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Congrats Ben and team! I think this is Cloudflare's most notable acquisition yet? From Wikipedia it looks like they've previously mainly acquired smaller cyber

by simonw 1y ago

Congrats Ben and team! I think this is Cloudflare's most notable acquisition yet? From Wikipedia it looks like they've previously mainly acquired smaller cybersecurity firms like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_1_Security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_1_Security

echelon 1y ago
I don't know that this was an acquisition in the sense that the Replicate investors and team made bank. I don't see a price tag, and the market for these "run model" infra companies is pretty crowded.
- mritchie712 1y ago
  replicate "only" raised $50m, so I'd wager the founders, investors and early employees did well here. If they raised $500m... then yes, the wouldn't have done so well.
  - dagi3d 1y ago
    for investors, it will highly depend on the valuation ($350m) and liquidation preferences. so, even if they "only" raised $50m, seeing almost or none return is plausible. this also includes employees who exercised their options. another story is for the founders
michaelbuckbee 1y ago
This feels the most like Cloudflare branching out to something closer to a traditional hosting model and further from their networking efforts (though things like workers and R2 certainly have blurred that line).
- tracker1 1y ago
  I'd love to work on Cloudflare's underlying email platform... from pretty early on, I've felt like the workers model could be great for handling relatively short lived tcp connections, not just web requests... in this way, all the other facilities CF offers such as R2 and D1 could be used with an email platform that could scale incredibly well. With this acquisition, it's another natural fit into such a platform for email spam filtering and classification. Definitely exciting to see.
  - NicoJuicy 1y ago
    Recently implemented it to only process emails where the sender is in the list of customers email and then extract info from email and do an api call. Really easy to do it on the edge. No hassle with POP3, IMAP, ... Easy to use a subdomain of my email domain Loc: ~40
    - tracker1 1y ago
      Did a CF worker for an email group list which worked well enough... having each email address target have to approve themselves was about the only hiccup. Definitely nice options all around. Would be interested in seeing an Outlook/(o365/Exchange) alternative from Cloudflare with a bit more of a feature rich offering... or at least the ability to build something like that on CF.
  - weitendorf 1y ago
    If you (or others here) are truly interested in email+tcp proxying+workers-like-computing, then I have work to offer you in the build out of my company’s network/computing platform. This is something that you can or could already do with Envoy proxy with the right amount of polish, knowhow, and elbow grease (which we have). What Cloudflare doesn’t have are good general computing products and multitenancy supprt. But we have those, something like D1, and something like a remote tunnel that runs in your browser. So users can launch Stalwart instances painlessly and use our secret magic to render it in actual browsers without special middleware or extra state (or we could offer shared/default Stalwart to do it completely out of the box). So that would take you the rest of the way from platform-level email to application-level and user-level/managed email. What we don’t have is the time to spare in productizing that and handling the email-specific routing in envoy, or finding capable/knowledgeable people who know all the email-specific content and skills. So hit me up if that's you, and otherwise, feel free to run wild with the knowledge that you can configure Envoy Proxy with an L4 network filter or HTTP filter that delegates to dynamically loadable/configurable wasm if you want a hackable Cloudflare workers or even a platform-level alternative (hint: store wasm code in FUSE). The L4 filter should work for email filtering. [0] https://www.envoyproxy.io/docs/envoy/latest/intro/arch_overview/advanced/wasm https://www.envoyproxy.io/docs/envoy/latest/intro/arch_overv... [1] https://github.com/proxy-wasm/spec/tree/main/abi-versions/v0.2.1#proxy_on_new_connection https://github.com/proxy-wasm/spec/tree/main/abi-versions/v0... (where you'd start implementing email filtering logic) [2] https://mail.mplode.dev https://mail.mplode.dev (demo/test Stalwart instance we're running in our dev environment. Platform magic would allow us to render an email client directly embedded in https://brilliant.mplode.dev https://brilliant.mplode.dev via remote IMAP/POP3)
- NicoJuicy 1y ago
  It feels like more related to this: https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-runs-more-ai-models-on-fewer-gpus/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-runs-more-ai-mode... And doing it their way than the traditional way. Note: Their innovation seems to lie in smaller and fine-tuned ( broader catalog) models than larger ones. So Replicate seems a perfect match. The traditional way: Rent a GPU and run inference on an container.
ramimac 1y ago
Probably, but you can check out a more robust list here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/acquisitions/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/acquisitions/ * BastionZero * Kivera * Baselime * PartyKit * Area 1 * Vectrix * Zaraz * Linc * S2 Systems Corporation * Neumob * Eager * CryptoSeal * StopTheHacker
- captn3m0 1y ago
  Not everything seems to be tagged as acquisition. Dyte.io was acquired, and announced here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-realtime-and-realtimekit/#say-hello-to-realtimekit https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-realtime-...

