Latest news with #CloudflareWorkers
Techday NZ
25-06-2025
- Business
- Techday NZ
Cloudflare launches Containers beta for flexible edge computing
Cloudflare has announced the public beta release of its Containers product, enabling developers to execute code in a secure, isolated environment as part of its connectivity cloud services. The company said Containers are now accessible to all users on paid plans, providing a platform where applications such as media processing, backend services, and command-line interface tools can run at the edge of the network or in batch workloads. The integration with Cloudflare Workers means developers maintain a simple workflow using familiar tools. Cloudflare Containers are designed to extend the existing Workers platform by allowing more compute-intensive and flexible tasks. Developers can deploy globally without needing to manage configuration across multiple regions. They also have the option to choose between using Workers for lightweight requests or Containers for tasks that require greater resources and full Linux compatibility. The company highlighted the ability to run commonly used developer tools and libraries that were not previously available in the Workers environment. The workflow for deploying applications remains straightforward. Developers define a Container in a few lines of code and deploy it using existing tools. Cloudflare handles the routing, provisioning, and scaling, deploying containers in optimal locations across its global network for reduced latency and rapid start times. This is designed to enable use cases such as code sandboxing, where each user or AI-generated session requires a securely isolated environment, a scenario already adopted by some users including Coder. Configuration is managed via the Container class and a configuration file. Each unique session triggers a new container instance, and Cloudflare automatically selects the best available location to minimise response times for end-users. Initial startup times for containers are typically just a few seconds, according to the company. During development, wrangler dev allows for live iteration on container code, with containers being rebuilt and restarted directly from the terminal. For production deployment, developers use wrangler deploy, which pushes the container image to Cloudflare's infrastructure, handling all artefact management and integration processes automatically so developers can focus solely on their code. Observability and resource tracking are built into the Containers platform. Developers can monitor container status and resource usage through the Cloudflare dashboard, with built-in metrics and access to real-time logs. Logs are retained for seven days and can be exported to external sinks if needed. Application range Cloudflare pointed to a range of new applications enabled by Containers, such as deploying video processing libraries like FFmpeg, running backend services in any language, setting up routine batch jobs, or hosting a static frontend with a containerised backend. Integration with other Cloudflare Developer Platform services—including Durable Objects for state management, Workflows, Queues, Agents, and object storage via R2—expands potential application architectures. "We're excited about all the new types of applications that are now possible to build on Workers. We've heard many of you tell us over the years that you would love to run your entire application on Cloudflare, if only you could deploy this one piece that needs to run in a container." "Today, you can run libraries that you couldn't run in Workers before. For instance, try this Worker that uses FFmpeg to convert video to a GIF. Or you can run a container as part of a cron job. Or deploy a static frontend with a containerized backend. Or even run a Cloudflare Agent that uses a Container to run Claude Code on your behalf. The integration with the rest of the Developer Platform makes Containers even more powerful: use Durable Objects for state management, Workflows, Queues, and Agents to compose complex behaviors, R2 to store Container data or media, and more." Pricing details The Containers platform is available in three instance sizes at launch—dev, basic, and standard—ranging from 256 MiB to 4 GiB of memory and fractional vCPU allocation. Cloudflare charges based on actual resource usage in 10-millisecond increments. Memory is billed at USD $0.0000025 per GiB-second with a 25 GiB-hour monthly allowance, CPU at USD $0.000020 per vCPU-second with 375 vCPU-minutes included, and disk usage at USD $0.00000007 per GB-second with 200 GB-hour included. Network egress rates vary between USD $0.025 per GB for North America and Europe, up to USD $0.050 per GB for Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Korea, with included data transfer varying by region. Charges begin when a container is active and end when it automatically sleeps after a timeout, aiming to ensure efficient scaling down for unpredictable workloads. The company plans to expand available instance sizes and increase concurrent limits over time to support more demanding use cases. Roadmap Cloudflare outlined upcoming features for Containers, including higher memory and CPU limits, global autoscaling, latency-aware routing, enhanced communication channels between Workers and Containers, and deeper integrations with the broader developer platform. Plans are underway to introduce support for additional APIs and easier data storage access. "With today's release, we've only just begun to scratch the surface of what Containers will do on Workers. This is the first step of many towards our vision of a simple, global, and highly programmable Container platform." "We're already thinking about what's next, and wanted to give you a preview: Higher limits and larger instances... global autoscaling and latency-aware routing... more ways for your Worker to communicate with your container... further integrations with the Developer Platform — We will continue to integrate with the developer platform with first-party APIs for our various services. We want it to be dead simple to mount R2 buckets, reach Hyperdrive, access KV, and more. And we are just getting started. Stay tuned for more updates this summer and over the course of the entire year."
