September 2021 Summaries

Stream Live is an open beta of an end-to-end scalable live-streaming platform by Cloudflare that allows developers to focus on growing their live video apps without worrying about the codebase. It supports millions of concurrent broadcasters and users, works with popular broadcasting software, and automatically records, optimizes, and delivers videos using the Stream player. The built-in player and access control features allow for granular control over user experience and enable limiting who can view live videos. Instant recordings are available as soon as a live broadcast ends. Stream Live scales instantly with use case and uses Cloudflare's global network to ensure reliability and low latency. It offers simple, predictable pricing based on video storage capacity and duration of video viewed, without hidden costs for ingesting the live stream or additional quality levels. For high-volume users, volume pricing is available upon request.

Cloudflare has announced new secure filtering capabilities in InterPlanetary FileSystem (IPFS). The company's IPFS module is designed to protect users from threats such as phishing and ransomware, with the software being released as open source for the benefit of the entire community. The code is available on GitHub. This development aims to provide more security options for users and application developers in the distributed web space.

Cloudflare has announced that it is making its technology for running a 24/7 streaming video channel available to other businesses. The company launched Cloudflare TV in June 2020, focusing on topics related to building a better internet and the people working towards this goal. Since then, over 1,000 live shows have been hosted on the platform. The technology behind Cloudflare TV includes Brave for managing live content transitions, Zoom for facilitating live sessions, Cloudflare Workers for handling various tasks, Cloudflare Stream for video asset management, and Cloudflare for Teams for securing access to internal dashboards and admin interfaces. The company is also working on an overhauled version of the platform called Cloudflare TV 2.0, which will leverage new technologies such as its Real Time Communications Platform and Stream Live for video encoding and syndication.

Cloudflare Radar, a free tool for observing Internet trends and insights, has detected an increase in interest in Spanish media outlets following the eruption of a volcano on La Palma island on September 19. Notably, El País experienced a significant rise in popularity, climbing several positions in Cloudflare's Global Popularity Ranking Trend. Other Spanish news outlets such as El Mundo and RTVE also saw increased global popularity after the event. The platform offers insights into various trends and human habits across different countries.

Cloudflare introduces its Real Time Communications (RTC) platform, designed to help developers build the next generation of real-time, interactive applications. The platform leverages Cloudflare's global edge network to improve connectivity for existing WebRTC-based video and audio applications. It also offers scalability to thousands of participants, DDoS mitigation protection, and IP and ASN-based access policies. The company aims to simplify the development process by providing developer-first APIs that abstract low-level infrastructure management, authentication, authorization, and participant permissions. Cloudflare is currently seeking partners for its closed beta WebRTC Components program.

Cloudflare has introduced "Cloudflare for Offices," a strategic partnership aimed at extending its network into over 1,000 of the world's busiest office buildings and multi-dwelling units. The initiative will leverage custom secure hardware and partnerships with fiber providers to scale globally. This move is expected to bring significant benefits to building tenants, including improved security posture, increased productivity due to faster internet performance, and enhanced flexibility in work environments. Cloudflare for Offices also simplifies the process of setting up new offices or securing shared workspaces by eliminating the need for costly hardware solutions and multiple regional third parties. The initiative aligns with the growing trend towards remote and flexible working arrangements while maintaining security and performance standards.

Cloudflare has introduced a beta version of its dashboard's dark mode feature. Users can configure the dashboard to appear in light or dark mode, or have it automatically adjust according to their system settings. The design team at Cloudflare leveraged the company's Design System to implement this feature swiftly and efficiently. By reversing the luminosity scales of its color system, the team was able to create a new set of colors for the dashboard in dark mode while maintaining brand aesthetics and accessibility standards. The design process involved iterating on various components such as buttons, icons, links, and charts to ensure their compliance with WCAG's AA accessibility standards.

