I think those architectures you mentioned come from entirely different philosophies. The data center model relies on a glob of services that you manage yoursel

I think those architectures you mentioned come from entirely different philosophies. The data center model relies on a glob of services that you manage yourself, and manage infrastructure & networking for. That's how a lot of the early AWS services were built. AWS still offers that paradigm, especially for bigger enterprises that want or need that level of control. But Cloudflare fast-forwards all that by a few generations, which makes their edge computing MUCH easier, faster, and cheaper to use than Lambda or similar services. Instead of worrying about specific data centers, interconnect, firewalls, bandwidth, etc., on Cloudflare the topology is mostly invisible (unless you have to deal with the Chinese Firewall). You just upload your stateless Javascript code into a worker, and it gets replicated everywhere nearly instantly. Replication and caching are handled invisibly by Cloudflare and you never really have to think about it. If you need state or durable storage, their edge storage products (Workers KV, Durable Objects) function similarly... a few lines of code and you've got a globally scaled auto-replicating data store that you never have to manage the infrastructure for. The benefit is that it's way easier than having to manage network infrastructure, and Cloudflare's offering is far superior to anything a small business could easily set up or maintain on their own. If you're a huge enterprise, maybe there's more concern about how much control you have over the topology, caching details, etc. But for simpler websites and apps, the Cloudflare stack is tremendously easier to work with than anything AWS offers, waaaaaaay faster (especially for cold starts), and usually much cheaper. Workers isn't a 1:1 replacement for Lambda, but it's probably the better choice for simpler functions. As for this database connector, it goes against their edge-native offerings, but it's probably just there as a compatibility layer for people who aren't able to rearchitect their whole stack yet. Like their other CDN products, this lets you connect legacy stacks (single host or single data center) to a global CDN with little work.