EP09 - Cloudflare Edge

Yes. That is literally what you are supposed to do. You've just discovered your first enemy: the speed of light.

The internet is a physical thing, Shez. It's fiber optic cables under the ocean. Your friend's request has to travel 10,000 kilometers from Tokyo to Virginia and back. The round-trip time, the **latency**, is limited by physics.

That's a 2010 solution. That helps with the big files, but what about the first connection? The initial request still has to travel all the way to Virginia. The handshake is still slow.

This is the problem Cloudflare was obsessed with. They didn't just want to cache files. They wanted to shrink the internet itself.

With a clever networking trick called **Anycast**. Imagine you have one phone number for your company.

With Anycast, Cloudflare announces the same IP address from all 310 of their data centers. When your friend in Tokyo visits your site, the network automatically routes him to the server in Tokyo, not Virginia. The handshake is local and fast. They moved the 'front door' of your website to be down the street from every user on Earth.

You've just discovered the second problem of the internet: it's a rough neighborhood. You've connected your house directly to the street. You need a bouncer.

A **Web Application Firewall**, or WAF. But instead of hiring your own, you can use Cloudflare's.

Because they are the front door for 20% of the entire web, they have a unique advantage.

When their WAF sees a new type of attack on one website, it learns from it. It can then write a rule that instantly protects *every other website* on their network. It's a crowd-sourced immune system. They fight the bad guys once, for everyone.

You didn't just get popular. You got a tiny taste of a **DDoS attack**. Your server is a small bucket. The internet is a firehose.

But remember the Anycast trick? The magic post office? It also solves this.

You can't flood 310 locations at once. The attack is diffused across the globe. Each data center only has to handle a tiny fraction of the traffic. The attack is absorbed harmlessly in the network before it can ever reach your server.

You don't. You bypass it. This is the problem Cloudflare was built to exploit.

Cloudflare drove a truck up to the back wall of AWS and built their own private bridge. It's called the **Bandwidth Alliance**. They made deals for free data transfer. Then they launched **R2 Storage**—a clone of AWS's S3, but with one killer feature: zero egress fees.

They weren't building a CDN. They were building a better internet.

And now, by combining all of those pieces—the low-latency network, the cheap storage, the global firewall, and their serverless compute platform, **Workers**—they've accidentally built the operating system for what comes next.

No. You've just re-introduced the original problem.

Because the 'thinking' is still happening in Virginia. Your friend in Tokyo still has to send his request 10,000 kilometers just for your server to decide which language to use. You've made the data fast, but the *logic* is still slow.

Yes. But not a whole server. You just need to run a tiny little piece of code. This is the final piece of the puzzle. **Cloudflare Workers**.

Think of your Virginia server as the 'central brain' of your application. It's big, powerful, but it's in one place.

A Worker is a tiny piece of that brain—a single nerve ending—that you can copy and paste into all 310 of Cloudflare's data centers at once.

You upload a snippet of Javascript. It deploys globally in seconds. When your friend in Tokyo visits, the 'if country is Japan' logic runs in the Tokyo data center, 30 milliseconds away from him. The decision is made instantly, at the edge.

Exactly. And now you understand why this is relevant. Now you understand the future of AI.

Think about the AI agents we're starting to see. The ones that can book flights, order groceries, and manage your calendar. What is the one thing they need to feel real?

No. **Speed.** If you ask your AI assistant a question and it takes two seconds to think, it feels dumb. It feels like a slow website from 2005. Latency is the enemy of intelligence.

For an AI agent to be useful, it needs to 'think' as close to you as possible. It can't live in a single data center in Virginia. It needs to live at the edge.

...is the ancestor of an entire new species. An internet of autonomous AI agents, running on a global, low-latency execution layer like Workers.

I wished.