Cloudflare has announced R2 Storage, an object storage service that enables developers to store large amounts of unstructured data. The service offers full compatibility with Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) API and eliminates egress bandwidth fees typically associated with cloud storage services. Priced at $0.015 per GB of data stored per month, R2 is designed for scalability and reliability, offering 99.9999999% annual durability and resistance to regional failures. The service integrates seamlessly with Cloudflare Workers serverless runtime, allowing developers to build data pipelines and manipulate objects easily. R2 also supports multi-region storage, jurisdictional restrictions for data sovereignty requirements, and automatic integration between R2 and Cloudflare cache. Developers can sign up for the waitlist to access R2, with an open beta expected soon.

Cloudflare has announced that all its customers now have full access to its registrar services, including the ability to register new domains. The company is also introducing over 40 new top-level domains (TLDs) starting with .uk, allowing existing domain transfers and eventually enabling new registrations within a few weeks. Cloudflare's pricing for these services will be at cost, meaning customers will only pay the wholesale registry fee plus any applicable ICANN transaction fees. The company plans to expand its support for more country code TLDs in the coming months.

In 2020, Cloudflare joined the UN Global Compact (UNGC) and released its first Communication on Progress report, detailing how it is integrating UNGC principles across its company to help build a better Internet. The Ten Principles of the UNGC include human rights, environmental sustainability, labor protections, and anti-corruption, derived from related UN treaties. Cloudflare is committed to helping advance all 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), focusing on SDG 5 for gender equality and empowering women, as well as SDG 13 for urgent action against climate change. The company has achieved 100% renewable energy usage in its network and is working to remove or mitigate all historic greenhouse gas emissions associated with powering its network by 2025.

Cloudflare has launched an open Beta for its Email Routing feature, which simplifies email address creation and management without needing additional mailboxes. The service acts as an intelligent router at the transport layer, handling and modifying SMTP envelopes to deliver messages while preserving original headers and keeping bodies intact. It ensures security protocols remain functional and doesn't store or queue emails. Email Forwarding is currently in private beta, with users able to sign up for access through a form on Cloudflare's website.

Cloudflare has introduced a new tool called the Email Security DNS Wizard to tackle email spoofing and phishing, as well as improve email deliverability. The wizard helps users create DNS records that prevent others from sending malicious emails on behalf of their domain. It also warns users about insecure DNS configurations and provides recommendations for fixing them. Initially rolled out to Free plan users, the feature will be made available to Pro, Business, and Enterprise customers over the next weeks. The tool aims to increase adoption of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records, which are crucial for securing domains against email spoofing and phishing attacks.

On September 27, 2021, Cloudflare celebrates its 11th birthday and continues its tradition of launching innovative new products as a gift back to the Internet. The company has experienced significant growth in the past year, with over half of its team starting since March 2020 due to the pandemic. Despite initial concerns about remote work affecting their culture, Cloudflare found that hiring curious and empathetic individuals allowed them to maintain productivity and happiness among employees. As they emerge from the pandemic, the company aims to create a better way to work by combining in-person collaboration with flexibility for remote work. Regarding the Internet, Cloudflare remains committed to its mission of building a better one, despite challenges such as cyberattacks and toxic social media. The company believes that while some technologies have caused harm, the Internet itself is still a miracle that has allowed people to stay connected during the pandemic. As policy makers address new harms in an interconnected world, Cloudflare will continue to engage with them to preserve the integrity of the Internet. In terms of innovation, Cloudflare focuses on making web page loading, email sending, video streaming, and other online activities more secure, reliable, or faster. The company is entering a new area to address network security risks and investing in technologies that could disrupt the current state of the web. Overall, Cloudflare believes it is just getting started and will continue to grow with the Internet.

Mengqi Chen implemented OAuth 2.0 login protocol for Wrangler, the Workers command line interface (CLI), to improve developer experience and security. Previously, wrangler login used API tokens which required manual copying and pasting. The new OAuth 2.0 integration allows users to directly choose permissions or scopes from Wrangler, simplifying the login process while making it more secure. It also enables users to revoke access at any time using the command "wrangler logout". The security features include Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) states, Proof Key for Code Exchange (PKCE) challenges, and short-lived access tokens. OAuth 2.0 integration is now available in the 1.19.3 version release of Wrangler.

