NVIDIA and Cloudflare announced a partnership that will “put AI into the hands of developers everywhere.”

Working with NVIDIA, Cloudflare will offer artificial intelligence (AI) tools to developers on top of its workers developer platform, making it “easier and faster for developers to build the types of applications that will power the future all within a platform.” On the Cloudflare blog, it claimed that it is faster and 75% less expensive than AWS Lambda.  

Cloudflare also announced it will support TensorFlow, the open source tool for testing machine learning models, so developers will have access to familiar tools to help build applications before deploying on Cloudflare’s network. 

The announcement said the intent of the partnership is to “bring AI to the edge at scale.”

Developers rely on AI for applications that require any number of tasks, including text translation on webpages to image object recognition, which “makes machine learning models a critical part of application development,” according to the announcement. 

SEE: Natural language processing: A cheat sheet (TechRepublic)

Developers need to keep proprietary machine models reliable and secure. Security is paramount to Cloudflare, which routes all web traffic for its internet customers through its intelligent global network. Users expect functionality to be fast and reliable. Cloudflare addresses its customer’s “security, performance and reliability needs” while NVIDIA provides developers with a range of AI-powered application frameworks which include Jarvis for natural language processing, Clara for healthcare and life sciences and Morpheus for cybersecurity.

NVIDIA’s and Cloudflare’s partnership, it said on Cloudflare’s blog, will combine NVIDIA’s accelerated computing technology and Cloudflare’s edge network to create a very large platform for developers to deploy applications that use pre-trained or custom-machine learning models “in seconds.” Developers can use familiar tools to build and test machine learning models as it leverages the TensorFlow platform, which can be deployed globally onto Cloudflare’s edge network.

“Cloudflare Workers is one of the fastest and most widely adopted edge computing products with security built into its DNA,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder & CEO of Cloudflare. “Now, working with NVIDIA, we will be bringing developers powerful artificial intelligence tools to build the applications that will power the future.”

Machine learning models were initially deployed on expensive centralized servers or would use cloud services that presented limitations to specific regions around the world. 

Cloudflare and NVIDIA, the announcement said, “will put machine learning within milliseconds of the global online population enabling high performance, low latency AI to be deployed by anyone.”  Developers can deploy custom models without the risk of being on end-user devices where they might risk being stolen, because the machine learning models themselves will remain in Cloudflare’s data centers.

“As companies are increasingly data driven, the demand for AI technology grows,” said Kevin Deierling, senior vice president of networking at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA offers developers AI frameworks to support applications ranging from robotics and healthcare to smart cities and now cybersecurity with the recently launched Morpheus.”

Cloudflare uses machine learning for needs that include business intelligence, bot detection, anomaly identification and more. Cloudflare uses NVIDIA accelerated computing to speed training and inference tasks and present the same technology to any developer that uses Cloudflare Workers.

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