June 2023 Summaries

Zaraz, a Cloudflare service that enables faster and safer loading of third-party JavaScript tools, has introduced JSONata integration to provide users with more flexibility in data manipulation. JSONata is a query and transformation language for JSON documents. Users can leverage this feature to process and modify information before sending it to their third-party tools within Cloudflare Zaraz. This integration offers immense power and flexibility as users have access to a fully-featured Worker, opening up endless possibilities.

In a week-long series of updates and product announcements called Speed Week, Cloudflare unveiled new features to improve website performance, security and data privacy for its users. These include full support for HTTP/3 Extensible Priorities, Argo Smart Routing for UDP traffic, improvements in compression algorithms, new performance monitoring tools, advanced API management with Ricochet for API Gateway, enhanced live streaming capabilities with Low-Latency HLS Support for Cloudflare Stream and more.

Debugging networking issues can be challenging, especially when the issue is occurring in the kernel. In this post, we discussed a specific problem where packet segmentation was not working correctly with IPVS's native encapsulation. We outlined our approach to debugging the issue using pwru and kprobe tracepoints to identify where things were going wrong. By analyzing tracepoint output, we discovered that inner MAC header offsets were being calculated incorrectly. We then corrected this in our kernel and observed an immediate improvement in network performance. Finally, we submitted a Linux kernel patch upstream for inclusion in future releases of the kernel.

Cloudflare Radar provides insights into network performance and quality by analyzing Internet Quality Indicators (IQIs) from more than 500 million daily probes across over 240 countries, regions, and territories worldwide. Users can view IQIs such as latency, bandwidth, and connection speed on the Radar website or access them programmatically using the API. Radar also provides a network performance testing tool that allows users to test their own Internet connection

The text provides a comprehensive checklist for transferring domains to Cloudflare Registrar. It covers eligibility requirements, ensuring compatibility with nameservers and TLDs, managing premium domains and internationalized domain names (IDNs), meeting ICANN's rules regarding transfers and registrant information updates, obtaining necessary credentials from current registrars, unlocking domains for transfer, and adding a payment method to Cloudflare. The process of initiating and confirming the transfer is also detailed, including steps like requesting an authorization code, inputting it into Cloudflare's dashboard, confirming contact information, approving transfers with both registrars, monitoring the transfer status in the Cloudflare dashboard, testing websites and emails after the transfer, and potential future project ideas for the transferred domain.

Once.net worked with the Eurovision Song Contest in 2023 to handle real-time voting for fans around the world during the live shows of the contest. To ensure a smooth experience, once.net used Cloudflare's global network and other features such as Tiered Caching and DDoS protection to manage traffic spikes and potential attacks. The platform handled 350 million events, seven million unique users in three hours during the event. Reference(s): https://blog.cloudflare.com/once-net-the-2023-eurovision-song-contest-and-cloudflare/ ```

Cloudflare is introducing a new feature called "End-to-End Brotli Compression," which aims to enhance website performance by compressing assets at the highest possible level. This feature will be available for all customers, and it can provide significant size reductions compared to traditional Gzip compression techniques. The higher levels of compression are particularly effective on SVG or BMP images. By optimizing compression techniques, users can experience improved website performance, faster page load times, and reduced egress fees.

Cloudflare has announced Ricochet for its API Gateway, which aims to enhance API traffic by automatically reducing average latency through intelligent caching of repetitive API requests that would otherwise go to the origin server. The feature is set to launch in 2024 and will make a measurable difference speeding up APIs while being easy to start without requiring much time from developers' teams.

Cloudflare has introduced significant improvements in the performance and efficiency of its Pages product, which is used by developers to deploy their websites easily and securely. Through the use of Workers for Platforms, a technology that enables building complex pipelines with multiple layers of execution, Cloudflare has achieved a reduction in time-to-first-byte (TTFB) latency from 600ms to 60ms. This change not only provides users with a faster web experience but also saves CPU usage and reduces storage requirements on Cloudflare's data centers. The improvements were made possible by migrating all existing Pages deployments to the new infrastructure, which uses Workers for Platforms routing enabled pipelines. The migration was carried out in stages, allowing for A/B testing between the legacy setup and the new one, and ensuring that customer impact in terms of downtime was minimized. The adoption of Workers for Platforms has also led to increased LRU hit rate, which is beneficial for cache performance. Additionally, with the use of Flame technology, Cloudflare aims to shave off even more milliseconds from every request made by users, further enhancing the speed and efficiency of its Pages product. Overall, these enhancements demonstrate Cloudflare's commitment to delivering a faster web experience for all developers and users, while also reducing resource consumption on their data centers.