Cloudflare has announced the availability of HTTP DDoS Managed Ruleset, allowing customers to independently tailor their HTTP DDoS protection settings regardless of their plan. This feature enables users to tweak and optimize settings directly from within the Cloudflare dashboard or via API. The company's mission is to make DDoS disruptions a thing of the past with no customer overhead, investing in automated detection and mitigation systems. Unmetered DDoS Protection ensures that customers do not need to request service credits for attack traffic, as it is automatically excluded from billing systems. The new feature provides users with more control over their DDoS protection settings, allowing them to customize actions and sensitivity levels according to their specific application needs.

Cloudflare has announced that it now connects with over 10,000 other networks, a project they've named Project Myriagon. This is significant as direct connections to their network can greatly improve performance by allowing for local exchange of internet traffic and avoiding congestion caused by bottlenecks between networks. The company plans to continue expanding its network connectivity in an effort to build a better internet.

Cloudflare Pages is a fast, secure, and scalable Jamstack platform for building and deploying websites. It leverages one of the fastest networks in the world, with data centers in over 250 cities globally, ensuring optimal loading times and performance. The platform supports the latest web standards such as TLS 1.3, IPv6, QUIC & HTTP/3 for improved security and speed. Pages also offers a seamless developer experience with full Git integration, allowing developers to collaborate efficiently and build faster with optimized build times. Additionally, it provides Web Analytics tools to track website performance metrics and identify areas of improvement. With upcoming features like Cloudflare Workers integration and support for monorepos, Pages aims to revolutionize the way websites are built and deployed on the web.

In September 2021, Joshua Nelson and Kabir Sikand discussed how developers have been able to run computationally intensive workloads on the Cloudflare edge network since the launch of Workers Unbound. They introduced Chrome DevTools Integration (Beta) for profiling and monitoring Workers performance. The integration allows users to profile their Cloudflare Workers using chrome://inspect, similar to debugging a Node backend. The feature is demonstrated with an example of optimizing a simple JavaScript program that outputs the first thousand integers separated by a space. Users can analyze the resulting flame graph and understand where most time is spent in their code. The profiler works by gathering stack traces at a sampled rate, providing an approximation of where the code spends its execution time. Cloudflare aims to improve visibility into edge-based computing with this integration and encourages feedback from the community.

Cloudflare recently conducted a measurement experiment using Real User Measurement (RUM) data from the standard browser API to test the performance of its network and others in real-world conditions across the globe. The results show that Cloudflare is #1 in almost all cases, whether looking at all networks on the globe or the top 1,000 largest or most active ones. The company plans to continue measuring and optimizing its network to ensure it remains the fastest worldwide.

Turpentine is a VCL-to-TypeScript converter that enables users to migrate their legacy Varnish configurations to modern, Turing-complete programming languages and onto the edge. This solution helps eliminate critical dependencies on individuals who know how to write in VCL and allows for greater expectations of network functionality. Turpentine generates human-readable and well-commented TypeScript code that can be deployed to Cloudflare Workers, a fast serverless platform. The conversion process involves three phases: understanding the meaning of the VCL, optimizing the generated code, and ensuring it is easy to understand by virtually any engineer on the team. Turpentine has been tested in private beta with large customers who have complex VCL files.

Cloudflare for Teams is designed to secure a company's users, devices, and data without compromising performance. Unlike other vendors, Cloudflare's products avoid backhauling traffic and adding latency, making teams faster instead of slower. The platform includes features such as Cloudflare Access, which replaces legacy private networks with Cloudflare's network; Cloudflare Workers, a serverless platform that runs in every Cloudflare data center; DNS filtering features in Cloudflare Gateway; and Secure Web Gateway acceleration. These components work together to deliver a comprehensive Zero Trust platform that enhances security while maintaining speed. The tools are available for free for the first 50 users, making them accessible to businesses of all sizes.

