DNSSEC is Open for Beta
10/20/2015
Since January, CloudFlare has been running a small, private beta for DNSSEC. Starting today, the DNSSEC beta is open for everyone. ...
A Look at the New WordPress Brute Force Amplification Attack
10/16/2015
Recently, a new brute force attack method for WordPress instances was identified by Sucuri. This latest technique allows attackers to try a large number of WordPress username and password login combinations in a single HTTP request....
Single RX queue kernel bypass in Netmap for high packet rate networking
10/09/2015
In a previous post we discussed the performance limitations of the Linux kernel network stack. We detailed the available kernel bypass techniques allowing user space programs to receive packets with high throughput. ...
Doubling the speed of jpegtran with SIMD
10/08/2015
It is no secret that at CloudFlare we put a great effort into accelerating our customers' websites. One way to do it is to reduce the size of the images on the website. This is what our Polish product is for. ...
Manchester, UK: CloudFlare's 63rd data center
10/06/2015
Our new point of presence in Manchester, UK brings the CloudFlare network to 63 points of presence across 33 countries. In other words, the sun never sets across the CloudFlare network. ...
Happy 5th Birthday, CloudFlare!
09/28/2015
Today is September 27, 2015. It's a rare Super Blood Moon. And it's also CloudFlare's birthday. CloudFlare launched 5 years ago today. It was a Monday. While Michelle, Lee, and I had high expectations, we would never have imagined what's happened since then....
Mobile Ad Networks as DDoS Vectors: A Case Study
09/25/2015
CloudFlare servers are constantly being targeted by DDoS'es. We see everything from attempted DNS reflection attacks to L7 HTTP floods involving large botnets....
iOS 9 — How did the launch really go?
09/22/2015
On September 16 2015 at 10:00AM PST, Apple released their latest update to the iPhone: iOS 9. For several days after the announcement, ISPs and customers reported problems downloading iOS 9 due to overloaded servers....
Why we raised $110m from Fidelity, Google, Microsoft, Baidu and Qualcomm
09/22/2015
The past few years have been marked by tremendous growth for CloudFlare. At the time of our last fundraising in December 2012, CloudFlare was a team of 37 operating a network in 23 cities and 15 countries—today we number over 200 with a presence in 62 cities and 33 countries....
Announcing CloudFlare’s Internet Summit - And How to Get an Invitation
09/17/2015
Five years ago next week, CloudFlare launched its service to the public. We’re celebrating our birthday in a variety of ways, including holding our first-ever Internet Summit on Thursday, September 24th....
Cloudflare + WHMCS: faster websites for your customers
09/16/2015
We’re at the cPanel Conference in Denver this week, so feel free to drop by our booth and say hello. It’s a great opportunity to connect with our partners and better understand their needs....
How We Extended CloudFlare's Performance and Security Into Mainland China
09/14/2015
CloudFlare launched five years ago. Within a year of our launch, the biggest surprise was the strong global demand for our service. From nearly the beginning, China was the second largest source of traffic by country to our network, behind only the United States....
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: CloudFlare's 45th data center
09/11/2015
Kuala Lumpur joins the CloudFlare network as our 45th global point of presence (PoP). While this latest deployment comes only a day after the announcement of our expansion in Berlin (back-to-back!), it's been a long three years since we last crossed a new border in Asia. ...
Berlin, Germany: CloudFlare's 44th Data Center
09/10/2015
Our data center in Berlin is our 3rd in Germany following Frankfurt and Düsseldorf, 14th in Europe, and 44th globally. Berlin is of considerable importance not just because it is the capital of Europe's most populous country....
Weird bug of the day: Twitter in-app browser can't visit site
09/08/2015
We keep a close eye on tweets that mention CloudFlare because sometimes we get early warning about odd errors that we are not seeing ourselves through our monitoring systems. Towards the end of August we saw a small number of tweets like this one:...
Kernel bypass
09/07/2015
In two previous posts we've discussed how to receive 1M UDP packets per second and how to reduce the round trip time. We did the experiments on Linux and the performance was very good considering it's a general purpose operating system....
Test all the things: IPv6, HTTP/2, SHA-2
09/02/2015
CloudFlare constantly tries to stay on the leading edge of Internet technologies so that our customers' web sites use the latest, fastest, most secure protocols. For example, in the past we've enabled IPv6 and SPDY/3.1....
Simple Helix chooses CloudFlare to ignite white-hot Magento performance
09/01/2015
Some months ago, we made a big bet on partnering with CloudFlare for performance improvements and website security for our Magento hosting customers. Customer experience is core to our business and relying on another company is a major deal. ...
Railgun v5 has landed: better, faster, lighter
08/31/2015
Three years ago we launched Railgun, CloudFlare's origin network optimizer. Railgun allows us to cache the uncacheable to accelerate the connection between CloudFlare and our customers' origin servers. ...
SXSW Interactive 2016: Vote for CloudFlare’s Submissions
08/27/2015
It’s that time of year again, when the end of summer is in sight, students are back in school, football is on TV again, and your social feeds are flooded with “vote for my panel at SXSW” updates. ...
Mombasa, Kenya: CloudFlare's 43rd data center
08/27/2015
Only two weeks after the announcement of our four new points of presence (PoPs) in the Middle East, it is with much hullabaloo that we announce our 43rd PoP, and second in Africa following Johannesburg, in Mombasa, Kenya (a.k.a. “The Castle”)....
