Cloudflare Makes Every Internet Application More Programmable
Cloudflare, Inc. the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, today announced Cloudflare for Platforms, a new suite of tools that allows organizations to transform any application into a programmable platform for developers to build on. Cloudflare for Platforms allows organizations to easily transform any fixed application–ranging from ecommerce solutions to chat apps and everything in between–so developers can build custom functionality using the latest open API standards, without relying on costly external servers to manage complex APIs.
As businesses scale, they need to cater to individual customer needs that may vary from a Fortune 100 financial institution to a hyper-growth technology company. Previously, businesses would use their own engineering resources to build features for each customer, which can be costly and hard to scale. Imagine a workplace chat application provider is asked by a customer to build an integration with an email tool. Instead of using valuable engineering resources, the chat application provider can give its customers the ability to build directly within the application. With Cloudflare for Platforms, any organization will be able to empower users to program an application the way they want and need it to perform without costly servers, massive developer resources, or external consultants.
“Five years ago Cloudflare built our serverless computing platform, Cloudflare Workers, to give all of our customers the ability to program the way Cloudflare worked for themselves,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “Cloudflare Workers is one of the fastest and most widely adopted edge computing products that provides limitless possibilities for our customers. Now we’re taking this formula and helping any organization do the same, using the scale, speed, and flexibility of Cloudflare’s global network.”
Cloudflare for Platforms is built on Cloudflare Workers, a serverless solution that allows developers to deploy code instantly across Cloudflare’s global network for exceptional performance, reliability, and scale. Additionally, Cloudflare is partnering with leading organizations to create new API standards for developers that will form the foundation of how applications can be built in the future to take advantage of the scale and flexibility of edge computing. Now Cloudflare will enable any product to become a platform, by allowing its developers to:
- Use Cloudflare’s fast, scalable, and secure environment: With multiple developers building customized tools on a businesses’ platform, code needs to run quickly in a highly secure environment and scale as needed.
- Quickly and easily view all of their code: Developers need to have visibility into errors, and an overview of what’s going on in their code. Trace Cloudflare Workers make it easy for any business to pass that information onto their customers’ developers.
- Use the API standards of the future for a common experience, wherever they code: Any developer will be able to write and run code conforming to Web Platform standards–and easily transfer it–between Cloudflare Workers, Deno, and Node.js seamlessly and without the need to rewrite an application.
- Get insights from powerful analytics: Using Ready Analytics, platforms can expose easy to use dashboards to developers.
- Simplify and secure custom domains: For many platforms, especially for SaaS use cases, having the ability to run the service on a custom domain is table stakes. SSL for SaaS, part of Cloudflare for Platforms, provides an easy way to provision SSL certificates for custom hostnames, without having to manage complex certificates deployment pipelines.
“Shopify is the Internet’s commerce infrastructure, with millions of merchants using the platform,” said Zach Koch, product director, custom storefronts, at Shopify. “Partnering with Cloudflare, we’re able to give developers the tools they need to build unique and performant storefronts. We are excited to work with Cloudflare to alleviate some of the complexities of building commerce experiences – like scalability and global availability – so that developers can instead focus on what makes their brand distinct.”
