Cloudflare is an internet infrastructure platform that organisations use for DNS, a content delivery network (CDN), web application firewall, load balancing, rate limiting and bot mitigation. It also offers a developer platform with serverless compute (Workers), storage (including R2, D1 and KV) and AI services. The services are delivered as SaaS through Cloudflare's global network, so your traffic is routed through that network.
Cloudflare, Inc. is a publicly listed US company headquartered in San Francisco, which places it under US jurisdiction, including the CLOUD Act. According to its privacy policy, Cloudflare primarily stores information in the United States and the European Economic Area, and it has self-certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework; for other transfers it relies on standard contractual clauses. With the Data Localization Suite (Regional Services and Customer Metadata Boundary), you can control where traffic is processed and where logs stay. The platform is proprietary and not open source. For a European organisation, this means a core part of its internet infrastructure sits with a non-European provider.