We love developers.

Late last year, we hosted Full Stack Week, with a focus on new products, features, and partnerships to continue growing Cloudflare’s developer platform. As part of Full Stack Week, we also hosted the Developer Speaker Series, bringing 12 speakers in the web dev community to our 24/7 online TV channel, Cloudflare TV. The talks covered topics across the web development ecosystem, which you can rewatch at any time.

We loved organizing the Developer Speaker Series last year. But as developers know far too well, our ecosystem changes rapidly: what may have been cutting edge back in November 2021 can be old news just a few months later in 2022. That’s what makes conferences and live speaking events so valuable: they serve as an up-to-date reference of best practices and future-facing developments in the industry. With that in mind, we're excited to announce a new edition of our Developer Speaker Series for 2022!

Check out the eleven expert web dev speakers, developers, and educators that we’ve invited to speak live on Cloudflare TV! Here are the talks you’ll be able to watch, starting tomorrow morning (May 9 at 09:00 PT):

The Bootcampers Companion – Caitlyn GrefflyIn her recent book, The Bootcamper's Companion, Caitlyn dives into the specifics of how to build connections in the tech field, understand confusing tech jargon, and make yourself a stand-out candidate when looking for your first job. She'll talk about some top tips and share a bit about her experience as well as what she has learned from navigating tech as a career changer.

Engaging Ecommerce with the Visual Web – Colby FayockExperiences on the web have grown increasingly visual, from displaying product images to interactive NFTs, but not paying attention to how media is delivered can impact Core Web Vitals, creating a bad UX with slow-loading pages, hurting your store’s conversion and potentially losing sales.

How can we effectively leverage media to showcase products creating engaging experiences for our store? We’ll talk about the media's role in ecomm and how we can take advantage of it while optimizing delivery.

Testing Web Applications with Playwright – Debbie O’BrienTesting is hard, testing takes time to learn and to write, and time is money. As developers, we want to test. We know we should, but we don't have time. So how can we get more developers to do testing? We can create better tools.

Let me introduce you to Playwright, a reliable tool for end-to-end cross browser testing for modern web apps, by Microsoft and fully open source. Playwright's codegen generates tests for you in JavaScript, TypeScript, Dot Net, Java or Python. Now you really have no excuses. It's time to play your tests wright.

Building serverless APIs: how Fauna and Workers make it easy – Rob SutterBuilding APIs has always been tricky when it comes to setting up architecture. FaunaDB and Workers remove that burden by letting you write code and watch it run everywhere.

Business context is developer productivity – John FeminellaA major factor in developer productivity is whether they have the context to make decisions on their own, or if instead they can only execute someone else's plan. But how do organizations give engineers the appropriate context to make those decisions when they weren't there from the beginning?

On the edge of my server – Brian RinaldiEdge functions can be potentially game changing. You get the power of serverless functions but running at the CDN level - meaning the response is incredibly fast. With Cloudflare Workers, every worker is an edge function. In this talk, we’ll explore why edge functions can be powerful and explore examples of how to use them to do things a normal serverless function can't do.

Ten things I love about Wrangler 2 – Sunil PaiWe spent the last six months rewriting wrangler, the CLI for building and deploying Cloudflare Workers. Almost every single feature has been upgraded to be more powerful and user-friendly, while still remaining backward compatible with the original version of wrangler. In this talk, we'll go through some of the best parts about the rewrite, and how it provides the foundation for all the things we want to build in the future.

L is for Literacy – Henri HelveticaIt’s 2022, and web performance is now abundantly important, with an abundance of available metrics, used by — you guessed it — an abundance of developers, new and experienced. All quips aside, the complexities of the web has led to increased complexities in web performance. Understanding, or literacy in web performance is as important as the four basic language skills. ‘L is for Literacy’ is a lively look at performance lexicon, backed by enlightening data all will enjoy.

Cloudflare Pages Updates – Greg BrimbleGreg Brimble, a Systems Engineer working on Pages, will showcase some of this week’s announcements live on Cloudflare TV. Tune in to see what is now possible for your Cloudflare Pages projects. We're excited to show you what the team has been working on!

Migrating to Cloudflare Pages: A look into git control, performance, and scalability – James RossJames Ross, CTO of Nodecraft, will discuss how moving to Pages brought an improved experience for both users and his team building the future of game servers.

If you want to see the full schedule for the Developer Speaker Series, go to our landing page. It shows each talk, including speaker info and timing, as well as time zones for international viewers. When a talk goes live, tuning in is simple – just visit cloudflare.tv to start watching.

New this year, we’ve also prepared a Discord channel to follow the live conversation with other viewers! If you haven’t joined Cloudflare’s Discord server, get your invite.

In June 2020, Cloudflare TV made its debut: a 24/7 streaming video channel, focused on topics related to building a better Internet (and the people working toward that goal). Today, over 1,000 live shows later, we’re excited to announce that we're making the technology we used to build Cloudflare TV available to any other business that wants to run their own 24x7 streaming network. But, before we get to that, it’s worth reflecting on what it's been like for us to run one ourselves.

Let’s take it from the top.

