June 2016 Summaries

In April, Cloudflare added experimental support for HTTP/2 Server Push to all its websites. The company's implementation of Server Push made use of the HTTP Link header as detailed in W3C Preload Working Draft. However, there was a serious restriction in their initial version: it was not possible to specify more than one asset per Link header for Server Push and many CMS and web development platforms would not allow multiple Link headers. This problem has now been addressed, allowing users to request that multiple assets be pushed in a single Link header. Additionally, Cloudflare added a header called Cf-H2-Pushed which contains the assets that were pushed. The company is interested in hearing about experiences with pushing different types of resources and working out the optimal number of items to push per page.

This article discusses timeouts when writing an HTTP server or client in Go. It explains the concept of Deadlines and how they can be used to implement timeouts on both the server and client side. The author also covers server timeouts, including ReadTimeout and WriteTimeout, as well as client-side timeouts such as Timeout field of http.Client, net.Dialer.Timeout, http.Transport.TLSHandshakeTimeout, and others. Additionally, it touches on how to cancel a request using Request.Cancel or Context in Go 1.7. The article emphasizes the importance of setting timeouts to prevent resource leaks and getting stuck during network operations.

Cloudflare has implemented a unique approach to handling negative answers in DNSSEC by using "black lies" and the "DNS shotgun." This method reduces compute cost and helps keep packet size small, allowing them to provide DNSSEC for free for any domain. The technique involves returning false previous and next names in NXDOMAIN responses and setting all types in NODATA responses, which ensures compliance with existing standards while minimizing the need for database lookups or precomputation of dynamic answers.

On June 17 and June 20, Cloudflare experienced internet outages due to significant packet loss on one of their major transit provider backbone networks, Telia Carrier. The company's systems detected the problem instantly and recorded it. They identified weaknesses in communication during these incidents and are taking steps to improve their response time and accuracy. Cloudflare is working towards building a resilient network through greater interconnection, automated mitigation, and increased failover capacity. They plan to extend their proactive packet loss detection mechanism to all their POPs within the next two weeks.

On June 21st at 6PM PST, Paul Vixie will be the speaker for the third and final talk in a series on DNS hosted by CloudFlare and Gandi. The event will take place at the Gandi office in San Francisco with a live stream available. Paul is known for writing most of BIND Version 8 and hiring the team who wrote BIND Version 9, which are widely used DNS software. Topics covered during the talk include alternative DNS root servers, email security and spam, as well as what needs to be done about DNS and security. Attendees can RSVP for the event.

On June 16, 2016, Xiaolin Gong announced that CloudFlare expanded its network to Moscow, Russia, increasing the data center and city count to 83. Moscow is home to several internet exchanges, including MSK-IX, Data IX, and Global IX (with Eurasia Peering coming soon). This addition raises the number of exchanges CloudFlare participates in to over 120, making it one of the top interconnected networks globally. By localizing delivery, they help reduce latency for Russian users by more than 20ms. Moscow is also the birthplace of Tetris, a game that optimizes tile arrangement, which aligns with CloudFlare's mission to continually build and optimize its global network for better internet user experiences worldwide.

Nitin Rao announced on June 15, 2016 that Denver is now home to CloudFlare's twelfth data center in the United States and their 82nd globally. This expansion aims to improve regional web performance. Denver has a thriving technology and entrepreneurship community, with companies such as Chipotle, HomeAdvisor, and LogRhythm emerging from it. The new data center is expected to double the performance for end users visiting websites using various internet service providers (ISPs). CloudFlare participates in two major internet exchanges: Any2 Denver and IX-Denver. This expansion follows a week of growth for the company, with more North American cities planned for future development.

This tutorial demonstrates how to use GitHub Pages with CloudFlare to host a static website using a custom domain name. By utilizing CloudFlare's CDN service and Universal SSL option, users can improve site performance and security while benefiting from HTTP/2 support. The guide also explains the advantages of static sites over dynamic ones, including better control for collaborative editing and improved performance. It covers setting up Jekyll as a static site generator, preparing the GitHub repository, configuring DNS settings, enabling SSL, and optimizing cache settings. While there are some limitations to this approach, such as not being able to set custom headers or use it for sensitive transactions, overall it provides an efficient and secure hosting solution for static sites.

On June 13, 2016, Nitin Rao announced that CloudFlare's newest data center is located in Brussels, marking their 23rd data center in Europe and the 81st globally. This addition provides extra redundancy to nearby facilities in Amsterdam and Paris, improving internet speed for millions of websites using CloudFlare. The strategic location of the data center in Brussels, home to numerous European institutions and over 40,000 EU employees, will benefit from faster internet access as nearly 90% of Belgium's citizens are online. Two more data centers are set to be announced later that week in two of the world's most populous countries.

The layered structure of the internet, with HTTP on top of TCP, TCP on top of IP, and IP on top of Ethernet, has been crucial for its development. However, this model can cause delays in TLS-encrypted data transmission due to fixed record sizes. To address this issue, Cloudflare modified NGINX to support dynamic TLS record sizes, improving the efficiency of web page delivery over HTTPS connections. The company open-sourced their patch and encourages feedback and improvements from users.

CloudFlare has launched its newest data center in Perth, Australia, expanding its global network to 80 unique cities across 41 countries. This is the fourth data center in the Oceania region and will provide faster internet access for visitors to millions of websites across Western Australia. The company now has data centers in cities beginning with most letters of the alphabet, except for E, I, K, R, U, Y, and Z.

In June 2016, Cloudflare's UI team decided to change their JavaScript framework from Backbone & Marionette to React & Redux. They built a new UI framework called cf-ui, which includes over 50 packages with various components and utilities. The decision to open source this framework was made in the spirit of the open web, allowing other developers to learn from their technical decisions while building a large React application. Key points: 1. Cloudflare's UI team changed their JavaScript framework from Backbone & Marionette to React & Redux. 2. They built a new UI framework called cf-ui and open sourced it. 3. The framework includes over 50 packages with various components, utilities, test helpers, etc. 4. Lerna was used for managing multiple packages within the same repository, allowing independent versioning and testing across all packages. 5. Builder Components were introduced to reduce repetition in component usage. 6. Integrated Test Utilities were developed to prevent common mistakes while writing tests. 7. Some external APIs were wrapped to expose minimal API surface areas for confident changes or swapping out underlying modules. 8. Accessibility improvements were made during the rewriting of components, including keyboard navigation enhancements and open-sourcing related libraries.

Apple announced that as of June 1, all apps submitted to the Apple Store must support IPv6-only networking. Most existing apps will not require changes due to their compatibility with Apple's NSURLSession and CFNetwork APIs. The transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is happening because IPv4 has a technical limitation of only allowing about 4 billion unique addresses, which is insufficient for the growing number of devices that need internet access. IPv6 uses a 128-bit address, allowing for approximately 340 trillion trillion trillion unique addresses. The adoption rate of IPv6 has increased significantly in recent years, with last year being a record year with a 4% increase. Developers should replace hardcoded IP addresses with domain names and avoid network preflighting to ensure code compatibility with IPv6 DNS64/NAT64 networks. CloudFlare offers various features for developers during their migration to IPv6, including Pseudo IPv4 which allows legacy IPv4 applications to take advantage of IPv6.