December 2013 Summaries

In 2013, CloudFlare experienced significant growth with a 400% increase in page views, revenue, and traffic across its network. The company also added new partners and customers while doubling its team size and opening a second office in London. Despite these successes, the year was not without challenges, including record-level denial of service attacks and an aging code base. In response, CloudFlare undertook major refactoring efforts to improve its infrastructure and capabilities. Looking ahead to 2014, the company plans to expand its data centers in regions with limited coverage, enhance developer control over its platform, and implement state-of-the-art encryption technologies for customer data protection.

Domain sharding, a technique where webpage resources are split across different domains or subdomains, is generally considered beneficial as it allows more connections and faster downloads. However, with the adoption of Google's SPDY protocol, domain sharding can actually hinder performance and is not recommended. This is because SPDY enables multiple resources to be fetched in parallel over a single connection, making domain sharding unnecessary. Instead, using a certificate that covers all domains involved can result in better performance for both older browsers and those supporting SPDY. CloudFlare offers simple SSL options and push-button SPDY activation, facilitating this approach.

John Graham-Cumming of CloudFlare has provided an update on their open source projects since October 2013, including Red October, Lua Resty Shcache, Lua Resty Core, Go Libs, BM, Lua Raven, Lua Resty Logger Socket, conf, Lua Resty Kyoto Tycoon, Go LZ4, Aho Corasick, kt-fdw, and Lua Resty Cookie. They have also contributed to projects like OpenSSL, SystemTap, and PhantomJS. CloudFlare's GitHub page has been reorganized by language/software for easier accessibility. An innovative security project is set to be released in the New Year.

Union Square Ventures (USV) has invested in CloudFlare, an Internet security company that provides protection against DDoS attacks and malware for websites. USV's interest in CloudFlare stems from its belief in the power of the internet to enable innovation and transform markets. The investment comes as more companies struggle with scaling their services securely. Michelle Zatlyn, one of CloudFlare's co-founders, played a significant role in convincing USV of the importance of the company's services. CloudFlare aims to democratize access to essential network services for both large and small innovators worldwide.

On December 12, a webcast will be held by Kristin Tarr to discuss methods for making websites faster using CloudFlare services. The topics covered include basic setup for speed, caching strategies, image optimization techniques such as Polish and Mirage, JavaScript optimization with Rocket Loader, and more. This session is designed for website owners who want to learn the basics of performance on CloudFlare without prior knowledge of their service. Registration is available at the provided link.