May 2022 Summaries
64 posts from Cloudflare
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The Cloudflare Developer Platform has expanded its offerings with new compute, storage, and developer services capabilities. Key updates include the ability for Workers to call other Workers without incurring charges when idle, an open-source license for the Workers runtime later this year, and the addition of R2 object storage and D1 SQLite database to their storage products. The platform also offers a range of developer services such as Pages for Jamstack applications, Image optimization, video streaming, and observability solutions. These updates aim to provide developers with comprehensive tools and services to build and deliver applications on the edge.
May 31, 2022
1,128 words in the original blog post.
Content design is a growing discipline that focuses on improving user experiences through effective text. At Cloudflare, Alice Bracchi has been working as a content designer since July 2020, initially as a technical writer for Zero Trust products. She transitioned to UI content by defining the product's voice and tone, creating guidelines based on their design system, and developing heuristics to evaluate content quality. To better understand user experiences, Alice joined front-end team stand-ups and built relationships with product designers. As a result, they have improved various aspects of the Zero Trust dashboard, including empty states, error messages, and onboarding experience. Currently, Cloudflare is building a content design team to scale these efforts across all products.
May 30, 2022
1,256 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare recently updated its developers' documentation website (developers.cloudflare.com) by migrating from Gatsby to Hugo, a faster static site generator built using Go. The transition also involved converging multiple Workers Sites into a single Cloudflare Pages instance. This change brought improvements in developer experience, performance, and quality of life for engineers, technical writers, and product managers at Cloudflare. The new engine allows all Cloudflare products' documentation to be developed, built, and deployed using the same core foundation. The migration involved converting 1600 markdown pages from MDX to a standard Markdown variant that Hugo can interpret. This change also allowed for automation of the entire process, reducing manual work and time taken. The new HTML-first static site has significantly improved performance metrics like First Contentful Paint, enhancing user experience and SEO ranking.
May 27, 2022
2,240 words in the original blog post.
Recent cyber attacks on servers like Baseboard Management Controllers (BMCs) have targeted vulnerabilities such as Pantsdown and USBAnywhere, leaving servers vulnerable due to infrequent firmware updates. Cloudflare has discovered new critical vulnerabilities in popular BMC software used in their fleet. These vulnerabilities can enable ransomware propagation, server bricking, and data theft. To mitigate the impact of these vulnerabilities, Cloudflare has updated firmware, reduced exposure of BMC remote and local interfaces, disabled default passwords, and enabled BMC logging and auditing. Additionally, they are moving forward with OpenBMC, an open-source firmware for supported baseboard management controllers, and extending secure boot capabilities to the very first device that has power to their systems.
May 26, 2022
1,044 words in the original blog post.
The Product Content Experience (PCX) team at Cloudflare treats content as a product, with the goal of creating world-class content that anticipates user needs and helps build accessible Cloudflare products. By adopting a "content as a product" strategy, the team aligns its work with the product development process, ensuring that developer documentation is ready to publish when new products ship, and that content is updated in response to changes in product UI or the launch of new features. This approach has allowed the content team to maintain accuracy while staying user-focused and shipping content quickly. The open source authoring tools on developers.cloudflare.com have been instrumental in enabling writers and contributors to publish content faster, and the move to Cloudflare Pages has further improved the review and build processes. Overall, adopting a "content as a product" strategy requires buy-in from product managers and engineers but can scale well once established, with everyone focused on supporting the user experience.
May 26, 2022
1,064 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has significantly improved its DNS record propagation speed, reducing the time it takes for changes submitted to their API to be reflected in DNS query responses. The company's previous pipeline had a bottleneck at the Zone Builder stage, which was responsible for collecting and organizing records to be written to their global network. To address this issue, Cloudflare implemented per-record builds instead of full builds, resulting in an average 150x speed improvement. This change has benefited all Cloudflare customers, with larger zones experiencing even greater reductions in build times. The company plans to continue improving its DNS propagation pipeline by eliminating full builds altogether and introducing a batching system for record changes.
May 25, 2022
1,990 words in the original blog post.
In 2020, Cloudflare introduced Extended DNS Error (EDE) Codes on its public DNS resolver 1.1.1.1 to provide additional context and information about errors encountered during DNS queries. EDE codes are based on the proposed IETF standard enabled by the Extension Mechanisms for DNS (EDNS). These codes return extra information about DNS or DNSSEC issues without altering the RCODE, making debugging easier.
Now, Cloudflare has expanded its support to include more error code types and additional helpful information to further improve users' debugging experience. Users can leverage these EDE codes by running dig or kdig commands in their terminal. The new supported error codes provide valuable insights into the issues encountered during DNS queries, such as unsupported DNSKEY algorithms, missing DNSKEYs, expired signatures, and more.
