Summer Replay - Cutting Cloud Costs at Cloudflare with Matthew Prince

Screaming in the Cloud

In this Summer Replay of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey is joined by Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince. In this cost-cutting conversation from 2021, Matthew breaks down what exactly Cloudflare is up to, and how they are handling their clients' cloud cost needs. The pair focus on Cloudflare as a company and the options they are bringing to their clients. They discuss their mutual concerns with some AWS costs and why Cloudflare’s suite of tools has slowly been made available over time. Turn back the clock with this fan-favorite episode for more insight.

Show Highlights:

• (0:00) Intro
• (0:53) Backblaze sponsor read
• (1:20) Origins of Cloudflare
• (5:55) The Achilles Heel of the AWS cloud
• (10:09) What is Cloudflare R2?
• (12:26) Pricing philosophies in the cloud
• (17:35) Egress cost of the “static” internet
• (19:48) How Amazon’s pricing harms the overall market
• (24:34) Firefly sponsor read
• (25:10) Cloudflare’s endgame
• (28:32) Staying focused as a business
• (33:35) The value of providing a valuable service
• (37:17) “The internet is a fad.”
• (42:19) The strength of admitting you’re wrong
• (43:04) Where you can find out more about Cloudflare

About Matthew Prince:

Matthew Prince is co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world's largest networks, which spans more than 200 cities in over 100 countries. Matthew is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, winner of the 2011 Tech Fellow Award, and serves on the Board of Advisors for the Center for Information Technology and Privacy Law. Matthew holds an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a George F. Baker Scholar and awarded the Dubilier Prize for Entrepreneurship. He is a member of the Illinois Bar, and earned his J.D. from the University of Chicago and B.A. in English Literature and Computer Science from Trinity College. He’s also the co-creator of Project Honey Pot, the largest community of webmasters tracking online fraud and abuse.

Links Referenced:

• The Cloudflare Blog: blogs.cloudflare.com

Sponsors:

• Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/
• Firefly: https://www.firefly.ai/