Cloudflare gives back to its community! Ambassadors and Community Engineers launch, with another $1M for open source

Hi everyone, it's Shii! Today's news from Cloudflare isn't a new product feature, it's something warmer: a program to support the community. It's a shoutout to open-source maintainers and everyone running meetups and study groups, so let me walk you through it.

Cloudflare Blog blog.cloudflare.com

What was announced?

Cloudflare Blog announced that it's refreshing its community support programs and launching two new ones. Alongside that, it revealed it's committing another $1M in funding for open source.

• Cloudflare Ambassadors: a program supporting people who organize meetups, hackathons, and workshops in their local communities, lead student groups, or write tutorials
• Cloudflare Community Engineers: a program supporting maintainers and contributors of open-source (OSS) projects

Both programs come from a desire to properly give back to the people who use Cloudflare's technology to energize communities or build tools that support the ecosystem.

The story so far

Cloudflare has run a Discord server since 2020, and it has grown into a large community with nearly 100,000 members. There has also been project-level support before this: for example, Cloudflare set up a $1M fund to support the Vite community alongside its acquisition of VoidZero, and it sponsored Tanner Linsley, the creator of TanStack.

This announcement builds on those existing efforts and organizes them into two named programs, Cloudflare Ambassadors and Cloudflare Community Engineers, with clear application windows, benefits, and terms.

What changes

The biggest change is that support that used to depend on individual effort or Cloudflare's case-by-case judgment is now a formal program anyone can apply to.

• People organizing events or teaching in their local communities can formally apply as an Ambassador for credits, marketing assets, and technical resources
• OSS maintainers now have a shot at grants from the newly created $1M Community Engineer fund
• Either way, participants get an officially recognized role within Cloudflare's Discord community

For people who've been supporting the community on a volunteer basis, this looks like it will make it easier to keep going.

Dive Deep

Let's look a bit closer at how each program is structured.

Cloudflare Ambassadors works like this.

• Activities: organizing meetups, hackathons, workshops, and talks; leading student groups; creating learning spaces; writing tutorials; providing peer support in the community
• Support: you can apply for credits, marketing assets, technical resources, and more
• Term: up to two years
• Perk: a visible, official role in Discord
• Deadline: applications close September 6, with selections announced by October 5

Cloudflare Community Engineers is aimed at OSS maintainers and contributors.

• Named examples of projects that could be a focus include Astro, Agents SDK, EmDash, Hono, and Vinext
• It's funded by the newly added $1M fund, granted out over two years
• Unlike Ambassadors, there's no maximum term, because, as Cloudflare puts it, open-source work doesn't neatly fit into annual cycles
• Applications for this program will open at a later date, so it isn't open yet

Even before this new fund existed, Tanner Linsley, the creator of TanStack, had already received sponsorship from Cloudflare. He said: "Cloudflare's sponsorship has given us room to keep investing in foundational open-source work...More than anything, that support buys stability." It sounds like Cloudflare wants to expand this kind of individual support under the new Community Engineers program.

The Discord community itself is also getting some attention. A new committee made up of Ambassadors and Cloudflare staff will focus less on enforcement-style moderation and more on connecting members with domain experts and internal teams, creating content and opportunities. Cloudflare is also developing automated protections against spam and malicious links, and plans to open-source that tooling down the line.

Wrap-up

• Cloudflare refreshed its community support programs, announcing two new ones: Cloudflare Ambassadors and Cloudflare Community Engineers
• Ambassadors is for people organizing events and education activities, offering credits and technical resources. Term is up to two years, applications close September 6
• Community Engineers is for OSS maintainers, funded by the new $1M fund. There's no maximum term, and applications open at a later date
• Cloudflare is also strengthening how its Discord community is run, including plans to open-source its anti-spam tooling

If you're active in a community or maintaining an open-source project, this is one announcement worth keeping an eye on!