Fullstack applications
Fullstack web applications combine frontend and backend technologies to deliver complete, dynamic user experiences. These applications rely on a broad technology stack covering user interfaces, backend services, databases, integrations, and increasingly, AI-driven features to function seamlessly and scale reliably.
On the frontend, developers typically use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, often alongside frameworks like React, Next.js, or Angular. These tools provide the structure and interactivity needed for modern user interfaces, helping manage state, render dynamic content, personalize experiences, and optimize performance across devices.
On the backend, server-side code handles tasks like processing requests, running business logic, authenticating users, integrating AI models, and interacting with databases. Developers build these services using languages like JavaScript, Python, or Java, supported by frameworks that simplify routing, middleware, and API creation.
Databases are critical in the stack, storing and retrieving application data. Relational databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite manage structured data and enforce data integrity, while NoSQL options like MongoDB or Cassandra offer flexibility for handling unstructured or large-scale datasets.
Modern fullstack development increasingly incorporates external services, APIs, pre-built components, and AI capabilities. This approach reduces the need to create complex features from scratch, such as content moderation, personalized recommendations, and semantic search. As a result, development teams can build applications more quickly and efficiently.
Cloudflare’s Developer Platform combines all these capabilities into a unified, globally distributed environment, offering developers everything they need to build, deploy, and scale modern fullstack applications with minimal operational overhead.
Cloudflare’s platform doesn’t just offer individual services. Rather, it offers a composable ecosystem, enabling teams to build powerful applications quickly, scale seamlessly, and innovate faster without the overhead of managing infrastructure.
In this section, we’ll present a practical example of how these services come together in a real fullstack application architecture.
Sends requests to the server. This could be through a desktop or mobile browser, or native or mobile app.
Process incoming requests to ensure the security of an application. This includes encryption of traffic using SSL/TLS, offering DDOS protection, filtering malicious traffic through a web application firewall (WAF), mitigations against automated bots, and API Shield to identify and address your API vulnerabilities. Depending on the configuration, requests can be blocked, logged, or allowed based on a diverse set of parameters. Sensible fully managed and default configurations can be used to reduce attack surfaces with little to no overhead.
Serve static requests from global cache (CDN). This reduces latency and lowers resource utilization, as the requests are being served from cache instead of requiring a request to storage & media services or compute services. Take advantage of Argo Smart Routing to route requests across the most efficient network path, avoiding congestion.
Process dynamic requests using serverless compute with Workers. This could include authentication, routing, middleware, database interactions, and serving APIs. Moreover, Workers Assets can be used to serve client-side or server-side rendering web frameworks such as React, Next.js, or Angular. Utilize Workers for Platforms to allow users to deploy custom code on your platform or enable them to deploy their own code directly. For stateful workloads, Durable Objects provide low-latency, stateful compute by running logic close to where the object's data is stored, enabling coordination, persistence, and real-time communication at the edge.
Introduce state to applications by persisting and retrieving data. This includes R2 for object storage, D1 for relational data, KV for data with high read requirements and Durable Objects for strongly consistent data storage. The storage options guide can help to assess which storage option is the most suitable for a given use case.
Build real-time serverless video, audio, and data applications with Realtime. Serve optimized images from Images and on-demand videos as well as live streams from Stream.
With Workers AI, developers can run popular open-source models for tasks like text generation, image analysis, and content moderation powered by serverless GPUs. Vectorize is a globally distributed vector database for similarity search, personalization, and recommendation features. Agents further extend AI capabilities - Cloudflare provides the Agents SDK that lets you build and deploy AI-powered agents that can perform tasks, interact in real time, call models, manage state, run workflows, query data, and integrate human-in-the-loop actions.
Queues enable durable, asynchronous messaging to decouple services and handle traffic spikes. Workflows orchestrate complex processes across APIs, services, and human approvals, abstracting away infrastructure and state management. Pipelines let you ingest high volumes of real time data, without managing any infrastructure.
Send logs from all services with Logpush, gather insights with Workers Logs directly in the Cloudflare dashboard, collect custom metrics from Workers using Workers Analytics Engine, or observe and control AI applications with AI Gateway.
Integrate Cloudflare's observability solutions with your existing third-party solutions. Logpush supports many destinations to push logs to for storage and further analysis. Also, Cloudflare analytics can be integrated with analytics solutions. The GraphQL Analytics API allows for flexible queries and integrations.
Define and manage resources and configuration using third-party tools and frameworks such as Terraform and Pulumi, Cloudflare's Developer Platform command-line interface (CLI) Wrangler, or the Cloudflare API. All of these tools can be used either for manual provisioning, or automated as part of CI/CD pipelines.
Cloudflare’s Developer Platform is built for seamless integration with external services. Whether connecting to third-party APIs, databases, SaaS platforms, or cloud providers, developers can easily make outbound requests from Workers, trigger workflows based on external events, and securely exchange data across systems.
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