DNS service provider Cloudflare is getting serious about apps. The company has announced the Cloudfare Apps Platform as well as a $100 million fund that will distribute venture capital to startups that build apps on the platform.
Founded in 2011, Cloudfare has now built out a network that spans 115 cities around the world, serving six million websites. Prominent customers include Uber and Fitbit. Cloudfare also offers CDN (content delivery network) services, firewalls and DDoS (distributed denial of service) protection.
Cloudflare App Platform is a natural evolution of the business, CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a blog post:
Prior to today, if you wanted to write code that took full advantage of Cloudflare's global network you needed to be a Cloudflare employee. Our team is able to run code on thousands of servers in hundreds of locations around the world and modify our customers' packets as they flow through our network in order to make their web site, application, or API faster and more secure. Today, we open that access to the rest of the world.
The Apps Platform allows third parties to develop applications that can be delivered across Cloudflare's edge to any of our millions of customers.
Cloudflare sits in a unique place. Our customers' packets flow through our network before reaching origin servers and in the way back to clients. That enables us to filter out bad actors, introduce new compression, change protocols, and modify and inject content. The Cloudflare Apps Platform enables developers to do the same, and produce applications that help build a better Internet.
Meanwhile, the developer fund is being backed by Venrock, Pelion and NEA, which were early investors in Cloudfare:
Building Cloudflare was a community effort. We can't wait to see what developers build now that we've opened Cloudflare's infrastructure and access to investors to a greater audience.
The App Platform stems from Cloudflare's purchase of Eager last year. Despite its name, the platform doesn't offer a full set of developer tools. Rather, it provides a way for third-party developers to wrap their JavaScript and CSS-based applications in an install.JSON file. Cloudflare's platform abstracts away complexity for website customers, allowing non-technical users to use a simple interface to configure and install apps on their sites.
Eager's technology replaces an earlier app platform Cloudflare had built on its own. The company's app marketplace has about 50 applications so far but clearly the goal is to have many, many more. Like other stores, Cloudflare will take a piece of developers' revenue, in this case 30 percent.
POV: Surprisingly rich applications can be built with JavaScript and CSS, but you can expect the variety of applications that populate Cloudflare's store to include a fair amount of widgets, too, albeit useful ones, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses or department-level websites who want to add features quickly without engaging IT. Like any, the marketplace and platform's success will depend on developer and customer awareness, but Cloudflare's overall momentum, along with the $100 million fund, should ensure a fair amount of both.
