This week we celebrated Cloudflare’s 9th birthday by launching a variety of new offerings that support our mission: to help build a better Internet.  Below is a summary recap of how we celebrated Birthday Week 2019.

Every day Cloudflare protects over 20 million Internet properties from malicious bots, and this week you were invited to join in the fight!  Now you can enable “bot fight mode” in the Firewall settings of the Cloudflare Dashboard and we’ll start deploying CPU intensive code to traffic originating from malicious bots.  This wastes the bots’ CPU resources and makes it more difficult and costly for perpetrators to deploy malicious bots at scale. We’ll also share the IP addresses of malicious bot traffic with our Bandwidth Alliance partners, who can help kick malicious bots offline. Join us in the battle against bad bots – and, as you can read here – you can help the climate too!

Speed matters, and if you manage a website or app, you want to make sure that you’re delivering a high performing website to all of your global end users. Now you can enable Browser Insights in the Speed section of the Cloudflare Dashboard to analyze website performance from the perspective of your users’ web browsers.  

Several months ago we announced WARP, a free mobile app purpose-built to address the security and performance challenges of the mobile Internet, while also respecting user privacy.  After months of testing and development, this week we (finally) rolled out WARP to approximately 2 million wait-list customers.  We also enabled WARP+, a WARP experience that uses Argo routing technology to route your mobile traffic across faster, less-congested, routes through the Internet.  WARP and WARP+ are now available in the iOS and Android App stores and we can’t wait for you to give it a try!

Last year we announced early support for QUIC, a UDP based protocol that aims to make everything on the Internet work faster, with built-in encryption. The IETF subsequently decided that QUIC should be the foundation of the next generation of the HTTP protocol, HTTP/3. This week, Cloudflare was the first to introduce support for HTTP/3 in partnership with Google Chrome and Mozilla.

Finally, to wrap up our birthday week announcements, we announced Workers Sites. The Workers serverless platform continues to grow and evolve, and every day we discover new and innovative ways to help developers build and optimize their applications. Workers Sites enables developers to easily deploy lightweight static sites across Cloudflare’s global cloud platform without having to build out the traditional backend server infrastructure to support these sites.

We look forward to Birthday Week every year, as a chance to showcase some of our exciting new offerings — but we all know building a better Internet is about more than one week.  It’s an effort that takes place all year long, and requires the help of our partners, employees and especially you — our customers. Thank you for being a customer, providing valuable feedback and helping us stay focused on our mission to help build a better Internet.

Can’t get enough of this week’s announcements, or want to learn more? Register for next week’s Birthday Week Recap webinar to get the inside scoop on every announcement.

When it comes to overall awareness of Cloudflare, it seems most folks fall into one of three camps: 1) those who don’t know much about Cloudflare at all, 2) those who are familiar with one or two of Cloudflare’s many solutions (i.e. DDoS protection, caching, DNS, etc.), and finally, 3) those who understand the full breadth and scope of Cloudflare’s global cloud network. This latter group of folks are especially excited about the broad scope of Cloudflare’s mission, which is: “to help build a better Internet.” Last week our co-founder Michelle Zatlyn explained in a blog post what this mission actually means:

“Our mission at Cloudflare is to help build a better Internet. That is a big, broad mission that means many things. It means that we push to make Internet properties faster. It means respecting individual’s privacy. It means making it harder for malicious actors to do bad things. It means helping to make the Internet more reliable. It means supporting new Internet standards and protocols, and making sure they are accessible to everyone. It means democratizing technology and making sure the widest possible group has access to it. It means increasing value for our community, while decreasing their costs.”

(See Michelle’s full blog post for more color on each of these areas).

You’ll observe that all of our recent Crypto Week and Birthday Week announcements delivered on the tenets of our bold mission. We’ve been very encouraged that our customers are excited about the progress we’ve made so far. We’re confident we’re moving in the right direction, but we know that lots of people still haven’t even heard of us yet, and that not enough people yet know how Cloudflare can help their users’ internet experience be better. We’re excited to invite more people to learn about Cloudflare and join with us (as customers and partners) in helping  build a better Internet.

This week we’re starting to experiment with a new campaign that aims to communicate the scope of Cloudflare’s mission to an ever-growing audience.

This campaign is all about being bold, provocative, and declarative in proclaiming who we are and what we do. After all, Cloudflare isn’t just another technology company — we’re on a very real mission to help build a better Internet. And we’re inviting folks to join us!

Our customers know that Cloudflare is a technology disruptor and democratizer, taking complex and sophisticated cloud network technologies, and making them available to organizations both large and small. Our global cloud network not only serves some of the world’s largest enterprises, but we also proudly serve minority groups, the disenfranchised, and sometimes, even the rebellious. The nature of our role in the Internet ecosystem sometimes puts us in the middle of criticism and controversy but we don’t shrink from the responsibility that rests on our shoulders.

We think it is appropriate that we introduce Cloudflare loudly and unapologetically. The messages in this campaign are direct and provocative. These do NOT look like polished, boring, corporate IT ads. Instead, they look a bit raw and maybe even slightly irreverent. They’ve been created fast and furiously by a team which is inspired to make our message known and to make a difference.  

Below are some of campaign assets you may start seeing.

Wild Postings across Manhattan

Muni bus wraps in San Francisco

Civic Center Muni takeover

Select billboard placements in San Francisco

Forbes Takeover

We plan to start testing this campaign in two US cities (San Francisco and New York), as well as a number of US national publications (digital versions of the New York Times, Forbes, others), social media, and other digital channels. If you’re in SF and NYC, you may see a few billboards and/or posters around town.

If you see any of these messages out in the wild, we’d love to see a photo/screenshot and hear what you think. Let us know via social media by tagging #BetterInternet.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 buy a domain or transfer your domain to Cloudflare. Register for early access to the Cloudflare Registrar.

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.

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!