CloudFlare Redefines What Cloud Native Is | ✉️ #64

Illustration of a smiling person holding a cat, next to a text box. Text reads "MKDev Dispatch #64" and "Cloudflare redefines what Cloud Native is" on a background of paper airplane icons.

Last updated: 01/03/25 | Published: 01/03/25

Hey! 👋

Last few weeks I had a pleasure of using CloudFlare again. CloudFlare, I believe, is the most under-appreciated cloud provider out there. Part of the reason is that many people don’t even know, that it is a fully functional cloud provider these days - and that is entirely because they took a bit of a different route in building the cloud.

AWS started with SQS, EC2 and S3, purely backend-oriented services. Back then, there were no better way to kick-start cloud computing market by doing VPS, but better - with granular billing, elasticity, APIs and so on. But, at the end of the day, EC2 is a server that you need to configure. Higher-level abstractions like Lambda came later, as cloud industry evolved and evolved.

CloudFlare started as a CDN, taking care of the closest endpoint to your customer - your frontend. Then they took time to engineer one of the best global networks out there and made using the CDN as simple as creating a DNS record and activating “proxied” mode. Giving your customers free SSL, DDoS protection and CDN with simplest configuration possible allowed CloudFlare to grow fast.

And it also allowed them to introduce even more features at the edge of the client to backend communication. You start with a single DNS record and a checkbox, you end up having all of your client traffic processing logic to be moved to CloudFlare. And now that this frontend part is already in CloudFlare, maybe you could use some other features too? How about replacing S3 with R2, object storage with a bit less aggressive data transfer pricing? Or maybe skip deploying your small service to Lambda and deploy it directly as a CloudFlare Worker? And why mess around with complex access configuration, if you can Zeru Trust services in the same place?

None of these new features are meant to be PaaS like Heroku. But all of these features are free from the burden of “legacy” infrastructure. It’s all serverless, zero-trust, distributed across the globe, blazing fast and, for a big chunk of features, free to use! CloudFlare found it’s place between hyperscalers with hundreds of services and PaaS with just a few simple to use and super expensive offerings. I'm having a hard time to describe what this place is, but it seems like as of today, CloudFlare and not AWS define what Cloud Native is. I am definitely going to explore CloudFlare more and see ready it is to stand on its own, and not just substitute some of the less than ideal offerings of the Big Three.

What We've Shared

DevOps Accents #56: Kubernetes has gotten too complicated? with Gerrit Schumann from mogenius
What Are Synthetic Identities: an excerpt from DA #55

And on the website, as usual, there are two new articles:

Scan Container Images with Clair V4: Explore the power of container security with Kirill Shirinkin as he guides you through enhancing your CI pipeline with Clair, a tool that identifies vulnerabilities in container images. Learn to automate security scans using Clair to safeguard your deployments.
Buildah, Dive, Skopeo: 3 Container Tools for building images on Kubernetes Cluster, with Gitlab CI

What We've Discovered

A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500: A beautiful visualization of technology and how it evolved, over centuries, sorted by categories like Hardware, Body, Medicine and so on (over a dozen categories).
Prepare for Kubernetes version upgrades with cluster insights: Did you know that EKS can automatically check your cluster for compatibility with new K8s versions and even tell you what you need to fix in your configuration?
How webMethods iPaaS built a multi-tenant SaaS platform on Amazon EKS: Most insightful part of this case study is the network architecture, that could be learned from regardless usage of EKS.
Kubernetes in 2025: are you ready for these top 5 trends and predictions? Some data and observations on what’s coming in 2025 for Kubernetes. Predicting that Karpenter will continue capturing the cluster auto scaling market is spot on.
The Anthropic Economic Index : It’s time to start verifying the theory that AI will take our jobs. Anthropic analysed millions of conversations with Claude to detect which professions benefit from AI the most - and for which tasks they are using it. Of course, for better understanding we need all major LLM providers to contribute the data, but it’s the first step in understanding where exactly AI is helping us in the real world.

The 65th mkdev dispatch will arrive on Friday, March 14th. See you next time!