by simonw 1y ago

echelon 1y ago

I don't know that this was an acquisition in the sense that the Replicate investors and team made bank. I don't see a price tag, and the market for these "run model" infra companies is pretty crowded.

mritchie712 1y ago
replicate "only" raised $50m, so I'd wager the founders, investors and early employees did well here. If they raised $500m... then yes, the wouldn't have done so well.
- dagi3d 1y ago
  for investors, it will highly depend on the valuation ($350m) and liquidation preferences. so, even if they "only" raised $50m, seeing almost or none return is plausible. this also includes employees who exercised their options. another story is for the founders

michaelbuckbee 1y ago

This feels the most like Cloudflare branching out to something closer to a traditional hosting model and further from their networking efforts (though things like workers and R2 certainly have blurred that line).

tracker1 1y ago
I'd love to work on Cloudflare's underlying email platform... from pretty early on, I've felt like the workers model could be great for handling relatively short lived tcp connections, not just web requests... in this way, all the other facilities CF offers such as R2 and D1 could be used with an email platform that could scale incredibly well. With this acquisition, it's another natural fit into such a platform for email spam filtering and classification. Definitely exciting to see.
- NicoJuicy 1y ago
  Recently implemented it to only process emails where the sender is in the list of customers email and then extract info from email and do an api call. Really easy to do it on the edge. No hassle with POP3, IMAP, ... Easy to use a subdomain of my email domain Loc: ~40
  - tracker1 1y ago
    Did a CF worker for an email group list which worked well enough... having each email address target have to approve themselves was about the only hiccup. Definitely nice options all around. Would be interested in seeing an Outlook/(o365/Exchange) alternative from Cloudflare with a bit more of a feature rich offering... or at least the ability to build something like that on CF.
- weitendorf 1y ago
  If you (or others here) are truly interested in email+tcp proxying+workers-like-computing, then I have work to offer you in the build out of my company’s network/computing platform. This is something that you can or could already do with Envoy proxy with the right amount of polish, knowhow, and elbow grease (which we have). What Cloudflare doesn’t have are good general computing products and multitenancy supprt. But we have those, something like D1, and something like a remote tunnel that runs in your browser. So users can launch Stalwart instances painlessly and use our secret magic to render it in actual browsers without special middleware or extra state (or we could offer shared/default Stalwart to do it completely out of the box). So that would take you the rest of the way from platform-level email to application-level and user-level/managed email. What we don’t have is the time to spare in productizing that and handling the email-specific routing in envoy, or finding capable/knowledgeable people who know all the email-specific content and skills. So hit me up if that's you, and otherwise, feel free to run wild with the knowledge that you can configure Envoy Proxy with an L4 network filter or HTTP filter that delegates to dynamically loadable/configurable wasm if you want a hackable Cloudflare workers or even a platform-level alternative (hint: store wasm code in FUSE). The L4 filter should work for email filtering. [0] https://www.envoyproxy.io/docs/envoy/latest/intro/arch_overview/advanced/wasm https://www.envoyproxy.io/docs/envoy/latest/intro/arch_overv... [1] https://github.com/proxy-wasm/spec/tree/main/abi-versions/v0.2.1#proxy_on_new_connection https://github.com/proxy-wasm/spec/tree/main/abi-versions/v0... (where you'd start implementing email filtering logic) [2] https://mail.mplode.dev https://mail.mplode.dev (demo/test Stalwart instance we're running in our dev environment. Platform magic would allow us to render an email client directly embedded in https://brilliant.mplode.dev https://brilliant.mplode.dev via remote IMAP/POP3)
NicoJuicy 1y ago
It feels like more related to this: https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-runs-more-ai-models-on-fewer-gpus/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-cloudflare-runs-more-ai-mode... And doing it their way than the traditional way. Note: Their innovation seems to lie in smaller and fine-tuned ( broader catalog) models than larger ones. So Replicate seems a perfect match. The traditional way: Rent a GPU and run inference on an container.

ramimac 1y ago

Probably, but you can check out a more robust list here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/acquisitions/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/acquisitions/ * BastionZero * Kivera * Baselime * PartyKit * Area 1 * Vectrix * Zaraz * Linc * S2 Systems Corporation * Neumob * Eager * CryptoSeal * StopTheHacker

captn3m0 1y ago
Not everything seems to be tagged as acquisition. Dyte.io was acquired, and announced here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-realtime-and-realtimekit/#say-hello-to-realtimekit https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-realtime-...