AI with Cloudbleed, which could have been alright except for how they initially handled it. In addition, a few checks & balances have retired or stepped back so there's nothing stopping AI amplification of that company culture.

They may succeed or not, but right now it's hard to stomach as a former fan. I see where a blog post like this could be coming from.

I have to say: Yes, there is a lot of velocity from Cloudflare pushing out AI-adjacent features as of late.

But also: What they've doing with Workers et al. has made them a platform for fully-fledged apps and deployments. I personally love the ecosystem and use it for all of my projects now. It's like the perfect blend of ease-of-use and DX of Heroku, and breadth of services of AWS / GCP. Well, maybe not quite AWS or GCP, but that's kind of the point -- they've created an opinionated system of "objects" that are all highly extensible to the point where in my opinion you can pretty much deploy anything you want on it.

It took me a bit of time to learn the "Cloudflare way" of doing things, but once I started making on it I saw just how flexible (and low cost!) everything is.

Great read. Exact pinpointing of my feelings about CF lately.

It sounds like a blog post in support of a slowdown for product releases. But the reality is there are multiple companies trying to capture the attention of the same market.

Maybe 2 years ago it would’ve been acceptable to release the product internally, slowly add features, dogfood it, then open to public a year later. But now someone else will release the same product within a month, get sticky customers, and most likely won’t switch.

It’s much easier and faster to release features, so once anyone sees a competition gaining some attention, they just copy the same feature. Which, i think, is fair.

It’s easy to blame the org, but the market is extremely competitive right now. Kind of race to the bottom, except the hardware parts, which have different constraints right now.

> Examples? Ok -> Let us look at data storage.

> They got D1 (SQLite serverless), Durable Objects with their own SQLite, KV, R2, Queues, and Hyperdrive to speed up external Postgres or MySQL.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't see this as confusing:

- D1 is SQLite on cloud, their go-to relational database

- Durable object is the cousin of durable execution (via actor model instead of saga)

- KV is for caching like Redis (sub-ms read latency)

- R2 is S3, R2 SQL is Iceberg + Athena (for OLAP queries)

- Queue is SQS

- Hyperdrive is bridge to allow CF worker to use native Postgres/MySQL driver (since v8 isolate cannot maintain persistent connection)

I've built some stuff on top of CF, and the data ecosystem is actually useful.

This is definitely as opinionated as an opinion piece can go. Worth mentioning I don't use CF anywhere or care about it... but my employer does.

I can really only remember one catastrophic outage. It involved some part of CF that had no redundancy, and the incident was followed by a pretty whiny blog about a data center.

That's pretty much it. There were other minor outages but I'm not aware that it affected business.

Despite the disclaimer I think the author should explain precisely how "AI product mindset" or whatever is actually translating to bad outcomes.

Cloudflare's UI is basically the web equivalent of the git CLI.

Powerful, but the densest collection of UI anti-patterns known to man.

Their "designers" obviously walked up hill both ways in the snow to school every day while being eaten by a walrus and feel anyone who doesn't enjoy a suitably opaque navigation scheme isn't worth acknowledging.

> Too many ways to do the same thing, none of them great

They want to eat at the AI table, given that they are not producing models or GPUs and not building datacentres, they try with the product. But we are still in the early stage so it's not clear what will work and what not, so they have to try as much as possible.

Hey everyone, author here, I am very frustrated with the state of Cloudflare and I posted this blog the other day on my blog and here on HN (but generated no discussion), thanks for re-posting it, I am gonna start reading the comments and start replying

I'm also curious about the question posted at the end: where did the infrastructure nerds go?

> First of all tons of more outages than ever, remember that React useEffect fkup [0]? Complete insane that this would happen at an infra company that runs a third or so of the web.

Bugs happen all the time. They roughly increase with scale, not decrease. There’s an argument to be made about better testing, but this specific bug seems like a perfect one to slip through: multiple services, hard to spot at code review, involves JS/frontend, invisible at low traffic (test/UT envs).

So IMO it’s not completely insane. Is the implication that Cloudflare should have no bugs whatsoever?

I know CF has a good reputation, but at the same time when I first approached their website I have to agree with the poster, it’s just incoherent.

I don’t understand the impulse to whine and complain about the aesthetics of a big company.

> a little more cringey and clique

Why on earth do I care if someone thinks Cloudflare is cringe? What is interesting about that? They are following the market like everyone else.

> Too many ways to do the same thing, none of them great…They got D1 (SQLite serverless), Durable Objects with their own SQLite, KV, R2, Queues, and Hyperdrive to speed up external Postgres or MySQL.

What does this have to do with AI psychosis? I thought that was the thesis of this article? As I said, it’s just directionless complaining.

> There was a time Cloudflare just made the internet better

This is the kind of naive thinking that enabled what's going on today. Sadly, the decentralized Internet is now destroyed and will never exist again.

I view a lot of this as downstream from sort of the IaaS version of the "DRM problem" in cryptography.

In the DRM problem you want to sell someone a Blu-Ray with a movie they can play, but also not allow them to copy the movie. So they get the data but can't have the data.