Cloudflare TV began as an experiment in every way you could think of, one we hoped would help capture the serendipity of in-person events in a world where those were few and far between. It didn’t take long before we realized we had something special on our hands. Not only was the Cloudflare team thriving on-screen, showcasing an amazing array of talent and expertise — they were having a great time doing it. Cloudflare TV became a virtual watercooler, spiked with the adrenaline rush of live TV.

One of the amazing things about Cloudflare TV has been the breadth of content it’s inspired. Since launching, CFTV has hosted over 1,000 live sessions, featuring everything from marquee customer events with VIP speakers to game shows and DJ sets. Cloudflare’s employee resource groups have hosted hundreds of sessions speaking to their unique experiences, sharing a wealth of advice with the next generation of technology leaders. All told, we’ve welcomed over 650 Cloudflare employees and interns — and over 500 external guests, including the likes of Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, Gradient Ventures board partner Bonita Stewart, Broadcom CTO Andy Nallappan, and Zendesk SVP Christina Liu.

Tune In, Geek Out: A CFTV Montage

This is Cloudflare TV, so of course we put an emphasis on technical content for viewers of all stripes. When we announce a new product or protocol on the Cloudflare Blog, we often host live sessions on CFTV the same day, featuring the engineers who wrote the code that just shipped. Every week, we broadcast episodes on cryptography, on learning how to code, and on the hardware that powers Cloudflare’s network in over 250 cities around the world.

Whether you’re new to Cloudflare TV or a longtime viewer, we encourage you to pay a visit to the just-launched Discover page, where you’ll find many of our most-loved shows on demand, ranging from Latest from Product and Engineering, to perennial favorite Silicon Valley Squares, to Yes We Can, featuring women leaders from across the tech industry. You can also browse upcoming Live segments and easily add them to your calendar.

One of the most promising indicators that we’re on the right track has been the feedback we’ve gotten, not just from viewers — but from companies eager to know which platform we were using to power CFTV. To date we haven’t had much to offer them other than our sincere thanks, but as of today we’re able to share something much more exciting.

But first: a look behind the scenes.

We didn’t initially set out to build Cloudflare TV from scratch. But as we explored our available options, we quickly realized that few solutions were designed for 24/7 linear streaming, and fewer still were optimized to be managed by a globally-distributed team. Thankfully, at Cloudflare, we like to build.

Our engineers worked at a blazing pace to build our own homegrown system, tapping open-source projects where we could, and inventing the things that didn’t yet exist. Among the starring components:

• Brave (BBC) — Brave is an open-source project named for a highly descriptive acronym: Basic Real-Time Audio Video Editor. It serves as the Cloudflare TV switchboard, allowing us to jump from live content to commercial to a pre-recorded session and back automatically, based on our broadcast schedule. The only issue with Brave is that, as the BBC put it: it’s a prototype. One that hasn’t been updated since 2018...

The CFTV Switchboard (Now streaming: Latest from Product & Engineering)

• Zoom — When we first designed Cloudflare TV, there was one directive that stood above the others: it had to be easy. If presenters had to deal with installing a browser plugin or unfamiliar app, we knew we’d lose many of them — especially external guests. Zoom emerged as the clear answer, and thanks to its RTMP broadcast feature, it’s worked seamlessly to facilitate live content on Cloudflare TV. In most cases, participating in a CFTV session is as simple as joining a Zoom meeting.

• Cloudflare Workers — Put simply, Cloudflare TV wouldn’t exist were it not for Cloudflare Workers. Workers is the glue that brings together each of the disparate components of the platform — handling authentication, application logic, securely relaying data from our backend to our frontend, and sprinkling SEO optimizations across the site. It’s the first tool we reach for, and often the only one we need.

• Cloudflare Stream — With over 1,000 episodes in our content library, we have a lot of assets to manage. Thankfully Stream makes it easy: episodes are uploaded and automatically transcoded to the appropriate bitrate, and we use Stream embeds to power Video on Demand across the entire platform. We also use the Stream API to deliver recordings to our backend switchboard so that they can be seamlessly rebroadcast alongside our Live sessions.

• Cloudflare for Teams — Cloudflare TV is obviously public-facing, but there are an array of dashboards and admin interfaces that are only accessible to select members of the Cloudflare team. Thankfully the Cloudflare for Teams suite, including Cloudflare Access, makes it easy for us to set up custom rulesets that keep everything secure, without any cumbersome VPNs or authentication hurdles.

We knew from the beginning that it wasn’t enough for Cloudflare TV to be easy for presenters — we needed to be able to run it with a relatively small team, working remotely, most of whom were juggling other responsibilities.

A special shoutout goes to the members of Cloudflare's office and executive admin teams, whose roles were dramatically impacted by the pandemic. Each of them has stepped up and taken on the mantle of Cloudflare TV Producer, providing technical support, calming nerves, and facilitating each one of our live sessions. We couldn’t do it without them, nor would we want to.

Even so, running a TV station is a lot of work, and we had little choice but to make the platform as efficient as possible — automating away our pain points, and developing intuitive admin tools to empower our team. Here are some of the key contributors to the system’s efficiency:

The Auto-Switcher — CFTV’s schedule features hundreds of sessions every week, including weekends, which would be prohibitive if any manual switching were involved. Thankfully the system operates essentially on auto-pilot. This is no simple playlist: every minute, a program running on Cloudflare Workers syncs with the CFTV backend to queue up recordings and inputs for upcoming sessions, deleting those belonging to sessions that have already aired. If we take a week off over the holidays, Cloudflare TV will keep on humming.

