 Welcome back everyone to SuperCloud 3, security plus AI. This is our third installment of SuperCloud. This is the intersection of AI, multi-cloud and security, excited to have here for our keynote, Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, of course, with Dave Vellante, my co-host. Matthew, thanks for coming on this program, SuperCloud 3, great to have you guys. You guys should use the term SuperCloud. So first of all, we love your company and love the fact that you guys are calling in SuperCloud 2 because you guys are powering the future. Thanks for coming on. Thanks John and Dave for having me on. You know, one of the successes is this shift towards large-scale cloud growth and you're seeing this next-gen happening. What do you guys see in the Cloudflare world around your customers and the intersection of how next-gen cloud is becoming more, you know, I wouldn't say multi-vendor or multi-cloud, but SuperCloud-like in the sense that customers want to just run their workloads across multiple clouds, multiple environments as they've inherited multi-cloud in and of itself. They still got to run and handle all that plumbing. Yeah, you know, I think even companies that think that they're just going to go all in on one cloud don't actually end up that way, whether it's because they do acquisitions, because they've got a Skunkworks team that's running off in their own direction. Everyone ends up being multi-cloud one way or another. And when I talk to customers, what customers really want fundamentally is the ability to pick and choose not just from one cloud to another, but one feature on one cloud to another. And so when we can already see that, and especially in the AI space, where you're seeing that different cloud vendors have different strengths, different weaknesses and what we hear from customers is, they don't want to be all locked in on just AWS, just Google, just Microsoft, just Alibaba, just Oracle, just any one of the different clouds that are out there. They want to actually have competition on the individual features. And that's something that we're hearing time and time again and something that I think is going to be a bigger trend as the cloud develops and do its next generation. You know, one of the things that comes up a lot in these CUBE conversations is Dave and I have been doing this for 13 years, cloud emerge, oh, the cloud, that's cloud's not going to be big, okay, it became big. Services, web services, microservices now, cloud native applications. But if you go to on-premises and even the edge that's emerging, self-driving cars to IoT devices and industrial, it's IP devices, it's network traffic. So you got this intersection between on-premise, infrastructure-based kind of DNA and personnel and technologies colliding with a services-based model in the cloud where the apps are developing and with open source and AI booming, this is where JNA is going to shine in some areas. What use cases do you see where AI and security can come together to take advantage of these kind of connective environments, platforms coming together? Because that's the real kind of challenge right now. You know, I think Cloudflare, when we first started, we used to, we actually practiced different ways of describing us. And I remember the first meeting that we were in with some investors and we said, you know, Cloudflare is an AI company and the number of eyes that rolled to the back of their heads was pretty astonishing. And yet, fundamentally, the whole thesis of Cloudflare is if you get enough of the internet sitting behind one platform, you can use traffic data from all of our customers in order to be able to find new threats, new vulnerabilities, new security concerns, and it helped protect sort of the collective using, you know, once upon a time we called it AI and then we, for a long time called machine learning now, I guess we're calling AI again. But that was, you know, really kind of the premise of Cloudflare. I think a couple of other things have really emerged as uses across our network that have surprised me. So the first is a little bit less of a surprise and that is that, you know, I think that the, there are two types of AI sort of tasks that need to happen. One is training and that requires a bunch of machines all in a big building next to each other. It's a lot like modeling the weather. You got to run that and it cranks and cranks and cranks for, you know, hours or days or months or weeks or weeks or months and then it outcomes a model. After that model is built, then the next step is something called inference. The big hyper-sale public clouds are going to be really good for the training of the models and Cloudflare and the network that we have is not the right place to run training in at least in that sort of most straightforward way. But the inference bit, I think inference is either going to run on the end device. It's going to run on your phone. It's going to run in your driverless car. And for those things that have to be hyper, hyper, hypersensitive to latency, you know, do I slam on the brakes because a kid just chased a ball out into the street? You know, that's not something you want even five milliseconds of network latency to slow you down. So I think those types of models are going to be running on the devices themselves, but not every device, not every model is going to run there. And I think the other place you're going to see a lot of models run is inside the network, very