These enhancements aim to make troubleshooting DNS-related problems more efficient and user-friendly by providing detailed information about the errors encountered. Users can refer to Cloudflare's developer documentation for more details on the supported EDE codes and their meanings.
May 25, 2022
673 words in the original blog post.
Bashar Bashaireh has joined Cloudflare as Managing Director for the Middle East and Turkey (MET) region, bringing over two decades of experience in cybersecurity and software industry. He is excited to be part of Cloudflare's mission to build a better internet that is fast, safe, and reliable for everyone. The MET region presents an opportunity for Cloudflare to add value to regional enterprises and increase its footprint and market share due to the rapid uptake in Internet use and digital transformation initiatives. Bashaireh looks forward to helping establish Cloudflare's presence in this fast-growing and dynamic market, leveraging his experience in building a regional presence for global software and technology providers.
May 24, 2022
1,027 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has achieved three major steps forward in proving the security and privacy protections it provides to customers of its cloud services. Firstly, it received ISO/IEC 27018:2019 certification, a key cloud services certification related to processing personal data. Secondly, it completed an independent audit and received its Cloud Computing Compliance Criteria Catalog (C5) attestation. Lastly, it joined the EU Cloud Code of Conduct General Assembly to help increase the impact of the trusted cloud ecosystem and encourage more organizations to adopt GDPR-compliant cloud services. These certifications offer assurance that any personal data processed by Cloudflare meets GDPR requirements.
May 23, 2022
1,250 words in the original blog post.
Wendy Komadina, who recently joined Cloudflare as the head of Partnerships & Alliances for Asia Pacific, Japan, and China (APJC), shares her reasons for choosing to work at the company. She was drawn by its mission to "Help Build a Better Internet" and its leading role in transforming traditional on-premise networking and security hardware into cloud-based solutions. Komadina also appreciates Cloudflare's commitment to social causes, such as Project Galileo, which provides free cybersecurity services to vulnerable groups. She highlights the company's strong representation of female leadership and its dedication to embracing diverse talent. Her top priority is building a strong partner ecosystem in APJC, focusing on Zero Trust Partner Practices and partnerships with professional service providers. Komadina looks forward to sharing more about Cloudflare's APJC Partnerships strategy at the upcoming Cloudflare Connect event in Sydney.
May 20, 2022
737 words in the original blog post.
The Eurovision Song Contest had a significant impact on internet traffic across participating countries. During the contest's final, there was a 6% decrease in overall internet traffic compared to the previous Saturday, with a notable dip around 22:00 CEST and an increase after 23:15 CEST. Traffic to fan websites saw a significant spike during the event, particularly when Ukraine was announced as the winner. Official national broadcaster websites also experienced higher traffic on semi-final and final nights compared to previous days. Video platforms like YouTube and TikTok showed increased DNS traffic after 23:16 CEST on the night of the final, with a peak at 01:11 CEST when the contest ended.
May 19, 2022
2,080 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare uses Prometheus as their core monitoring system since 2017. They've developed an open-source tool called pint to improve the reliability of their alerting rules in Prometheus. Pint is a linter for Prometheus rules that can be run against live Prometheus servers, integrated into CI pipelines, or deployed as a sidecar to all Prometheus servers. It helps detect missing metrics, typos, and other potential problems with Prometheus queries. The tool also allows setting policies for alerting rules, such as requiring annotations and priorities. Pint is useful in ensuring that Prometheus alerting rules always work correctly and notify the team of any incident.
May 19, 2022
4,186 words in the original blog post.
Ulysses Kee, a master's student at National University of Singapore (NUS), shares his experience interning at Cloudflare as a Software Development Intern on the Partnerships team. He details the interview process and highlights of his internship, including working with serverless technology to build viable tools for partners and customers. Kee developed a Zone Copier web application built on Cloudflare Workers, which significantly reduces the time required to copy over zone configuration settings. The project also included auxiliary tools such as a Zone Viewer and Zone Comparison. Kee's experience at Cloudflare was positive, with a supportive work environment and opportunities for community engagement through initiatives like Pledge 1%. He encourages others to visit their careers page for upcoming internship opportunities.
May 18, 2022
1,775 words in the original blog post.
The Spring Developer Challenge by Platform Week encourages developers to create real-time, collaborative applications using Cloudflare's tools. These include Workers, Worktop, Pages, Durable Objects, Workers KV, and R2. Participants can merge their ideas with newly released features, earn recognition on the blog, and receive swag. The challenge is open to developers aged 18 or above, who can work in teams of up to 10 people. Submissions are due by May 24 June 7, and participants can seek help via Discord.
May 17, 2022
553 words in the original blog post.
