Cloudflare is playing Go, AWS is playing chess

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I came across an interesting article about Cloudflare’s strategy of expansion.

AWS is playing chess, Cloudflare is playing Go
https://www.swyx.io/cloudflare-go/

Establish: Establish a foothold in something incumbents don’t care enough about
Envelop: Reverse-proxy something that incumbents don’t serve customers well on
Expand: cross-sell other premium products and services until they are more customers of you than they are customers of the incumbent.

While AWS boasts an impressive 230+ points of presence, Cloudflare has interconnects with 10,000 networks including “every major ISP, cloud provider, and enterprise”. These aren’t the same thing, but it reflects the substantially different game that Cloudflare is playing.

In Chess, pieces have different values and capabilities.
In Go, each piece is indistinguishable from the other; it is the network position that counts.

So while AWS has 17 ways to run containers and 7 ways to do async message processing, all overlapping and reinforcing and supporting each other, Cloudflare will tend toward introducing singular primitives, stuff them in a box, and try to ship those boxes to as many places as will possibly take them. If they could install Cloudflare on your mobile phone, they would

This analogy helped me understand Cloudflare’s potential better.

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While AWS boasts an impressive 230+ points of presence, Cloudflare has interconnects with 10,000 networks including “every major ISP, cloud provider, and enterprise”. These aren’t the same thing, but it reflects the substantially different game that Cloudflare is playing.

I bolded the important take-away there. It’s like saying one company has 230 field offices while another company has 10,000 telephones. It’s apples to machine bolts.

The better comparison is that Amazon’s Cloudfront has 191 POPs to Cloudflare’s 230. (https://www.amazonaws.cn/en/cloudfront/ )

However, raw number of POPs don’t necessarily say much. Akamai, for instance, has 325,000 POPs, which is MULTIPLE orders of magnitude higher than either Cloudflare or Amazon. Akamai further claims that 85% of the world is within 1 hop of an Akamai POP (https://www.akamai.com/company/facts-figures ).

Fastly, OTOH, prides itself on having fewer POPs than any other high performing CDN. Fastly’s difference is that their POPs are large in both compute and storage, so that they can handle a higher percentage of requests without having to go back to the Origin Server. A close POP does you no good if it doesn’t have the latest, up to date content to provide. Matter of fact, that slows things down as you need yet another request from the POP to the Origin Server and back - and then back to the requesting user.

Cloudflare is doing a lot of things right, but apples to machine bolts comparisons aren’t useful. In addition, comparing Cloudflare to Amazon’s Cloudfront doesn’t say much. Amazon has many many services, most of which Amazon doesn’t give a lot of attention. Amazon concentrates on its big business and high returns, and provides other services so customers don’t have to have multiple vendors. But, like Amazon’s DocumentDB isn’t real competition for MongoDB’s Atlas, Cloudfront isn’t the real competition for Cloudflare. I’d be more interested in how Cloudflare competes with Fastly and Akamai in terms of CDNs, and how it competes with Fastly and Amazon’s Lambda and Lambda@Edge in terms of serverless/edge computing.

One of the things Cloudflare is doing right is coming up from the low-end. This is classic Christensen - new technology introduced to support a low-end market, then expand into higher end products. These are all highly competitive markets. The barrier to moving CDNs is extremely minimal; the battle for edge computing is still ongoing and I haven’t seem any really TAM estimates presented.

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