While Railgun has served customers for over a decade and exhibited relative stability, maintaining it in the face of better alternatives would hinder progress and divert resources from newer technologies. Cloudflare's network has undergone significant advancements, expanding to over 285 cities worldwide and deploying more efficient and capable hardware. The software platform has also evolved rapidly to accommodate the diverse range of services that the company offers. Continuing to support and maintain Railgun would create a burden on their ability to invest in new solutions and address the evolving needs of their customers. Additionally, rebuilding Railgun from scratch would duplicate features already present in existing, newer products while impeding the development and release of other innovative features.
I think that the rationale behind this decision is rooted in their commitment to continuously solve new problems for customers and provide improved alternatives. Railgun, which established a permanent TCP connection between the customer's environment and Cloudflare's network, serves as a reliable solution for grabbing new content from the customer's origin server. It is useful. However, the last major release of Railgun occurred around eight years ago, and it has been in maintenance mode since then. While hundreds of customers still utilize it, Cloudflare's network has significantly evolved during this period and it now offers a broader range of services that can address the same problems Railgun aimed to solve. Consequently, deprecating the outdated solution allows the company to focus on investing in newer technologies and maintaining the security and adaptability of its network platform.
Cloudflare One is a single-vendor Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform that enables Zero Trust security and any-to-any connectivity across enterprise applications, users, devices, and networks. Cloudflare One helps organizations simplify, modernize, and consolidate their IT architecture by converging security and networking services on our single global network and control plane.
Many organizations start by adopting our Security Service Edge (SSE) services — like ZTNA, SWG, CASB,...
While Railgun has served customers for over a decade and exhibited relative stability, maintaining it in the face of better alternatives would hinder progress and divert resources from newer technologies. Cloudflare's network has undergone significant advancements, expanding to over 285 cities worldwide and deploying more efficient and capable hardware. The software platform has also evolved rapidly to accommodate the diverse range of services that the company offers. Continuing to support and maintain Railgun would create a burden on their ability to invest in new solutions and address the evolving needs of their customers. Additionally, rebuilding Railgun from scratch would duplicate features already present in existing, newer products while impeding the development and release of other innovative features.
I think that the rationale behind this decision is rooted in their commitment to continuously solve new problems for customers and provide improved alternatives. Railgun, which established a permanent TCP connection between the customer's environment and Cloudflare's network, serves as a reliable solution for grabbing new content from the customer's origin server. It is useful. However, the last major release of Railgun occurred around eight years ago, and it has been in maintenance mode since then. While hundreds of customers still utilize it, Cloudflare's network has significantly evolved during this period and it now offers a broader range of services that can address the same problems Railgun aimed to solve. Consequently, deprecating the outdated solution allows the company to focus on investing in newer technologies and maintaining the security and adaptability of its network platform.