The secret to Cloudflare’s pace of Innovation

What this post added

This post details Cloudflare's deliberate approach to innovation, highlighting three key pillars: cultivating curiosity within its team, leveraging its own technology ('eating its own dog food') for product development, and engaging its vast free customer base for testing and insights. Specific examples of this approach include the development of R2 object storage to address egress fees, the expansion of the at-cost registrar service, the use of CloudflareTV as a real-time streaming service, and the iterative development of features like Dark Mode. The post emphasizes the role of the Workers platform in enabling rapid development velocity and global rollout, the effectiveness of small, focused teams (including Emerging Technology and Incubation, and Research teams), and the consumer-software-like iterative development process. It also highlights how cost-effective network infrastructure and a large free customer base enable rapid testing and refinement of new capabilities, leading to confident broad rollouts.