June 2020 Summaries

On June 30th at 12:00 PM, Connor Peshek introduced the seventeenth edition of "The Serverlist," a resource for staying updated on serverless technology. It includes latest news in the serverless space, developer tutorials, discussions with fellow developers, and information about upcoming meetups and conferences. To receive this content directly to your email, sign up using the provided link while ensuring your privacy is maintained.

On June 30, 2020, Lucas Pardue discussed HTTP/3, the latest version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol that uses QUIC as its transport protocol for improved performance and security. Cloudflare enabled QUIC and HTTP/3 support on their edge network during their Birthday Week in 2019, with support from Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Enabling HTTP/3 for a domain requires flipping the switch in the Cloudflare dashboard's "Network" tab. To test HTTP/3 using Firefox Nightly, users can download and install the latest build, enable HTTP/3 by setting "network.http.http3.enabled" to true, and check the Developer Tools "Protocol" column in the "Network" tab. The QUIC Working Group recently announced a milestone towards standardization, with all design issues resolved or proposed for resolution. Implementations are expected to improve their support for HTTP/3 and eventually enable it in stable channels.

The Workers Distributed Data team has introduced a new feature in Workers KV that allows users to add extra JSON metadata to each key/value pair for various uses, such as content types and etags. This eliminates the need to recompute the type on every request and reduces bundle size by moving detection code from workers to uploading tools. Additionally, significant improvements have been made in write latency due to a major internal change that added a second source of truth on the European continent, resulting in faster response times for users closer to Europe than the US.

Cloudflare has introduced Regional Services, a feature that gives customers full control over where their traffic is handled. This service allows organizations to maintain regional control over their data for various reasons such as geographic restrictions on data flows or processing. Enterprise customers can now add Regional Services to their contracts and choose which subset of data centers are able to service traffic on the HTTP level while still using Cloudflare's global edge network. The launch includes preconfigured US and EU regions, with more options available based on customer demand.

In June 2020, Cloudflare doubled the size of its Summer intern class due to a huge influx of students interested in their engineering internships. The company sent out a take-home project for applicants, which involved building an A/B test application using their serverless product, Cloudflare Workers. This exercise was designed to gauge candidates' experience with JavaScript and the Workers APIs. Applicants were also encouraged to explore wrangler, a command-line tool used to deploy Workers applications. Extra credit sections of the project involved changing contents on the page using Workers APIs, persisting variants, and deploying to a domain that they owned. The most common mistakes made by applicants included writing unclean code, rushing through the exercise without ensuring the base implementation was working correctly, misunderstanding or incorrectly implementing the solution, and excessive bandwidth usage.

On June 18, 2020, Cloudflare announced an expansion of its worldwide reseller partnership with Rackspace Technology to include managed services offerings for Cloudflare. This collaboration aims to provide customers with access to and the scalability of Cloudflare's global network and integrated cloud platform of security, performance, and reliability solutions. Rackspace engineers are now trained on the features and configuration of Cloudflare to manage its capabilities alongside customers' Rackspace-hosted websites. The partnership will allow both companies to provide additional value to their global customers while aligning with their core values of reducing the complexity of internet security, performance, and reliability.

Marek Majkowski, a programmer working on a bug-free C program, experienced a "Segmentation Fault" error when running his code. He initially wondered about the origin of the "V" in the signal name SIGSEGV and whether it was a mistake or an ancient reference to a "Segmentation Vault." David Wragg explained that the signal stands for "Segmentation Violation," which is related to memory segmentation errors from older computer systems. Further investigation by Martin Levy revealed that the original signal name was SIGSEG, but it was later renamed to SIGSEGV in both userspace and kernel side around 1980. Majkowski fixed his code crash by catching and handling the SIGSEGV signal, preventing future crashes.

Cate Danielson shares her positive experience as a remote intern at Cloudflare's APAC Marketing team during the pandemic. Despite facing challenges due to virtual work, she has gained valuable skills and insights from working on various projects such as running campaigns, promoting webinars, and conducting data analysis. She offers advice for incoming interns, including setting up meetings to expand their network, actively participating in discussions, and using shared experiences to connect with coworkers. Cloudflare's supportive environment has allowed her to grow professionally and personally during her internship.

Cloudflare has introduced Cache Analytics, a new tool that provides deeper exploration capabilities into the performance of its caching and content delivery services for customers' web presence. The analytics tool helps users understand how Cloudflare's cache is performing and can also be used as a general-purpose analytics tool. Key features include seeing what resources are missing from cache, expired, or never eligible for cache in the first place, filtering by hostnames, viewing top URLs that miss cache, switching between views of requests and data transfer to understand both performance and cost, and more. Cache Analytics is available today for all customers on Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans.

