Announcing Cloudflare Ambassadors, Community Engineers, and another $1M in open-source funding

Announcing Cloudflare Ambassadors, Community Engineers, and another $1M in open-source funding | Cloudflare Blog

Skip to content

As a platform for helping build a better Internet, Cloudflare helps turn ideas into real products and experiences around the world. Across communities and backgrounds, developers build with Cloudflare using the tools they love, shaping what comes next for the Internet while inspiring, collaborating with, and teaching others. The community is where some of Cloudflare’s best moments happen. Students show their friends how to deploy Workers for the first time. Discord users answer questions from other developers via working code samples, instead of links to documentation. Open-source contributors build novel solutions to solve their own problems, then share them with the world. Organizers host events that give builders from all backgrounds the space to start building their dream project. All of these represent a community at its best: people helping other people build. This spirit of community is an exciting and vital part of helping to build the Internet. Those who step up to educate and support others, or to invent, build, or maintain tools shared across the ecosystem, make lasting contributions to the health and potential of the Internet. We want to have their backs. That's why today we’re announcing an improved community program, designed to better support, recognize, and empower the people getting involved, while working with them to shape what comes next. The program has two main tracks: Cloudflare Ambassadors: Bringing Cloudflare to their own communities. Cloudflare Community Engineers: Contributing to open-source projects that improve the Internet.

We’re launching a new home for the program where you can learn more and get involved: cloudflare.com/community . Cloudflare Ambassadors Cloudflare Ambassadors are people who bring Cloudflare into their own communities. You can probably think of people in the communities you value who share a genuine passion for a product or technology. It’s inspiring and we love to see it. When that enthusiasm includes the tools we’re building here at Cloudflare, it’s especially exciting for us. Following our annual application process (more below), we’ll announce the year’s Cloudflare Ambassadors cohort. Selected Ambassadors will receive support, resources, and benefits to help their community thrive and bring their ideas to life. Ambassadors can serve for up to two years, giving them meaningful time to build momentum while helping us support more communities over time. What Ambassadors do and what we provide Being an Ambassador might mean organizing a local event, leading a student group, creating spaces where builders can learn together, publishing tutorials or sharing content online, or being the person others turn to when they want to understand what’s possible with Cloudflare. Ambassadors will take the lead on events in their communities, whether on campus, through local organizations, or across their city. When hosting meetups, hackathons, workshops, or talks, they will be able to apply for support in the form of credits, marketing assets, technical resources, and more. We’ll also give them a visible role in Cloudflare’s online community spaces, including Discord, so that other developers know who they are, and that they’re here to help. Applications are open now, and will be accepted through September 6. Those selected as Ambassadors will be informed of their selection by October 5. Apply to become a Cloudflare Ambassador A great example of the enthusiasm we’re looking for comes from Sruthi Pereddy, a Computer Science major at University of Michigan and a current intern on Cloudflare’s Recruiting Ops team. Sruthi’s work within Cloudflare has created a drive to share and explore more with others: “Whether it’s hackathons, startup venture funds, or coursework, I want to show my peers that Cloudflare is a go-to developer platform for whatever they’re building,” Pereddy says. “Students are ready to build, but often feel constrained by resources. I’m excited to bridge that gap and make sure they have the infrastructure to turn their ideas into reality from day one.” Cloudflare Community Engineers Some community work happens in person, but a great deal of community work also happens in code. Much of Cloudflare’s Developer Platform is built on open-source work, or is open-source, like workerd and quiche . Open-source contributors, especially maintainers, do wonderful work and embody so much passion and determination. We’re eager to support them, especially since their work can sometimes feel thankless. So we’re doubling down on our efforts to build stronger incentives and directly support the maintainers doing this important work. Last year, we announced our sponsorship of the web framework TanStack . TanStack creator Tanner Linsley says that sponsorship has had a major impact. “Cloudflare’s sponsorship has given us room to keep investing in foundational open-source work that’s hard to tie to a single product or launch, maintaining the core libraries, improving docs and tooling, supporting contributors, and putting real time into bigger bets like TanStack Router and Start,” Linsley says. “It’s also helped us make sure TanStack apps have a really solid path onto Cloudflare’s platform. More than anything, that support buys stability, which is kind of everything when you’re building open source for the long haul.” Today, we’re expanding on our previous open-source investments by introducing Cloudflare Community Engineers. Earlier this year, we announced a $1M fund as part of our acquisition of VoidZero to support the Vite community. We’re committing an additional $1M in funding to sponsor and support open-source projects over the next two years, with eligible Community Engineers receiving grants from the fund to support their continuing work in open source. The Community Engineer program does not have a maximum term. Open source work doesn’t neatly fit into annual cycles. Some projects require maintenance for years, while other times, contributors do the work that is needed at exactly the right moment. This program is intended to support that. To begin, we’ll focus on developers working on things in the orbit of our own open-source projects — projects like Astro, Agents SDK, EmDash, Hono, and Vinext. We’ll also grant our Community Engineers a special designation in Cloudflare’s Discord server and other online spaces....