In this text, hardware engineer Yasir Jamal from Cloudflare discusses an issue they faced when servers from one vendor (SKU-B) were consistently performing 5-10% worse than servers from another vendor (SKU-A). The team initially suspected CPU performance as the cause and ran AMD's DGEMM high-performance computing tool, but found that underperforming servers had lower Thermal Design Power (TDP) and floating-point computation rate. After trying various debugging options like disabling idle power saving mode, checking network interface, and enabling AMD Preferred I/O functionality, the team discovered a difference in memory clock frequency from Infinity Fabric system using AMD's HSMP tool. They asked the vendor to provide a new BIOS that set the frequency to 1467 MHz during compile time, which resolved the issue and improved performance of SKU-B servers to match or exceed SKU-A servers.
May 17, 2022
920 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has introduced Network Analytics Logs, allowing customers on the Enterprise plan to gain near real-time visibility into their network traffic and DDoS attacks. The logs include packet samples of traffic dropped and passed by various systems such as Network-layer DDoS Protection Ruleset, Advanced TCP Protection, and Magic Firewall. These logs can be fed directly into storage services or network monitoring tools like Kentik and Splunk. Setting up the logs requires creating a Cloudflare API token, a Splunk Cloud HTTP Event Collector (HEC) token, and enabling a Cloudflare Logpush job.
May 17, 2022
1,190 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare is launching a series of experiments focused on finding new ways to address scale and environmental challenges faced by blockchain technologies. The company aims to help advance the state of the art in web3, with a particular focus on reducing energy consumption while maintaining scalability for increased user adoption. These experiments will involve research into consensus protocols such as Proof of Stake and Proof of Spacetime, which are expected to be more efficient than current Proof of Work systems. Cloudflare plans to participate in the development and deployment of Ethereum by running validator nodes on its network, contributing to the decentralization and security of the blockchain ecosystem.
May 16, 2022
1,470 words in the original blog post.
During Ramadan, there are noticeable shifts in internet usage patterns in countries where the holiday is observed. Internet traffic increases before sunrise as people wake up earlier for their pre-dawn meal (Suhur) and decreases after sunset when they break their fast with Iftar. Countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Morocco, Libya, and Turkey show significant increases in internet usage before sunrise during Ramadan. After the holiday ends, daily total internet traffic varies depending on the country, with some experiencing an increase while others see a decrease. Sunsets also bring more internet traffic after Ramadan as people continue to use the internet for socializing and entertainment. Overall, these changes in internet usage patterns highlight the human impact on the internet during religious holidays like Ramadan.
May 16, 2022
1,153 words in the original blog post.
The text discusses the development and use of an observability tool called IPFS Gateway monitor, which is used to measure the performance of IPFS gateways. It explains that IPFS is a distributed system for storing and accessing files, websites, applications, and data, and that IPFS gateways enable users to access IPFS content using only web browsers. The text also provides details on various scenarios tested with the monitor, including serving immutable IPFS contents, mutable IPNS named contents, and DNSLink websites. It concludes by stating that IPFS content is fetched best when cached, and that leveraging DNSLink appears to be a faster strategy for naming IPFS resources. The text also mentions the growth of IPFS use and the ongoing development of tooling to improve metrics related to IPFS gateways.
May 16, 2022
1,509 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare, a global network provider, has shared its latest benchmarking results for 3,000 networks worldwide. The company was the fastest in 42% of these networks. Since September 2021, Cloudflare has been working to improve performance and increase the number of networks where it is the fastest by at least 10%. During Security Week (March 2022), this goal was met, and the work continued during Platform Week (May 2022). The benchmarking results also included an update on Cloudflare Workers platform performance compared to Fastly's [email protected] Cloudflare outperformed Fastly in all tests at the 95th percentile for Time to First Byte.
May 16, 2022
2,406 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has announced that it will make it possible for its customers to serve their sites on the InterPlanetary FileSystem (IPFS) network. This integration aims to provide content accessibility and availability across multiple providers, leveraging the IPFS gateway. The announcement comes as businesses have new tools to streamline web development with Cloudflare Workers, Pages, and R2. The integration will allow developers to build their websites using Cloudflare Pages while making their content accessible on the IPFS network.
May 16, 2022
1,453 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has made its Ethereum and IPFS gateways publicly available to all customers. The interest in these gateways since their private beta last September has been overwhelming. Over the past eight months, improvements have been made, including a new API for hostname deployment, a brand-new UI, testnet support, and integration with other Cloudflare products. Thousands of individuals, companies, and DAOs are already using these gateways to build new web3 applications. The migration from the legacy gateway endpoints to the new API is underway, and free users will continue to use the gateways at no cost.
May 16, 2022
720 words in the original blog post.
