Cloudflare Is Taking On Amazon by Harnessing the Edge
Cloudflare (NYSE: NET) is best known for speeding up its customers' applications and protecting them from hackers and attacks. The company's global network sits between a website visitor and a customer's infrastructure, protecting that infrastructure from being overloaded with malicious traffic and caching content close to the user.
Cloud computing has been a revolution for developers, allowing virtual servers and storage to be quickly provisioned and scaled with ease. If a developer wants to build an application, they can go to Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Web Services and have infrastructure ready to go in a few minutes.
The downside of this approach is that code and data are executed and stored in one place. AWS and other major cloud providers are split into regions, and your application is generally going to live in one of those regions. If someone visits your website from California and you're using one of AWS's regions on the East Coast, requests are going to be flying across the country. It's a fast process, but it's not instantaneous.
Source Fool.com