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Cloudflare vs. Akamai Technologies: Which CDN Stock Has an Edge?
Cloudflare NET and Akamai Technologies AKAM are both established players in the content delivery network (CDN) market. Both Cloudflare and Akamai are expected to gain from the rapidly expanding CDN space, which is expected to witness a CAGR of 18.04% from 2025 to 2034, per a report by Precedence Research. With this strong industry growth forecast, and given Cloudflare and Akamai Technologies' superior position in the CDN market, the question remains: Which stock has more upside potential? Let's break down their fundamentals, growth prospects, market challenges and valuation to determine which offers a more compelling investment case. Cloudflare's CDN provides a globally distributed, high-performance platform that speeds up content delivery, all the while keeping secure web connectivity. Cloudflare reduces latency and improves the load time of web pages by using a large network of edge locations to cache content close to users. Cloudflare uses methods like tiered caching, Argo smart routing, and cache reserve to minimize traffic and optimize delivery efficiency. The company goes further to secure its clients with security tools, including Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS), Web Application Firewall (WAF), bot management, and automatic Secure Sockets Layer and Transport Layer Security. Furthermore, NET's CDN supports advanced protocols, including HTTP/3, and offers developer flexibility through Cloudflare Workers. Cloudflare Workers lets developers build, deploy, and scale applications across Cloudflare's global network with a single command. The Workers platform has been adopted by more than three million developers since its launch date. Since the CDN contributes to a large portion of NET's revenues and is also gaining explosive growth, Cloudflare expects its 2025 revenues to be between $2.09 billion and $2.094 billion. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for NET's 2025 revenues is pegged at 2.09 billion, indicating year-over-year growth of 25.4%. Cloudflare's non-GAAP earnings per share are anticipated to be between 79 cents and 80 cents. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the same is pegged at 79 cents per share, indicating year-over-year growth of 5.3%. Image Source: Zacks Investment Research Akamai Technologies is one of the oldest players in the enterprise CDN space, with a wide reach across 135 countries supported by 365,000 servers across the globe. Like any other established CDN player, Akamai also offers an ecosystem combining cloud computing and security in its CDN. Akamai Technologies integrates security offerings like DDoS and WAF protection with edge computing solutions like EdgeWorkers and EdgeKV. In addition to these, Akamai offers advanced features like API Acceleration, Adaptive Media Delivery, Download Delivery, and Global Traffic Management. AKAM's CDN platform handles approximately two trillion web interactions on a daily basis. Akamai Technologies has always priced its services higher than its competitors, prompting some of its key clients to develop their own DIY CDN initiatives. Hence, Akamai Technologies moved toward a more aggressive pricing strategy in the hope of attracting more customers and traffic to its network, especially in the video content segment, potentially hurting its profitability. Akamai Technologies' delivery segment revenues have been on a constant decline for the past 17 quarters, raising investors' concerns about the sustainability of its CDN business. Akamai Technologies' profitability is also under pressure. The company expects its non-GAAP earnings to be in the range of $6.10-$6.40 per share. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the same is pegged at $6.27 per share, indicating a year-over-year decline of 3.2%. Image Source: Zacks Investment Research In the year-to-date period, Cloudflare shares have climbed 66.9% while Akamai Technologies has plunged 18.3%. Image Source: Zacks Investment Research Cloudflare is trading at a forward sales multiple of 26.65X, while AKAM is trading at a forward sales multiple of 2.71X. Although Cloudflare seems to be overvalued, its strong position in the CDN space and robust financials justify its current valuation. Image Source: Zacks Investment Research Both companies are major players in the CDN space, but Akamai Technologies is slowly losing its grip, given its declining delivery segment's revenues, while Cloudflare continues to capture market share and flourish in this space. Currently, Cloudflare carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold), giving it an edge over Akamai Technologies, which has a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell). You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Akamai Technologies, Inc. (AKAM) : Free Stock Analysis Report Cloudflare, Inc. (NET) : Free Stock Analysis Report This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research ( Zacks Investment Research Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Can Cloudflare's Workers Platform Lead Its Next Phase of Growth?