The Descaler Program, launched by Cloudflare in March 2023, provides an efficient and streamlined process for Zscaler customers to transition their services to Cloudflare One. Through continuous engagement with customers of all sizes, the Descaler tooling has been improved, allowing configuration migrations from Zscaler to Cloudflare to be completed within hours instead of days. The program simplifies migration by exporting current configurations and settings, transforming them into a format compatible with Cloudflare One, and then migrating them into a new account. This accelerated transition helps organizations meet their migration deadlines and reduces manual migration effort without any interruptions to operations. Several customer success stories demonstrate the swiftness of this process, enabling seamless transitions in as little as 24 hours. The Descaler Program is designed to be simple and straightforward, with resources ensuring a smooth transition and technology that aligns with customers' goals.

In preparation for Cloudflare Speed Week 2023, significant improvements were made to the performance of the Cloudflare dashboard. The exercise involved benchmarking the dashboard's Lighthouse Performance scores and implementing measures such as shipping less JavaScript, code splitting top-level boundaries, and optimizing dead-code elimination. Key results show that performance was significantly improved for most users. However, ongoing efforts are planned to continually improve performance, including decoupling signup pages from the main application, redesigning SSO login experience, exploring microfrontends, and edge-side rendering.

Cloudflare has announced support for MASQUE, a new protocol, in the beta version of its consumer WARP iOS app. MASQUE extends HTTP/3 and leverages QUIC transport properties to efficiently proxy IP and UDP traffic, making internet browsing faster and more stable without sacrificing privacy. Currently offered as a free service, Cloudflare plans to integrate MASQUE into its Zero Trust enterprise product suite after learning from operating it on mobile devices at scale. The company is moving away from WireGuard, citing issues such as rigidity and non-standardization of cryptography. Moving towards QUIC-based protocols like MASQUE aligns with the evolving internet standards.

Cloudflare Gateway is a secure web gateway that provides internet security through DNS filtering and content inspection at the network's edge. The performance of this service depends on various factors, including network infrastructure, peering agreements with ISPs and cloud providers, and the physical hardware being used for processing requests. To maintain good performance levels, Cloudflare has built an extensive global network with over 12,000 peered networks that allow users to connect directly to nearby data centers without having to traverse long distances over public internet routes. Additionally, Cloudflare's strong relationships with major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud ensure optimal performance when accessing applications hosted within these platforms. Performance measurements for Cloudflare Gateway are based on HTTP response times, which focus specifically on network latency rather than end-user application metrics or browser rendering times.``` SUMMARY:

In this post, Onur Karaagaoglu shares updates on network performance improvements by Cloudflare. They have been analyzing their own and other networks' performance to identify areas for enhancement. Since July 2022, they started taking a closer look at specific networks needing improvement, resulting in significant progress. As of May 31, 2023, Cloudflare is now the fastest provider for 46% of networks, up from 33%. Their tooling and processes involve Real User Measurements (RUM), analyzing performance metrics like TCP Connection Time and Time to First Byte, as well as their Performance Benchmarks Dashboard. They actively monitor and work on improving these metrics, using three categories of actions: establishing peering, expanding compute capacity, and applying traffic engineering. Their goal is to constantly optimize their infrastructure and become the fastest provider everywhere.

Cloudflare has released a beta version of its Digital Experience Monitoring (DEX) product, which provides businesses with tools for monitoring and enhancing the digital experience of their employees. The DEX platform offers insights into internet security solution performance, device fleet statuses, and application monitoring, using data from Cloudflare's global network. Synthetic Application Monitoring enables companies to schedule HTTP GET tests targeting applications at specific intervals, helping them identify trends, spot anomalies, and optimize application performance. Fleet Status provides real-time insights into the status of client devices enrolled in Cloudflare WARP, aiding administrators in proactively addressing connectivity issues. Future enhancements to DEX will include additional visibility features and test customization options.

