Exciting new Products at Cloudflare After Their 2023 Birthday Week
Each year, Cloudflare celebrates their birthday with exciting product releases. In this year, I'll cover what I find most exciting.
This year, Cloudflare celebrated their birthday again with the unveiling of lots of new products and services. Let's take a look at the shiny new stuff.
Cloudflare Fonts
Although it's not available yet, Cloudflare Fonts seems to be a faster and more privacy-friendly way to use the currently widely-used Google Fonts. With "a click of a button", the pre-existing Google Fonts on your website can be loaded over your own domain, reducing loading times and protecting your users' privacy.
Cloudflare Trace
This is a neat tool for people who like to configure products like WAF (Web Application Firewall) or Page Rules. Trace makes it easy to send requests to your site through the Cloudflare network, and "trace" how they're routed and which rules are invoked.
Updated Images and Workers pricing
The Cloudflare Images pricing was updated, so you're not obligated to pay the $5 minimum anymore. You can now use your own image storage and only pay for the image transformations you use.
Workers are now only billed by CPU time. This means you won't be charged for idle time anymore, like when your Worker is waiting for network requests or I/O. Also, the "Bundled" and "Unbound" pricing plans have been combined.
Workers AI & AI Gateway
With AI products on the rise, Cloudflare seemed to lack behind. Not anymore! AI Workers have been announced, which make running AI models easy with a few lines of code on Cloudflare's global GPU network.
AI Gateway is also here, and could help monitor and scale applications using AI models.
Hyperdrive
Hyperdrive is a completely new Cloudflare product, which promises to turn your regional databases into edge databases when accessed through the Cloudflare network by e.g. Workers.
Post Quantum Cryptography
Cloudflare also announced that they're taking Post Quantum Cryptography into general availability in the following months, protecting users from future encryption cracking with quantum computers. This is a major deal, and I'm really excited that this is coming!
More stuff available
Cloudflare has also made more integrations for Workers available, added a Pages Build Cache to reduce build times, and made Turnstile (their CAPTCHA alternative) generally available.
All in all, I'd say there's a lot of cool new stuff. I want to point out that I'm purely writing this article because I'm interested in the new products Cloudflare offers. I haven't been paid for anything, that's why I'm also free to say, that I think Cloudflare should finally add data migration to R2 from other sources than AWS S3 and improve their freaking docs! Goddam, why does it take so long!
Otherwise, I'm really excited! Can't wait to try it all out!