Cloudflare's NET first-quarter 2025 results show that its Workers platform may become a key part of its future growth. The company signed its biggest-ever deal, worth more than $100 million, mainly because of the Workers platform. This deal shows that large customers now see Cloudflare as more than just a security or network company. Cloudflare Workers lets developers build and run applications closer to users. Since its launch in 2017, the platform has been adopted by more than three million developers who are actively using the platform. Cloudflare Workers started as a serverless platform that helped developers to build, deploy, and scale applications across Cloudflare's global network. Convenient to use, the Workers platform enabled developers to take actions using a single command and reduced infrastructure management and configuration complexities. Now the company is evolving the platform with AI implementation. The Workers AI tool embedded inside the Workers developer platform has experienced an explosive 4,000% year-over-year rise in inference requests as reported in the first-quarter earnings. Cloudflare is now focusing on enriching its Workers platform with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. The MCP server running inside its Workers platform will enable its clients to leverage MCP's standardized, low-latency connection between AI models and software platforms. This will further help these clients to deploy AI agents to simplify tasks like managing workflows, handling transactions, or querying business data. This value addition can trigger more upsells and customer acquisition, hence boosting this platform's growth. Alphabet GOOGL and Amazon AMZN also provide general-purpose serverless and container-based edge deployment solutions. Alphabet offers Google Cloud Functions + Cloud Run with Cloud CDN, while Amazon Web Services offers Lambda & Lambda@Edge. While Alphabet is implementing AI in its Cloud Run solution, Amazon's AWS Lambda & Lambda@Edge leverage deep integrations with AWS services, robust tooling, and a mature developer base. Additionally, AWS Fargate is the AWS service that also enables serverless compute for containers. Cloudflare provides configuration-less auto-scaling, a high-performance global network, and low latency in serverless services that are compatible with all the major programming languages, including JS, Rust, C, and C++, so it will thrive in this competitive environment. Cloudflare's Price Performance, Valuation and Estimates Shares of NET have surged 66.5% year to date compared with the Zacks Internet - Software industry's growth of 13.2%. Image Source: Zacks Investment Research From a valuation standpoint, NET trades at a forward price-to-sales ratio of 26.61X, higher than the industry's average of 5.68X. Image Source: Zacks Investment Research The Zacks Consensus Estimate for NET's fiscal 2025 and 2026 earnings implies year-over-year growth of 5.33% and 31.62%, respectively. The estimates for fiscal 2025 earnings have been revised downward in the past 60 days and the 2026 earnings have been revised downward in the past seven days. Image Source: Zacks Investment Research NET currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Inc. (AMZN) : Free Stock Analysis Report Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL) : Free Stock Analysis Report Cloudflare, Inc. (NET) : Free Stock Analysis Report This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research ( Zacks Investment Research
Channel Post MEA
13-05-2025
- Business
- Channel Post MEA
Cloudflare And Tech Companies Create AI Agent Experiences Through Anthropic's Claude
Cloudflare has announced a wave of global technology companies, including Asana, Atlassian, Block, PayPal, Sentry, Stripe, and more, are working with Cloudflare to create powerful AI experiences through Anthropic's AI assistant, Claude. These software companies are enabling Claude and other AI assistants to securely interact with their services on behalf of users, through connections built on Cloudflare Workers. Now users can complete tasks and interact with their favorite business tools through natural conversations with Claude, rather than working directly in the application. AI is already transforming the way we work by helping to edit emails, generate code, and analyze data. However, it still often requires the user to switch between multiple applications, tabs, and tools to implement the actions it recommends. For truly autonomous, agentic AI experiences, AI tools should be able to act on the user's behalf. That can only happen if AI tools can directly interact with business software tools. MCP servers allow AI platforms to connect directly to the popular tools where data resides so the user can send an email, answer a question about a marketing campaign, or create invoices–all without leaving the AI assistant. But delivering reliable, low-latency, and secure access to external tools and data is a significant technical challenge, especially at global scale. 'Cloudflare is powering how AI connects to the world,' said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO, Cloudflare. 