Global content delivery network (CDN) and cloud services provider, Cloudflare, has just made an announcement on its entry into the observability market through the acquisition of Baselime, a cloud-native observability platform. Cloudflare will be in a position to overcome the difficulties of observability for serverless applications by combining Baselime’s technology with Cloudflare’s developer platform.
This acquisition would allow Cloudflare to bring together its extensive understanding of serverless platforms and its experience as a developer. Financial terms of this acquisition were not disclosed.
It is now common practice to construct entire applications using serverless architectures, including everything from computing to databases, storage, queues, and more, stated Cloudflare. In spite of this, observability would frequently be considered to be one of the shortcomings of serverless architectures. This is because it involves giving up visibility into the behavior of the application in exchange for scalable infrastructure that does not require management operations, Cloudflare added.
When it comes to building and debugging production applications, it would be necessary to have the capacity to comprehend patterns and trends, recognize performance bottlenecks, and isolate faults in order to guarantee continuous dependability, scalability, and security. According to Cloudflare, when selecting a platform on which to build, one of the most important considerations that developers would take into account is whether or not they will have access to this level of visibility, preferably all within the same platform.
“Two million developers who are building on Cloudflare trust us to help them scale their apps globally, but they may still struggle to understand the behavior of their cloud applications,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “We are of the opinion that in order to be the most successful developer platform, it is going to be absolutely necessary to have the most advanced observability tools built in. The bar for serverless observability has been increased by Baselime, and we are able to further unlock those insights for every developer who is working on our platform.”
‘For the Future of the Cloud’
Through this acquisition, Cloudflare expands its market reach into the observability space, hence facilitating the deployment of services in production for developers. This would enable teams to recognize when a release has gone wrong and needs to be rolled back, examine problems and regressions, optimize performance, and execute a variety of other tasks.
The ability to optimize the cost of their serverless applications would also be beneficial to developers. This can be achieved by looking into the causes of latency and becoming aware of the speed at which requests are being made.
Baselime will be incorporated into Cloudflare’s developer platform as a result of this acquisition, which will assist developers in pushing the frontiers of modern observability in order to:
- Conduct an analysis of their observability data over thousands of possible variables and values in order to bring to light any problems, requests, or performance issues that may be affecting certain users or the entire application’s overall performance.
- Enable and implement tools and standards that are based on OpenTelemetry in order to ease integration with a wide variety of application frameworks and cloud providers. These tools and standards would make it possible for developers to easily and uniformly instrument their applications for rich observability data. This would make it simpler to swiftly fix problems, regardless of whether they affect a single user, a subset of users, or the entire application.
- Gain insights from their observability data by utilizing a package of upgrades to the developer experience. These changes include real-time error monitoring that is based on logs and traces, alerts that can be acted upon, trace diagrams and timelines, an approachable query engine, and an artificial intelligence debugging helper.
“With their connectivity cloud, Cloudflare is constructing the next revolutionary step in the field of cloud computing,” said Boris Tane, founder and CEO of Baselime. “Our primary objective has always been to simplify and innovate observability for the future of the cloud, and Cloudflare’s ecosystem provides the ideal ground to further this cause. With Cloudflare, we are in a position to deeply integrate into a platform that is trusted by two million developers. This will allow them to rapidly design, ship, and troubleshoot applications. I cannot express how enthusiastic I am about the possibilities of what we may create together and the influence that it will have on developers all across the world.”
