There is some marketing here to be sure, but in some sense, they are at least partially right in that:
- they aren’t just reselling AWS services (if I recall correctly Netlify and to at least some extent Vercel do, for instance)
- They will be providing their own database platform (coming soon according to the blog post, as of 12/17/2020) which means they can provide the ability to have a single end to end provider for my app. (Interested to know if CloudFlare will provide a secure user authentication layer on top)
- they have one of the world's largest CDNs, no other player really offers that out of the box (though you can just as easily integrate with theirs, it’s just not as convenient and I’m sure the integration there will play out accordingly)
- They are offering workers out of the box, which are a lot like lambdas, in that they run some arbitrary function(s) when called, but have greater capabilities beyond that with the system since they are “CloudFlare Aware”
It’s not all untrue, however:
To your point, it’s very much a marketing message vs a hard reality in that services offer a good deal of feature parity and this is more of a leap in the current iteration of things rather than a pure innovation in the problem space. You can readily achieve this today with some combination of Heroku + CloudFlare CDN, for instance (and that would include edge workers, if you so choose)
I imagine this wouldn't be terribly hard to emulate with AWS Amplify[0] either, though. I like that CloudFlare is offering something not directly tied to AWS or another cloud provider explicitly (I'm not talking about them using it for extra compute or what have you. I know that CloudFlare has their own network of servers and generally they're selling access to their metal, not another provider(s))
[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/