Cloudflare has built its own backbone network consisting of long-distance fiber optic cables connecting various data centers across North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. This dedicated network provides guaranteed capacity and consistent latency between locations, improving redundancy and reducing website loading times by up to 45%. The Cloudflare Backbone is a software-defined network that constantly calculates the performance of routes between various networks, adjusting routing preferences in real-time to make use of all available routes. By enabling this backbone, average response time improvements of up to 44% have been observed. This initiative allows Cloudflare to be located within 50 milliseconds of 95% of the Internet connected population and helps improve internet security, reliability, and performance.

Cloudflare has introduced Last Mile Insights, a new reporting tool for customers to see where their end-users are having trouble connecting to their Cloudflare properties. The tool uses a combination of signals and machine learning to detect errors and performance regressions on the Last Mile. This helps customers understand what is going wrong and why during issues, improving communication with end users and speeding up time to resolution. Additionally, Cloudflare continues to expand its presence into new cities and markets to get as close to every network and user as possible, minimizing the time spent on unreliable Last Mile networks.

Cloudflare has announced support for Early Hints, a new feature that significantly improves browser page load performance and reduces idle time. In initial tests using Early Hints, the company observed more than 30% improvement to page load times for first-time visitors to a website. The technology is currently available in beta and can be accessed by Cloudflare customers through the dashboard's Speed tab. Early Hints works by taking advantage of "server think time" to asynchronously send instructions to the browser, allowing it to begin loading resources while the origin server compiles the full response. By sending these hints before the complete response is prepared, the browser can figure out what it needs to do to load the webpage faster for the end user. The technology is based on a new HTTP status code (103 Early Hints) that defines new interactions between a client and server. It enables the browser to use "think time" (when it would otherwise be waiting) to fetch needed assets, prepare parts of the displayed page, and get ready for the full response to be returned. Early Hints is particularly useful for optimizing dynamic page loads by using "server think time" to help get the browser going on critical steps to render the page before the full server response arrives. This can lead to faster page loads and lower user-perceived latency, resulting in happier users.

Cloudflare's "Magic" services, including Magic Transit, Magic WAN, and Magic Firewall, aim to simplify network security by replacing traditional hardware with cloud-based solutions. These products leverage Anycast architecture for efficient routing of traffic across the globe, eliminating latency caused by backhauling in conventional hub-and-spoke models. By utilizing Cloudflare's expansive network and intelligent routing decisions, users can experience significant performance improvements for their entire IP traffic. The company continues to invest in expanding its presence, interconnections, and backbone while developing new products like WAN Optimization and Quality of Service functions to further enhance network speed and efficiency.

Cloudflare has introduced Web Analytics Vitals Explorer, a new feature that helps users measure their website's performance using Core Web Vitals such as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). The tool provides actionable insights on how to improve user experience by identifying the elements affecting users the most. It also includes additional debugging information for Core Web Vitals, such as element, path, value, URL, size, name, layout information, current rect, and previous rect. This feature aims to provide a structured approach with grading and actionable insights into as many web analytics measurements as possible.

Today, Cloudflare is launching its new product, Cloudflare Images, which offers efficient storage, resizing, optimization and delivery of images for customers of all sizes. The service eliminates the need to create multiple versions of an image in different sizes and formats, reducing infrastructure costs. It also provides built-in access control with expiring signed URL tokens, ideal for membership sites that sell premium content. Furthermore, Cloudflare Images eliminates egress costs by storing, optimizing, and delivering images through a single product. The pricing is straightforward: $5/month for every 100,000 stored images and $1 per 100,000 delivered images, with no additional resizing, compute or egress costs. Images can be uploaded using the Cloudflare Images Dashboard, Direct Creator Uploads feature, or through APIs. The service also allows for image resizing with variants and optimized image delivery based on client headers and image type. Future features include AVIF support, variants that add a blur effect to images, and analytics to better understand the use of Images.