The Auto-Scheduler — Scheduling CFTV content by hand (well over 250 segments per week) quickly went from a meaningful exercise to a perverse task. By week two we knew we had to figure something else out. And so the auto-scheduler was born, allowing us to select an arbitrary window of time and populate it with recordings from our content library, filling in any time slots between live segments.

Segments can be dragged, dropped, added, and removed in a couple of clicks; one person can schedule the entire week in less than an hour. The auto-scheduler intelligently rotates through each episode in the catalog to ensure they all get airtime — and we see plenty of opportunities for it to get smarter.

The Broadcasting Center — The lifeblood of Cloudflare TV is our live segments, so we naturally spend a lot of time trying to improve the experience for presenters. The Broadcasting Center is their home base: a page that loads automatically for each session’s host, providing them a countdown timer and other essentials. And because viewer engagement is a crucial part of what makes live programming special, it features a section for viewer questions — including a call-in feature, which records and automatically transcribes questions phoned in by viewers.

Broadcasting Center — Presenter View

Meanwhile, our CFTV Producers use an administrative view of the same tool, where they check to make sure the stream is coming through clearly before each session begins. A set of admin controls allow them to troubleshoot if needed, and they can moderate viewer questions as well.

For both producers and presenters, the Broadcasting Center provides a single control plane to manage a live session. This ease-of-use goes a long way toward keeping the system running smoothly with a lean team.

Broadcasting Center — Admin View

One reason we’ve invested in Cloudflare TV is that it serves as fantastic platform for dogfooding — not only are we leveraging a broad array of Cloudflare’s media products, but our 24/7 linear content makes us a particularly demanding customer, with no appetite for arbitrary constraints like time limits or maintenance downtime.

With that in mind, we’re excited to integrate many of the new technologies Cloudflare is introducing this week, which will combine to power an overhauled version of the CFTV platform that we’re calling Cloudflare TV 2.0. Namely:

• Real Time Communications Platform — Today, Cloudflare announced its new Real Time Communications Platform, powered by WebRTC. In the near future, Cloudflare TV will leverage this platform to handle many of our live sessions. CFTV will continue to support Zoom, OBS, and any other application capable of outputting a RTMP stream, because convenience is one of the essential pillars in helping our presenters engage with the platform. But we see opportunities to push our creativity to new heights with custom, programmatically-controlled media streams — powered by Cloudflare’s Real-Time Communications Platform.

• Stream Live — CFTV’s backend server currently handles video encoding for our live broadcast, generating a stream that is relayed to a video.js embed. Replacing this setup with Stream Live will yield several key benefits: first, we will offload video encoding to Cloudflare’s global network, resulting in improved speed, reliability, and redundancy. It also means we’ll be able to generate multiple renditions of the broadcast at different bitrates, allowing us to offer streams that are optimized for mobile devices with limited bandwidth, and to dynamically switch between bitrates as a user’s network conditions change.

• Stream Connect — Today, the only way to watch Cloudflare TV is from the platform’s homepage — but there’s no reason we can’t syndicate it to other popular video platforms like YouTube. Stream Connect will become the primary endpoint for our backend mixer, and will in turn generate multiple copies of that stream, outputting to YouTube, the main broadcast, and any number of additional platforms.

We’re also actively working on a fresh implementation of our switchboard — one that is designed to be more reliable, scalable, and customizable. This switchboard will power the core of Cloudflare TV 2.0.

Cloudflare TV 2.0 will represent a major step forward for the platform, one that leverages over a year of insights as we rearchitect the system from its core to take full advantage of the Cloudflare network. And we’re doing it with you in mind: the same technology will be used to power Cloudflare TV as a Service.

Most products at Cloudflare are designed to scale from individuals up to the largest businesses. This is not one of those. Running a 24x7 streaming network takes a lot of time and effort. While we've made it easier than ever before, this is a product really designed for businesses that are willing to make a commitment similar to what we have at Cloudflare. But, if you are, we're here to tell you that running a streaming service is incredibly rewarding, and we want to enable more companies to do it.

Interested? Fill out this form and, if it looks like you'd be a good fit, we'll reach out and work with you to help build your own streaming service.

In the meantime, don’t miss out on Stream Live and the new Real Time Communications Platform. There’s no reason you can’t start building today.

Last week, Cloudflare TV celebrated its first anniversary the only way it knows how: with a broadcast brimming with live programming spanning everything from the keynotes of Cloudflare Connect, to a day-long virtual career fair, to our flagship game show Silicon Valley Squares.

When our co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince introduced Cloudflare TV to the world last year, he described it as a platform for experimentation. By empowering Cloudflare employees to try whatever they could think up on air — bound only by restraints of common sense — we hoped to unlock aspects of our team’s talent and creativity that otherwise might go untapped in the midst of the pandemic.

The results, as they say, have been extraordinary.

