October 2011 Summaries

In October 2011, The Pumpkin Lady, a popular website dedicated to pumpkin carving patterns, sought assistance from CloudFlare due to an anticipated increase in traffic during their busiest week of the year. The Pumpkin Lady's online business attracts its largest audience from Europe and experiences a significant rise in traffic each October. After implementing CloudFlare, they reported saving 1.54 Terabytes of bandwidth and over 136 million requests within a month. This resource savings allowed them to remain on their shared hosting environment without the need for server moves or increased expenses during peak season. The Pumpkin Lady praised CloudFlare as one of their best investments, providing security and capacity expansion that enabled them to focus on delivering an exceptional customer experience.

The text discusses two types of routing schemes used on the internet: Unicast and Anycast. Under Unicast, every node has a unique IP address, while in Anycast multiple machines can share the same IP address. When a request is sent to an Anycasted IP address, routers direct it to the closest machine. The author explains that CloudFlare uses Anycast for its globally distributed DNS infrastructure, which provides benefits such as speed, resiliency, and attack mitigation.

On October 19, 2011, Matthew Prince shared that they have been adding more details on how CloudFlare works to their website. They have created new pages such as "CloudFlare CDN," "Optimizer," "Analytics," and "Security." One of the favorite new pages is the network map, which displays data center locations worldwide and provides an approximately real-time view of traffic volume entering their network. Additionally, they hinted at a new location being added to the network map soon.

On October 19, 2011, Matthew Prince announced significant improvements within CloudFlare that would gradually be implemented over the coming weeks. One of these enhancements was end-to-end Keep Alives, which aimed to reduce latency and improve efficiency by maintaining a single connection between CloudFlare's network and an origin server for multiple resource requests. This feature had been tested in Singapore and then rolled out across their entire network. The testing showed that this improvement increased overall snappiness of the service by approximately 10%.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a critical component of the internet that translates human-readable domain names into machine-readable IP addresses. Recursive DNS servers are used by web surfers to resolve domains, while authoritative DNS servers store and provide information about specific domains. Many ISPs underinvest in their DNS infrastructure, leading to potential slowdowns or failures. Services like OpenDNS and CloudFlare offer improved recursive and authoritative DNS services, respectively, with features such as caching, geographic distribution, and protection against malware or cyberattacks.

On October 16, 2011, CloudFlare was named the Most Innovative Network & Internet Technology Company of 2011 by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). The WSJ received over 600 entries from companies in 31 countries. CloudFlare is a San Francisco-based company that provides services to secure and enhance website performance. It operates between a website's hosting service and a visitor's computer, routing traffic through its global network of data centers. Its security features detect threats such as excessive spam, malicious bots, and denial-of-service attacks. Despite the added layer of protection, CloudFlare's developers optimized their systems to ensure that most pages load up to 40% faster. The company received praise from hacker group LulzSec after successfully protecting a website against numerous attacks.

In 2011, CloudFlare celebrated reaching over 100,000 websites using their services with a team retreat to Moaning Caverns in California. The team of 20 embarked on a rappelling and caving expedition, navigating through chambers and tight passages such as the Roach Motel, Meat Grinder, Guillotine, and Birth Canal. Despite some claustrophobic moments, the experience brought the team closer together and increased their confidence in overcoming challenges. The company is actively seeking smart, talented, and adventurous individuals to join their growing team and help improve the internet's speed, safety, and overall quality.

On October 5, 2011, John Roberts discussed the security of web traffic through CloudFlare and introduced a new partner, Dome9. While CloudFlare protects websites from unwanted visitors and attacks, it does not cover non-web traffic such as SSH, FTP, and other administrative ports. Dome9 provides server security management as a service, allowing users to close all administrative ports easily and completely by default. Their Secure Access Lease™ enables on-demand opening of servers for specific people within a defined time frame with an audit trail. The service is available for $20/month per server and requires installation of the Dome9 Agent on Windows or Linux servers. However, it is not compatible with shared hosting environments at this time.

The text discusses the conventional wisdom in web performance circles that suggests combining multiple JavaScript and CSS files to reduce HTTP requests. However, it highlights several problems with this approach, such as clobbering namespace, becoming unwieldy, invalidating cache, losing benefits of cross-site CDNs, and difficulty in combining third-party scripts. The author introduces CloudFlare's Rocket Loader, which automatically detects tags that require a new HTTP request and streams the individual files through one request, providing benefits of HTTP request reduction without downsides of file combination. It also mentions how users can manually or automatically enable Rocket Loader on their websites.