Cloudflare vs Fastly: The serverless race in 2026

The AI agent infrastructure battle

Anthropic’s Claude Managed Agents launch on April 8, 2026, changed the competitive landscape for edge computing. The product handles the infrastructure requirements for AI agents with session management, state checkpointing, crash recovery, and multi-agent coordination. Each agent session runs in a disposable Linux container. The architecture is a three-layer system: a model layer for reasoning, an execution layer for running commands and browsing the web, and a session layer that is an append-only log. This separation reduced response latency by 60 percent at median and over 90 percent at the 95th percentile compared to architectures where the model waits for container provisioning. On April 10, 2026, Fastly fell 18 percent in a single session. Cloudflare fell 11 percent on April 9, and Akamai fell 12 percent on April 10. These companies spent the previous two years positioning their edge compute as the layer for AI workloads. Cloudflare is a developer of Workers AI and an Agents SDK. Fastly positioned its edge compute specifically for AI workloads. Anthropic provides a different model where developers bring application logic and Anthropic handles the rest. Built-in tools for the service include Bash execution, file operations, web search, and web fetch. For an always-on agent running 24 hours a day, the service costs roughly $58 per month in session fees before token costs. OpenAI also launched a similar environment on February 10, 2026, with its Responses API providing server-side Debian containers with full terminal access. Ben Reitzes of Melius Research wrote that the market is correctly identifying SaaS trends, following a loss of $1.4 trillion in SaaS market cap since Anthropic was worth just $18 billion in January 2025.

Vulnerabilities in the HTTP/3 translation

Cloudflare remains more resilient than Fastly against HTTP/3 connection exhaustion attacks. Researchers from the National University of Singapore, Fuzhou University, the University of Sheffield, and Johns Hopkins identified two techniques: HTTP/3 Bandwidth Amplification (HBA) and HTTP/3 Connection Amplification (HCA). These attacks exploit the translation between the HTTP/3 used for browsers and the HTTP/1.1 used for origin servers. The HBA attack uses QPACK header compression to amplify traffic. Against CDNs like Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent that support the dynamic table, the researchers measured up to 350x amplification. Cloudflare and Fastly do not support the dynamic table. During testing, five of the six CDNs, including Fastly, saw connections to the origin exceed 300 during the connection exhaustion attack. Cloudflare remained the exception because it buffers the complete request before opening an origin connection. The researchers identified 42,330 subdomains potentially exposed across the six tested networks, and they found that CloudFront accounts for 17,431 of these, while Cloudflare and Fastly account for 12,371 and 11,606 subdomains respectively within their respective infrastructures. An attacker needs only an ordinary laptop to execute these attacks, although the researchers used a VPS in Singapore for their tests. The connection attack is quieter, sending data frames slowly to control how long each CDN-to-origin connection stays open.

Pricing and flexibility for developers

Cloudflare is the better choice for developers seeking model-agnostic tools and transparent scaling. Cloudflare runs inference across Llama, Mistral, and many others, whereas Anthropic runs Claude only. Fastly targets enterprise customers like the UK government and Amazon, but its service is prone to instability. A service configuration error at Fastly caused a massive global outage that affected sites like Reddit, Spotify, and The New York Times. Cloudflare also had a configuration error in 2020, but it is much harder to find a better value for small-scale developers on Fastly. Fastly’s pricing is opaque, and many users find it difficult to sign up for services without contacting sales. Cloudflare provides a clear path for pay-as-you-go users via the Workers Paid plan, which has a $5 monthly minimum. This plan is a set of increased initial usage allotments and clear charges for usage that exceeds the base plan. Fastly’s users often encounter a $50 minimum fee in the small print. Cloudflare also provides many features to all plans, including Logpush and Logpush Transformers, which allow users to filter and redact logs before delivery. Cloudflare maintains a 2026 growth projection of 28 to 29 percent. Fastly operates POPs in at least 58 cities and has a combined global capacity of 130 terabits per second. If you want to avoid vendor lock-in, Cloudflare provides much better flexibility. How will model providers react when the infrastructure layer continues to compress? Use Cloudflare for developers who need model variety and transparent, per-request pricing.