During Cloudflare's 2023 Developer Week, the company announced Constellation, a set of APIs that enable running fast, low-latency inference tasks using pre-trained machine learning/AI models directly on their network. One month after launching this feature, three new updates have been introduced: increased model size limit from 10 MB to 50 MB, tensor caching for better network latency and faster inference times, and the addition of XGBoost runtime support. Constellation allows developers to deploy globally distributed machine learning applications on Cloudflare's network.

Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) can improve performance metrics by serving cached sites, however it currently does not have a way to prioritize images over other assets or dynamically rewrite HTML. We recommend testing with Workers or using Cloudflare Snippets and sharing your experiences.

Cloudflare has announced that its new feature called Snippets is now available in alpha and will be opening access to a waiting list in the coming weeks. Snippets are small pieces of user-created JavaScript run by Cloudflare before serving a website, API or application to users. They enable more complex customizations compared to existing rule products and offer various features such as operating within the Ruleset Engine and being cumulative in nature. Unlike Workers, Snippets are lightweight and have limitations on execution time, memory, and package size. However, they are available across all plan levels at no extra cost, making them a valuable addition to Cloudflare's offerings. Users can write, preview, deploy, and test Snippets in the dashboard or via API/Terraform. The company is looking forward to seeing innovative use cases that customers will create with Snippets.

Kinsta, a hosting service provider, uses Google Cloud Platform's Premium Tier Network and C2 Machines to deliver content with speed and security. They also use Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV for optimized caching rules of static and dynamic content. In early 2023, they doubled down on using Cloudflare cache wrangling to make caches more responsive to client-side configuration changes while reducing backend work. They increased the share of cached customer data by 56.3% between October 2022 and March 2023. By leveraging Workers KV, they can programmatically customize every request and response with minimal effort and lower latency. They have also implemented a microcache strategy for Workers KV data to save on reading operations and improve performance.

Cloudflare has announced a new performance improvement for its Workers KV offering, which is designed to significantly reduce latency for developers using the service. The update involves introducing a decoupled cache TTL and consistency parameters, as well as improvements in consistency and worst-case latency. These updates are expected to benefit all users without requiring any redeployment or changes to their existing applications. The new caching layer built by Cloudflare helps developers reduce latency while maintaining data consistency across regions. The architecture is designed to be flexible enough to add further enhancements in the future, including features such as setting the consistency TTL parameter for sub one minute consistency, a best effort global purge feature, and exposing this new caching layer as a general Worker binding anyone can use within a Worker in front of their own service or to put in front of their Worker. Workers KV is a native API provided by Cloudflare that enables any Worker script to read, write, list, and manage storage. It also offers a REST API for interaction with HTTP requests from any client capable of making such requests. The Cloudflare Dashboard provides an easy way for users to create, list, and delete keys for use with the rest of their Workers setup. With these updates, Cloudflare aims to provide developers using its Workers KV service with a faster, more efficient experience that will help them build better applications more quickly.

In this blog post, Cloudflare discusses their work on improving their coreless cache purge system for their edge network. The new system includes an entrypoint worker that handles authentication and validation of requests from users and then dispatches them to the appropriate data center(s). They also describe a new distribution system using Durable Objects which helps reduce latency and improve throughput in processing these requests. Additionally, they mention their ongoing work on making flexible cache purge fully coreless as well. Reference(s): - [Cloudflare](https://blog.cloudflare.com/coreless-cache-purges-part-2/)

Cloudflare is faster than Zscaler for both Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) and Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) services across multiple cloud regions and service providers. In the tests conducted, Cloudflare was faster in 93% of tested cloud regions for ZTNA and 100% for RBI.

Cloudflare has relaunched Turpentine and introduced a new Migration Hub to simplify the process of translating Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) into Cloudflare Workers for Content Delivery Network (CDN) migrations. The hub features brand-new migration guides, enabling users to compare Cloudflare's Rules or Workers with VCL or XML configurations and access mappings between different products across vendors. Additionally, the company has established a Professional Services group to assist customers in transitioning smoothly to Cloudflare's first-class products.

Extensible Priorities is a new standard for prioritizing data transfer in HTTP/3 connections. It enables clients to communicate their priorities for different resources, allowing servers to optimize bandwidth usage by serving more important requests first. This can significantly improve webpage loading times and user experiences. The standard also allows servers to override client signals, providing powerful tuning possibilities for proxies or other middleware components.