The text discusses the challenges and solutions related to cache invalidation, a crucial aspect of content delivery networks (CDNs) like Cloudflare. Cache invalidation is difficult due to scale, speed, and scope factors. To address these issues, Cloudflare has developed an efficient purge pipeline that can quickly invalidate cached content across its global network. The company's new coreless purge architecture aims to improve the speed and scalability of the purge requests by removing reliance on core data centers and leveraging Workers and Durable Objects for request handling and distribution.
May 14, 2022
2,636 words in the original blog post.
On May 13th, 2022, Erwin van der Koogh announced a partnership between Cloudflare and MailChannels to provide an email sending service specifically for Cloudflare Workers. This integration removes the friction associated with sending emails by filtering spam before sending out an email, ensuring that user-submitted content in an email won't ruin domain reputation with email providers. The best part is that it is completely free to send email using this service. The only constraint currently is that the integration only works when the request comes from a Cloudflare IP address.
May 13, 2022
736 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare Stream has released an open beta version that supports video playback with sub-second latency over SRT or RTMPS at scale. The service is designed to deliver low-latency video content globally, making it ideal for live streaming applications where real-time interaction between viewers and broadcasters is crucial. Cloudflare Stream uses a serverless dynamic topology that minimizes latency by routing the video as much as possible within its network. The platform supports various video protocols such as RTMPS, SRT, HLS, and DASH, allowing users to choose the best option for their specific needs.
May 13, 2022
1,262 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has introduced a new feature called "Sourcing Kit" for its Cloudflare Images product. This kit allows users to define one or more sources containing objects they want to migrate to Cloudflare Images, making it easier to import large numbers of images from external repositories. The Sourcing Kit provides options such as defining a target path and filename for imported images, obtaining logs for bulk operations, and allowing the option to overwrite existing images. Currently, the Beta version allows users to define AWS S3 buckets as sources, with plans to enable definitions for other common repositories in future versions. The kit is also planned to be available through CLI. Users can request to join the waitlist on the Cloudflare Images dashboard to access the Beta version.
May 13, 2022
955 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has introduced Route to Workers for its Email Routing feature, allowing users to create custom email processing logic using Cloudflare Workers. The new feature enables users to handle incoming emails in various ways, such as creating allowlists or blocklists, content-based filtering, tagging messages, and more. Users can also integrate with external APIs and trigger actions based on specific conditions. The first 100,000 email triggers per day are free, with paid plans starting at $5 for 10 million requests. A closed beta is expected to begin in a few weeks, and users can join the waitlist through their dashboard.
May 13, 2022
694 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare Stream is adding auto-detection of embedded captions for live streams delivered to viewers. This feature will benefit thousands of customers who use Stream to incorporate video functionality into their apps, providing a more comprehensive viewing experience. The support currently includes one language during the live event and multiple languages after it becomes an on-demand video. Live captioning is set to be available in closed beta next month, with plans for automatic live captions in the future.
May 13, 2022
383 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has introduced a new feature that allows every Stream account to configure its own domain in the Stream dashboard, enabling creators to broadcast to a custom domain such as push.live-yoga-classes.com. This feature is available at no additional cost and supports secure video ingestion using RTMPS and SRT protocols. Custom domains help users avoid vendor lock-in and seamless migration when moving live video pipelines to Stream Live, with the upcoming support for custom keys further simplifying the process.
May 13, 2022
496 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare Stream introduces a new feature called Creator Property, which allows creator platforms to track video usage on a per-creator basis. This enables them to answer critical questions such as "Who are our fastest growing creators?" and "How much do we charge or pay creators each month?" The Creator Property eliminates the need for platforms to maintain their own index to track content ownership, making it easier to manage user-generated content. Additionally, users can now filter Stream Analytics via the Dashboard or GraphQL API using the creator property, simplifying tasks such as generating monthly reports of all creators and video watch time recorded for their videos.
May 13, 2022
673 words in the original blog post.
Pages Plugins, a new feature by Pages, allows developers to incorporate reusable chunks of runtime code into their applications. These plugins can be customized and are similar to Pages Functions in terms of functionality. The launch partners for this feature include Sentry, Honeycomb, and Stytch. Pages Plugins aims to reduce the amount of boilerplate code required by developers and improve efficiency. Developers can also create their own plugins and share them on npm or the developer documentation. Some additional plugins that are currently being developed include Google Chat, Cloudflare Access, static forms, and GraphQL API.
