Cloudflare vs AWS feud: how Cloudflare's push into serverless compute and zero-egress storage became an open feud
What happened? Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince says Amazon Web ServicesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has unilaterally cancelled Cloudflare's booth at re:Invent, AWS's annual conference in Las Vegas (November 30 to December 4, 2026). "There are always signs when someone finally realizes they're losing," Prince wrote on X on October 16, adding that Cloudflare will attend anyway and "throw the most fun side events without paying Amazon". AWS has not commented publicly, and Prince did not say why the booth was pulled. Engineer and author Gergely Orosz wrote that cancelling a sponsor booth at the last minute is "unheard of" and suggests AWS sees Cloudflare as a competitor.
Why it matters: The booth is the latest flashpoint in a rivalry that has been building for years as Cloudflare moves from CDN and security into AWS's core cloud business. It now markets itself as a "connectivity cloud" and pitches its developer platform as an alternative to the hyperscalers:
Compute: Workers, Cloudflare's serverless platform that runs code across its network in more than 300 cities, competes with AWS Lambda. In 2021 Cloudflare dropped egress fees on Workers Unbound and Durable Objects, its stateful serverless primitive, and it also offers D1, a serverless SQL database.
Storage: R2, announced in September 2021 and generally available in September 2022, is S3-compatible object storage with zero egress fees. Cloudflare said it aims to be at least 10% cheaper than S3 Standard.
AI: Workers AI, launched in September 2023, runs inference on NVIDIA GPUs deployed across Cloudflare's network. Prince told SiliconANGLE the company had "people with suitcases full of GPUs running around the world".
History of the feud: Egress fees have been Cloudflare's main line of attack. In 2018 it founded the Bandwidth Alliance, in which providers including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle and many smaller clouds waive or discount transfer fees for shared customers. AWS did not join. In a July 2021 blog post titled "AWS's Egregious Egress", Cloudflare argued that wholesale bandwidth had become about 93% cheaper over ten years while AWS's egress prices had fallen only about 25%, and it called AWS's pricing a "Hotel California" model that locks customers in. Cloudflare made the same case to regulators: in submissions to Ofcom's cloud market study and the UK CMA's follow-on investigation, it argued that AWS egress fees deter switching and multi-cloud use, and it cited the EU Data Act's switching rules. On March 5, 2024, AWS said it would waive data-transfer-out fees for customers moving their data off AWS, citing customer choice and the direction set by the EU Data Act. In its July 31, 2025 final decision, the CMA recommended strategic market status investigations into AWS and Microsoft.
Sources: Matthew Prince on X (Oct 16, 2026), Cloudflare: AWS's Egregious Egress (2021), Cloudflare: Announcing R2, Cloudflare: R2 general availability, Cloudflare: Workers egress fees dropped, Cloudflare: Workers AI launch, SiliconANGLE, Cloudflare submission to Ofcom, CMA cloud services market investigation, AWS News Blog (Mar 2024), Reuters. Photo: Noam Galai for TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