Cloudflare has introduced new analytics tools called Timing Insights, which aim to help users understand and improve their website's Time To First Byte (TTFB). The tools provide insights into the time taken by various components of a web page load, such as DNS resolution and origin server response. Users can query these metrics using Cloudflare's GraphQL API or explore them via the Observatory dashboard in the future. This will help users identify performance bottlenecks and optimize their website's loading times. SUMMARY: Cloudflare introduces Timing Insights to improve website TTFB

Cloudflare has introduced Performance Experiments in its Observatory platform to allow website owners to safely test and implement code optimizations without affecting their live sites or user experience. The new feature enables users to input desired codes, run Observatory's testing suite, and observe the impact on their Lighthouse score before deciding to implement the changes. This approach helps users identify performance improvements while minimizing the risk of outages or other issues. Observatory integrates Real-User Monitoring (RUM) data and synthetic tests for easier website performance monitoring and optimization. The platform also offers tailored Cloudflare settings based on Lighthouse test insights and RUM data, helping users boost their performance score effortlessly with a single click.

Cloudflare Observatory is designed to help website owners measure and optimize their site's performance. With new features like Google Lighthouse integration, Real User Monitoring (RUM), more tests allowed, and a comprehensive testing suite, users can now gain valuable insights into their website's performance from both a synthetic and real-world perspective. This makes it easier for website owners to understand how changes and optimizations affect the end-user experience and make informed decisions to enhance their site's performance.

Cloudflare has announced the introduction of traffic acceleration to customer's UDP traffic, which can improve latency for UDP-based applications like video games, voice calls, and video meetings by up to 17%. The company is extending its Argo Smart Routing technology used in HTTP and TCP traffic to UDP. This will help reduce latency, packet loss, and jitter in gaming, live audio/video applications, and real-time communications. In testing from Tokyo to Iowa, round-trip-time was reduced by up to 17.3% on average with the feature enabled.

TTFB (Time To First Byte) is a metric that measures the duration between the user or client making an HTTP request and the first byte of the page being received by the client's browser. It can be influenced by server speed, network latency, and other factors. However, it does not fully represent the end-user experience. LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) is a more comprehensive metric for evaluating webpage performance. LCP measures how long it takes to load the largest image or text block visible in the browser. A lower LCP score indicates faster loading of the webpage's main content. FID (First Input Delay) is another more user-centric performance metric. It measures the time from when a user first interacts with a website (like clicking on a link, etc.) until when the website can respond back to this interaction.

Google has announced that Interaction to Next Paint (INP) will become a Core Web Vital in 2024, joining First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). INP measures the time it takes for a user's interaction with a webpage to be displayed on their screen. It is considered a more comprehensive measure of interactivity than FID, which only measures the input delay after a user's first interaction with a page. By including INP as a Core Web Vital, Google aims to encourage websites to improve their interactive performance beyond the initial load of the site. To prepare for this change, website owners can enable real user monitoring (RUM) providers like Cloudflare's Web Analytics or Observatory products, which provide insights into how users interact with webpages and where improvements can be made.

Stream Live introduces support for Low-Latency HTTP Live Streaming (LL-HLS) in a closed beta, offering a faster streaming experience with reduced latency from highs of around 30 seconds to less than 10 in many cases. LL-HLS is an extension of HLS and helps reduce glass-to-glass latency. This feature enables more interactive applications like Q&A or chat, live events, sports, gaming, etc., with less than 10-second latency. Stream Live's pricing includes simple, predictable costs: \$5 per 1,000 minutes of video stored per month and \$1 per 1,000 minutes of video viewed per month. The beta version is currently available for testing non-production workloads. After the beta period, LL-HLS will be generally available to all new and existing Stream subscriptions with no pricing changes or contract requirements.

Cloudflare has expanded its global network to over 12,000 Internet networks in more than 300 cities worldwide. The network runs every service in every data center, ensuring consistent user experience regardless of location. This growth is vital for providing new and efficient ways to serve customers and enhancing the overall internet experience. Key benefits include reduced latency, improved interconnections, and increased resilience. Cloudflare continues to expand strategically, focusing on underserved markets and enhancing network performance.