May 12, 2022
1,225 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare introduces Workers Analytics Engine, a new way to obtain telemetry data using Cloudflare Workers. The engine provides time series analytics built for the serverless era and uses the same technology that powers Cloudflare's analytics for millions of customers. It can be used to get telemetry about almost anything and has been adopted by internal teams at Cloudflare, such as their R2 storage product. The Analytics Engine can also be used to build custom security rules or track non-Workers related events like IoT sensor data. To use the engine, developers need to configure it in Wrangler, write data using the Workers Runtime API, and query data using SQL or GraphQL APIs. The engine is optimized for time series analytics that can be visualized using tools like Grafana. It offers benefits over traditional metrics systems such as unlimited cardinality of label values, low latency reporting, and fast queries at any timescale. A closed beta version of the Workers Analytics Engine is now available with an ambitious roadmap ahead, including support for building analytics and usage-based billing for customers.
May 12, 2022
1,403 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has announced the private beta of its programmable message bus, Cloudflare Pub/Sub, built on the widely-used MQTT protocol. The service allows developers to publish event data from any MQTT-capable client and write code that can filter, aggregate, or modify messages before they are distributed to subscribers. It also enables pushing events from applications in other clouds or on-premise, with Pub/Sub acting as a programmable event router or a hook into persistent data storage like R2 or KV. The beta aims to support the MQTT v5.0 specification and provide an accessible free tier for developers.
May 12, 2022
1,424 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has expanded its closed beta of HTTP Applications to all enterprise customers. This product allows users to better manage their L7 Cloudflare configuration with versioning and staging capabilities. HTTP Applications enable the management of configurations by use case rather than hostname, with each application consisting of a set of versions representing different settings for managing traffic. Routing Rules are used to decide which version of an HTTP Application will affect a specific set of traffic. This combination allows users to stage changes without requiring separate staging zones and provides IPs for testing before rolling out configurations to production.
May 12, 2022
950 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has introduced Custom Domains for Workers, allowing users to connect a domain to their Worker without worrying about certificates, origin servers or DNS. The feature leverages Cloudflare DNS to register the user's Worker as the origin for their domain. Users can add custom domains by going to the Triggers tab in their Worker and clicking "Add Custom Domain." This new functionality enables users to trigger a request to any path on that Custom Domain, with the associated Worker being considered the 'origin server.' The feature is available in an Open Beta starting today, with support built right into the Cloudflare Dashboard and API's. CLI support via Wrangler is coming soon.
May 12, 2022
665 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare is focusing on building a modern cloud with a developer-first experience. The company aims to provide flexibility and eliminate the friction involved when migrating applications onto or off of its platform. To achieve this, Cloudflare has partnered with various DevOps platforms, CMSs, data companies, and observability platforms to improve developer productivity through simple development and deploy workflows. These partnerships enable seamless integration of tools and services necessary for building, deploying, and supporting applications on the Cloudflare network. The ultimate goal is to provide developers with choice and freedom in selecting the best tools for their projects while ensuring a smooth and efficient development lifecycle.
May 12, 2022
1,621 words in the original blog post.
Magic NAT is a new approach to Network Address Translation (NAT) that aims to solve the problems of traditional hardware and virtual solutions. It offers unlimited capacity, global availability through Anycast architecture, and compatibility with any network type. Magic NAT for Carriers can handle high volumes of traffic, simplifying NAT deployment and reducing complexity and cost associated with thousands or millions of connections. The solution is built on Cloudflare One's foundational components and works across all network-layer on-ramps, including Anycast GRE or IPsec, CNI, and WARP. It also supports address translation between IP versions and can be used in conjunction with security policies for safe access. Magic NAT leverages Cloudflare's entire network capacity and is priced based on the 95th percentile of clean bandwidth usage, eliminating unexpected charges.
May 12, 2022
2,003 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has introduced a new feature called Cache Reserve, which allows customers to persistently serve all static content from its global cache. This helps achieve higher cache hit ratios and lower egress bills. Cache Reserve removes customer content from popularity contests and ensures that even less-popular content can be served from Cloudflare's cache, avoiding the need to pull it from the origin server and saving customers money on egress fees. The feature is currently in closed beta and will be rolled out to more users over the coming weeks.
May 11, 2022
1,583 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has released its open beta version of R2, an object storage solution designed to eliminate high egress charges from other cloud providers. The response to R2 has been positive, with developers and corporations excited about the potential for cost savings and improved collaboration. R2 offers two APIs: In-Worker API and S3-compatible API, both supporting basic create/read/update/delete operations. During the open beta period, R2 aims to sustain 1,000 GET operations per second and 100 PUT operations per second, per bucket. The forever-free tier includes 10 GB-months of stored data, 1,000,000 Class A operations, and 10,000,000 Class B operations per month. Future plans for R2 include improving performance, expanding feature set, and adding automatic global distribution of storage.