Since launching in June 2020, Cloudflare TV has featured over 1,000 original live episodes covering an incredible array of topics: technical deep dives and tutorials like Hardware at Cloudflare, Leveling up Web Performance with HTTP/3, and Hacker Time. Security expertise from top CISOs and compliance experts. In-depth policy discussions. And of course, updates on Cloudflare’s products with weekly episodes of Latest from Product and Engineering, Estas Semanas en Cloudflare en Español, and launch-day introductions to Magic WAN, Magic Firewall, Cloudflare Pages, and Stream Connect.

We’ve seen a wealth of content that can only be described as inspirational — like Vets at Cloudflare exploring the journeys of military veterans, This is What a Technologist Looks Like showcasing diversity across the industry, and Yes We Can, Cloudflare co-founder, President & COO Michelle Zatlyn’s series debunking the myth that there are no women in tech. Founder Focus has shared the stories of dozens of entrepreneurs, Between Two Clouds delves into the world of customer support, and series like Home Office TV and Cooking With Cloudflare have given an inside look at the personalities (and recipes) that make the Cloudflare community so unique.

All told, Cloudflare TV has featured well over one thousand presenters and their illustrious guests. We’ve been fortunate to welcome the likes of Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom; Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; John Collison, co-founder and President of Stripe; and Jackie Smalls, Chief Programs Officer at Code.org, to name a few.

We’ve also seen amazing contributions from Cloudflare’s Employee Resource Groups — including Latinflare celebrating Cinco De Mayo, Womenflare celebrating Women’s Empowerment Month, Asianflare and Desiflare celebrating APAC Heritage Month, Afroflare celebrating Black History Month (UK & US), Mindflare (supporting mental health awareness), Cloudflare’s sustainability group, Greencloud, and Proudflare, Cloudflare’s LGBTQIA+ group, which is celebrating Pride all month long.

The feedback from fans has been extraordinary. We regularly receive messages from viewers telling us how much they were inspired by a recent guest, or sharing that they leave Cloudflare TV “playing in the background all day.” You can tell they care, because they also let us know that they don’t appreciate when the commercials are louder than the program itself (we’re working on that!)

Perhaps the most meaningful impact of Cloudflare TV has been the way it’s connected the Cloudflare team. Cloudflare is growing quickly, and many team members have never set foot in a Cloudflare office. For anyone who is new to the company, Cloudflare TV has served as a way to get to know their colleagues, and vice versa. Job candidates use it to learn about the teams they aspire to work on. And we all get an excuse to talk to folks beyond the borders of our usual Zoom calls. It is, in a sense, the ultimate virtual water cooler — and the water is spiked with the adrenaline rush of live TV. It’s a potent mix that often leads to declarations of, “that was fun!”

It sure is.

Supporting such a broad array of on-air talent is no small feat, and we have an amazing production team that helps ensure every session goes smoothly (give or take). Many of our Cloudflare TV Producers have roles at Cloudflare that were radically impacted by the pandemic, including our office management and executive admin teams. Few of them had prior TV experience. But that hasn’t kept them from becoming absolutely indispensable.

Before each and every live session — all 1,000+ of them — Cloudflare TV’s producers join our hosts to make sure they have everything they need. They provide crucial technical support, soothe pre-show jitters, and deal with the myriad tiny (and not-so-tiny) emergencies that make live TV so exciting. They are television producers in every sense of the word, and they have helped make this newfangled platform a very human experience, at a time when such things matter.

Also, our engineers are pretty great too. Speaking of which...

Cloudflare TV began as an experiment, and that label still applies. We’re finding creative ways to navigate our own pain points, dogfooding Cloudflare’s newest technologies, and generally trying to take advantage of the fact that this is not well-charted territory. We’ll soon share more technical details on how we run a TV station 24/7, and some of the tools we’re building along the way. Here's an appetizer.

Our product roadmap includes many of the things you’d expect, like an easier way to find your favorite episodes, and to hear about upcoming new ones. The rainbow bars adorning this blog post will make fewer cameos on the broadcast itself. And just like any good experiment: there will be surprises.

So tune in, geek out — and don’t touch that dial.

To learn more about the solutions Cloudflare launched to help businesses navigate their compliance needs — including the new data localization suite — see our recent blog post here.

Prof. Dr. Wilfried BernhardtHonorary professor -- University of Leipzig,Attorney, CEO Bernhardt IT Management Consulting GmbH

We have to agree to go down a common road, a common path. And this common path can really only consist of saying: let's sit down together again. I'm talking about the European Commission and, above all, the new administration in the United States. We are all waiting for them expectantly.

And then we look at what our common fundamental values are and see if we don’t simply come together better than we have in the past. After all, our fundamental values are the same: human rights, democracy, the rule of law. You have to concede that there are some differences in understanding when it comes to interpreting what privacy means — well, in the US freedom of expression is sometimes considered more important than privacy. In Europe, it's perhaps the other way around.

But if we look at it without ideological blinders, we can certainly come together. After all, when it comes to fighting terrorism and crime, it is common insights that play an important role. So it would be a great pity if we didn't come together. But it is not permissible that, for example, American authorities simply say: we will allow ourselves access to European data of European Union citizens, we don't have to ask anyone, and we don't grant legal protection either. To be honest, that's not how it works.