In this blog post, the author discusses three data science tricks that have been used to solve real problems for customer support groups and customers. These include language classification, fuzzy string matching, and threat identification. The author emphasizes the importance of refining data before processing it through machine learning algorithms to achieve improved results without changing the underlying strategies. They also highlight how understanding the limits of a given classification algorithm can help develop an approach that complements it. Additionally, they share their experience with optimizing fuzzy string matching approaches and using multiple dimensions for threat identification. The author concludes by stating that data science techniques have significantly improved their ability to build new functionality and highlights the importance of preprocessing data in optimizing processing pipelines.

Cloudflare has introduced Standalone Health Check Analytics to enhance its existing Standalone Health Checks service, which allows users to monitor the health of their origin servers without relying on third-party services. The new analytics feature helps decrease time to resolution for potential issues by providing detailed logs and data visualizations. Users can now quickly identify the root cause of problems and minimize time to resolution. Additionally, the availability of different portions of infrastructure is complemented with performance metrics such as waterfall view of a request within the event log, which provides insights into time taken for TCP connection, TLS handshake, and time to first byte (TTFB) for the request. Health Check Analytics also enables users to run health checks from multiple regions across Cloudflare's network, providing an overview of their application's performance from different geographical locations.

Cloudflare's Project Galileo has provided free security services to vulnerable nonprofits, journalism and independent media voices online for six years. The project aims to empower marginalized voices that may not be heard or bring together oppressed groups of people who might otherwise find themselves isolated and alone. In the past year, there has been a 60% increase in the total number of participants in Project Galileo, with more than 1,000 participants currently receiving Cloudflare's security protections in every region of the world. The project now partners with civil society organizations to identify and provide services to politically and artistically vulnerable entities on the Internet. Some notable recent additions include The Carter Center, which works in election monitoring, democratic institution-building, and supporting human rights defenders; CoronaSafe, a guide and collection of tools built as an open-source public utility for the Kerala State government in India to help people stay safe during the pandemic; Digital Waitingroom, a platform that simulates a doctor’s visit providing information on symptoms associated with COVID-19; Freifunk Munich, which started creating an online conference system specifically for families during COVID-19; and #BeatCovid19Now, a symptom tracker led by researchers at the Centre for Global Health and Equity.

The text discusses the implementation of a new load balancing service for backend services at Terin Stock, which previously relied on stateful TCP proxies and NATs. The goals for this replacement were to preserve source IPs, support an architecture with backends across racks and subnets, allow zero-downtime maintenance, use common Linux tools, avoid explicit connection synchronization between load balancers, and enable a staged rollout from the previous implementation. The new architecture uses consistent hashing to ensure all load balancers send traffic to the same backends without needing to persist any connection state. It leverages Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) protocol between routers and load balancers, IP Virtual Server (IPVS), and Foo-Over-UDP encapsulation for routing traffic from the load balancer. The team also developed a Go agent running on each load balancer to synchronize with a control plane layer tracking service locations and backend server availability. The text concludes by mentioning future work, including monitoring IPVS developments, migrating to nftables, improving handling of BGP session failures, investigating Lightweight Tunnels, and adding support for additional reading materials on similar topics.

The text discusses encryption technologies used daily without realizing it, such as transport-layer encryption and disk encryption. It introduces end-to-end encryption, which only allows the end-users to access their data. UtahFS is a proof-of-concept storage system built by Brendan McMillion while working on Cloudflare's Research Team. The system uses object storage for storing data and implements various security measures like confidentiality, integrity, and hiding access patterns using Merkle Trees and Path ORAM.

Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, has announced the launch of Cloudflare TV, a 24x7 live television broadcast streamed globally via the company's network. The initiative aims to replicate the best features of tech conferences in a COVID-19 world and provide a platform for experimentation. Key programming includes conversations with industry leaders, technical discussions, and interactive sessions featuring Cloudflare employees. The launch was delayed by a week due to recent events targeting Black communities in the United States, and additional content has been added to highlight the importance of diversity within tech teams.

This blog post discusses how HashiCorp Nomad was deployed to improve the availability of services in data centers worldwide. The author explains the reliability model of customer-facing and management services running in each data center, highlighting the challenges faced with existing models. They then describe their pick for a dynamic task scheduling system, HashiCorp Nomad, and its deployment architecture. The post also covers job files, service discovery, observability, and challenges encountered during the process. Finally, it mentions the management services currently running on Nomad and future plans to onboard more services.

In the wake of George Floyd's murder and subsequent protests in the US, there has been a significant increase in cyberattacks on advocacy organizations fighting against racism. Cloudflare, an internet security company, saw a 17% rise in blocked cyberattack HTTP requests over the weekend of May 30/31 compared to the same period in April. Advocacy groups experienced a staggering 1,120x increase in attacks during this time. Additionally, attacks on government and military websites have also risen month-on-month by 1.8x and 3.8x respectively. Cloudflare remains committed to protecting vulnerable targets through its Project Galileo initiative, which provides protection from cyberattacks for at-risk organizations advocating for marginalized groups.