May 11, 2022
1,074 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has announced D1, its first SQL database designed specifically for Cloudflare Workers. Built on SQLite, the most ubiquitous database in the world, D1 is a serverless database that allows developers to create full-stack applications quickly and easily. The developer experience with D1 includes creating databases, inserting or uploading data, and managing databases using simple commands. D1 will be free of egress charges and priced based on storage plus database operations performed. Key features include read replication, batching, embedded compute, backups and redundancy, and importing and exporting data. The beta access for D1 is expected to start as early as June 2022.
May 11, 2022
1,661 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has announced that its enterprise customers can now use Logpush to store logs on R2, a low-cost object storage service. This feature is particularly useful for storing raw logs from Cloudflare products, which are used by customers for debugging performance issues, investigating security incidents, and maintaining compliance with security standards. With R2's low costs, the decision of whether to keep necessary logs or manage tight budgets becomes easier for customers. The example provided in the text shows that using R2 leads to 86% savings compared to Amazon S3. Additionally, Cloudflare is working on improving log retrieval and plans to build out more advanced Logpush features with a focus on customization.
May 11, 2022
776 words in the original blog post.
Developers have been leveraging Durable Objects as a building block for distributed applications since their launch. These objects provide globally unique instances of a JavaScript class that can be accessed via a unique ID, making them suitable for stateful backend applications. However, there was no way to programmatically wake up an object until the introduction of Durable Object Alarms. These alarms allow developers to schedule objects to be woken up at a specific time in the future, unlocking new use cases such as queues and deferred processing. Alarms are more fine-grained than Cron Triggers and can be directly scheduled from within a Durable Object. They guarantee fault tolerance by being designed with no single point of failure and running entirely on Cloudflare's edge network. Developers can get started with Durable Object Alarms by enabling them in the Cloudflare dashboard and referring to the developer docs or Discord for more information.
May 11, 2022
1,107 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has introduced Cache Reserve, a new feature that allows customers to persistently serve all static content from its global cache. This helps achieve higher cache hit ratios and lower egress bills. Cache Reserve removes customer content from popularity contests and ensures that less-popular content can still be served from Cloudflare's cache, saving costs on origin egress fees. The feature works by backstopping all cacheable content in a large, persistent data store implemented on top of R2. It provides guaranteed SLAs for how long content can remain in cache and extends the benefits of Tiered Cache by reducing the number of times Cloudflare's network needs to ask an origin for content. Currently, Cache Reserve is in closed beta with plans to roll it out to customers over the coming weeks.
May 11, 2022
1,582 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has announced significant updates to its build times, logs, and settings for Pages, a platform designed to fit seamlessly into developers' workflows. The new infrastructure is generally available and automatically enabled for all existing and new projects. Build initialization time has been reduced from 2+ minutes to 2-3 seconds, allowing users to iterate on their code more quickly. Additionally, build logs can now be streamed in real-time, enabling developers to debug issues as soon as they happen. Users also have full control over the precise branches they'd like to include and exclude for automatic deployments. Future updates will focus on implementing incremental builds, caching strategies, build image updates, and more productive error messaging.
May 10, 2022
1,589 words in the original blog post.
Pages has introduced direct uploads to improve the developer experience by allowing users to push their build artifacts directly to Pages without needing a git repository or version control system. This feature supports various source control providers and accommodates build project complexities. Users can now use Wrangler CLI or drag and drop assets into the Pages interface for deployment. The direct uploads feature enables more flexibility in building projects, including unique preview URLs, integration with Workers, Access and Web Analytics, custom redirects/headers, and support for monorepo structures and custom CI logic.
May 10, 2022
886 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has announced the addition of Workers execution logs to Logpush, making it easier than ever for developers to gain visibility into applications built on Workers. This new dataset will include unstructured console.log() messages, exceptions, and metadata about requests/responses. The update is particularly beneficial for larger enterprises and platform companies using Workers as a foundation for their customers' development. Logpush can now send Workers logs to preferred cloud storage destinations or analysis platforms like Splunk or New Relic. This brings new ways to get transparency into Workers, allowing developers to pinpoint issues and track down specific log lines for debugging purposes.
May 10, 2022
579 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has announced Workers for Platforms, a tool suite designed to make any product programmable. The platform aims to help customers deliver value to their users and developers instantly. Workers for Platforms enables exposing a direct way for customers' developers to bring their own logic to applications. This approach is expected to unlock a wave of customer-led innovation on top of companies that adopt it, potentially being as impactful to building applications on the web as APIs have been. The platform also offers better experiences for developers by eliminating tedious tasks such as setting up hosting and authentication schemes.
May 10, 2022
1,952 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has introduced Service Bindings, a new API that enables Workers to communicate with each other without using the internet. This feature allows developers to segment application logic across multiple Workers, making it easier for teams to build complex applications on the platform. Service Bindings also provide cost efficiency by removing the concept of "idle resources" and charging only for the time a thread is allocated to Workers and the time they are awaiting external dependencies. This feature is now available for users to try out.