Introducing a Powerful Way to Purge Cache on CloudFlare: Purge by Cache-Tag
08/19/2015
Today CloudFlare is introducing a new way to purge the cache using Cache-Tags. Cache-Tags are assigned to cached content via a Cache-Tag response header, and are stored as metadata with cached objects so that global purges take only seconds, targeting a granular, finite set of cached objects....
Ensuring the web is for everyone
08/17/2015
This is the text of an internal email I sent at CloudFlare that we thought worth sharing more widely. I annotated it a bit with links that weren't in the original....
Dear Internet, Send Us Your Videos
08/14/2015
CloudFlare turns 5 years old this September. It's been an amazing ride since our launch. Before we launched at TechCrunch Disrupt on September 27, 2010, we'd signed up about 1,000 beta customers. It took us nine months to get those first customers. ...
Now serving the Middle East: 4 new data centers, partnerships
08/10/2015
Our last embarkation into a new geography coincided with a significant milestone: our 30th data center (and first in Africa) in Johannesburg, South Africa. And as we march past number 40, we’re proud to announce yet another. ...
DNS parser, meet Go fuzzer
08/06/2015
Here at CloudFlare we are heavy users of the github.com/miekg/dns Go DNS library and we make sure to contribute to its development as much as possible. Therefore when Dmitry Vyukov published go-fuzz and started to uncover tens of bugs in the Go standard library, our task was clear....
Up and to the Right: Forrester Research Ranks CloudFlare as a “Leader” for DDoS Services Providers
08/05/2015
Forrester Research, Inc. has released The Forrester Wave™: DDoS Services Providers, Q3 2015 report which ranks CloudFlare as a leader. How do you get placed “up and to the right”? ...
Dublin, Ireland: CloudFlare's 38th data center
08/05/2015
Top of the morning to our users and readers from Ireland! Our latest PoP in Dublin is our 38th globally, and 14th in Europe following our Bucharest deployment last week. As of yesterday, traffic from Ireland's 3.6 million Internet users will now be routed through Dublin as opposed to our London PoP....
A deep look at CVE-2015-5477 and how CloudFlare Virtual DNS customers are protected
08/04/2015
Last week ISC published a patch for a critical remotely exploitable vulnerability in the BIND9 DNS server capable of causing a crash with a single packet. ...
Quick and dirty annotations for Go stack traces
08/03/2015
CloudFlare’s DNS server, RRDNS, is entirely written in Go and typically runs tens of thousands goroutines. Since goroutines are cheap and Go I/O is blocking we run one goroutine per file descriptor we listen on and queue new packets for processing....
Bucharest, Romania: CloudFlare's 37th data center
07/31/2015
Our global expansion continues in Bucharest, Romania, the 6th largest city in the European Union* following London, Berlin, Madrid, Rome, and Paris (nearly all of which feature a CloudFlare PoP!). ...
CloudFlare headed to HostingCon 2015. Thanks for the memories and let’s create some more!
07/24/2015
The CloudFlare team is heading to HostingCon 2015 in San Diego next week. We are excited to meet colleagues from the industry, reconnect with partners, and make new friends. ...
Introducing Partner Analytics
07/23/2015
CloudFlare has over 5,000 hosting provider partners. Every day, thousands of our partners' customers take advantage of CloudFlare to help them be faster and more secure....
Célébrer le 14 Juillet avec Marseille, le 36ème point de présence de CloudFlare
07/14/2015
What better day than the 14th of July (Bastille Day) to announce the latest addition to our network in Marseille, France? Our data center in the southern city of Marseille is our 2nd in France, 12th in Europe and 36th globally....
CloudFlare Lands a New Office in Singapore
07/14/2015
After months of preparation, my teammates Algin, Marty, Adam, Jono and I touched down in Singapore and were greeted by skyscrapers, malls, Singlish, chili crab, and Marty’s special sweet and sour chicken. It immediately hit us that we were no longer in San Francisco....
Fighting Cancer: The Unexpected Benefit Of Open Sourcing Our Code
07/08/2015
Recently I was contacted by Dr. Igor Kozin from The Institute of Cancer Research in London. He asked about the optimal way to compile CloudFlare's open source fork of zlib....
Increasing Cache Hit Rates with Query String Sort
07/07/2015
At CloudFlare, we care a lot about serving requests as fast as possible. Files can be served much faster when already in CloudFlare’s cache....
The Internet is a cooperative system: CNAME to Dyn DNS outage of 6 July 2015
07/06/2015
Today, shortly after 21:00 UTC, on our internal operations chat there was a scary message from one of our senior support staff: "getting DNS resolution errors on support.cloudflare.com", at the same time as automated monitoring indicated a problem....
Blue Light Special: Ensuring fast global configuration changes
07/03/2015
CloudFlare operates a huge global network of servers that proxy our customers' web sites, operate as caches, inspect requests to ensure they are not malicious, deflect DDoS attacks and handle one of the largest authoritative DNS systems in the world. ...
Welcome UK2 Group!
07/01/2015
Today we are thrilled to welcome UK2 Group as a CloudFlare partner. Customers of UK2 Group (including its brands UK2.net, Midphase, and Westhost) are now able to access CloudFlare’s web performance and security solutions with a single click....