Cloudflare Images is a solution designed to address the challenges faced by businesses in storing and serving large numbers of images. It eliminates egress fees, reduces dependency on multiple buckets, optimizes load times, and minimizes maintenance efforts. The platform offers zero egress costs, consolidates image storage, optimization, and delivery into one tool, and requires minimal engineering effort with its APIs and UI. Additionally, it enables automatic browser-based image optimization for improved loading speed and search engine ranking.

The text discusses the implementation of Cloudflare Images product using reusable Rust libraries and Cloudflare Workers. It explains how Image Resizing was developed in Rust, which is a web server that receives HTTP requests for images along with resizing options, fetches full-size images from the origin, applies resizing and other image processing operations, compresses, and returns the HTTP response with the optimized image. The text also mentions how Polish, another product developed in Golang, recompresses images in their cache and uses Image Resizing via a command-line tool for lossy compression or generating WebP images or animations. Furthermore, it explains how Cloudflare Images was built in Rust as a collection of Rust crates to be reused in other services running anywhere in the network. The text also delves into how Image Resizing works at the edge and is deployed on every server of the Cloudflare global network, and how Cloudflare Images work with its components including the core service that powers the public API to manage images assets, the Image Resizing service responsible for image transformations and caching, the Image delivery Cloudflare Worker responsible for serving images and passing corresponding parameters through to the Imaging Resizing service, and image storage. The text also explains how they store information on Cloudflare Images in several places including image metadata in Cloudflare's core data centers, variant definitions in Cloudflare's edge data centers, original images in core data centers, and optimized images in Cloudflare cache, physically close to eyeballs. It further discusses how they keep processed images up to date by purging the Cloudflare cache when necessary, and how they restrict access to Cloudflare Images using URL signatures with expiration. The text concludes by mentioning that the Cloudflare Images product runs on top of the Cloudflare global network and is built in Rust and Cloudflare Workers, which allows them to use Rust reusable libraries in several products such as Cloudflare Images, Image Resizing, and Polish.

Cloudflare has introduced an Image Optimization Testing Tool to help website owners improve their page loading speed by optimizing images. The tool analyzes a website's URL and runs automated tests to identify possible improvements in delivering optimal images to visitors. Poorly optimized images can cause slow page loads, which negatively impact user experience and search engine rankings. Optimization techniques include ensuring appropriate image dimensions, using modern image formats like AVIF, adjusting quality settings, providing image markup with dimensions, implementing lazy-loading for images, and hosting all images on the same domain. The testing tool uses WebPageTest and Lighthouse to calculate Core Web Vitals and provides a detailed breakdown of each image's optimizations.

Cloudflare now allows its customers to generate Signed Exchanges (SXG) for Google Search with just one click, improving website load times and SEO. SXG is an open standard delivery mechanism that authenticates the origin of a resource independently of how it was delivered. This enhances various use cases such as prefetching, offline internet experiences, and serving from third-party caches in a secure and privacy-preserving manner. By partnering with Google on SXG implementation, Cloudflare simplifies integration while ensuring consistency. The broader implication of SXGs is that they make content portable, which can be used to achieve use cases like fully offline experiences or faster page loads for users. Automatic SXG will be free for all Cloudflare Pro, Business and Enterprise customers as well as for customers using their Advanced Platform Optimization product.

Instant Logs is a new platform by Cloudflare that provides real-time HTTP log viewing with powerful filters. It removes barriers to accessing logs in distributed systems like Cloudflare's edge network, allowing developers to receive, process, and act on information quickly. The system leverages Workers and Durable Objects for efficient data handling and filtering, enabling users to target specific events or search for patterns instantly. Instant Logs is currently in beta and interested parties can join the waitlist for access.

Cloudflare has introduced Live-updating Analytics and Instant Logs for Pro, Business, and Enterprise customers. The analytics dashboard now updates live to show data as it arrives, while Enterprise customers can view their HTTP request logs instantly in the Cloudflare dashboard. These features provide real-time visibility into network and application performance, enabling users to respond to threats and resolve errors quickly. Live-updating Analytics allows for quick drill downs into specific time periods and filtering of data, while Instant Logs offer event level information and are delivered within seconds. The company aims to make the "glass-to-glass" time under one second. Live-updating Analytics is available now on all Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans, with Instant Logs in beta for select customers.

