Scaling DevTools Rita Kozlov from Cloudflare: competing with the hyperscalers
Aug 21, 2025
Rita Kozlov, VP of Developers and AI at Cloudflare, talks about the company’s strategy to outsmart hyperscalers like AWS. She highlights their innovative Workers platform, designed for efficiency and developer accessibility. Rita dives into the importance of fostering a culture of curiosity and transparency to drive continuous innovation. She also discusses how they cultivate talent and maintain agility, ensuring that their approach to product development is both user-centered and strategically disruptive.
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Efficiency Trumps Raw Scale
- Cloudflare built Workers from a constraint-driven need for extremely efficient, low-latency compute at the edge.
- Disruptive efficiency, not owning huge data centers, is their long-term play against hyperscalers.
Containers Lived Internally First
- Cloudflare ran containers internally for years before exposing them to customers via Workers and browser isolation.
- They dog-fooded the platform and only released containers when customers clearly needed the missing piece.
True Serverless Is About Eliminating Leaks
- Serverless built on isolates avoids the leaky abstractions of VMs and containers like cold starts and region management.
- That genuine serverless experience broadens access and simplifies developers' lives.