Field Report: Why Cloudflare Stands Out as an All-in-One Platform

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Developer Elia shares his hands-on experience using Cloudflare across side projects and enterprise work. Moving away from on-prem infrastructure and Vercel, he highlights the benefits of Cloudflare Workers, R2, D1, and integrated security tooling.

Key points

  1. Transition from on-prem and Vercel: Frustrations with ticket-driven server provisioning and rapidly escalating Vercel invoices prompted the switch.
  2. Cloudflare Workers: Code deploys within seconds across 300+ cities globally, offering negligible cold starts without managing infrastructure.
  3. Zero egress fees on R2: Unlike AWS S3, Cloudflare R2 does not charge for outgoing data transfers, lowering media-serving costs.
  4. Serverless SQL via D1: D1 provides SQL capabilities without the need to maintain, patch, or manually back up virtual machines.
  5. Enterprise security: Zero Trust successfully replaces unstable VPN connections, while Bot Management filters automated malicious traffic out of the box.
  6. Technical nuance from discussion: Community members noted D1 relies on read replicas and R2 uses caching, meaning write latencies still require origin round trips, which Elia acknowledged while maintaining it remains fast.

Why it matters

Managing infrastructure overhead and predicting cloud bandwidth expenses remain major friction points for engineering teams. Cloudflare's platform demonstrates how combining edge compute, zero-egress storage, and managed databases can accelerate deployment cycles while controlling costs.

Analysis

Elia frames Cloudflare as a cohesive operating platform rather than a collection of disparate tools. The core appeal lies in the tight integration where Workers, R2, and D1 interact behind unified DDoS and CDN protection. While Vercel is acknowledged for strong developer experience, its pricing at scale drove him away; Cloudflare's model, particularly R2's lack of egress charges, offered significant predictability. Public feedback adds important architectural context, clarifying that serverless edge databases and object stores still incur latency on writes due to origin round trips, even if read performance remains high.

Original post

Elia

@eliakuratli · 19 August 2026

Read this if you wanna use @Cloudflare for anything t.co/ltqlcUCCTB

116 likes4 replies148 bookmarks31.2k views

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More posts in the thread (3)
  1. @paxaral @Cloudflare But it‘s still crazy fast compared to others, thanks for the clarification
  2. @legare_dominic @Cloudflare 100% happy to help you with further things if you need help with anything
  3. @maail @Cloudflare Yeah the plans are sooo generous
Selected replies (4)
  • @paxaral @eliakuratli @Cloudflare D1 is not actually on the edge, and neither is R2… D1 has read replicas, R2 doesn’t, you just have caching. Neither of these has low write latencies magically. It’s full origin round trip.
  • @maail @eliakuratli @Cloudflare Cloudflare is the best. And I can’t believe it’s mostly free
  • @legare_dominic @eliakuratli @Cloudflare I spent last weeks to understand and play with @Cloudflare and its a game changer for me and my business
  • @m16vie @eliakuratli @Cloudflare Ok, but how many times have you read what the LLM wrote? t.co/lG9Dqd4wWo

Mentioned links

Summary generated by AI (Gemini 3.8 Flash, 27 September 2026). It may contain errors – the original source is authoritative.

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