'Whether it's through a browser, an app, or an AI assistant like Claude, we're the backbone making those experiences fast, secure, and reliable. As agentic AI becomes the new interface, Cloudflare is the core infrastructure companies will rely on to build and scale their AI strategies.' 'AI apps are most valuable when they can connect to your data and tools, but building these connections reliably at scale is complex,' said Mahesh Murag, Product Manager at Anthropic. 'Cloudflare is helping to simplify and secure how anyone can connect their apps to Claude via MCP, accelerate adoption of MCP, and kickstart an ecosystem of remote servers.' Simplifying How Enterprises Build with MCP Standard Cloudflare provides the only toolkit to build remote MCP servers quickly and easily – allowing developer teams to focus on building powerful AI experiences for their users rather than managing the technical challenges of MCP, the open-source standard developed by Anthropic. Cloudflare makes it easy to build secure MCP servers – simplifying complex authentication and authorization processes, providing controls to restrict agent permissions, and offering visibility into what data has been accessed and what actions were taken. Building and deploying remote MCP servers on Cloudflare takes days instead of weeks, and is supported by Cloudflare's global network for fast, reliable, seamless AI experiences for customers anywhere. 0 0
Techday NZ
02-05-2025
- Business
- Techday NZ
Cloudflare & Anthropic team up to power secure AI app links
Cloudflare has announced a collaboration with Anthropic to enable secure, real-time integrations between Anthropic's AI assistant Claude and major software-as-a-service companies, including Atlassian, Stripe, PayPal, Asana, and Intercom. The partnership allows users to interact with business applications through natural conversation with Claude, bypassing the need to switch between multiple software tabs or interfaces. These connections are being facilitated by Cloudflare's new Managed Connection Proxy (MCP) toolkit, with Cloudflare stating it is currently the only platform simplifying the building of such integrations. Atlassian is one of the first companies to utilise this new capability. Users of Atlassian's Jira and Confluence products can now interact with these tools via Claude, engaging in conversational AI rather than navigating traditional software interfaces. Taroon Mandhana, Head of Product Engineering at Atlassian, said, "AI is not one-size-fits-all and we believe that it needs to be embedded within a team's jobs to be done. That's why we're so excited to invest in MCP and meet teams in more places where they already work. Hosting on Cloudflare infrastructure means we can bring this powerful integration to our customers faster and empower them to do more than ever with Jira and Confluence, all while keeping their enterprise data secure. Cloudflare provided everything from OAuth to out-of-the-box remote MCP support so we could quickly build, secure, and scale a fully operational setup." Cloudflare reports that global technology firms such as Asana, Block, PayPal, Sentry, Stripe, and more, are working with the company to develop AI experiences through Anthropic's Claude assistant. These companies are making it possible for Claude and similar AI assistants to securely interact with their software ecosystems on behalf of end users, leveraging connections built on Cloudflare Workers. The goal is to facilitate truly autonomous, agentic AI experiences where the assistant can not only provide recommendations but also act on the user's behalf within business applications. This is made possible by deploying MCP servers that connect AI platforms directly to business tools, enabling tasks such as sending emails, responding to marketing queries, or generating invoices without switching out of the AI interface. Delivering secure and low-latency access to third-party tools and data presents substantial technical challenges, particularly on a global scale. Matthew Prince, Cloudflare's Co-Founder and Chief Executive, stated, "Cloudflare is powering how AI connects to the world. Whether it's through a browser, an app, or an AI assistant like Claude, we're the backbone making those experiences fast, secure, and reliable. As agentic AI becomes the new interface, Cloudflare is the core infrastructure companies will rely on to build and scale their AI strategies." Mahesh Murag, Product Manager at Anthropic, commented, "AI apps are most valuable when they can connect to your data and tools, but building these connections reliably at scale is complex. Cloudflare is helping to simplify and secure how anyone can connect their apps to Claude via MCP, accelerate adoption of MCP, and kickstart an ecosystem of remote servers." The open-source MCP standard, developed by Anthropic, outlines how secure connections between AI agents and external software should be established. Cloudflare's toolkit provides developer teams with the means to build remote MCP servers efficiently, focusing on