Our customers are accustomed to us launching new services, features, and functionality at a feverish pace, but recently, we’ve been especially active. This week we celebrated our 8th Birthday Week by announcing new offerings that benefit our customers and the global Internet community. Our mission is to help build a better Internet, and we’re convinced that launching new capabilities that benefit not only our customers, but also the broader Internet overall, is the best way to fulfill our mission.
Helping build a better Internet, one launch at a time
As an organization, we could choose to celebrate Cloudflare’s birthday in lots of different ways (a press release, a company party, or fun gifts for all our employees). But at Cloudflare, we have a unique birthday tradition: we roll up our sleeves and give our customers and the Internet community a new capability (i.e. a gift) every day of our birthday week.
Some of this past week’s launches have been entirely new offerings, like providing key-value storage across Cloudflare’s global cloud network with Cloudflare Workers KV. Other birthday week launches help improve the overall Internet ecosystem: the Bandwidth Alliance reduces data transfer charges from major cloud hosts and Cloudflare Registrar reduces the hidden fees typical of many domain registration providers. Other new offerings are focused on improving the Internet’s security and performance and are completely free to use. For example, Encrypted SNI helps fix one of the security holes in the Internet, and our support of the QUIC protocol promises to help make mobile browsing faster.
We believe the only real way to help build a better Internet is to keep innovating, keep building, and keep launching -- every single day. In fact, our prelude to this year’s Birthday Week was Crypto Week, a full week dedicated to announcing new technologies that use cryptography to make the Internet better. No promises, but it is entirely imaginable that in coming years Cloudflare won’t just be celebrating a Birthday Week, but we’ll be launching new capabilities every day of a Birthday Month!
Below is a wrap-up of the capabilities launched this past week.
Birthday Week Announcements
Day 1: ENCRYPTED SNI
Cloudflare is fixing one of the core Internet bugs by keeping hostnames private using Encrypted Server Name Indication (SNI). All domains on Cloudflare using our authoritative name servers get Encrypted SNI enabled by default. Explore the protection of Encrypted SNI.
Day 2: SUPPORT FOR QUIC (Beta)
Cloudflare is looking forward to the standardization of the new QUIC protocol being developed by the IETF. Applications are being accepted for early access to our test implementation that allows developers to validate their QUIC deployments before supported web browsers become available. Learn more about QUIC.
Day 3: BANDWIDTH ALLIANCE
The Bandwidth Alliance is a group of forward-thinking cloud and networking companies that are committed to discounting or waiving data transfer (also known as bandwidth) fees for shared customers. Learn how the Bandwidth Alliance reduces costs.
Day 4: CLOUDFLARE REGISTRAR (Early Access)
Cloudflare Registrar lets you securely register and manage your domain name with transparent, no-markup pricing that eliminates surprise renewal fees and hidden add-on charges. Be one of the first to transfer your domain to Cloudflare. Register for early access to the Cloudflare Registrar.
Day 5: WORKERS KV (Beta)
Cloudflare Workers KV provides access to a secure low latency key-value store at all 153 Cloudflare data centers. Developers can use Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV to augment existing applications or to build entirely new applications on top of Cloudflare's global cloud network. Workers KV scales seamlessly to support applications serving dozens or millions of users. Explore how Workers KV allows for serverless key-value storage.
You’ve been hearing a lot from us; now hear from those who inspire us!
Another way we’ll soon be serving the Internet community is by hosting the fourth annual Cloudflare Internet Summit next week at our San Francisco office on Thursday, October 4th. We don’t spend any time talking about Cloudflare at the Internet Summit. Instead we facilitate discussions with the people who inspire and challenge us. The Internet Summit focuses on the future of the Internet and will feature a series of fireside chats, intimate panel discussions, and lively conversations from some of the brightest thought leaders, executives, entrepreneurs, researchers, and operators. Tickets are almost sold out, so register for the Cloudflare Internet Summit now or plan to tune in to our live stream!
