Act 1: Application Services
The Original Cloudflare
The products that started it all — making websites fast, reliable, and secure. This act represents the bulk of Cloudflare's historical revenue and established the massive global network that everything else is built on.
Lessons (8)
DNS
The internet's phone book — how Cloudflare makes it faster and more secure
CDN
Caching and delivering content from the edge, closer to users
DDoS Protection
Absorbing massive attacks so websites stay online
WAF
Blocking SQL injection, XSS, and other web application attacks
Bot Management
Identifying and controlling automated traffic
Load Balancing
Steering and balancing traffic from the edge across origins
SSL/TLS
Encrypting connections between users and websites
API Shield
Discovering, securing, and managing APIs
Act 2: Network Services & Zero Trust
Protecting the Corporate Network
Shifting the focus inward to protect a company's employees, data, and internal applications. This is Cloudflare's play to replace legacy VPNs, firewalls, and MPLS circuits with cloud-delivered security.
Lessons (9)
Zero Trust Overview
The 'never trust, always verify' security framework
Cloudflare Access
Replacing VPNs with identity-based application access
Cloudflare Gateway
Filtering and securing internet-bound employee traffic
Cloudflare Tunnel
Securely connecting applications to Cloudflare without opening public inbound ports
Magic Transit
DDoS protection and security for entire IP networks
Magic WAN
Connecting offices and data centers through Cloudflare's network
Magic Firewall
Cloud-native packet-level firewall for enterprise networks
Browser Isolation
Running web browsing in a secure cloud sandbox
Email Security
Stopping phishing and business email compromise
Act 3: Developer Platform
Cloudflare IS the App
Cloudflare as a full cloud provider. Rather than just sitting in front of applications, developers can build entire applications directly on Cloudflare's global edge network — compute, storage, databases, and AI.
Lessons (8)
Workers
Serverless compute running on every Cloudflare data center worldwide
R2 Storage
S3-compatible object storage with zero egress fees
D1 Database
Serverless SQL database built on SQLite
Workers KV
Global, low-latency key-value storage
Durable Objects
Strongly consistent storage and real-time coordination
Queues
Reliable message queuing for background tasks and event-driven architectures
Pages
Deploy and host websites with Git integration
Workers AI
Running AI inference on Cloudflare's global GPU network
Act 4: Agentic Web & AI
The Frontier
The newest frontier — building infrastructure for the era of AI agents. This act focuses on the tools and platforms AI agents need to operate, be identified, and be monetized on the web.
Lessons (5)
AI Gateway
Observability, caching, and control for AI API calls
Workflows
Durable execution for multi-step, long-running tasks
Agents SDK
Framework for building stateful AI agents on Workers
AI Audit
Visibility and control over how AI bots use your content
Consent-to-Crawl
Giving website owners control over how AI bots access their content