close to where you are, but not constrained by power, not constrained by storage, not constrained by the access to the network, not as constrained by the CPU or GPU resources. And that's one of the things that we're increasingly seeing Cloudflare being used by different AI companies is how can we take those models that don't make sense to run on the end device and put them still close enough where data can stay local and where the performance can be really high. And so I think for inference, a network like Cloudflare is just going to be really, really strong. I think that's another place you're going to see it. The last place, which was the real surprise for me is, you know, I think the big constraint when you are in that training set right now is that there's a shortage of GPUs. So if you try to get GPU time, it's either very, very expensive or in a lot of cases you can't get it. And so the problem is that the big hyperscale public clouds, AWS being the sort of biggest example of this, really lock you in by being almost the hotel California. You can put your data in, but it costs a ton to take it back out. And that's true even if you want to go from AWS East to AWS West or AWS West to AWS Singapore, anywhere you want to go. And if you're chasing GPU resources, that becomes really expensive. It becomes even more expensive when you're trying to balance between AWS and Google and Microsoft and go for wherever the GPUs are. And so increasingly, and again, this is something I didn't anticipate, but increasingly these AI companies are using Cloudflare's R2 product, our data storage product, in order to be able to store data in one central place and then take it to wherever GPU capacity is. And because we don't charge for egress fees, that's been a really big driver of AI companies using our platform. But I think fundamentally what that is, is AI companies are at the leading edge of being truly multicloud and Cloudflare is helping empower that. So we agree with what you're saying about the inferencing. Now we've said that AI inferencing at the edge is where all the action is going to be. And I know you've kind of bristled at that term in the past, but so I'd love to get your thoughts on how we should actually think about your network because you've taken a developer perspective and when you think about what you've, how you use the super cloud term, it's different than the way we use it. We use it as a layer floating on top of the hyperscale infrastructure where you I think take a real developer mindset, which is, hey, I want to run code on a machine because it's so much easier to do that and then just deploy it. And you just happen to have this giant global distributed machine, which is what you call super cloud. But you don't like the term edge, but help us understand how you think about super cloud. And if you don't call it edge, what do you call it? I like super cloud. Like, let's just go with that more than that. You know, I think fundamentally, if you think about what it is that customers want to do, they want to be able to use different functions from different cloud providers and do it in a way, which is cost, not cost prohibitive, that has a security layer, which is consistent, and it has a high degree of performance that's there. What's hard about that is that's antithetical to all the hyperscale public clouds. Their KPI that they're measuring themselves on is how much of a customer's data are we holding and how difficult do we make it for them to move that data out of our cloud? So they are essentially the kind of hoarding clouds that are out there. Get your data and hold on to it no matter what. Whereas if you think about what Cloudflare is, Cloudflare is fundamentally a network. And what networks are good at is moving data between two places. So we don't care if you store your data with us. If it makes sense for certain applications, we're happy to do that. But what we're really good at is connecting things together. And so in that sense, we're really that connectivity layer, that fabric, which connects the different clouds together. And so at some level, I can say that we're the sort of layer that sits on top of the clouds. I think of it more as we're the connectivity that connects anything that's online, whether it's a cloud, a device, a database, on-premise hardware, anything that you have, we want to make it as easy as possible for that connectivity to exist. And so sure that exists out of the edge, it exists at the core as well. And so we're fundamentally that network. And the way we think of Cloudflare is if you could redesign the internet today, knowing everything we know, and you could build security into it from the beginning, you could build performance into it at the beginning, you could build reliability from the beginning, you could get rid of the original sin of the internet, which is that privacy is inherently goes away because your IP address reveals who you are. And then you could make it as efficient as possible so that we could take not just the 4 billion people that use the internet today, but the next 4 billion people and make it cost effective for them to get it on. That's the vision of Cloudflare. And when we say we're helping build a better internet, that's fundamentally what we're doing. And yes, that means making it easier for you to use AWS with Google, with Microsoft, with Oracle and mix and match and have more competition in the cloud space. But it also means helping