Cloudflare is offering two products, Tiered Caching and Orpheus, for free to all its customers. Tiered Caching reduces origin data transfer and improves website performance by dividing Cloudflare's data centers into a hierarchy of lower-tiers and upper-tiers. This practice makes websites more cost-effective to operate and improves visitor experience. Orpheus routes around problems on the Internet, ensuring that customer origin servers are reachable from everywhere, reducing errors for visitors. Both products aim to help build a better internet by improving website performance and reliability.

Argo, launched by Cloudflare in 2017, improves internet performance using real-time global network information to route around various issues. Today, several upgrades have been announced for Argo's intelligent routing, including optimizing routes from clients and users to Cloudflare, reducing end-to-end latency by up to 40%. These improvements are now available for Free, Pro, and Business plan Argo customers with no additional configuration or charge. Argo also supports accelerating pure IP workloads, allowing Magic Transit and Magic WAN customers to build IP networks and enjoy the performance benefits of Argo.

In 2015, Facebook introduced Instant Articles, a format allowing publishers to serve their content directly from Facebook's infrastructure. This was followed by Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) initiative in October of the same year. These initiatives posed a threat to the open web and raised concerns about the concentration of power within these tech giants. However, they also aimed to address performance issues on mobile devices, particularly in developing countries where internet access is often slow or expensive. In response to this situation, Cloudflare set up an Emerging Technologies & Incubation (ETI) team in 2016, led by Dane Knecht. The ETI team was tasked with working on strategic projects with a long payoff time horizon and fostering innovation within the company. This team has been responsible for developing several successful products, such as Cloudflare for Teams, 1.1.1.1, and Workers. In collaboration with Google's AMP team, Cloudflare developed Signed Exchanges, a technology that combines the benefits of AMP (faster page loading) while giving back control over content to individual publishers. This innovation helps build a better internet by making web pages faster and more accessible, even in areas with slow or expensive internet access. The ETI team continues to explore new technologies and ideas, fostering a culture of continuous innovation at Cloudflare. Their work on Signed Exchanges demonstrates the importance of collaboration and open standards in driving meaningful progress in the field of internet performance optimization.

Cloudflare has announced support for Vary, an HTTP header that allows different content types to be served to user-agents with varying capabilities. This is particularly useful in serving optimized image formats to browsers with differing capabilities. The Vary header enables origins to serve variants of the same content from a single URL and have intermediate caches deliver the correct variant to each user-agent that comes along. By parsing the request's Accept header, Cloudflare ensures that the origin knows exactly what content it needs to deliver to the browser. This feature is currently available for Pro, Business, and Enterprise Customers through the Cloudflare API.

Cloudflare has expanded its network infrastructure by adding 17 new cities across eight countries, increasing the number of on-network cities to over 250. The company has also tripled its external network capacity and increased long-haul internal backbone network by more than 800% since the start of 2020. These improvements aim to provide faster internet connections for users worldwide, with 95% of the entire Internet-connected world now within 50 milliseconds (ms) of a Cloudflare presence and 80% within 20 ms. The company plans to continue expanding its network infrastructure to become more localized while maintaining security, privacy, and reliability for all users.

In this article, Rita Kozlov discusses the performance of Cloudflare Workers, a serverless platform that runs directly on the edge. The author explains how the platform has evolved over the past few years to become 30% faster than it was three years ago at P90 and significantly faster compared to other platforms like [email protected] and Lambda. Kozlov also highlights the importance of measuring serverless performance in terms of end-user experience, using global benchmarks to measure performance. The article delves into the factors that define the performance of a serverless platform, such as distance from the user and time taken for runtime to spin up. It emphasizes how Cloudflare Workers was designed from the ground up for an edge-first serverless model, which has contributed to its superior performance compared to other platforms. The author concludes by encouraging developers to sign up and deploy their first Worker to experience the platform's benefits firsthand.

