July 2015 Summaries

On July 31, 2015, Cloudflare announced its expansion to Bucharest, Romania, the sixth largest city in the European Union. The new data center will serve approximately 11 million Romanian internet users and those from surrounding areas. The company emphasizes not only expanding geographically but also interconnecting with local Internet service providers (ISPs) for optimal performance. In addition to its Bucharest PoP, Cloudflare is planning a data center in a castle, offering an exciting prize for anyone who can guess the location.

CloudFlare is participating in HostingCon 2015 in San Diego. This marks their fifth time at the conference, and they have accomplished a lot since their first appearance in 2011. They now have 36 data centers worldwide, serve over 2 million customers, and work with more than 5,000 partners. In the past year, they added new partners in Brazil and South Africa, and continued to innovate their technology offerings. At HostingCon, CloudFlare is offering complimentary limo transfers, breakfasts, Nerf Railguns, and t-shirts. They are also hosting a cybersecurity panel and a presentation on SEO boosts.

CloudFlare has over 5,000 hosting provider partners who benefit from the company's services, including bandwidth savings and protection against malicious requests. In the last month alone, CloudFlare saved its partners more than 25 Petabytes in aggregate bandwidth and stopped over 65 billion malicious requests that would have otherwise impacted their infrastructure. The new Partner Portal now provides dynamic analytics data to all of CloudFlare's partners, allowing them to see the savings and protection delivered by the company. This includes information on bandwidth saved, threats blocked, unique visitors, and more.

On July 14, 2015, a new data center was announced in Marseille, France by an unnamed company. This marks their second data center in France, twelfth in Europe and thirty-sixth globally. The choice of Marseille is strategic due to its size as the second largest city in France with 2 million internet users, its role as a point of redundancy for their Paris data center, and its location as a major gateway for networks throughout the Mediterranean region, including many African and Middle Eastern countries. This deployment has reduced latency by half for Algeria and other countries, making web sites and applications behind CloudFlare 2x faster to access. The company is also participating in FranceIX's Marseille Internet exchange, serving traffic to networks throughout the Mediterranean region.

On July 14, 2015, Grace Lin and her teammates Algin, Marty, Adam, and Jono arrived in Singapore to establish a presence for their company, CloudFlare, in Asia. They were impressed by the city's skyscrapers, malls, Singlish, chili crab, and sweet and sour chicken. Singapore was chosen due to its thriving tech community, business-friendly environment, and delicious food options. The team attended RSA Asia Pacific & Japan on July 24 and is actively hiring for various positions in their new Singapore office. They thanked the Singapore Government and The Working Capitol for their support in setting up the CloudFlare Singapore office.

Dr. Igor Kozin from The Institute of Cancer Research in London contacted Vlad Krasnov regarding the optimal way to compile CloudFlare's open source fork of zlib. Zlib is widely used for compressing DNA sequencing files, and it turns out that CloudFlare's zlib fork is the best open source solution for this file format. The benefits of open-source software extend far beyond one's imagination, making sophisticated algorithms and software accessible to individuals and organizations without the resources or financial means to develop them independently. CloudFlare's zlib fork includes several improvements over the default implementation, such as using uint64_t as the standard type, an improved hash function, searching for matches of at least 4 bytes instead of the suggested 3 bytes, utilizing SIMD instructions for window rolling, and optimizing the longest-match function. Independent benchmarks show that CloudFlare's implementation outperforms competitors in most settings, with the experimental branch offering even greater performance improvements on certain levels.

The text discusses how Cloudflare optimizes its performance by increasing cache hit rate, focusing on the newly available feature called Query String Sort. By default, Cloudflare caches static files and items are cached by their full URL, including query strings. However, due to the details of how query strings work, this can lead to some cache misses. The Query String Sort feature addresses this issue by sorting the query strings in a URL into a deterministic order before checking cache for the resource or requesting it from the origin. This is especially useful for API servers that rely heavily on multiple query string arguments. Enterprise customers can turn on the feature through the Caching app in the Cloudflare dashboard, and those interested in learning more about the Enterprise plan can get in touch with them.

On July 6, 2015, Cloudflare experienced an outage due to DNS resolution errors on support.cloudflare.com and other CNAME-based users' sites. The issue was traced back to another major DNS operator, Dyn, having problems with their own DNS configuration (https://www.dynstatus.com/incidents/4sbm48rdsdbq). Cloudflare worked together with Dyn to resolve the issue for everyone's benefit and implemented temporary workarounds on their side.

CloudFlare, a global network of servers, provides fast configuration changes for its customers' websites and DNS systems. The company constantly updates configurations, with an average rate of 40 changes per second. To ensure quick propagation times across data centers, CloudFlare monitors metrics and uses a custom alert system that triggers a blue rotating "police light" when propagation time exceeds a threshold. This helps the team to quickly identify issues and take necessary actions.

On July 1, 2015, UK2 Group joined as a CloudFlare partner, allowing their customers (including those from brands like UK2.net, Midphase, and Westhost) to access CloudFlare's web performance and security solutions with just one click. This partnership enables UK2 Group's clients to safeguard their websites against potential threats, ensure only clean traffic is served, and enhance site performance regardless of visitor location. Additionally, customers in need of advanced features can opt for the CloudFlare Plus plan, which is exclusively offered through reseller partners. UK2 Group, a global leader in hosting innovation with roots in London, is thrilled to partner with CloudFlare to provide top-notch web performance and security solutions to its vast clientele.

Filippo Valsorda from CloudFlare discusses the use of the -X linker option in Go programming to embed version numbers into binaries. The -X option sets the value of a string variable in the linked Go program and can be used with the -ldflags option. An example is provided where the who variable's value is changed from "World" to "CloudFlare". This method works even when using external linking, such as cgo. The author also mentions that CloudFlare is hiring in London, San Francisco, and Singapore for those interested in working with experienced Go developers.