Who knew Matthew Prince had it in him, because CloudFlare just reeled in a big fish, more like a whale. Ben Fathi, ex-CTO of VMWare has joined CloudFlare as Head of Engineering. Prior to VMWare, Ben worked as SVP of Networking Operating Systems at Cisco, GM of Storage/File Systems at Microsoft, and Director of Operating Systems at Silicon Graphics. In other words, Ben is an Artistic Genius when it comes to the OS, which leaves you wondering – what’s CloudFlare’s agenda with the hire.
Everyone has an agenda, especially CloudFlare, and we already know how much love Prince has for Amazon, so perhaps CloudFlare is planning on offering an AWS like service at the edge? It wouldn’t be a shocker if they decided to go that route. After all, CloudFlare has 500K customers, which is a staggering 50% of Amazon’s customer base. If we were Prince and had Google as an investor, we’d definitely go for it, and try to go “mano-a-mano” with AWS in the cloud infrastructure ring.