Cloudflare’s recent acquisition aims to supercharge developers

The deal should make it easier to build AI applications on the Cloudflare Developer Platform

Cloudflare logo and branding pictured on a glass door and store front at the company's offices in San Francisco, USA.
(Image credit: Getty Images)

Cloudflare has announced plans to acquire developer database firm, Outerbase, in a bid to drive application development and agentic AI capabilities for devs.

In an statement, Cloudflare said the deal will make building database-backed applications more straightforward for developers, simplifying how full-stack, AI-enabled applications can be built and deployed on the firm's global network.

"Businesses are racing to build AI-powered applications to be as productive, innovative, and competitive as possible. Our goal is to make it easy and accessible for any developer, regardless of expertise, to build database-backed applications that can scale," said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare.

"Outerbase's technology and design expertise are an important factor in accelerating this improved developer experience."

Cloudflare plans to integrate Outerbase’s core features into its platform, showing up in the Cloudflare dashboard for developers using D1 or Durable Objects.

The firm's data explorer for browsing and editing tables, new REST APIs, query editor with type-ahead functionality, real-time data capture, and other tooling will also appear.

Over the next quarter, Cloudflare plans to adapt its table viewer and query runner experiences to D1 and Durable Objects. It said it will make it easier to get started with Durable Objects, improving its CII tooling Wrangler, the Cloudflare dashboard, and the ways developers plug into them from their client applications.

This, the firm said, will improve visualization of the state of a Workflow and Workflow instances, and add pre and post-query hooks for D1, automatically registering handlers that can act on users data.

"Some of this work has already begun. You’ll see the first pieces in the coming days, weeks, and months," said Brandon Strittmatter, co-founder and CEO of Outerbase.

"We’ll be building in public like usual, posting progress on Twitter and in the Cloudflare Discord."

Cloudflare deal means changes ahead for Outerbase users

As a result of the acquisition, the hosted Outerbase cloud will shut down on October 15th, although the firm’s open source repositories will be maintained and developers will still be able to self-host Outerbase if they prefer.

Outerbase is actually built on Cloudflare Workers, making it relatively easy for the technology to rapidly be incorporated directly into Durable Objects, D1 and Cloudflare’s Agents, said the firms.

"We’ve built Outerbase on top of Cloudflare, so this next step feels natural. Now, we get to take what we’ve built and make it part of the platform itself," said Strittmatter.

"I’m beyond excited about this opportunity — not just because of what it means for the team, but how as part of Cloudflare, we will shape the way people are building developer tools and AI applications."

MORE FROM ITPRO

Emma Woollacott

Emma Woollacott is a freelance journalist writing for publications including the BBC, Private Eye, Forbes, Raconteur and specialist technology titles.