make sure that the internet stays on in Ukraine and helping make sure that in Sub-Saharan Africa that people can cost effectively get access to the internet. Those are all related to building a better network. And that's fundamentally what we're doing at Cloudflare. Explain why that's a better security model, if you would. Sure, because the challenge is, so I was talking to a customer the other day and they said, we'd love to implement security across our systems, but we have this 40 year old mainframe that sits in the corner and it still makes pricing decisions on how we sell some unit. And there's no way we can go in and put in modern SSO or anything like that. And I said, okay, but can you put a simple ACL? Can you put a rule in place that says that this mainframe won't accept connections unless it's coming from a particular network? And they said, absolutely, that's easy. We've been able to do that since the earliest network devices putting in place very, very basic connections like that. And I said, if you can do that, then what you can do is you can force all of the connections to that mainframe to come through Cloudflare's network and then Cloudflare can actually give you that consistent security layer where we're gonna say, all of the access controls, all of the logging, all of how you connect to your modern data point or endpoint security and your modern identity system, all of that gets built into the network and then the devices get tied to that network centrally. So the network becomes that one thing that everything that you're using is consistent across. And that's how Cloudflare is able to say, regardless of whether it's a 40 year old mainframe or a brand new application that you're building, we can give you one consistent policy layer that gives you a consistent security posture and lets you exist with both your legacy and with new applications. And I think that the only way to get that level of control is to have again a network like Cloudflare's, which again, I like calling a super cloud. Yeah, so I love the super cloud and the network's a source of truth. I mean, at the end of the day, a packet's a packet, it's got to move from point A to point B, is it good or is it bad? Where'd it come from? Where's it going? Where's it stored? These are huge value opportunities for you and the connectivity piece is massive. And by the way, congratulations on that strategy, pays dividends for you guys and you guys are killing it, congratulations. Now some of the value of the data, as you move up to the operating system, a Microsoft might want to control that data and then you move higher up in the stack at the edge or other devices where native data's in there that needs to talk down to the network. How do you guys see this stack emerging? As you look at developers today, they want to have data, probably in the CICD pipeline coding on top of it, data will be the value as a new moat, if you will, in the enterprise. This is kind of the IP conversation, intellectual property conversation of data. You have security and you have enablement on top of it. How do you see that enablement emerging for your customers? And then ultimately what we would see is open source developers. Well, I think fundamentally what we think is that that data is not our data, that's our customer's data. And so we want to give our customers more control of that data. And that means making it easy for them to take the data and move it to wherever makes most sense. It makes it easy for them to make sure that there's real privacy and even data locality guarantees that are associated with that data, which is something that every developer is going to have to think about. And so you may think that like AWS with the 20-some-on regions they have around the world is a lot, but if all of a sudden Lithuania says that you need to store your user's data in Lithuania, there's no AWS region in Lithuania. And yet Cloudflare has a data center there and we can actually help you do that. So because of the fact that we're across over 200 cities around the world, 300 cities around the world, excuse me, over 120 countries around the world, that gives us the ability to have this very micro fine-grained control and give our customers that micro fine-grained control over it. And so we use that data in order to keep all of our customers safe. But fundamentally that data we believe is our customers. And that's why we don't charge for egress fees. That's why we make it very easy for you to move from one system to another. We try not to lock you in with any sort of artificial economic constraints, but instead by building really great products to deliver an incredible value. And so again, I think that that's the difference between being a hoarding cloud and being a networking cloud or being a cloud that's all sort of designed around connectivity. That's what we are fundamentally. And that's how again, I think that we're going to help it make sure that there's more competition in the cloud space. Developers can use different functions across multiple different clouds, but you can still have one consistent security policy regardless of who you're mixing and matching to build whatever the solution to whatever problem you have. So what about the enterprise needs around the some of the older environments? You mentioned mainframe before. Let's just take an enterprise who has security needs safer on premises. You know, they have hybrid environment. They have cloud