Business Description

Overview Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. Over the past decade, the technology industry has been undergoing a massive transition from on-premises hardware and software that customers buy, to services in the cloud that they rent. Organizations find themselves at different points in this transition to the cloud. Regardless of where organizations are in their transition, they all face a common set of challenges: they exist in a complex, heterogeneous infrastructure environment which exacerbates the fundamental problems of the Internet more than ever, and the on-premises hardware boxes that they once relied upon to solve these problems were never designed to work in such an environment. As more workloads move to the cloud and workforces become increasingly distributed globally, there is no point in installing additional hardware boxes on premise. An on-premises box will not solve the problems organizations now face. Nor can a business ship a hardware box to a cloud vendor. Even if they wanted to, there is literally no place to install such a box in the cloud. The result is that a major architectural shift at the network layer is underway. Previously, enterprises would often string together a diverse set of on-premises hardware boxes from different vendors to solve their network challenges. As these solutions move to the cloud, the network latency, support complexity, and cost of overhead makes stringing together multiple point-cloud solutions that only address specific network needs also untenable. Customers are therefore looking to consolidate behind a single, global provider that operates in the cloud — what has been described as a “Connectivity Cloud". Cloudflare is a leader in this Connectivity Cloud category. We deliver a broad range of services to businesses of all sizes and in all geographies — making them more secure, enhancing the performance of their business-critical applications, and eliminating the cost and complexity of managing individual network hardware. Our network serves as a scalable, easy-to-use, unified control plane to deliver security, performance, and reliability across on-premises, hybrid, cloud, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. We serve comprehensive customer needs across security and connectivity, and increasingly, the distributed and programmable nature of our network is resulting in customers building their applications on top of our network, too — including both traditional applications and those that are enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI). Our Network We have built an efficient, scalable, programmable network that allows us to rapidly develop and deploy our products for our customers and that is architected to be flexible, scalable, and get more and more efficient as it expands. Our network is built to run every service on every server in every city. This design enables us to grow capacity quickly and inexpensively and to allow us to shift customers and traffic across our network efficiently. We refer to this architecture as “serverless” because it means we can deploy standard, commodity hardware, and our product developers and customers do not need to worry about the underlying servers. We are also expanding the capabilities of our network servers to enable AI workloads that are suited to take into account the widely distributed nature of our network. Additionally, our software is designed to manage the deployment and execution of our product developers’ code and our customers’ code across our network. Because we manage the execution and prioritization of code running across our network, it means that we are both able to improve the performance of our highest paying customers, and also effectively leverage idle capacity across our network. We have chosen to utilize this idle capacity to create a free tier of service which has generated substantial global scale for us. In turn, this scale makes us attractive partners for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) globally, which reduces our co-location and bandwidth costs. As our network grows, these dynamics become even more powerful. Today, our network spans more than 330 cities in over 125 countries worldwide and interconnects with over 13,000 networks globally, including major ISPs, cloud services, and enterprises. 9 Table of contents Increasingly, we are finding that our customers are also using our network to build their applications too.…