The innovator's dilemma is really interesting.

Whenever a new incumbent gets on the scene offering the same thing as some entrenched leader only better, faster, and cheaper, the standard response is "Yeah but it's less reliable. This may be fine for startups but if you're <enterprise|government|military|medical|etc>, you gotta stick with the tried tested and true <leader>"

You see this in almost every discussion of Cloudflare, which seems to be rapidly rebuilding a full cloud, in direct competition with AWS specifically. (I guess it wants to be evaluated as a fellow leader, not an also-ran like GCP/Azure fighting for 2nd place)

The thing is, all the points are right. Cloudflare IS different - by using exclusively edge networks and tying everything to CDNs, it's both a strength and a weakness. There's dozens of reasons to be critical of them and dozens more to explain why you'd trust AWS more.

But I can't help but wonder that surely the same happened (i wasn't on here, or really tech-aware enough) when S3 and EC2 came on the scene. I'm sure everyone said it was unreliable, uncertain, and had dozens of reasons why people should stick with (I can only presume - VMWare, IBM, Oracle, etc?)

This is all a shallow observation though.

Here's my real question, though. How does one go deeper and evaluate what is real disruption and what is fluff. Does Cloudflare have something that's unique and different that demonstrates a new world for cloud services I can't even imagine right now, as AWS did before it. Or does AWS have a durable advantage and benefits that will allow it to keep being #1 indefinitely? (GCP and Azure, as I see it, are trying to compete on specific slices of merit. GCP is all-in on 'portability', that's why they came up with Kubernetes to devalue the idea of any one public cloud, and make workloads cross-platform across all clouds and on-prem. Azure seems to be competitive because of Microsoft's otherwise vertical integration with business/windows/office, and now AI services).

Cloudflare is the only one that seems to show up over and over again and say "hey you know that thing that you think is the best cloud service? We made it cheaper, faster, and with nicer developer experience." That feels really hard to ignore. But also seems really easy to market only-semi-honestly by hand-waving past the hard stuff at scale.