What Cloudflare is trying to do is remarkable considering what they are up against.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/29/aws-earnings-q2-2021.html
I repeat, Cloudflare is already the world's leading CDN provider, ahead of AWS by a long margin. This is not a David vs Golias story. At most it's a CDN Golias vs a all-in Golias.
It's disingenuous to compare Cloudflare and it's CDN offering to AWS at face value based on gross revenue. AWS offers everything from build pipelines to satellite ground stations, and even provides backup services comprised of a big truck with armed guards.
Cloudflare is impressive and very successful, but it's by no means a small upstart, specially when it serves a market where it eclipse all competitors, including AWS.
In any case, it kind of is a David vs. Goliath. Cloudflare currently employs ~1800 people and has revenues of under a billion dollars. They don't qualify as a large enterprise by anyone's definition. They aren't a 2-man shop but they are very much a David in the broader market. Amazon is an absolute monstrosity in comparison.
I think this is generally how things are seen. For example, in the Apple vs Epic lawsuit, the judge said the market was "mobile gaming", and that in that space Apple was not a monopoly.
Amazon total revenue adds up, but in each of the cloud categories they operate in, are they the leader?
Note that cloud flare is not fighting against AWS or Amazon but only against the S3 team inside AWS.
Cloudflare's offering does not compete with Lambda at all. They have completely distinct usecases.
Cloudflare Workers at best compete with Lambda@Edge, which in spite of its name is actually a CloudFront feature.
(Disclosure: I'm the tech lead of Workers.)
Based on what I understand, there are still a few things missing to compete with Lambda's asynchronous use-cases. e.g. Step Functions, 15 min time limits, non-cron events (i.e. events for every CF product), batching events into the same execution, etc. While some of these are technically "not part of Lambda", to compete with Lambda CF needs the ecosystem as well.
Disclosure: 1. I'm an AMZN investor, therefore calling out that the ecosystem is worth keeping in mind. 2. I'm a NET investor, therefore calling out that I'm looking forward to seeing the ecosystem develop :)
Google market cap 1.89T
Microsoft market cap 2.289T
Cloudflare market cap 55.86B
Who do you expect to provide competition to Amazon/Google/Microsoft for egress pricing if not smaller company who is a "leading CDN provider" ?
Your comment seems to be justifying why Cloudflare is ideally suited to provide competition against the big 3 cloud providers with its R2 offering ...
Heck, market caps at this point are almost entirely untethered from reality. {cf. Tesla}
Revenues or profits in the cloud market for each company are mostly a measure of how much they are winning. How much they are spending is a measure of how much they are trying to compete, and the amount they can spend is also dependent on profits in other areas of their respective business.
> Heck, market caps at this point are almost entirely untethered from reality
Most stocks have some basis in reality, and relative value still matters even if you think the whole market is in Lala land. The stocks mentioned are not diamondhand stocks. Variation in valuation is not hitting two orders of magnitude, which is what we have here.
A better measure might be some gross profitability figure for each company that measures how much each company can pump into competing (expenses), but that is hard to calculate, especially for Amazon.
[1] Google Cloud Losses Shrink 59%, Revenue Hits $4.6B https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/google-cloud-losses...
Edited: added second paragraphs.
Cloudflare is by no means a small hosting provider. By some accounts, cloudflare is world's leading CDN provider by a long margin, far ahead of AWS in this market, and it currently piles up about half a billion dollars in revenue.
https://blog.intricately.com/2020-state-of-the-cdn-industry-...