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What is Cloudflare? Features, capabilities, and suitable uses from a production company's perspective.

While the name Cloudflare itself has become quite well-known, people often have a surprisingly vague understanding of what it actually does. To be honest, until recently, conversations often ended with "It's a CDN company, right?", and some people may have only learned about it during last year's outage.
Many of you probably already know this, but I'll simply summarize how people like us in companies, and directors, can make the most of it.

Cloudflare offers a wide range of features beyond just speeding up websites; it includes DNS, WAF, authentication control, serverless execution, static site delivery, file storage, log management, and AI-related capabilities.

From the perspective of someone working at a production company, this is quite significant.
That's because projects don't end with just "displaying the site." Every project involves detailed discussions about things like how to hide the staging area, where to send logs, and where to place images and attachments.

What makes Cloudflare convenient is that it makes it relatively easy to bring things together under a single, unified vision. Of course, you don't need to consolidate everything into Cloudflare, and depending on the project, combining it with Supabase or AWS might be a more natural approach.
However, it's quite powerful when you want to keep the configuration light or create a design that's easy to explain.

Cloudflare is often a good fit, especially for corporate websites, recruitment sites, owned media, and sites that include some user-facing elements for members. For companies with a front-end focus, it's not just about infrastructure; its ease of use as an extension of implementation is also a great advantage.

First, how can we easily understand Cloudflare?

You don't need to memorize all of Cloudflare's product names from the start. In fact, it's much easier to think of it as a "platform that takes care of everything around the entry point of the web."

For example, Cloudflare has a wide range of features surrounding the web, such as DNS, which is the first thing a browser goes through; CDN, which delivers content quickly; WAF, which blocks suspicious access; Access, which protects specific pages; Workers, which run light processing; Pages, which delivers static content; and R2, which is a file storage location.

Perhaps this could be called a "cross-sectional sense."
In projects, there are often many interconnected aspects, such as site display, operation, security, update flow, limited access, logs, and AI utilization, but Cloudflare's strength lies in its ability to easily organize these interconnected elements.

What is effective in the production company setting?

Cloudflare is also a very good fit for production companies and front-end implementation companies.
It's easier to have a configuration that fits within a reasonable scope without having to design a complex cloud environment.

For example, a fairly natural configuration would be to create a company website using Astro, host it on Cloudflare Pages, restrict access to certain pages using Access, send inquiries via email through Workers, and place attachments on R2.
While it's possible to integrate all of these into separate services, this can sometimes be overkill depending on the scale of the project.

When the number of services increases too much, complexity becomes apparent during handover and maintenance. Leveraging Cloudflare can help mitigate this complexity to some extent.

Is Cloudflare good enough for everything?

It's best to take a calm and objective look at this.
Cloudflare is convenient, but it's not always the right solution to consolidate everything into Cloudflare.

In projects with heavy application logic, complex database designs, or where another cloud platform is already firmly established, it may be more natural not to make Cloudflare the main platform. Vercel might be a better fit for the development experience in some cases, and AWS might simply be easier to consider when thinking about the entire backend.

Rather than choosing it because it's versatile, you should choose it based on "what aspects you want to be light, strong, and organized." It's quite attractive in terms of site distribution, entry point security, lightweight execution environment, limited access, and storage.

These types of companies and projects are well-suited for this.

Cloudflare is well-suited for the following types of projects:

• Projects like corporate websites, recruitment sites, and owned media, where there is a lot of content but the application complexity is not that high.
• A project that primarily uses a static site, but with the addition of simple features like form submission and some basic authentication.
• This project involves consolidating operations including Cloudflare DNS, WAF, and redirects.

For projects where the application is the main focus, such as full-fledged SaaS or business systems, we tend to look at how Cloudflare can be combined with other platforms (like Supabase) but a considering Cloudflare in isolation.

These days, LLM makes it much easier to organize these kinds of things.

In the past, I had no choice but to mentally organize things by comparing a large amount of service materials and documents, but that has changed considerably recently.

Using Cloud Code or Gemini to brainstorm questions like "Which Cloudflare features are relevant to this requirement?" and "How should we handle staging protection and the form infrastructure?" will help you organize your thoughts much faster.
Creating a draft of a comparison table and identifying key points has become considerably easier.

The division of responsibilities, operational structure, audit requirements, and the level of understanding of those responsible for updates are all things that are risky unless ultimately reviewed by a human. I think the ideal division of roles is for the LLM to create the initial map, and for humans to choose the path that suits the situation on site.

summary

If I had to describe Cloudflare in one word, it's not just a speed optimization service, but a platform that can support a wide range of aspects of the web. From a production company's perspective, it's incredibly effective when you want to "lighten the architecture" but "still have the necessary security and implementation in place."

Of course, Cloudflare isn't the only option for everything.
The ability to see everything from site delivery and authentication control to a lightweight backend, storage, and even the entry point to AI utilization is a major attraction. I think your impression will change quite a bit once you actually try it out!It's quite easy to set up!