I’ve just completed my first 30 days as a Solution Engineer at Cloudflare, and honestly, the sheer scale and speed of innovation here are mind-boggling. In networking and security, we often talk about rapid innovation, but seeing it happen here — from changing foundational reverse proxy components to releasing new capabilities like AI Gateways — is truly next level.

Cloudflare isn’t just selling boxes or features; we are fundamentally driven by the ambitious mission to help build a better internet.

This isn’t just corporate jargon; it defines the value we bring to every customer. The guiding philosophy is simple, if slightly audacious: “If Cloudflare ran the entire internet, what would the right decision be?".

Here are my view of unique values that Cloudflare offers, drawing straight from our mission to make the internet secure, efficient, reliable, private, and fast:

Fixing the Internet’s Fundamental Flaws

The internet, let’s be honest, is showing its age. When those original protocols were first laid down in the 60s and 70s, nobody imagined the massive amount of commerce and personal data that would rely on it today. As a result, the internet suffers from these fundamental issues (original sins) like lacking security, reliability, privacy, and efficiency right out of the box. Cloudflare’s core mission is to solve these problems, essentially working to ensure that everything in the world can be connected securely, efficiently, reliably, privately, and quickly.

DDoS Defense at Record-Shattering Scale

If there’s one thing about the internet, it’s that the internet is a battleground, and the threats are growing exponentially. Cloudflare constantly sees attack volume breaking records. In Q2 2025 alone, we automatically blocked 7.3 Tbps DDoS attack. The article was written in June 2025. A few months down the road, in September 2025 Cloudflare blocked a record-breaking 22.2 Tbps DDoS attack.

To put it in perspective, according to statistics by IMDA, the total of international internet capacity (bandwidth) owned by operators licensed in Singapore was about 41 Tbps. This data was recorded in June 2024 and the growth on this capacity Year-on-Year was negative. It was recorded 54 Tbps in June 2023.

The web application is running on top of the network layer. If we break down the type of DDoS attack from this article, it shows that the amount of network layer (L3/L4) DDoS attacks in 2025 is equivalent to the amount in the year 2023 and 2024 combined. Bear in mind that this article was written in Q2 2025. So it was only halfway through 2025.

Ultimately, the goal isn’t just to survive attacks, but to prevent them from hitting you at all. By placing our “battle tested network stack” in front of your data center, we can better protect the wokloads.

Customer-Focused, Including Free-Tier Customers

One of the most interesting philosophies and business differentiators at Cloudflare is the commitment to a generous free service for Application Services, Developer Platforms, and Cloudflare One. This is driven not only by goodwill but because it is a core strategic component — the free service actually helps keep costs lower.

The free tier creates a powerful flywheel effect:

1. Lower COGS via Peering: Because sites behind Cloudflare represent around 20% of the web, we become one of the most peered networks globally. We freely exchange traffic with thousands of ISPs, allowing them to cut out costly third-party transit providers, thereby helping us reduce our own bandwidth costs (the largest component of Cost of Goods Sold).
2. Unique Threat Intelligence: The sheer volume of diverse traffic and attacks we see from millions of free customers gives us a mass-scale threat data advantage. Like an immune system, the network learns from these attacks, allowing us to build security products that nobody else could. We analyze trillions of DNS requests and millions of requests per second from our reverse proxy data daily.
3. Faster Innovation: Free customers act as initial Quality Assurance (QA) testers. When we launch new features, we get immediate signal and scale, allowing engineers to quickly iterate and address bugs. Building intuitive products for this broad spectrum of users (from hobbyists to application developers) makes our tools better for everyone.

In Summary

Being here and understanding the depth of Cloudflare’s mission is exciting. The culture — focused on curiosity and empathy, and radical transparency — is entirely geared toward achieving that mission. Whether it’s connecting every endpoint through the Connectivity Cloud or utilizing the Free tier as a strategic advantage to combat increasingly large threats, the core value proposition is clear: we help make the internet better, faster, and more secure by default.