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The Network is the Computer

07/11/2019

2 min read

Get straight to the interviews:


We recently registered the trademark for The Network is the Computer®, to encompass how Cloudflare is utilizing its network to pave the way for the future of the Internet.

The phrase was first coined in 1984 by John Gage, the 21st employee of Sun Microsystems, where he was credited with building Sun’s vision around “The Network is the Computer.” When Sun was acquired in 2010, the trademark was not renewed, but the vision remained.

Take it from him:

“When we built Sun Microsystems, every computer we made had the network at its core. But we could only imagine, over thirty years ago, today’s billions of networked devices, from the smallest camera or light bulb to the largest supercomputer, sharing their packets across Cloudflare’s distributed global network.
We based our vision of an interconnected world on open and shared standards. Cloudflare extends this dedication to new levels by openly sharing designs for security and resilience in the post-quantum computer world.
Most importantly, Cloudflare is committed to immediate, open, transparent accountability for network performance. I’m a dedicated reader of their technical blog, as the network becomes central to our security infrastructure and the global economy, demanding even more powerful technical innovation.”

Cloudflare's massive network, which spans more than 180 cities in 80 countries, enables the company to deliver its suite of security, performance, and reliability products, including its serverless edge computing offerings.

In March of 2018, we launched our serverless solution Cloudflare Workers, to allow anyone to deploy code at the edge of our network. We also recently announced advancements to Cloudflare Workers in June of 2019 to give application developers the ability to do away with cloud regions, VMs, servers, containers, load balancers—all they need to do is write the code, and we do the rest. With each of Cloudflare’s data centers acting as a highly scalable application origin to which users are automatically routed via our Anycast network, code is run within milliseconds of users worldwide.

In honor of registering Sun’s former trademark, I spoke with John Gage, Greg Papadopoulos, former CTO of Sun Microsystems, and Ray Rothrock, former Director of CAD/CAM Marketing at Sun Microsystems, to learn more about the history of the phrase and what it means for the future:

To learn more about Cloudflare Workers, check out the use cases below:

  • Optimizely - Optimizely chose Workers when updating their experimentation platform to provide faster responses from the edge and support more experiments for their customers.
  • Cordial - Cordial used a “stable of Workers” to do custom Black Friday load shedding as well as using it as a serverless platform for building scalable customer-facing services.
  • AO.com - AO.com used Workers to avoid significant code changes to their underlying platform when migrating from a legacy provider to a modern cloud backend.
  • Pwned Passwords - Troy Hunt’s popular "Have I Been Pwned" project benefits from cache hit ratios of 94% on its Pwned Passwords API due to Workers.
  • Timely - Using Workers and Workers KV, Timely was able to safely migrate application endpoints using simple value updates to a distributed key-value store.
  • Quintype - Quintype was an eager adopter of Workers to cache content they previously considered un-cacheable and improve the user experience of their publishing platform.
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