critical aspects such as authentication, permissions control, and data access visibility. Cloudflare asserts that deploying these servers can be achieved in days instead of weeks, supported by its global network to ensure reliably fast AI experiences. Several companies have detailed their approaches to leveraging the MCP toolkit. Prashant Pandey, Chief Technology Officer at Asana, said, "At Asana, we've always focused on helping teams coordinate work effortlessly. MCP connects our Work Graph directly to AI tools like Claude, enabling AI to become a true teammate in work management. Our integration transforms natural language into structured work – creating projects from meeting notes or pulling updates into AI. Building on Cloudflare's infrastructure allowed us to deploy quickly, handling authentication and scaling while we focused on creating the best experience for our users." Jordan Neill, SVP Engineering at Intercom, commented, "The momentum behind MCP is exciting. It's making it easier and easier to connect assistants like Claude and agents like Fin to your systems and get real work done. Cloudflare's toolkit is accelerating that movement even faster. Launching the Intercom MCP server was effortless. We'll be encouraging our customers to leverage Cloudflare to build and deploy their own MCP servers to securely and reliably connect their internal systems to Fin and other clients." Tom Moor, Head of US Engineering at Linear, explained, "We're building on Cloudflare to take advantage of their frameworks in this fast-moving space and flexible, fast, compute at the edge. With MCP, we're bringing Linear's issue tracking and product development workflows directly into their AI tools of choice, eliminating context switching for teams. Our goal is simple: let developers and product teams access their work where they already are—whether refining specs in Claude, debugging in Cursor, or creating issues from conversations. This seamless integration helps our customers stay in flow and focused on building great products." On the payments and commerce side, Prakhar Mehrotra, Senior Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at PayPal, said, "MCPs represent a new paradigm for software development. With PayPal's remote MCP server on Cloudflare, now developers can delegate to an agent with natural language to seamlessly integrate with PayPal's portfolio of commerce capabilities. Whether it's managing inventory, processing payments, tracking shipping, handling refunds, AI agents via MCP can tap into these capabilities to autonomously execute and optimize commerce workflows. This is a revolutionary development for commerce, and the best part is, developers can begin integrating with our MCP server on Cloudflare today." David Cramer, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder at Sentry, noted, "Sentry's commitment has always been to the developer, and making it easier to keep production software running stable, and that's going to be even more true in the AI era. Developers are utilizing tools like MCP to integrate their stack with AI models and data sources. We chose to build our MCP on Cloudflare because we share a vision of making it easier for developers to ship software, and are both invested in ensuring teams can build and safely run the next generation of AI agents. Debugging the complex interactions arising from these integrations is increasingly vital, and Sentry provides the essential visibility needed to rapidly diagnose and resolve issues. MCP integrates this crucial Sentry context directly into the developer workflow, empowering teams to consistently build and deploy reliable applications." Jeff Weinstein, Product Lead at Stripe, described, "MCP is emerging as a new AI interface. In the near-future, MCP may become the default way, or in some cases the only way, people, businesses, and code discover and interact with services. With Stripe's agent toolkit, developers can now monetize their MCPs with just a few lines of code." Utkarsh Sengar, Vice President of Engineering at Webflow, added, "Since launching the Webflow MCP server, we've unlocked a new level of innovation as developers use AI agents and our APIs to simplify tasks that once took significant time and effort. Now, actions like managing a CMS, generating blogs at scale, improving SEO, and even getting help using Webflow can be achieved by simply prompting an AI agent. With Cloudflare's support for remote MCP connections, we're ensuring a seamless, secure experience while making authentication fast and easy. This partnership helps us bring development superpowers to everyone, providing the tools to build faster and smarter web experiences." Cloudflare has also announced the launch of its own MCP servers, designed to allow users to more easily build applications, improve website performance, and enhance network security by conversing directly with Claude. This means developers can access support for tasks such as analysing logs and tracking errors through natural language, without consulting traditional documentation or navigating observability tools.
