Built on top of Cloudflare's (NET) global edge computing network is a set of products aimed at software developers. Serverless functions can run on Workers; websites can be hosted on Pages; a full-featured database can be stood up using D1 ; and event-driven systems could be built with Queues. More recently, Cloudflare has launched multiple AI-focused products, bringing ultrafast AI inferencing to its developer platform.

While complete applications could be built using Cloudflare's developer platform, the missing piece has always been the ability to deploy arbitrary third-party applications. A developer may need to deploy a content management system, an authentication system, or any number of other software components. Cloudflare Workers is great for running bits of JavaScript or Python code, but it can't handle a wide range of use cases.

Cloudflare finally brings Containers to its developer platform

In June, Cloudflare will launch its Containers product into open beta. A container is essentially a stripped-down bundle of application code and all dependencies, allowing an application to be deployed to any computing environment quickly and easily in a standardized way.

With Cloudflare's Containers, essentially any application that can be deployed to a traditional cloud-computing provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS) can also be deployed to Cloudflare. That's not the case at the moment, and it's one of the major limiting factors for Cloudflare's developer platform.

Cloudflare is planning to deeply integrate its Containers product with Workers, enabling a wide variety of use cases. Containers can be spun up and down programmatically and in response to user actions, and Workers can be used to route traffic to Containers and to scale the number of instances up or down. Some simple Workers code can replace the complex configuration that is often required in other types of container environments.

Cloudflare's Containers will be particularly attractive for companies with highly variable computing needs. Pricing is based on the memory, central processing unit (CPU), and disk usage per second, and Containers can be put to sleep when inactive. Containers can be spun up to handle a burst of traffic, then spun back down when traffic declines, and the logic behind this scaling can be configured with some Workers code.

Winning new workloads

Cloudflare has nearly 240,000 paying customers, including 35% of Fortune 500 companies. For any customer already using some of Cloudflare's developer services, the launch of Containers opens the door for that customer to move workloads from traditional cloud providers to Cloudflare's platform.

For companies struggling to contain cloud-computing costs on AWS, Cloudflare's Containers makes its platform a viable alternative, particularly for workloads that are highly variable. Notably, Cloudflare tends to charge far less for bandwidth than traditional cloud-computing providers. For some AWS customers, Cloudflare could be substantially less expensive.

For start-ups that aren't yet committed to any cloud-computing provider, Cloudflare's Containers puts the company in the conversation. The usage-based pricing, with no need to pay for reserved capacity, could be attractive to start-ups looking to scale quickly while maximizing runway.

Cloudflare still has work left to do as it brings its Containers into open beta in June and prepares for general availability at some point down the road. Once Containers exits beta, the company's developer platform will be a viable option for all sorts of workloads that were impossible to run on Cloudflare in the past.