In the IaaS problem you want to sell someone a piece of server(s) in a datacenter they can play with, but also not allow them to just directly use the hardware (because then they could have open standards and portability). So the product teams are required to work backwards from the necessity of wrapping compute in a thing you can sell as a product.

This also explains nonsense like "durable objects", which may have some purpose but become the weekly podcast fad after getting hyped by cloud providers trying to find new ways to sell compute without selling compute.

I remember being so excited about Cloudflare's releases that I'd check their blog every couple of weeks for what new thing they were cooking up. This was before I actually had to use them to serve production clients.

When it came time to launch (2023?), the initial setup was using DNS/Cache, Workers, Workers KV, R2, D1, Durable Objects, Access, and Queues.

My first hint was that the Typescript library to access their API was simply just wrong. API requests through the library would fail, complaining about missing fields or invalid types, even though the types said my construction was correct, and I received dismissive replies when raising it in their Discord.

Then there were the D1 issues with random requests failing.

Then there were the Durable Objects issues with syncing clients in our collaborative editor.

Then there were the KV and (by extension) Access outages.

Eventually it made sense to switch it all over to AWS. Today, I trust Cloudflare for DNS, Cache, DDoS protection, and not much else.

The "AI psychosis" that may or may not have infected Cloudflare and caused this reminds me of Github's, except Cloudflare has a much much bigger moat.

The problem is, beside their size, they have not moat to compete in AI space. Their data centers are spread across the world in other companys DCs (btw do they own any DC actually from top to bottom?).

I don't know where this person got the idea that a company "run by engineers" would result in good products. Engineers don't always care about the end result. I've seen engineers completely compromise the utility and experience of the product to make their own job easier or more fun. If it "sounds logical", they assume it's good and don't ask more questions about how it will impact users.

Would you hire a mechanical engineer to run a car company? The mechanical engineer cares if the transmission is highly efficient; they don't care if the seats are comfortable, or if the car can fit standard wheels/tires. Those are the things the car's user cares about. They expect the transmission to be efficient, but they equally expect it to be comfortable and compatible.

"Infrastructure" isn't a raw mechanical component. It's a product with an entire "life" outside the technical. How it's controlled by a user, its responsiveness and intuitiveness, how they (and 3rd parties) interface with it, its operational and failure modes, its outputs and inputs... all of that's separate from the internal workings.

It's the difference between a car having a door, and having a door that fits perfectly, opens with ease, and closes with no effort, gaps or seams. A ton of extra work is required to make that happen. Making the door is easy; making it fit well is much harder.

Putting a nerd in charge will not fix the focus on the end result. You need to put people in charge who are obsessed with the customer's experience. Say what you will about Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, they at least got that right.

A good point made in the post (that's not really specific to CF) is the problem with multiplying features. It's interesting that most of the extremely-hot-on-AI companies and leaders I know are hyped about 100x product dev, etc and want to throw tons of new assorted features out. This is not a good thing!

I've been at companies with lots of staffing and velocity (pre-AI), and it is a huge foot-gun to think pumping out features is automatically a good thing. Most paying customers do not want this from SaaS type companies.

Smaller companies especially should calm down and do one thing well, and unfortunately AI dev does not encourage that.

For an article that claims to know Cloudflare, I don't think he does.

Cloudflare build from the bottom up. First the SDN ( Software Defined Network), then the products on top. The first one was logical: CDN + DDOS.

All the rest continued to build on top of the SDN - Workers, D1, ... But once they have the full stack ( which happened arround D1), it was time to let others build on top of Cloudflare.

That's the current stage ( Cloud 2.0), that was always the goal. It's even in their ticker ( NET ).

In practise, AI could be a godsend. A total new foundation for software where the Cloudflare stack is a perfect product fit( disposable compute, where others will protect their compute with long running compute contracts). I can't blame them to try to seize the opportunity.

Tbh. I feels like the author hasn't actually adjusted to how Cloudflare is building it's cloud ( eg. how powerfull Durable Objects is).

PS. A big outage is a long time ago... ( we use them, I remember the issues those days and the post mortem, a lot became more stable as far as I noticed).

on the bright side, this rant doesn't sound ai generated.

Accurate

Why would they do anything else?

They own a huge chunk of the internet now - with many, many companies having deeply integrated CF into their own stuff.

Switching costs are so high, from a business standpoint, investing in technical excellence would be wasted money. They're just a corp like everyone else. Gravity also applies to them.

__

Don't take this as "they're right to do so". Take this as "You should never have started integrating their products this deeply. This was inevitable and obvious."

Using CF always was trading short-term wins for long-term losses. We're now entering said long-term.

The fact is that every major company is AI accelerating their development, and soon, it will just be every company.

We're already past the point of getting our hackles raised when we suspect something is AI written. Everything is or soon will be AI written.

So I don't think it's that useful to blame bad product design on AI.

Bad product design is just bad product design. Bad writing is just bad writing. Bad graphic design is just bad graphic design.

The industry needs to get over this hump of pretending we're not all going to adopt AI for every imaginable thing. The cat's out of the bag, for better or for worse.