December 2014 Summaries

In 2014, CloudFlare made significant advancements including opening new data centers in Chile, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Colombia, Peru and South Africa; introducing Keyless SSL, WebSockets support, Universal SSL, CNAME flattening, SPDY/3.1 and more; addressing vulnerabilities like Heartbleed, Shellshock, POODLE and others; and becoming PCI certified. In 2015, the company plans to add even more data centers globally, introduce new product lines, support DNSSEC, and expand network capacity beyond what it achieved in its first five years combined.

Kyoto Tycoon, a distributed key-value store developed by FAL Labs, is used extensively at CloudFlare for replicating data from Postgres Database to its 30 global data centers. To ensure eventual consistency and guarantee ordering, it uses timestamp-based replication. However, the original design of Kyoto Tycoon had data replicated across the Internet in plaintext. In response to increased concerns about data security, CloudFlare has implemented a mutually-authenticated encryption tunnel for data replication using TLS mutual authentication and OpenSSL. The source code for these changes is now available on Github.

Vlad Krasnov recently joined CloudFlare and has been working on low level optimization of their servers. In a recent blog post, he discusses an improvement to PicoHTTPParser using the SSE4.2 instruction PCMPESTRI for finding delimiters in HTTP requests/responses. However, this method has limitations such as high latency and limited throughput. Krasnov proposes using AVX2 instructions instead, which operate on 32 bytes and have a higher throughput. He also suggests changing the logical flow of the program from latency bound to throughput oriented by creating bitmaps for all occurrences in a long string. This results in significant performance improvements compared to the previous version using PCMPESTRI.

On December 9, 2014, Cloudflare opened its 30th data center in Johannesburg, marking its first location in Africa. This new data center will improve the performance of websites and mobile apps using Cloudflare for users across Southern Africa, including South Africa, Botswana, Kenya, and Zambia. Latency has significantly decreased in these regions since the launch of the Johannesburg data center. The expansion into Africa is part of Cloudflare's mission to help bridge the digital divide by improving internet access and performance on the continent.

CloudFlare has expanded its Latin America data center network with a new facility in Lima, Peru, making it their 29th global data center and fourth in Latin America. The expansion aims to reduce latency for users accessing sites using CloudFlare, increase web performance in the region, and provide additional redundancy. This expansion also benefits key customers such as the Presidency of Peru and the ONPE during the upcoming Peruvian elections. Additionally, CloudFlare is working on over 20 new data center sites worldwide to further enhance security and performance for its users.