In this blog post, John Graham-Cumming discusses how Cloudflare has built a fast global network to create a "waitless" internet experience. He explains that building such a network requires three things: ample bandwidth, having content and applications close to the end user, and making the software as fast as possible. The author delves into various factors that contribute to this speed, including DNS resolution, closeness of servers to end users, TCP handshakes, optimized TLS using the latest protocols, congestion control, packet loss mitigation, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 protocols, image optimization, caching content near end users, and serverless computing. The post also highlights Cloudflare's commitment to measuring performance across the internet's networks to ensure its network remains the fastest available.

In this text, the author discusses how to deal with external libraries when processing object files and resolving dependencies. They add a new function to their toy object file that depends on the puts function from the C standard library. The compiler generates a relocation for the puts invocation, which is resolved by creating a jumptable for external code using Procedure Linkage Table (PLT) and Global Offset Table (GOT). They implement a simplified PLT/GOT in their loader to resolve external references when the object file is loaded and parsed. The author also demonstrates how to "hook" any external function call and divert the code to a custom implementation, which might be useful in some cases like malware research.

Cloudflare has introduced support for writing Cloudflare Workers in 100% Rust without requiring any JavaScript knowledge. The worker crate, available on GitHub and crates.io, enables Rust developers to run code inside the V8 WebAssembly engine. This new feature simplifies the developer experience by providing an ergonomic HTTP framework, fetch functionality, a router, easy-to-use HTTP features, Workers KV stores and Durable Objects, secrets, environment variables, and more. The worker crate is open source, and feedback is welcome.

Cloudflare has announced that SaaS providers can now give their customers visibility into the traffic on their network. Custom Hostname Analytics allows SaaS providers to see analytics about the traffic bound for their service, and also provide these insights to individual customers. This feature is useful for business decisions such as billing and scaling infrastructure. Additionally, it enables SaaS providers to build custom dashboards using Cloudflare's GraphQL Analytics API with the clientRequestHTTPHost field. Interested users can sign up for the Cloudflare for SaaS Beta program.

On August 25, 2021, Atlassian issued a security advisory for their Confluence Server and Data Center due to an Object-Graph Navigation Language (OGNL) injection vulnerability that could allow unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code. A full proof of concept (PoC) was made available by a security researcher on August 31, 2021. Cloudflare reviewed the PoC and prepared a mitigation rule via an emergency release, which was deployed on September 1, 2021. The new rule automatically protected all customers using the Cloudflare WAF to protect their self-hosted Confluence applications. Additionally, the Cloudflare WAF started blocking a high number of potentially malicious requests to Confluence applications even before the rule was deployed. Customers must update their self-hosted Confluence installations to ensure full protection from this critical vulnerability (CVE-2021-26084).

Cloudflare has announced new customizations for its SSL for SaaS product aimed at enterprise customers. These include Apex Proxying, which allows SaaS providers to allocate a dedicated set of IPs for their customers when CNAME records do not work; Bring Your Own IPs (BYOIP), allowing customers to bring their own IP range for Cloudflare to announce at its edge; Custom Origin Support, enabling SaaS providers to choose a custom origin that is not the default fallback origin for any of their Custom Hostnames; and Wildcard Support, extending the Custom Hostname's configuration from a specific hostname to the next level of subdomains. Additionally, new TLS management features include CSR Support/Custom Certificates, allowing customers to upload their own certificates or generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) for their Custom Hostnames; and Custom Metadata, enabling customization of configuration rules for customer domains using Workers.

Rishabh Bector, a software engineering intern at Cloudflare, developed the Quick Tunnels feature for the company's Tunnel team. The new feature allows users to establish an encrypted connection between their origin server and Cloudflare's edge without requiring any onboarding to Cloudflare. With Quick Tunnels, administrators can connect a service running locally to Cloudflare's edge in just one command. This feature is powered by Cloudflare Workers, which enables the management of Tunnel connections closer to users instead of a centralized location. The quick Tunnels are designed to be long-lived and persistent, improving overall tunnel quality of life.