November 2015 Summaries

On November 20th, 2015, Cloudflare announced its fifth point of presence (PoP) in Zürich, Switzerland, making it the company's 69th global PoP. The expansion will enable faster access to sites and apps using Cloudflare for Switzerland's seven million internet users. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, in 1989. Today, almost two in five people worldwide use the web. Cloudflare is committed to providing universal support for IPv6 and SPDY, as well as DNSSEC and HTTP/2 support. The company also offers free SSL certificates to all its customers, ensuring a secure browsing experience.

India is home to 400 million internet users, second only to China, and will add more new users this year than any other country in the world. CloudFlare, a company that protects and accelerates websites, mobile apps and APIs, has expanded its network by adding three new points of presence (PoPs) in Mumbai, Chennai and New Delhi. These new sites represent the 66th, 67th and 68th data centers respectively across CloudFlare's global network. The expansion will enable faster internet access for millions of Indian users by delivering content closer to them.

A customer reported slow HTTP responses from CloudFlare CDN servers. The issue was not easily reproducible and went unnoticed by usual monitoring systems. After investigating the problem, it was discovered that there were spikes in latency between the router and the server within their datacenter. System Tap, a debugging tool for Linux, helped identify the function causing the latency spike as tcp_collapse. The issue was resolved by adjusting the rmem sysctl to limit the receive buffer size on TCP sockets, which in turn reduced the time required for garbage collection and improved performance.

On November 17, 2015, Cloudflare introduced its latest point of presence (PoP) in Copenhagen, Denmark, extending the network to 65 PoPs across 34 countries. The new data center serves Danish traffic previously handled by Stockholm and Amsterdam. This expansion enhances the delivery of users' internet applications and content with a median latency of under 40ms throughout Europe. Additionally, Cloudflare plans to launch one data center per week in 2015, aiming for 70 PoPs by the end of the week.

On November 10, 2015, Cloudflare announced that they would be enabling DNSSEC for all their users with a single click. This follows their launch of free SSL one year prior, which led to a significant increase in the size of the encrypted web. DNSSEC is designed to ensure that website traffic is safely directed to the correct servers and protect against on-path attacks. The move aims to double the size of the DNSSEC-enabled web this year, bringing the technology to millions of websites for free. Cloudflare also revealed their plans to create an Internet standard protocol for direct communication between DNS providers and registries, which would allow automatic activation of DNSSEC on tens of thousands of websites with certain TLDs.

On November 6, 2015, Joshua Motta announced that the latest addition to the CloudFlare network is Phoenix, marking their 11th point of presence in North America. This expansion aims to regionalize traffic across the continent, resulting in faster page loads and transaction speeds for users. The article highlights the importance of local interconnection points in major cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area, Dallas, Chicago, Miami, Ashburn (Virginia), and New York. It also discusses how CloudFlare is working to bring content closer to audiences in other metro areas by expanding their network presence.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a global financial information security standard that ensures companies processing credit card transactions adhere to high technical standards. Companies at level one PCI compliance are subject to the most stringent checks. CloudFlare, a company providing security for important businesses worldwide, chose to be audited as a level one service provider. The PCI council has updated its guidelines from version 2.0 to 3.1, addressing known attacks and enhancing financial security controls in anticipation of future threats. Changes include increased accessibility and awareness, integration into everyday operations, more rigorous evidence requirements, shared responsibility, and the "sunset date" for old encryption standards like SSL 3.0, TLS 1.0, and TLS 1.1. CloudFlare has achieved full compliance as a level one service provider while improving its security and learning about customer compliance needs.