Another Cloudflare outage

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What’s up, everyone? Welcome to Next in Dev. In this issue, I dig into new Figma features, AI news, and some digital marketing news.

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The Payload team didn't release a new version as of the time of this issue, so I don't have much to write about here this week.

But if you missed my announcement last week, I'm creating a Payload CMS course. I'll create a course that walks you from installation all the way to deployment. The course will still feature my unique, comprehensive teaching style. If you want to get in on the pre-launch, visit this website to sign up.

I'm starting with a course on all the basics. But, I already have an outline for intermediate and advanced Payload CMS topics.

One of the most common questions I see about Payload CMS is: “How do I replace the Payload CMS icons and logos?” So, I made a video addressing that question. Hope this helps!

Figma added connectors for tools like Notion, Jira, GitHub, and Linear. Now teams can pull documentation into Make and push updates back out. It also launched the public beta of Figma Sites CMS. This enables designers to build blogs, portfolios, and event pages with dynamic content.

These connectors reduce context-switching and let prototypes stay aligned with real product specs. The Sites CMS beta brings more dynamic, CMS-driven workflows into Figma. It tightens the handoff between design and front-end implementation.

This was already in development before Figma acquired Payload CMS. It's way too basic to be something the Payload team would create.

Cloudflare just had its most serious outage since 2019. A malformed Bot Management config file that propagated globally crashed core proxy services. This included CDN, Workers KV, Access, and Turnstile for hours.

Cloudflare also announced it is acquiring Replicate. Replicate brings 50,000+ AI models and custom model support into Workers AI.

Together, these events show both the scale and stakes of Cloudflare’s expanding role. A single internal misconfiguration can cripple large parts of the Internet. It's not just Cloudflare. The Replicate acquisition tells us Cloudflare wants to be the default platform for building and running AI-powered applications globally. This move puts them in direct competition with Vercel. At the end of the day, developers enjoy a richer AI ecosystem and competition in the AI space. But, devs also inherit deeper operational dependence on Cloudflare’s reliability.

No service will be 100% reliable, that's just the nature of things. But, diversification is now more important as we see more and more services black out.

While some of my clients went down with this outage, I was at least able to tell them that Twitter was down, too. I think that helped.

OpenAI is deepening enterprise partnerships with Intuit and Target. Intuit will bring its financial apps into ChatGPT. It will also expand its use of OpenAI’s frontier models under a $100M+ agreement. Target is launching a ChatGPT-integrated shopping app. It's also scaling OpenAI-powered tools across retail operations.

These deals push ChatGPT toward becoming a central way to manage money and shopping. It blends consumer apps with conversational AI. For developers and businesses, it shows accelerating adoption of AI-native experiences inside products. This indicates rising expectations for personalized, real-time, high-stakes workflows powered by frontier models.

This means that developers need to get better with AI in any kind of e-commerce work they're doing. Expectations for AI continue to increase as more name brands add AI to their apps and sites. I imagine we'll see some special integrations with OpenAI's browser, Atlas.

Anthropic, Microsoft, and NVIDIA announced partnerships. . Anthropic will scale Claude on Azure with a $30B commitment. They'll also collaborate with NVIDIA on model and hardware co-design. Last, Anthropic will expand Claude’s across Microsoft Foundry, Copilot products, and Azure. NVIDIA and Microsoft are investing up to $10B and $5B in Anthropic. Claude models are now in public preview on Foundry with full enterprise integration.

Claude becomes the only frontier model available across all major clouds. For developers and businesses, this means easier access and stronger performance. But also we see a consolidation of power among a few cloud and GPU giants shaping the AI stack.

It's a race to profitability, and Anthropic is winning.

Railway shipped major reliability and UX upgrades. This includes richer webhook alerts, safer service settings, and some quality-of-life fixes. They also opened Office Hours for teams spending $5k+/month on infrastructure. Office hours offer architecture reviews, migration help, and cost-reduction guidance.

These updates reduce noise and prevent common deployment misconfigurations. They also make day-to-day operations more predictable. Office hours makes adoption less risky and speeds up optimization for larger teams.

As someone who got started in digital marketing, I need to talk about Adobe's acquisition of Semrush. This caught me by surprise. I mean, Semrush has been increasing their prices year over year since I can remember. It's expensive even for some companies. Adobe purchasing it does not bode well for its pricing structure. Adobe's not known for reducing pricing or opening products up, so it's hard to see the positives here.

That said, this is an interesting move. Adobe is buying Semrush for $1.9B to bring SEO and marketing insights into its marketing stack. The move helps Adobe offer end-to-end tools that span creation and analytics.

Marketers get a more unified workflow that connects SEO and performance data. Web developers who use Adobe's Experience Manager can expect tight integration of SEO insights. This could shift optimization to be earlier in the production process.

What did I miss? There’s so much happening in modern web dev that I’m sure I have missed something. Please share your thoughts in the comments or reply to this email. I want to address your suggestions and may include them in future newsletters.

Thanks for reading. See you next time.

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