May 2019 Summaries

On June 6, 2019, Cloudflare Bangalore Meetup will take place at the Oberoi from 3:30 PM to 8:00 PM. The event will cover topics such as latest security trends, serverless solutions, and strategies for protecting businesses in a complex internet environment. Industry leaders from big brands and startups will share their insights. Agenda includes discussions on DDoS landscapes, Workers overview, panel discussion on cybersecurity best practices, keynotes on edge computing and evolving cyber attacks, and a happy hour. Registration is required to attend the event.

Jim "Elwood" O'Gorman, a maintainer of Kali Linux, discusses the challenges faced by the popular open source penetration testing platform in distributing its software to users globally. The solution they found was using Cloudflare's CDN network, which significantly reduced load on their backend and improved download speeds for users. Despite initial issues with syncing an apt repository to a CDN and limitations on caching large files, these were resolved through tweaks in configuration and updates from Cloudflare respectively. The implementation resulted in a bandwidth savings of around 350TB per month for the open source project.

Cloudflare is partnering with PiscArt to host a meetup on June 4th, 2019, at PicsArt's office in Yerevan. The event will feature presentations from Areg Harutyunyan of Cloudflare and Gerasim Hovhannisyan of PicsArt, discussing topics such as Argo Tunnel, Cloudflare Access, content delivery scaling, and the future of serverless security. Attendees can expect networking opportunities, food, and drinks.

On May 11th, 2019, Microsoft's SharePoint server (versions 2010 through 2019) was found to have a critical web vulnerability, CVE-2019-0604. This Remote Code Execution vulnerability allowed advanced persistent threats (APTs) to exploit it and take control of servers. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security and Saudi Arabia's National Center issued alerts about this threat. A firewall rule was deployed by Cloudflare on the same day, allowing analysis of traffic before making a decision on default action. On May 13th, an immediate rule release was made to block malicious traffic for all customers. The vulnerability was found to be critical due to its potential impact on major software ecosystems and lack of stable patch from Microsoft at the time.

On May 24, 2019 at 5:46 PM, Connor Peshek and Andrew Fitch introduced the fifth edition of The Serverlist. This publication provides updates on serverless technology, developer tutorials, discussions with fellow developers, and information about upcoming meetups and conferences. To receive The Serverlist directly in your email, sign up using the provided link while ensuring that your privacy is maintained.

The Cloudflare PROTOCOLS team has made significant changes to the internal structure of NGINX while implementing Enhanced HTTP/2 Prioritization product. These changes were aimed at improving performance and addressing shortcomings in the original NGINX, particularly concerning data flow within the system. Changes included HTTP/2 frame write queue reclamation, HTTP/2 frame write event re-ordering, upstream buffer partial re-use, and TLS layer buffering adjustments. The team plans to continue testing and refining these changes for future releases and apply their newfound skills to other technologies such as QUIC and HTTP/3.

Cloudflare has announced that its Workers KV, a highly distributed key-value store, is now generally available and ready for production use. Workers KV allows users to store billions of key-value pairs with ultra-low latency anywhere in the world. It enables developers to build entire applications with the performance of a CDN static cache. The platform guarantees availability and partition tolerance, making it suitable for applications that require global availability with ultra-fast reads. Workers KV is now open to all customers and can be accessed from their Cloudflare dashboard under the Workers tab.

In this tutorial, we learn how to build a todo list application using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript while storing data in Cloudflare's Workers KV. The project is divided into several steps, including building the todos data structure, writing the todos into Workers KV, retrieving the todos from Workers KV, returning an HTML page to the client with the todos (if they exist), allowing creation of new todos in the UI, and handling todo updates. The tutorial also covers understanding Cloudflare Workers, setting up a canvas for the project, writing data to KV, rendering data from KV, adding todos from the UI, and updating todos from the UI. The final version of the code is provided at the end of the tutorial.

In this text, Andrew Galloni discusses Cloudflare's recent updates and improvements to their global network aimed at speeding up the internet. These updates include launching a HTTP/2 prioritisation model, an image resizing service, optimized live video delivery, streaming progressive images, and prototyping a new over-the-wire format for JavaScript. Additionally, they have introduced "TCP Turbo" to further accelerate websites. The text also highlights the importance of fast web experiences in terms of customer experience, engagement and revenue, reputation, and catering to diverse mobile users. Furthermore, it introduces the redesigned Speed Page on the Cloudflare dashboard that provides a clearer understanding of website performance and how features can be used to make websites faster. The new Speed Page includes visual comparison of website loading with caching enabled, expected improvement if any performance feature is enabled, and reports describing how fast a website is on desktop and mobile.

On May 10, 2019, Cloudflare held a Beijing Customer Appreciation Cocktail at Yintai Centre Xiu Rooftop Garden Bar. The event was attended by partners and customers who have supported the company's growth over the past decade. During the same week, Cloudflare also opened its grand office in Beijing, with a team that has doubled in size since last year. The company continues to invest in China and aims to grow its customer base while learning from their experiences in this market.

The European Parliament elections, taking place from 23-26 May 2019, are one of the largest democratic exercises globally. With approximately 400 million people eligible to vote across the EU's 28 member states, these elections play a significant role in shaping the future of the continent. The focus on election security has been high, with various EU institutions and agencies working together to drive awareness among EU Member States and help political parties prepare for potential cybersecurity threats. Cloudflare, which provides protection against DDoS attacks and other cyber threats, has protected numerous major U.S Presidential campaign websites from cyberattacks and is now protecting a number of political group websites across the EU. The European Commission has been monitoring industry progress under the Code of Practice on Disinformation to ensure a robust response to any threats to the democratic process.