Watch the full interview

Iverna McGowanDirector of the Europe Office, Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT)

My hope would be that we have a more global approach to international privacy standards. And I think for 2021 in Europe, it will be all about the Digital Services Act. And of course on the individual users’ rights as well, on free expression.

I think that human rights advocates will all have a lot of work to do to make sure that we guard our own rights to express ourselves online, but also protect people from harassment and hate. Getting that balance right in law and practice, I think, is going to be really important to maintain the Internet as a free and open space where we can organize and fight to protect human rights and democracy.

We at the Center for Democracy & Technology are strong advocates and practitioners of multistakeholder approaches. So these kinds of dialogues between the private sector and civil society to get into the details of, what are the technical solutions, what does that mean in different places? I think that's going to be really important to get some of these policy challenges right.

Watch the full interview

Marshall ErwinChief Security Officer, Mozilla Corporation

In the US we see a lack of a strong privacy regime, which is a problem — but also you don't really see mandatory data retention and you don't really see mandatory blocking in the US. Parts of Europe do have various sort of retention regimes or mandatory blocking regimes, or at least there is a desire within the policy space within Europe, to consider especially the DNS as a tool to facilitate content blocking.

Now, we think that's a very bad idea for a number of reasons, partly because it's bad on principle. It will result in risk to free expression. And also because it's not a very effective way to address a lot of these serious content problems that bubble up today. And that's the argument that I tend to make. We are actively thinking about the right set of solutions for malicious content on the Web. But blocking at this level, the stack through the DNS system — it's a bad idea. It's not going to work, and it will have serious free expression challenges.

Watch the full interview

Dr. Katrin SuderChairperson of the Advisory Council on Digitalization for the German Federal Government, Member of Cloudflare's Board of Directors

I think a lot of realism has come in, realism about what is actually feasible and what is possible, and at the same time the recognition that we don’t want to lose the innovation that American companies in particular are bringing.

How will this continue? Of course, that’s always difficult to predict in a process like this. I think what is actually needed, and we have talked about this in various forums, is first of all a clean assessment process for the current situation. Where do we actually stand with sovereignty? We have to be honest about this. So, where are we actually dependent and how can we deal with this dependency?

Because there are dependencies where you can perhaps say, yes, so be it, maybe it's not so bad. And then there are perhaps dependencies that are very critical. That's where you have to invest, but not to replicate, rather to push the next generation, so to speak. And I think this process should be driven by the European Commission.

Watch the full interview

Thomas BouéDirector General, Policy -- EMEA, BSA | The Software Alliance

One of the things that we spend time thinking about — and it's going to be a long-term project, because it will not happen overnight — but it's about: how can like-minded democracies find a way to create a standard? What will be the standard for acceptable government access to data and national security practices? What would be the ways that they would conduct these investigations? What would be the safeguards that exist? What would be the means of redress or of challenging those?

These are the things that need to happen between countries that are like-minded, that value privacy, but that also value the security of their citizens. And how can it go forward by creating this standard that would then bring a lot more clarity, a lot more certainty and a lot more appeased views in this entire debate. And that is the thing that we think is essential. We know that work is being done on this in certain fora — such as the OECD — and we very much encourage countries to think about this more, and to find a way forward.

Watch the full interview

Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and length, and translated as necessary.

So if you want to relax in an active and learning way this weekend, here are some of the topics we’ve covered on the Cloudflare blog this past week that you may find interesting.

Making things fast is one of the things we do at Cloudflare. More responsive websites, apps, APIs, and networks directly translate into improved conversion and user experience. On November 10, Google announced that Google Search will directly take web performance and page experience data into account when ranking results on their search engine results pages (SERPs), beginning in May 2021.

Rustam Lalkaka and Rita Kozlov explain in this blog post how Google Search will prioritize results based on how pages score on Core Web Vitals, a measurement methodology Cloudflare has worked closely with Google to establish, and we have implemented support for in our analytics tools. Read the full blog post.

Getting to the Core: Benchmarking Cloudflare’s Latest Server Hardware

At the Cloudflare Core, we process logs to analyze attacks and compute analytics. In 2020, our Core servers were in need of a refresh, so we decided to redesign the hardware to be more in line with our Gen X edge servers. We designed two major server variants for the core. The first is Core Compute 2020, an AMD-based server for analytics and general-purpose compute paired with solid-state storage drives. The second is Core Storage 2020, an Intel-based server with twelve spinning disks to run database workloads. This is a refresh of the hardware that Cloudflare uses to run analytics provided big efficiency improvements.

Read the full blog post by Brian Bassett

We previously explained how and why we built Quicksilver. Quicksilver is the data store responsible for storing and distributing the billions of KV pairs used to configure the millions of sites and Internet services which use Cloudflare. This second blog post is about the long journey to production which culminates with Kyoto Tycoon removal from Cloudflare infrastructure and points to the first signs of obsolescence.

Geoffrey Plouviez takes you through the entire story of real-world engineering challenges and what it’s like to replace one of Cloudflare’s oldest critical components.

