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Birthday Week recap: everything we announced — plus an AI-powered opportunity for startups
This year, Cloudflare officially became a teenager, turning 13 years old. We celebrated this milestone with a series of announcements that benefit both our customers and the Internet community.
From developing applications in the age of AI to securing against the most advanced attacks that are yet to come, Cloudflare is proud to provide the tools that help our customers stay one step ahead.
We hope you’ve had a great time following along and for anyone looking for a recap of everything we launched this week, here it is:
Cloudflare Stream’s LL-HLS support is now in open beta. You can deliver video to your audience faster, reducing the latency a viewer may experience on their player to as little as 3 seconds.
Cloudflare account permissions are now available to all customers, not just Enterprise. In addition, we’ll show you how you can use them and best practices.
Now available: Workers AI, a serverless GPU cloud for AI, Vectorize so you can build your own vector databases, and AI Gateway to help manage costs and observability of your AI applications.
Cloudflare delivers the best infrastructure for next-gen AI applications, supported by partnerships with NVIDIA, Microsoft, Hugging Face, Databricks, and Meta.
Launching Workers AI — AI inference as a service platform, empowering developers to run AI models with just a few lines of code, all powered by our global network of GPUs.
Cloudflare’s vector database, designed to allow engineers to build full-stack, AI-powered applications entirely on Cloudflare's global network — available in Beta.
AI Gateway helps developers have greater control and visibility in their AI apps, so that you can focus on building without worrying about observability, reliability, and scaling. AI Gateway handles the things that nearly all AI applications need, saving you engineering time so you can focus on what you're building.
Developers can now use WebGPU in Cloudflare Workers. Learn more about why WebGPUs are important, why we’re offering them to customers, and what’s next.
Many AI companies are using Cloudflare to build next generation applications. Learn more about what they’re building and how Cloudflare is helping them on their journey.
Cloudflare launches a new product, Hyperdrive, that makes existing regional databases much faster by dramatically speeding up queries that are made from Cloudflare Workers.
D1 is now in open beta, and the theme is “scale”: with higher per-database storage limits and the ability to create more databases, we’re unlocking the ability for developers to build production-scale applications on D1.
Introducing the Browser Rendering API, which enables developers to utilize the Puppeteer browser automation library within Workers, eliminating the need for serverless browser automation system setup and maintenance
We partnered with Microsoft Edge to provide a fast and secure VPN, right in the browser. Users don’t have to install anything new or understand complex concepts to get the latest in network-level privacy: Edge Secure Network VPN is available on the latest consumer version of Microsoft Edge in most markets, and automatically comes with 5GB of data.
We are revamping the playground that demonstrates the power of Workers, along with new development tooling, and the ability to share your playground code and deploy instantly to Cloudflare’s global network
Engineers from Cloudflare and Vercel have published a draft specification of the connect() sockets API for review by the community, along with a Node.js compatible polyfill for the connect() API that developers can start using.
Announcing new pricing for Cloudflare Workers, where you are billed based on CPU time, and never for the idle time that your Worker spends waiting on network requests and other I/O.
Cloudflare is rolling out post-quantum cryptography support to customers, services, and internal systems to proactively protect against advanced attacks.
Announcing a contribution that helps improve privacy for everyone on the Internet. Encrypted Client Hello, a new standard that prevents networks from snooping on which websites a user is visiting, is now available on all Cloudflare plans.
Cloudflare customers can now scan messages within their Office 365 Inboxes for threats. The Retro Scan will let you look back seven days to see what threats your current email security tool has missed.
Any Cloudflare user, on any plan, can choose specific categories of bots that they want to allow or block, including AI crawlers. We are also recommending a new standard to robots.txt that will make it easier for websites to clearly direct how AI bots can and can’t crawl.
Deep dive into Cloudflare’s approach and ongoing research into detecting novel web attack vectors in our WAF before they are seen by a security researcher.
Deep dive into the fundamental concepts behind the Distributed Aggregation Protocol (DAP) protocol with examples on how we’ve implemented it into Daphne, our open source aggregator server.
We are rolling out post-quantum cryptography support for outbound connections to origins and Cloudflare Workers fetch() calls. Learn more about what we enabled, how we rolled it out in a safe manner, and how you can add support to your origin server today.
Cloudflare’s updated benchmark results regarding network performance plus a dive into the tools and processes that we use to monitor and improve our network performance.
One More Thing
When Cloudflare turned 12 last year, we announced the Workers Launchpad Funding Program – you can think of it like a startup accelerator program for companies building on Cloudlare’s Developer Platform, with no restrictions on your size, stage, or geography.
A refresher on how the Launchpad works: Each quarter, we admit a group of startups who then get access to a wide range of technical advice, mentorship, and fundraising opportunities. That includes our Founders Bootcamp, Open Office Hours with our Solution Architects, and Demo Day. Those who are ready to fundraise will also be connected to our community of 40+ leading global Venture Capital firms.
In exchange, we just ask for your honest feedback. We want to know what works, what doesn’t and what you need us to build for you. We don’t ask for a stake in your company, and we don’t ask you to pay to be a part of the program.
Targum (my startup) was one of the first AI companies (w/ @jamdotdev ) in the Cloudflare workers launchpad!
In return to tons of stuff we got from CF 🙏 they asked for feedback, and my main one was, let me do everything end to end on CF, I don't want to rent GPU servers… https://t.co/0j2ZymXpsL
Over the past year, we’ve received applications from nearly 60 different countries. We’ve had a chance to work closely with 50 amazing early and growth-stage startups admitted into the first two cohorts, and have grown our VC partner community to 40+ firms and more than $2 billion in potential investments in startups building on Cloudflare.
Next up: Cohort #3! Between recently wrapping up Cohort #2 (check out their Demo Day!), celebrating the Launchpad’s 1st birthday, and the heaps of announcements we made last week, we thought that everyone could use a little extra time to catch up on all the news – which is why we are extending the deadline for Cohort #3 a few weeks to October 13, 2023. AND we’re reserving 5 spots in the class for those who are already using any of last Wednesday’s AI announcements. Just be sure to mention what you’re using in your application.
So once you’ve had a chance to check out the announcements and pour yourself a cup of coffee, check out the Workers Launchpad. Applying is a breeze — you’ll be done long before your coffee gets cold.
Until next time
That’s all for Birthday Week 2023. We hope you enjoyed the ride, and we’ll see you at our next innovation week!
