How We Built Cloudflare's Data Platform and an AI Agent On Top Of It
Cloudflare, Thursday, May 28th, 2026
Cloudflare built Town Lake, a unified data platform, and Skipper, an AI agent, to simplify data access across disparate systems.
Cloudflare processes over a billion events per second, but its data was scattered across dozens of databases and systems, making it difficult for analysts to access and understand.
To solve this problem, the company built Town Lake, a unified SQL interface using Apache Trino and R2 Data Catalog, and Skipper, an AI agent that allows employees to query data in plain English.
The platform is built on Cloudflare's own infrastructure (R2, Workers, Workflows) and includes security features like automatic PII detection, access controls via Lifeguard, and metadata management through DataHub.
The architecture uses a data lakehouse pattern with multiple components including Skimmer for PII detection, Transformer for ELT operations, and Ingestion for connecting operational systems to the data lake.