In this blog post, we explore how Cloudflare Workers continues to excel as a JAMstack deployment platform, and how it can be used to power e-commerce experiences, integrating with familiar tools like Stripe, as well as new technologies like Nuxt.js, and Sanity.io.

Read the full blog post and get all the details and open-source code from Kristian Freeman.

When we review design documents at Cloudflare, we are always on the lookout for Single Points of Failure (SPOFs). In this post, we present a timeline of a real-world incident, and how an interesting failure mode known as a Byzantine fault played a role in a cascading series of events.

Tom Lianza and Chris Snook’s  full blog post on Byzantine faults describes the consequences of a malfunctioning switch on a system built for reliability.

At Cloudflare, we pride ourselves in our global network that spans more than 200 cities in over 100 countries. To accelerate all that traffic through our network, there are multiple technologies at play. So let’s have a look at one of the cornerstones that makes all of this work.

Tom Strickx’ epic deep dive into ASICs is here.

Let us know your thoughts and comments below or feel free to also reach out to us via our social media channels. And because we talked about careers in the beginning of this blog post, check out our available jobs if you are interested to join Cloudflare.

Here are some of the highlights.

Stewart ButterfieldCo-founder and CEO, Slack

The thing that I think people don't appreciate or realize is that this is not a choice that companies are really going to make on an individual basis. I've heard a lot of leaders say, “we're going back to the office after the summer.”

If we say we require you to be in the office five days a week and, you know, Twitter doesn't, Salesforce doesn't — and those offers are about equal — they'll take those ones. I think we would also lose existing employees if they didn't believe that they had the flexibility. Once you do that, it affects the market for talent. If half of the companies support distributed work or flexible hours and flexible time in the office, you can compensate for that, but I think you’ve got to pay a lot more or something like that because that optionality is valuable to people.

Watch the full interview

Hayden BrownPresident and CEO, Upwork

I think a lot of these things are here to stay. What's fleeting is this idea that we have our children home from school and we don't have a social system around child care and things like that, because that's not sustainable.

What's here to stay are really companies finding, and workers finding, a new balance. It's not about, “let's all lock ourselves in our homes forever.” This is about being very intentional. How can we be intentional to really recognize the benefits that a distributed, more work from home-oriented culture and set of practices can give workers and businesses?

Those benefits include some very powerful tools towards addressing some of the diversity challenges that all of our companies face, because it suddenly opens up pools of talent that we can tap into, outside of the places where we've traditionally hired, and we can tap into those people — and they're not second class citizens, because they're not the only ones working remotely while everyone else is back at the office.

Watch the full interview

Brett HautopVP of Global Design + Build at LinkedIn

That might be the single hardest thing to figure out. Because the big decision that's made right after the meeting, after you heard everything but you wanted to say it to one person and not everybody else. Or the thing that happens serendipitously on the way into a meeting, just because you're talking about your weekends and then you remember something — that is really unfair to the people who are on the team (working remotely).

And unless you go back to technology like the telepresence person driving around, or each of us having our own drone in the office that follows people around serving as my ability to see — these creepy things — it's really hard to recreate. So it's about changing a cultural norm and getting people to be more thoughtful about how to include people who aren't there, to go out of their way to include them. And that's something that could take years for us to teach ourselves.

Watch the full interview

Chris YoungFormer CEO, McAfee

We saw a huge rise in phishing attacks that were directly correlated to the move to work from home. Cyber attackers understand that all of a sudden you've got probably millions of workers across different organizations that are not supervised in the same way — new systems, new protocols for how they work. And they preyed upon that very quickly… there's a whole litany of attacks that have been levied against the work from home model.

It's prudent to make sure that if you're going to have people working from home, that you take some steps to protect the home networking infrastructure because we could find ourselves in a situation where, if we don't pay attention to that over the long run, you start to see an uptick of attackers going after the home networking infrastructure. We always know the attackers will find the path of least resistance. It's like water on a roof: it will find the hole and go right there.

And I think it means a few things for us in a cybersecurity landscape. I think it's going to continue to shift and put a premium on the identity based architecture. The zero trust model authentication is going to be key. It's really the combination of: can I trust the user and can I trust the device in order to make a decision of do I trust this session? Do I trust this transaction?

Watch the full interview

Bret TaylorPresident and Chief Operating Officer at Salesforce

I hear across every industry that people aren't going to come back to the office full time. Maybe they'll come in a couple days a week. But that means our offices are probably going to be a little bit more for on-sites than they are for desks. And I think about: how does that change the shape of our employee engagement? And more importantly, how does it change the shape of our business models?

I think that the companies who were treating their digital initiatives as something sort of on the side are probably suffering right now. And there's an urgency around these shifts now that is more powerful than ever before.

I think a lot of these trends will remain. And that’s where the opportunity is for great companies, whether it's technology companies or other companies, who will lean into these changes and transform themselves. I think the ones that do will benefit from it. And I think there's going to be a lot of business model disruption and technology disruption coming out of this.

Watch the full interview

*Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Want to watch more interviews and catch up on all of the announcements from Cloudflare during Birthday Week? Visit Cloudflare Birthday Week 2020

Here are some of the highlights.