Cloudflare's Smart Hints will leverage advanced algorithms and machine learning to analyze real-time data on website performance and automatically adjust resource loading priorities to optimize page load times for users. This innovative solution will use a combination of Early Hints, Fetch Priorities, and other optimization techniques to improve the overall user experience without requiring any additional work or configuration from developers. By continuously analyzing webpage behavior, Smart Hints can dynamically adapt loading priorities to ensure that critical resources are always given the highest priority during page load. Smart Hints is built on top of our vast Real User Measurements (RUM) data and advanced machine learning algorithms to analyze real-time user interactions with websites across the Internet, identify performance bottlenecks, and provide intelligent suggestions for optimizing loading priorities. This will enable developers to focus on creating great content while Cloudflare's technology takes care of delivering it as fast and efficiently as possible. In order to make Smart Hints work seamlessly, we have also built in a comprehensive suite of testing and validation tools that allow us to verify the effectiveness of our optimization algorithms before deploying them to live sites. By continuously monitoring and analyzing performance data from thousands of websites, Cloudflare can quickly identify trends and patterns in user behavior and use this information to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of Smart Hints over time. To get started with Smart Hints, developers simply need to enable it on their website through the Cloudflare dashboard or API. Once enabled, Smart Hints will automatically begin analyzing website performance data and making intelligent suggestions for optimizing loading priorities based on real-time user interactions. As new trends and patterns emerge in user behavior, Smart Hints will continue to evolve and adapt its optimization algorithms to ensure that it remains at the cutting edge of performance technology. In conclusion, Cloudflare's Smart Hints represents a major leap forward in website performance optimization by providing an intelligent, automated solution for optimizing resource loading priorities. By leveraging advanced machine learning algorithms and our vast RUM data, we are able to provide developers with powerful tools that can help them deliver faster, more responsive websites without requiring any additional work or configuration on their part. With Smart Hints, developers can focus on creating great content while Cloudflare's technology takes care of delivering it as fast and efficiently as possible. 1Yes, scripts and stylesheets can also be placed within the <body> section, but their primary location is in the <head>.``` SUMMARY:

Bot management is a critical component of our platform that helps detect and mitigate bots performing malicious activities on the web. By optimizing memory allocation in the Rust implementation of bot management, we were able to improve performance significantly. Memory allocations are an expensive operation as they require accessing the heap, which can result in cache misses and increased latency. We used several techniques to reduce the number of memory allocations: 1. Avoid unnecessary buffer copies by passing references instead of values. 2. Rewrite algorithms to operate on stack-allocated data whenever possible. 3. Test for zero allocation using dhat, an automated testing tool that counts memory allocations. 4. Optimize decision trees for single-document evaluation rather than multiple documents at once. This reduces the need for additional vector allocations. 5. Reuse buffers by passing references instead of owned data structures like Vecs or Strings. By implementing these optimizations, we reduced P50 latency from 388us to 309us (20%), and P99 latency from 940us to 813us (14%). These improvements make our bot management module faster and more efficient, enhancing the overall performance of our platform. In conclusion, optimizing memory allocation can lead to significant performance gains in real-world applications like our bot management module. By focusing on reducing unnecessary allocations and reusing buffers where possible, we were able to achieve substantial improvements in latency without compromising functionality or readability.

In this article, we discussed how Cloudflare developed a new design for its Bot Management platform using Rust and machine learning features. We explored the various challenges faced by their previous system and delved into the innovative solutions they implemented to overcome these hurdles. Key highlights of the redesign include: - The introduction of mmap-sync, a newly developed Rust package that provides efficient memory-mapped file operations with wait-free synchronization. - The development of two new components - the bliss service and library - designed for optimal batch processing of vast data quantities and minimal resource usage, respectively. The system redesign brought about significant improvements in latency and machine learning feature availability, as well as enhanced efficiency in resource utilization. Overall, this upgrade has led to a more robust and performant Bot Management platform at Cloudflare.

Cloudflare has developed a new technology called Orpheus that automatically saves user requests when they fail due to network problems on the Internet. The technology works by identifying congested routes and re-routing traffic to avoid these failures, ensuring a more reliable internet experience for end users. It also helps maintain consistent performance levels across different types of connections such as HTTP, TCP, and WebSocket protocols. Orpheus is an expansion of Argo Smart Routing which was already used by Cloudflare customers to optimize web performance.

