Event: Cloudflare Connect 2026
Dates: Monday, October 19 to Wednesday, October 21, 2026
Venue: Moscone West, San Francisco, California
Host: Cloudflare
Entry: $595 conference pass, University training $495 extra
Cloudflare has published the day-by-day schedule for the second edition of its Connect conference, and registration is live. The company is planning for 5,000-plus developers, architects and security leaders at Moscone West, with around 40 ecosystem partners in the expo hall and more than 100 sessions across three days. Last year’s event was a first outing. This one is roughly double the size.
Check the dates before you book flights
Two sets of dates are circulating. Cloudflare’s Connect site, including the structured event data it publishes for agents and scrapers, says October 19 to 21: three days, closing with an evening party on the Wednesday. Cloudflare’s general events calendar and at least one regional landing page say October 19 to 22, and a number of third-party listing sites have copied that. Some of those listings also put the venue at an airport hotel, which is simply wrong.
The Connect site’s own agenda runs out on the 21st, so treat that as the real thing and keep Thursday flexible if you’re flying in. Attendance figures wander too. Cloudflare says 5,000-plus; several aggregators still show 2,500, which looks like a leftover from an earlier capacity estimate.
How the three days are laid out
- Monday, October 19: Cloudflare University runs three back-to-back training blocks from 9am. The Global Partner Summit takes the afternoon (1pm to 5pm), the Cold Start startup competition runs 4pm to 5pm, and a welcome reception closes the day.
- Tuesday, October 20: the opening general session at 8:30am, then breakouts from 11am to 3:40pm. The expo hall is open all day. Parallel programming includes System Sketch whiteboarding sessions, Built It hands-on labs, the Innovation Theater and a live podcast stage called The Frequency. Certification exams run in two windows. Orange Cloud happy hour at 5pm.
- Wednesday, October 21: an early University session at 7:30am, a general session at 9am, then breakouts until nearly 4pm. The NextNet speaker series wraps the programme at 4:30pm, and the closing party, billed as func(tion), starts at 7pm.
Tracks and the central argument
Cloudflare has organised the content into four named tracks: Application (Connect and Protect), Developer and AI (Build Smarter), Networking and Security (Beyond SASE), and Platform and Governance (Connectivity Cloud). Confusingly, the marketing copy on the same page mentions five tracks, so expect one more to appear in the session catalogue.
The thesis running underneath all of it is agentic traffic. Cloudflare’s pitch is that its network sits between models and the tools they call, and that this position is what makes it the control point for autonomous systems. Watch for the mainstage segment on getting paid when machines read your content, which is where the pay-per-crawl work is heading.
Speakers
Co-founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn headline. Outside speakers announced so far include AMD chief technology officer Mark Papermaster, organisational psychologist Adam Grant, Corey Quinn of Duckbill, and Alexandra Heidel, VP for internet and content at Telekom Deutschland.
Pricing
The conference pass is $595 and covers meals, event swag and the evening party. The Cloudflare University add-on is $495 on top, buying a full day of technical training with a certification exam later in the week. Groups of five to nine pay $495 a head; groups of ten or more get half off. Government, military, non-profit and education attendees take $100 off with a .gov, .mil, .org or .edu address.
Who it suits
Network and platform engineers already running workloads on Cloudflare will get the most out of it, particularly anyone weighing a SASE consolidation or trying to work out how to put agents into production without losing control of what they touch. Security leads come for the roadmap. Developers come for the labs. If you’re evaluating Cloudflare rather than using it, the expo hall and the Knowledge Bar are probably worth more of your time than the keynotes.
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