Anu HariharanPartner, Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund

Fast forwarding ten years from now, I think entrepreneurship is global, and you're already seeing signs of that. 27% of YC startups are headquartered outside the US. And I'm willing to bet that in a decade, at least 50% of YC startups will be headquartered outside the US. And so I think the sheer nature of the Internet democratizing information, more companies being global, like Facebook, Google, Uber — talent is everywhere. I think you will see multi-billion dollar companies coming out of other regions.

People have this perception that everything is a zero sum game, or that we are already at peak Internet penetration. Absolutely not. The global market cap is ~$85 trillion. Less than 10% is e-commerce. Internet enabled businesses is $8 trillion. So even if you play this out for another twenty years, Internet enabled businesses should be at least $66 trillion. So we have a lot more to go. And I think the zero sum game that investors tend to think of, what we've gotten wrong is — most of these Internet enabled businesses are expanding TAM.

Watch the full interview

Karan SinghCo-founder and COO of Ginger

Our vision is a world where mental health is never an obstacle, and that's a never-ending vision. I don't think that will be done in 10 years, but I am hopeful that in 10 years or even well before that, this whole new virtual-first sort of care paradigm can really start to take shape, where you start digitally and then progress to an in-person should you need it.

And for some people who are more acute, or in specific situations, they absolutely do need to see an in-person provider. But for many people, starting virtual — virtual being the default — feels like a more democratic and equitable experience in the world.

Watch the full interview

Jennifer Hyman,CEO and co-founder of Rent the Runway

Where I'm optimistic is that I think that in a life post-vaccine, when kids are back in school, when things are a little bit more normal, businesses are no longer going to require their employees to come to work five days a week in the same way and in the same structure that existed in the past. We realize that because of technology, we can work more flexibly, we can work more virtually.

And I think that that is going to have unlocks for everyone, don't get me wrong, but it'll have huge unlocks for women who are often the ones making the sacrifice to spend more time with the kids, be at home, do all of the house-related leadership, so I think that this will be a great equalizer in many ways.

Watch the full interview

Eric SchmidtFormer CEO & Executive Chairman, GoogleCo-Founder, Schmidt Futures

It seems to me that the gains in machine learning and the investment that everyone, including Cloudflare, Google, et cetera, is putting in it — are going to yield a whole new set of applications.

We should expect more of the unexpected because of the level of investment. And so the people who sit there and say, oh, you know, it's Apple and Google and Amazon and Microsoft and so forth, and it's all done. They're missing the narrative. The narrative is that there's a new platform emerging which the big guys and the new guys, the new little guys are going to compete over. And that competition will generally be incredibly helpful. It will produce very significant large companies as they figure out a way to monetize. But more importantly, it'll have an impact on society, both in terms of entertainment, as we saw with TikTok and its predecessors, but also in terms of information and productivity.

Watch the full interview

Eric YuanFounder and CEO of Zoom

For now, if we all work from home, from a productivity perspective there's no productive loss. However, social interaction is a problem. Mental health is another problem. The reason why, no matter how good we think it is now — it cannot deliver a better experience than a face-to-face meeting.

If I didn’t see you for a while, and I wanted to give you a big hug — you cannot feel my intimacy over Zoom, right? And if you are getting a cup of coffee, I can not enjoy the smell, not like when you and I are in a Starbucks.

I think that technology-wise, in the future with those cutting edge technologies, we should believe that videoconferencing like Zoom can deliver a better experience than a face-to-face meeting. I shake hands with you remotely, you can feel my hand-shaking. And even if you speak a different language, with AI, with real-time language translation — I think those technologies can truly help make sure that online communication is better than face to face meeting. In the next 10 or 15 years, I think we will get there with some technology.

Watch the full interview

Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

We also see this milestone as an opportunity to reflect on where the Internet was ten years ago, and where it might be headed over the next decade. So we reached out to some of the people we respect most to see if they’d be interested in joining us for a series of Fireside Chats on Cloudflare TV.

We’ve been blown away by the response, and are thrilled to announce our lineup of speakers, featuring many of the most celebrated names in tech and beyond. Among the highlights: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, OpenTable CEO Debby Soo, Stripe co-founder and President John Collison, Former CEO & Executive Chairman of Google and Co-Founder of Schmidt Futures Eric Schmidt, former McAfee CEO Chris Young, former Seal Team 6 Commander Dave Cooper, Project Include CEO Ellen Pao, and so many more. All told, we have over 24 hours of live discussions scheduled throughout the week.

To tune in, just head to Cloudflare TV (no registration required). You can view the details for each session by clicking the links below, where you’ll find handy Watch Now buttons to make sure you don’t miss anything. We’ll also be rebroadcasting these talks throughout the week, so they’ll be easily accessible in different timezones.

A tremendous thank you to everyone on this list for helping us celebrate Cloudflare’s 10th annual Birthday Week!