In this week's series of blogs we will be focusing on performance improvements across multiple product areas including web performance, Zero Trust security, and cache purge. We'll explain why the commonly used metric "Time To First Byte" (TTFB) is not sufficient for understanding and improving overall website performance experience. In this week's series of blogs we will be focusing on performance improvements across multiple product areas including web performance, Zero Trust security, and cache purge. We'll explain why "Time To First Byte" (TFFBB) commonly used metric is not sufficient for understanding and improving the overall website performance experience.

Over the last several years, governments in countries within the Middle East/Northern Africa (MENA) region have implemented widespread nationwide shutdowns to prevent cheating on nationwide academic exams, despite no clear evidence of their effectiveness. These shutdowns cause financial losses estimated in millions of US dollars. In June 2023, Iraq has implemented a series of multi-hour shutdowns that are expected to continue through mid-July, while Algeria has taken similar actions during baccalaureate exams. Similar actions were observed in Iraq, Syria, Sudan, and Algeria in 2022 and in Syria and Sudan in 2021. These shutdowns have a significant impact on internet connectivity and traffic, with Iraq experiencing disruptions between 04:00 - 08:00 local time, while the autonomous Kurdistan region within Iraq implemented its own shorter disruptions between 06:30 - 07:30 or 06:40 - 08:30 local time. Algeria is following a similar pattern to previous years, with two multi-hour internet disruptions each day between June 11 and June 15. Digital rights organizations have launched the #NoExamShutdown campaign on social media platforms, urging MENA governments to end this practice and highlighting its negative impact on human rights and essential activities. Cloudflare Radar will continue monitoring such disruptions.

In this post, we explore how we built a high-performance GraphQL query parser at the edge with Rust and without allocating any heap memory. The need for such a parser emerged when we wanted to provide more visibility into our customers’ traffic patterns by calculating depth and size of their received GraphQL queries. We were able to achieve this while keeping the parsing time under 50 microseconds for p95, which is an impressive performance feat. We started by converting raw GraphQL input into a list of lexical tokens according to the GraphQL grammar using Rust and then built our validation engine to calculate query depth and size in one pass. This allowed us to provide valuable data insights that can be used to protect against potential security threats or create more effective rate limiting policies for API Gateway customers. We have also started integrating this functionality with existing features such as complexity-based rate limiting, allowing customization of endpoint-specific protections, and providing data insights on the relationship between query complexity and response time from the customer origin. These improvements will enable our users to better manage their GraphQL APIs' security and performance while reducing operational overhead. Overall, this project highlights the power of Rust as a language for building efficient solutions like Cloudflare’s API Gateway.

On June 08, 2023 at 3:00PM, Samuel Vieira and Paul East announced that Cloudflare Area 1 has obtained a SOC 2 Type II report. This cloud-native email security service helps protect against advanced threats such as spear phishing and BEC. The report covers the period from January 1 to March 31, 2023, assessing the effectiveness of 70 implemented controls for Security, Confidentiality, and Availability. Cloudflare Area 1 plans to expand its scope for the Global Cloud Platform SOC 2 Type II report later this year. Existing customers can obtain a copy through the Cloudflare Dashboard, while new customers may request one from their sales representative.

Introducing our latest feature - Waiting Room Analytics, which provides deep insights into the user experience within a Cloudflare Waiting Room. This new analytics tool helps you better understand and optimize your traffic distribution strategy based on data-driven decisions. Waiting Room Analytics is designed to provide actionable insights into how users interact with your website during a traffic surge. It includes metrics such as total active users, estimated wait time, total queued users, session duration, time spent in queue, and time spent on origin. With these powerful analytics tools at your fingertips, you can quickly identify trends and patterns that may indicate areas for improvement or optimization within your waiting room setup. Additionally, this data can be used to inform future decisions about how best to manage traffic distribution during peak usage periods. Waiting Room Analytics is available now for all Business and Enterprise customers who have a Cloudflare Waiting Room enabled on their account. To start using this feature, simply navigate to the "Analytics" tab within your dashboard and select "Waiting Room." From there, you can view detailed reports and customize various filters and settings to gain even more granular insights into user behavior during traffic surges. Overall, Waiting Room Analytics is a game-changer for businesses looking to better manage their online presence amidst rapidly changing digital landscapes. By leveraging this powerful new tool, you can ensure that your website remains accessible and responsive to users at all times - no matter how much traffic comes your way! Don't wait - start exploring the benefits of Waiting Room Analytics today!