Cloudflare is partnering with Yandex to host a meetup on May 30, 2019, at Yandex's Moscow headquarters. The event will focus on the latest developments in the Internet industry and feature talks by experts from both companies. Topics covered will include performance and scalability at Cloudflare, security at Yandex Cloud, edge computing, and more. Attendees can expect networking opportunities, food, drinks, and a Q&A session following the presentations.

At Cloudflare's Edge servers, BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) plays a crucial role in handling network traffic and ensuring optimal performance. The company uses BPF for various tasks such as DoS mitigation, load balancing, socket dispatch, and more. BPF is also used to improve applications by enabling TCP splicing with SOCKMAP and providing detailed metrics through the "ebpf_exporter" tool. Cloudflare continues to explore new ways of utilizing eBPF in their network infrastructure, as it offers a safer and more efficient alternative to traditional kernel modules.

The performance of applications on the web platform is increasingly bottlenecked by startup (load) times due to large amounts of JavaScript code required for rich web experiences. Cold start times are particularly important as popular websites regularly release new code, and browsers move to separate caches for different domains. Parsing and compilation of JavaScript could become the dominant factor in cold starts as networks become faster. BinaryAST is a proposed over-the-wire format for JavaScript that aims to speed up parsing while keeping the semantics of the original JavaScript intact. It does so by using an efficient binary representation for code and data structures, as well as by storing and providing extra information to guide the parser ahead of time. BinaryAST can dramatically improve initial loading times by allowing only critical code necessary for start-up to be parsed, completely skipping over unused bits.

Concurrent Streaming Acceleration is a new technique introduced by Cloudflare to reduce end-to-end latency of live video on the web. The technique involves splitting up video segments into smaller chunks, enabling client players to start playing the chunks while they're still being created or downloaded. This approach can significantly decrease live streaming latency from 20-30 seconds to around 5-10 seconds. CDNs play a crucial role in delivering low-latency live video at scale, and Cloudflare's solution removes the cache lock, allowing multiple clients to safely read from a single file while it's still being written. This feature has been rolled out and can potentially shave precious seconds off end-to-end latency for live video delivery.

The amount of image data on median mobile webpages has doubled in the past three years, leading to slower websites and users hitting data transfer caps. To address this issue, Cloudflare has launched a new product called Image Resizing that allows customers to perform various actions on images such as resize, crop, compress, and convert to WebP format. This enables developers to store a single high-quality image on their server and create specialized variants for each specific use case, automatically benefiting from Cloudflare's global caching. The product is available at no additional cost for Business and Enterprise Customers with generous usage limits.

Cloudflare has introduced an update to HTTP/2 Prioritization, giving its servers control of prioritization decisions that can significantly speed up website loading times. The new feature allows customers on paid plans to enable "Enhanced HTTP/2 Prioritization" in the Speed tab of the Cloudflare dashboard, which overrides browser defaults with an improved scheduling scheme. This change puts control into the hands of site owners directly and can result in a significantly faster visitor experience.

Cloudflare has combined progressive image rendering and HTTP/2 multiplexing technologies to create a new method that significantly improves the perceived speed of loading for progressive images, making them appear in half the time. This is achieved by sending the most important fragments of image data sooner. The end result is that images can look almost fully loaded in half the time, without adding any cost to file size or requiring additional requests. This technique takes advantage of existing web standards and is compatible with all browsers.

Cloudflare has introduced its Global Private Backbone, a private fiber connection network that links Cloudflare locations worldwide. The backbone benefits all Cloudflare customers and works in tandem with Argo, the company's intelligent routing service. Argo uses real-time global network information to route around internet issues such as brownouts, cable cuts, and packet loss, making the internet faster, more reliable, and secure on every hop worldwide. The Global Private Backbone adds further security, reliability, and speed to key connections between Cloudflare locations.

Cloudflare is launching its first-ever Speed Week to showcase products aimed at making the internet faster for everyone. The company's software stack focuses on both security and speed, with new innovations announced this week expected to improve page load times by up to 50%. Key areas of focus include HTTP/2 optimization, image management, video streaming, and JavaScript performance enhancement. A live stream webinar will also be held on May 13th at 11:00 am BST to discuss the challenges of modern web performance.

A bug was discovered in the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) that caused it to lose its ability to count when run as an unprivileged user. The issue arose due to a security fix in the eBPF verifier, which rewrote arithmetic operations on pointer values to ensure they remained within bounds. This unexpectedly affected scalar value subtraction, causing incorrect results. A workaround was found by using 32-bit ALU operations instead of 64-bit ones, and another solution involved tweaking the LLVM Intermediate Representation (IR) manually. The bug has since been fixed in newer kernel versions.

The article discusses how to generate a Cloudflare Worker-compatible test harness for executing Mocha unit tests directly in the production Cloudflare environment. It provides detailed steps on setting up directories, installing necessary tools like Mocha, Webpack, and Exports Loader, creating a modified version of Webpack's mocha loader, writing worker scripts and unit tests, building a test harness script, configuring Mocha Webpack, customizing the test harness, deploying and running the test harness, and integrating it into an existing CI/CD pipeline. The article also explains how to interpret detailed test reports returned by the test harness in JSON format.