Cloudflare

In practice Cloudflare works as a doorman in front of half the internet. When you open a site that uses it, you actually enter one of their computers first - it decides whether to let you in, where to serve you the page from fastest, and whether you're even a human or a machine sent to break the site. The site owner doesn't touch any of this. His traffic just passes through them, while they guard the threshold.

Their main job is defense against something called a DDoS attack - literally burying a site under millions of fake visits at once until it collapses under the weight, the way a line in front of a door can block an entire building. Cloudflare filters that line before it even reaches the site's door. They also keep copies of pages all over the world, so that every one of your requests doesn't have to travel all the way to the server - the computer where the site actually lives - somewhere on the other side of the world.

They exist because the internet was built without a lock on the front door. Every site, big or small, is exposed to attack from anywhere in the world, and most owners have neither the money nor the people to run their own round-the-clock security. Cloudflare sells exactly that - ready-made security, switched on with one setting.

Their clients range from one person's blog to banks and government sites. That's exactly why, when Cloudflare has a technical problem, the internet notices - not because their site is important, but because every fifth click on the world's network passes through it.

Cloudflare isn't a site you visit. It's the door you pass through without knowing such a door even exists.

I'll Say It Like a Curator

What you can't see from the outside is how concentrated the power behind this security is. When Cloudflare's servers go down for a few minutes, it's not one site that falls - a noticeable chunk of the internet falls at once. It's convenient for site owners. Less convenient once you realize how much of the network depends on a doorman whose door you never get to look behind.

And the doorman is growing. On October 9, 2026 Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js and of Deno, announced that the entire Deno team is joining Cloudflare. Both sides write "joining", with not a word about a deal or a sum. Deno Deploy, the hosting service for Deno, keeps running for six more months and then shuts down, and paying customers get help moving to Cloudflare Workers. The runtime itself gets one more year of monthly fixes, after which Deno stops developing it, and the code stays open source. In Dahl's words, the goal is for the Workers model to run both on Cloudflare's network and on your own servers. Anyone with something on Deno Deploy has six months.

The same day the doorman showed another side of itself: its own AI models. A week after the first Clef and Clef-flash, models that pick between given answers instead of writing text, Cloudflare released Clef-omni with open weights on Hugging Face. It decides on audio and video as well as text and images, in one request, without first transcribing the sound into text; by Cloudflare's data, a 21-second video with sound is scored in about 1.5 seconds. Clef-flash drops from $0.09 to $0.038 per million input tokens, which in Cloudflare's words makes it cheaper than TypeSafe's Jev. The discount has a price: its hosted version now takes up to 24k input tokens instead of 64k. The weights on Hugging Face are untouched and, self-hosted, still handle up to 256k.

The visual is generated code-art, no third-party images.