Cloudflare is a web infrastructure and security company founded in 2009 in California and generated $287 million in revenue last year. However, they have a fairly small position in the edge computing sector with only four documents in the last three years. Despite that smaller position, Cloudflare is starting a battle with AWS Lambda that they are well-positioned to win. Amazon is in no way dominant in the sector due to the openness of the field, with Amazon only having seventeen documents in the last three years. Amazon does have $280.5 billion in revenue last year though, making it a formidable foe to go up against. Cloudflare is taking on Amazon by launching Cloudflare Workers Unbound.
Cloudflare Workers Unbound is a revamped version of their Workers platform which is a serverless platform for allowing developers to run code and applications at the edge. Workers previously only supported Javascript but has now expanded to handle multiple different programming languages. Don't worry, COBOL made the list. If you want to use C++, Python, Ruby, etc. then those work now as well. This newly revamped platform will compete with AWS Lambda which offers a similar service by supposedly being able to offer better performance for a much lower cost.
It will be interesting to see what effect this has on Cloudflare's patent strategy as they have not been very active so far, but that could change with this renewed interest in their edge platforms. It will also be worth watching how Amazon responds and if they will leverage their resources to execute faster development and patenting timelines to compete with Cloudflare's new service. To see more about the exciting startups taking on tech giants, check out the Magic Number® Edge Computing Patent Forecast®.