HTTP/3 is becoming more popular as a web protocol and its adoption has seen significant growth in the past year, particularly among mobile browsers like Chrome Mobile and Safari. While major search engines and social media platforms continue to use primarily HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2 for their site crawling bots, there are some indications that usage of HTTP/3 may be on the rise. Overall, continued growth in HTTP/3 adoption could have significant implications for internet performance and security. Reference(s): https://blog.cloudflare.com/http-3-traffic-growth-in-2023/

To celebrate its ninth anniversary of protecting vulnerable voices on the internet through the Project Galileo initiative, Cloudflare has released a new report revealing that they mitigated 20 billion attacks against organizations protected under the program between July 1, 2022, and May 5, 2023. The company is also extending its partnership with CyberPeace Institute to provide Area 1 tools to Development and Humanitarian Organizations (DHOs) as part of Project Galileo. Additionally, Cloudflare has developed a Zero Trust Roadmap for high-risk organizations and released new case studies on the Social Impact Portal to help organizations stay secure with their security offerings. The company will be attending Access Now's RightsCon conference in Costa Rica, bringing together many of its Project Galileo civil society partners. Cloudflare plans to continue expanding protections for at-risk groups around the world through Project Galileo and other initiatives.

Cloudflare Workers is a powerful platform to build and deploy serverless functions, allowing developers to execute custom code in response to various events triggered by users interacting with their websites. By integrating Zaraz, the data management layer for your website, you can pass important user context from the edge to your workers, enabling more complex operations such as aggregation of data or enrichment of user profiles with external APIs. In this tutorial, we've seen how to define a Worker Variable and use it within our code. We've also provided two examples: translating a GTM Custom JavaScript variable into a Cloudflare Zaraz Worker variable, and enriching user information with data coming from an API. To start using Worker Variables, you first need to create a new Cloudflare Worker and configure it with the appropriate permissions. Then, you can easily integrate them within your Zaraz tools configuration. Overall, Cloudflare Workers offer great flexibility and power for building advanced data processing capabilities in serverless environments, making it easier than ever to develop complex applications that require custom logic at different points in their workflow.

Cloudflare has introduced a new feature called Regional Tiered Cache for its Enterprise customers. This feature is designed to enhance the performance of assets while reducing connections and load on customer origins. When enabled, lower-tier data centers will reach out to regional tiers in their proximity before reaching out to upper-tier data centers in different regions. The new Regional Tiered Cache improves upon Smart Tiered Cache by adding an additional tier in each region around the world, increasing the chances that content is available nearby and reducing latency for cache misses. Enterprise customers can enable this feature through either the Cloudflare Dashboard or API. This update aims to provide better performance for websites with upper-tiers located in one or two regions, but it will not benefit those using Generic Global Tiered Cache which has multiple upper-tiers across various regions. Cloudflare plans to continue developing and improving their CDN offerings, and interested parties can apply for positions within the company.``` SUMMARY: Cloudflare introduces Regional Tiered Cache feature for Enterprise customers to improve asset performance while reducing connections and load on customer origins.

Cloudflare has announced its plans to deprecate Railgun, a reverse proxy service for optimizing web performance and reducing latency, on January 31, 2024. The company offers alternatives such as Cloudflare Tunnel, Network Interconnect (CNI), Bandwidth Alliance, R2 storage product, and Argo Smart Routing technology to address the challenges that Railgun addressed for customers. The decision is based on maintaining a platform that adapts to evolving needs of various services offered by Cloudflare while considering the limitations of Railgun and its supporting tools. Customers have eight months from today's announcement to migrate away from Railgun, with support ending on February 1, 2024. Current Railgun connections will continue functioning during this migration window. Customers can reach out to their Customer Success team for additional help or join the dedicated forum room for more information and discussions about the deprecation plan and timeline. Cloudflare thanks its customers who initially chose Railgun as a solution for accelerating their applications and websites, and looks forward to providing them with new features that will enhance their performance in reaching their audience. Question: Why is Cloudflare deprecating Railgun?