May 10, 2022
1,106 words in the original blog post.
The Eurovision Song Contest, dating back to 1956, is an annual event where countries from across Europe and beyond compete for the title of best song. This year's edition marks its 66th occurrence and will take place in Turin, Italy. The contest consists of two semi-finals and a final, with the first semi-final on May 10, the second on May 12, and the final on May 14.
A dedicated page has been created for Eurovision fans, journalists, or anyone interested in following Internet trends related to the event. The page provides real-time data on Internet traffic from participating countries, as well as social media trends and fan site activity. Additionally, it showcases the impact of the contest on national official broadcasters' websites.
Some popular songs for this year's edition include Norway's "Give That Wolf A Banana," Portugal's "Saudade, Saudade," the UK's "SPACE MAN," and France's "Fulenn." The Eurovision Song Contest remains a significant cultural event that continues to captivate audiences worldwide.
May 10, 2022
518 words in the original blog post.
Yo'av Moshe and his team at Cloudflare developed a solution called Managed Components to improve the loading of third-party tools on websites without compromising security, performance, or privacy. The new format allows vendors to write their own performant, safe server-side integrations while providing users with transparency and control over what is happening on their website. Managed Components use a permission-based system for various actions such as setting cookies, changing the DOM, or collecting IP addresses. An example analytics Managed Component demonstrates how it can be used to send payloads without running any code in the browser. The benefits of Managed Components include same domain execution, website-wide events system, server logic capabilities, server-side rendered widgets and embeds, reliable cross-platform events, pre-response actions, integrated Consent Manager support, and open source availability. Cloudflare is working on expanding Managed Components to mobile applications and allowing unofficial installations on Cloudflare Zaraz.
May 09, 2022
2,318 words in the original blog post.
Platform Week, starting May 9th, focuses on improving developer experience by introducing new features and partnerships. The general availability of a new Wrangler version makes it easier to develop with Workers, while partnering with StackBlitz brings the Wrangler experience closer to developers through browser-based development environments powered by WebContainers. This collaboration enables instant development environments within browsers, allowing for quick project starts and dependency installations. The partnership also opens up possibilities for embedding code projects directly into documentation examples and tutorials. Future plans include enabling features that require authentication for a complete developer lifecycle within the browser.
May 09, 2022
464 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare, Vercel, Shopify, and individual core contributors to Node.js and Deno have established a new Community Group focused on the interoperable implementation of standardized web APIs in non-web browser, JavaScript-based development environments. The Web-interoperable Runtimes Community Group (WinterCG) aims to provide a venue for discussing and advocating for common requirements across all web environments. This initiative seeks to make code more portable by implementing the same standards across different environments such as Cloudflare Workers, Node.js, Deno, and web browsers. WinterCG has already started work on several important projects, including the Minimum Common Web API, Web Cryptography Streams, and a subset of fetch() for servers. The group is open to everyone, with all work being done in the open via GitHub.
May 09, 2022
1,964 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has announced the open-sourcing of its Workers runtime under the Apache-2.0 license, addressing concerns from developers about being locked in and needing a local development environment. The move is part of Platform Week and aligns with the company's commitment to supporting the developer community by building on web standards and providing an open source platform for developers to build upon freely.
May 09, 2022
898 words in the original blog post.
Wrangler, Cloudflare's CLI for building Workers, has been publicly released after a full rewrite aimed at improving the developer experience. The new version offers simpler installation, zero-config startup, improved debugging tools, better warnings and errors, support for npm modules, and addresses many outstanding issues. It also introduces local mode, enabling developers to run their code locally on their machines. This release is part of Cloudflare's commitment to continuously improve Wrangler based on user feedback.
May 09, 2022
1,506 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare is hosting its first live customer event since 2019 in New York City for their upcoming "Connect" event. The company's co-founder and CEO, Matthew Prince, will kick off the day with his insights. Attendees can expect to engage in focused conversations about product news, roadmaps, and more. Those interested in attending can register using the code BetterInternet for free admission. Cloudflare plans to host similar events in London, Sydney, and San Francisco later this year.
May 09, 2022
255 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare is hosting a new edition of its Developer Speaker Series on May 9th at 09:00 PT. The series will feature eleven expert web dev speakers discussing various topics in the industry, including testing web applications with Playwright, building serverless APIs, and edge functions. The talks can be watched live on Cloudflare TV or rewatched anytime. Additionally, a Discord channel has been prepared for viewers to follow the live conversation during the event.