operations. They want to have that scale. So to them it's a private cloud. So you guys look at that as just another environment from a cloud flare perspective. And how does that work from a deployment standpoint with cloud flare? Yeah, so from, you know, almost everyone who would potentially be a customer we're usually, you know, one fiber loop away. And so we can turn up our own, what we call magic transit, which is a transit service. We can turn up our own magic WAN service, which allows you to have access to the wide area network from wherever you are. But then it gets all of that traffic onto cloudflare's network as quickly as possible. So when we look at the customers, they're completely going all in on cloud flare. What they do is they say, okay, yes, we have our employees who once upon a time all came to the office, but now they're working all around the world. So we're going to give them some connectivity to make sure that their connection is secure, that they're not going out to some malicious site. If they get a strange link in an email and they click on that first of all cloudflare screen that email for them with our area one product, they get that link and they click on it accidentally. That opens in a virtual browser that runs on our network that's never even local. It has remote browser isolation that's completely separate from them. We're going to make sure that we can have constrict controls on from your work device. Here are parts of the internet you can go to and parts of the internet you can't go to. We have DLP to make sure that anything that is flowing from your network out is going to be controlled in that environment. And then make sure that as you access things you have one consistent control plan. At the same time, as you've moved to that environment you've had to expose more things to the internet because you've got people who are working remotely. So things like WAF where you have vulnerabilities that are potentially there become more important. Things like DDoS mitigation become significantly more important because DDoS attackers now aren't just knocking your website offline, but they're actually going after the endpoints that allow your employees to continue to do work. And what's unique about cloudflare is every single problem that we just discussed every single part of what it means to be a network cloudflare is able to deliver and deploy across our customers. And so the customers that go all in on cloudflare whether they have on-premise or they're in the cloud or there's some mix between those and almost everyone has some mix between those what they love about cloudflare is we give them one consistent network with a set of controls that's fully programmable that lets them say whatever I'm adding to this whether I find some 40 year old mainframe or some brilliant developer who builds my next hot application, I can have one consistent control because what all of those things have in common is the network. Take us through the value proposition pitch where I'm in the board room, you're here we're going to make a decision we're going to go all in on cloudflare talk to me through that kind of the talk track you got the disruption okay what's going to be the disruption what's my switching costs what's the upside how do I do this what are some of the things I consider and how do I get there? So I was just a customer in Amsterdam actually in your early stage and we said just describe to us what your IT stack looks like and they walked through it and in some cases there are things we don't do so we're not an identity provider or we're not an endpoint security provider but we partner with and we connect to just about everyone in that space and we know who's good and bad in all the different places so we can refer people to who makes sense but over and over and over again what we saw is you can replace whoever you're using for DDoS mitigation whoever you're using for WAF whoever you're using for your API management whoever you're using for your zero trust implementation your access control your gateway product all of those things you can consolidate behind cloudflare and that gives you two really huge advantages the first is we have one single pane of glass where you can have consistency where all the products work extremely well together and you can get an incredible amount of efficiency out of that and just better security at the end of the day and then the second big advantage is we give you efficiency and we mean that in every way and normally we can save you enormous amounts over what you're spending on your IT budget and these days, I mean, two years ago when we were coming in and telling people we could save them a bunch of money on their IT budget they say, why do we care, money is free, let's go but today when we come in and we can often say cut your IT budget for your network services in half that's a huge, huge, huge win for them and on top of it being better security and then also with efficiency we have just great performance we have never thought that it's okay that your security system should slow you down and so we're developers at heart if it takes an extra millisecond for a keystroke to bounce back to us from a server that's unacceptable to us and so we think that all of your security solutions shouldn't just not slow you down they should actually speed you up and that's again the value proposition that we're delivering at Cloudflare John, I had one last question I