Cloudflare looks to make web app automation easier with Linc deal

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(Image credit: Shutterstock / Blackboard)

Earlier this week Cloudflare acquired automation platform Linc to give more flexibility and functionality to help its front-end developers collaborate and build webapps with ease.

In a blog post announcing the move, Cloudflare said the acquisition will help the company enhance their newly announced front-end JAMStack hosting platform called Pages: “With the addition of Linc, we will accelerate Pages to enable richer and more powerful full-stack applications.”

Acknowledging the work of Linc with Frontend Application Bundles (FABs), the web infrastructure company added that together they’ll be able to make backends more accessible to frontend developers.

Hosting at the edge

“Linc and the Frontend Application Bundle (FAB) specification were designed with a single goal in mind: to give frontend developers the best possible tools to build, review, refine, and deploy their applications,” notes Glen Maddern, CTO of Linc.

Maddern added that while Linc’s goal was to give developers the best tooling for their apps, regardless of which hosting they were using, they noticed that when given a choice, developers usually chose Cloudflare to host their frontend: “Which is why, when we started talking to Cloudflare, everything fell into place.” 

Besides the immediate goal of adding new capabilities to Pages, Maddern says the Linc team will work towards enabling customers to “fully embrace edge-rendering and make global serverless hosting more powerful and accessible.”

Mayank Sharma

With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’s TechRadar Pro’s expert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.