May 08, 2022
939 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare's Platform Week focuses on the core value of being principled, aiming to deliver on principles and letting the best solution win. The company wants to break developers out of lock-in situations caused by code or economics. They emphasize freedom of choice for developers and believe in an Internet that allows specialization through the use of the best tools across several offerings. Cloudflare's approach is built on the foundation of open web and open standards, with a focus on data, application connectivity, and programmability. The company encourages developers to build amazing things using various providers dedicated to building a better Internet for all developers.
May 08, 2022
1,131 words in the original blog post.
Carlos Torales has joined Cloudflare as Vice President and Managing Director for Latin America. The company aims to contribute to building a better internet in the region by providing faster, more reliable connections without compromising security. With Latin America being the fourth largest region globally in terms of online users, there is significant opportunity for growth. Torales has previously worked with Cisco Latin America and has experience managing segments sales, product sales specialists teams, and business unit organizations. He sees a great opportunity at Cloudflare to make an impact on supporting Latin American countries through digital transformation.
May 06, 2022
1,050 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare collaborated with Assetnote through their Public Bug Bounty program, discovering and patching vulnerabilities in Cloudflare Pages. The team re-architected the platform to use gVisor for further isolation of builds. They shared information about the research that could help others make their infrastructure more secure and encouraged participation in their bug bounty program. The post detailed six bugs discovered, including command injection vulnerabilities, API key disclosure, Bash path injection, Azure pipeline escape, and Kubernetes control plane secrets exposure. Cloudflare notified customers who might have been exposed to the vulnerabilities and thanked the security researchers for their collaboration.
May 06, 2022
1,749 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare's Project Jengo has awarded $5,000 to Curtis Carter for his contribution in finding prior art related to a patent owned by Sable Networks. This is the second iteration of Project Jengo, which aims to discourage patent trolls from leveraging overbroad and unpracticed patents to extract settlements from operating entities. The project has already awarded $30,000 in total. In addition, Cloudflare has successfully killed off Sable's '932 patent through Inter Partes Review (IPR) process with the US Patent Office. This victory means that Sable Networks has one less patent to leverage for abusing the patent system.
May 05, 2022
1,270 words in the original blog post.
On April 30, 2022, an internet outage occurred in the Russian-occupied city of Kherson, south Ukraine, lasting until May 4. This was the most significant disruption to internet traffic in Kherson since the start of the war. The reasons for the lack of communication were interruptions of fiber-optic trunk lines and disconnection from the power supply of equipment of operators in the region. During this time, Ukrainian Internet users were connected to the Russian network by switching fiber-optic lines and communication stations. This is a gross violation of international law, as explained by Yuriy Shchyhol, head of the organization. The routing path for Khersontelecom showed a shift from several other Ukrainian network providers to a Russian network, AS201776 (Miranda), which also includes AS12389 (Rostelecom). This change impacted data center selection and requests were sent to Cloudflare's Moscow data center. However, traffic started being handled again by the Kyiv and Frankfurt data centers around 06:00 UTC on May 4, as the routing path for AS47598 no longer had Russian networks as upstream providers but instead returned to reaching the Internet through other Ukrainian networks.
May 04, 2022
766 words in the original blog post.
Hannes Gerhart announced that Cloudflare is now giving everyone the ability to proxy DNS wildcard records, a feature previously only available to Enterprise customers. A wildcard DNS record uses an asterisk symbol "*" in the Name field to create one or multiple DNS records for all subdomains not specifically covered by another DNS record. Proxied wildcard DNS records allow HTTP/S requests sent to any subdomain covered by the proxied wildcard DNS record to be proxied by Cloudflare's network, ensuring traffic is routed through the closest Cloudflare data center. This feature is now available on all plan levels and can be easily enabled in the Cloudflare dashboard.
May 03, 2022
1,157 words in the original blog post.
World Press Freedom Day is observed to acknowledge the importance of press freedom and highlight efforts to suppress it. Since its inception in 1993, this day has been crucial for recognizing the role of a free press in society. The ongoing war in Ukraine has led to an increase in cyber attacks on journalists, making their work even more challenging. In response, organizations like Cloudflare's Project Galileo provide security and performance services to protect free expression online. This initiative supports independent media, humanitarian groups, civil rights organizations, and journalists worldwide. The number of applications for Project Galileo has surged since the invasion began, with many requests coming from Ukraine and neighboring countries.
May 03, 2022
1,071 words in the original blog post.
Cloudflare has open-sourced a Cloudflare Worker that makes it easy to transform generic webhook responses into any format required for delivery to various services, such as Rocket Chat. The process involves cloning the webhook relay worker GitHub repository, checking the payload format of the communication tool, setting up wrangler secrets and modifying the worker to accept POST requests with authentication. The converted payload is then sent to the desired service using a POST request. This development aims to make notifications available to any communication service without compatibility concerns.
May 02, 2022
703 words in the original blog post.