Cloud finally gets some new competition

For more than a decade “cloud” has really meant three names: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Yet 2025 is proving that the market is no longer a closed club. Cloudflare and Oracle, two companies with wildly different histories, are pressing legitimate advantages that could chip away at hyperscaler dominance. One is winning developers’ hearts with a global edge and a friction-free toolchain; the other is turning decades of enterprise data gravity into an AI-driven growth engine. Neither company is necessarily known as a cloud company, yet both point to a future where cloud choice widens far beyond the Big Three.

Cloudflare pursues the developer experience

Cloudflare, long known for speeding up and securing websites, is steadily expanding into full-fledged cloud services. Cloudflare’s brand-new Cloudflare Containers beta is the capstone on an increasingly complete developer platform. This new offering lets developers run containerized applications across Cloudflare’s global edge network, tightly integrated with Cloudflare Workers (its serverless platform). The goal is to make deploying containers as effortless as deploying a Cloudflare Worker. In fact, Cloudflare boasts that you can define a container in just a few lines of code and deploy it with the same wrangler deploy command used for Workers. No complex infrastructure setup needed.

It’s a big deal, because it continues Cloudflare’s focus on developer experience, positioning itself as the cloud platform that abstracts away the painful parts of infrastructure. This is what AWS set out to do years ago by removing the “undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing infrastructure,” but Cloudflare arguably takes this further precisely by doing less. Rather than offering every conceivable service and then requiring developers to navigate that complexity, Cloudflare has kept its platform lean in favor of simplicity. As one analysis notes, “While AWS lets developers spin up virtual servers and hundreds of products, Cloudflare launches products that make developers’ lives simpler.”

Cloudflare’s strength also derives from its origin story as a global network. The company has servers in more than 330 cities worldwide, placing 95% of the world’s internet-connected population within 50 milliseconds of a Cloudflare data center. This expansive edge infrastructure means that applications built on Cloudflare can deliver low-latency responses to users practically anywhere. For developers, it’s like having a worldwide data center footprint by default. You write your code or container once, deploy it, and Cloudflare’s network automatically runs it close to users. There’s no need to manually choose regions or worry about geographic scaling, a stark contrast to the manual configuration often required on AWS or Azure.

Cloudflare’s unified product portfolio also differs from the big clouds’ approach. In the past few years, Cloudflare has added a number of primitives that cover the needs of full-stack applications: Workers (lightweight serverless functions), durable objects and KV storage for state, R2 object storage (an S3 competitor), D1 database (SQL database in beta), pub/sub and queues for messaging, and now containers for heavier workloads. These pieces interoperate seamlessly. A developer can, for example, serve a static front-end via Cloudflare Pages, use Workers for API logic, store data in Cloudflare KV or D1, and invoke a Container for any component that needs a traditional runtime or third-party library. Indeed, Cloudflare’s platform now supports building an entire application—compute and data—on its network. This is starkly different from AWS, for example, which has long prided itself on the sheer number of services it offers, which can be as bewildering for developers as enticing.

Even so, Cloudflare still has gaps it needs to address to take on AWS, Azure, and Google. Cloudflare’s product suite, while growing, is still limited compared to AWS’s hundreds of services. Developers with very specific needs (advanced data warehousing, proprietary AI services, IoT device management, etc.) might not find equivalents on Cloudflare. Also, Cloudflare’s database offerings (D1, Durable Objects) are new and not as battle-tested or feature-rich as AWS’s databases. If your app needs a full-text search engine, big data analytics, or a petabyte-scale data lake, Cloudflare’s platform may not be the answer yet. In short, Cloudflare covers the basics but not every niche; it will need to broaden its services to capture more workloads.

But that’s nitpicking. Last quarter Cloudflare announced it had closed a $100 million deal with a customer building on its developer platform. Clearly there’s huge demand for what Cloudflare already offers: developer simplicity at dramatic scale.

Huge demand also seems true for Cloudflare’s polar opposite, Oracle, which is finding growing success for very different reasons.

Oracle gets serious about cloud

While Cloudflare started with web developers and edge computing, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) started by targeting its traditional enterprise base. As I’ve written, recent results suggest this strategy is paying off: Oracle’s revenue has been on the rise thanks to surging cloud infrastructure and AI demand. In its latest earnings, Oracle surprised Wall Street with an 11% jump in revenue and its stock had its best week since 2001. Oracle achieved this by leaning into what it does best, databases and enterprise applications, and making them cloud- and AI-centric. Rather than trying to beat the likes of OpenAI or Google at general AI, Oracle is offering companies a way to bring AI to their own data securely within Oracle’s cloud. The new Oracle Database 23ai integrates machine learning capabilities directly into the database, allowing enterprises to get insights from their private data without shipping it off to a third-party service.

In a strange twist, Oracle has become an open choice for cloud workloads precisely by being a bit less “Oracle-esque” than it traditionally has been. Oracle embraced multicloud in a way few expected, making its database available on AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure rather than insisting all workloads must run on Oracle’s own OCI data centers. By being flexible, Oracle made its technology more attractive to cloud-hesitant customers, and in so doing, it has become a trusted partner to help otherwise cloud-resistant companies move critical workloads to the cloud.

Oracle also kept pouring money into its cloud infrastructure, investing billions to rapidly expand data center capacity after years of underinvestment. All these efforts have started to change Oracle’s image from a cloud laggard to a viable option, especially for companies that already use Oracle software. However, Oracle’s cloud push lacks a crucial element for long-term success: developer adoption. Years ago I pointed out that Oracle built a cloud for its existing enterprise customers, not for the next generation of developers. This remains a challenge, one that is almost exactly the opposite of Cloudflare’s challenges.

In today’s world, developers are often the new kingmakers who determine which platforms gain traction. A bank’s CIO might green-light an Oracle cloud contract, but the developers in that bank are the ones who pick the tools to build the next innovative app. If those developers aren’t thinking about Oracle, Oracle could miss out on the new workloads that aren’t already tied into its ecosystem. Oracle seems to recognize this and has started taking steps to woo developers. It has introduced a free tier on OCI and more transparent and straightforward pricing to let a dev with a credit card get started easily—something AWS mastered early on.

Two roads converge in the cloud

The Oracle story offers a lesson for Cloudflare: It’s not enough to have great tech or an incumbent advantage; you must win the hearts and minds of developers to sustain momentum. Oracle’s enterprise-centric cloud found new life by focusing on its strengths (data, AI, security) and that’s driving revenue, but its future will hinge on attracting the next generation of developers to build on OCI.

Cloudflare, conversely, has from the beginning been very developer-focused, cultivating enthusiasm among web and application developers. In some sense, Cloudflare and Oracle are coming at the cloud opportunity from opposite ends: Cloudflare has developer love and needs to prove itself in enterprise scenarios, while Oracle has enterprise credibility and needs to spark developer love. Both could carve out significant niches in the cloud market if they execute well. There’s room in the $100-billion cloud industry for alternative players, especially as companies pursue multicloud strategies and developers seek the best tool for each job.

AWS, Azure, and GCP still dominate by revenue and service depth, but hegemony breeds complacency. Cloudflare’s edge simplicity and Oracle’s AI-centric data strategy force the Big Three to double down on developer experience and multicloud openness. If there’s one lesson here, it’s that cloud advantage is increasingly about where your strengths naturally align with developer pain. For Cloudflare it’s hiding the ops. For Oracle it’s letting enterprises mine the gold already sitting in their databases. In 2025, those strengths are powerful enough to reshape the cloud leaderboard—and that’s great news for developers.