think faster I got one last question I have a million questions but I know we're out of time Matthew, I think when I was researching that piece that I wrote last fall, Cloudflare SuperCloud, what multi-cloud should have been I think that was you and I saw a video that you did and you said you had thought mistakenly that you would see apps spanning multiple clouds that that was your sort of original vision and you sort of changed your thinking on that and then I look at what Uber's doing but essentially building a digital twin of people, places and things and riders and drivers and ETAs and so forth and they are actually spanning multiple locations have you, what's your thinking on that currently how do you see the future of app? Do you think you'll revisit your original premise? No, I think that the most sophisticated organizations that are out there, so you look at an Uber you look at someone like Snowflake who has actually built an entire business on how can we make it very easy for you to span multiple clouds you can do it, but it's super hard and so betting your entire business on we're going to make sure that somebody can run the exact same application across three different cloud providers that seems unlikely to me I think some people will do it I think the most sophisticated organizations will do it I think organizations that get the best pricing will do it because it allows them to play different cloud providers off there but what I think every organization is going to do is they're going to say there are certain things that make sense for us to run on one cloud certain things that make sense for us to run on another cloud but fundamentally what we need is a network with a set of principles and guarantees regardless of where something is running one cloud, another cloud, on-premise, you know in space, you know, just watch what comes next and whatever it is that network should be able to span that wherever your application is running and give you that consistency of control that efficiency, that savings and that's fundamentally what it is that we're delivering for Cloudflare and what's at the heart of our business Matthew, thanks for coming on theCUBE and my final question is honestly, you mentioned you want to build this internet the way it should be there's a super cloud has been resonating with a lot of people in the industry I won't say they're becoming extinct but they're aging out or the tech is aging out we're seeing people saying I want to spend my next 10 to 20 years of my career building super clouds not managing IT racks and stacks so for the folks out there watching that are looking at their careers they got to decide where I want to bet my next 10 to 20 years of my career this is like an architectural decision this is more of a fundamental mind shift what's your advice and as you look at how Cloudflare has positioned itself so successfully you are architecting this next gen thinking it's system thinking it's developer led it's open source it's going to enable things like open source gen AI is going to spawn new apps new native apps a lot more services are going to be kind of automated away so it was a whole another 20 mile stare 20 year career for say a vendor that's got bought out or you know by Broadcom or Kaisa and Gals have been in their career for 15 years or just getting into the business you know what I'm which just makes me so happy is you know when Cloudflare started we started for the little guys we started for small businesses we started for startups and we serve those folks extremely well and we continue to do that over time but a lot of the people who bet on us early then went and got jobs at big financial institutions big healthcare providers huge industrial companies and at some point they raised their hand and they said you know we have this problem and I know a solution and that solutions Cloudflare and I just spent the last month in Europe traveling around meeting with customers talking to our team there and several different people who now are sitting in C level jobs said I owe a lot of my job to having bet on Cloudflare early and having brought this into my place of work and again a lot of times that was the folks who started with us and it was $20 a month and now there are customers that are spending millions of dollars a year with us or millions of euros in these cases and yet saving you know oftentimes tens of millions of dollars or euros of savings over time so I think that looking to where the puck is going thinking about not you know how am I going to go you know just become an AWS expert or an Azure expert or a Google expert but how do I actually stitch these different clouds together because I think that's inevitably what the future is going to be and again if we can be helpful at Cloudflare we're really proud of all of our customers and a lot of them have made their careers by betting on us and we're really happy to continue to support them every day. Love that story dev ops, dev sec ops dev sec data ops, dev sec Cloudflare ops enabling developers. Matthew thanks for coming on and spending the time I know you're super busy with your time and we appreciate you coming on our SuperCloud 3 Security Plus AI program looking forward to talking to you further down the road. Thanks for coming on. Don and Dave thanks for having me on. Okay SuperCloud 3, John Furrier, Dave Vellante we'll be back with more after this short break more SuperCloud 3 coverage. Be right back.