Founder of Equinix and Chairman & Co-Founder of ScorbitAired live on Thursday, October 1, 10:00 AM (PDT) // Watch Now

Fortune 500 Board Member and Author & Former CEO of MetricStreamAired live on Thursday, October 1, 6:30 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

Founder & CEO of PostmanAired live on Wednesday, September 30, 3:30 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

Founder of Exponential ViewAired live on Friday, October 2, 9:00 AM (PDT) // Watch Now

Co-Founder & CEO of Recount MediaAired live on Wednesday, September 30, 8:30 AM (PDT) // Watch Now

CTO & Co-Founder of SumoLogicAired live on Thursday, October 1, 7:00 AM (PDT) // Watch Now

CEO & Co-Founder of BackblazeAired live on Wednesday, September 30, 2:00 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

CEO of UpworkAired live on Wednesday, September 30, 5:00pm (PDT) // Watch Now

CEO of SlackAired live on Thursday, October 1, 8:30 AM (PDT) // Watch Now

Former Assistant Attorney General for the US Department of Justice’s National Security Division and current Chair of Morrison & Foerster’s Global Risk + Crisis Management practiceAired live on Tuesday, September 29, 12:00 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

Co-Founder & President of StripeAired live on Friday, October 2, 3:00 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

Dave Cooper

Former Seal Team 6 CommanderAired live on Tuesday, September 29, 10:30 AM (PDT) // Watch Now

Founder & Chair of L2Aired live on Wednesday September 30th, 12PM (PDT) // Watch Now

Founder & CEO of Hint Inc.Aired live on Thursday, October 1, 12:30 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

Founder of Europe China ForumAired live on Monday September 28th, 5:00PM (PDT) // Watch Now

VP and Chief Technologist for Security at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise companyAired live on Wednesday, September 30th, 9:00AM (PDT) // Watch Now

Former CEO of MyGov, Govt. of India and current Head & Co-Founder of Digital India FoundationAired live on Monday, September 28, 8:00 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

Partner at Y CombinatorAired live on Monday, September 28, 1:00 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

VP of Global Design + Build at LinkedInAired live on Friday, October 2, 11:00 AM (PDT) // Watch Now

CEO of BRCKAired live on Friday, October 2, 4:30am (PDT) // Watch Now

CEO & Co-Founder of Rent the RunwayAired live on Wednesday, September 30, 1:00 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

Co-Founder & Partner of TechSquare Labs and Co-Founder & Executive Chairman of PindropAired live on Wednesday, September 30, 8:00 AM (PDT) // Watch Now

Former UN Special RapporteurAired live on Thursday, October 1,  8:00 AM (PDT) // Watch Now

CEO of All RaiseAired live on Thursday, October 1, 1:30 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

Managing Director at Emerson Collective and former Engineering Executive at Twitter & UberAired live on Friday, October 2, 1:30 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

Co-Founder of MyFitnessPalAired live on Monday, September 28, 12:00 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

CEO & Co-Founder of BoxAired live on Thursday, October 1, 4:30 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

Co-Founder & GC of Alloy and former Deputy CTO of US GovernmentAired live on Thursday, October 1, 11:30 AM (PDT) // Watch Now

Former CEO of Reddit and current CEO of Project IncludeAired live on Tuesday, September 29, 2:00 PM (PDT) // Coming soon

General Partner at Founders Fund and former COO of SquareAired live on Wednesday, September 30, 3:00 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

Former CEO of Google and current Technical Advisor at Alphabet, Inc.Aired live on Monday, September 28, 12:30 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

Founder & Chief Scientist at Juniper Networks, and Founder & CEO at FungibleAired live on Wednesday, September 30, 11:30 AM (PDT) // Watch Now

Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer of GingerAired live on Monday, September 28, 3:00 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

CEO of OpenTable and former Chief Commercial Officer of KAYAKAired live on Wednesday September 30, 12:30 PT (PDT) // Watch Now

CEO of DocuSignAired live on Thursday, October 1, 1:00 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

Vice President, Global Partnerships & Americas Partnerships Solutions at GoogleAired live on Friday, October 2, 2:00 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

Managing Director at General CatalystAired live on Friday, October 2nd, 4:00PM (PDT) // Watch Now

President & Chief Operating Officer of SalesforceAired live on Friday, October 2, 12:00 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

Chief Executive at News Corp and former Editor-in-Chief at The Wall Street Journal & Dow JonesAired live on Thursday, October 1, 12:00 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

Founder & CEO of Pocket Outdoor Media and former EVP, Chief Digital Officer of Under ArmourAired live on Monday, September 28, 12:00 PM (PDT) //Watch Now

Chief Digital Officer at Openfit, Co-Founder of Gixo, and former President & CTO of SurveyMonkeyAired live on Thursday, October 1, 9:00 AM (PDT) // Watch Now

Director of ACLU's Speech, Privacy, & Technology ProjectAired live on Thursday, October 1, 10:30 AM (PDT) // Watch Now

Founder & CEO of Activate and former President and Chief Operating Officer of MTV NetworksAired live on Tuesday, September 29, 3:30 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Lux CapitalAired live on Friday, October 2, 1:00PM (PDT) // Watch Now

Co-Founder of Apple, Inc.Aired live on Wednesday, September 30, 10:00 AM (PDT) // Watch Now

Former CEO of McAfeeAired live on Thursday, October 1, 11:00 AM (PDT) // Watch Now

Founder & Chief Executive Officer of ZoomAired live on Monday, September 28, 3:30 PM (PDT) // Watch Now

Cloudflare TV is inspired by television shows of the 90s that shared the newest, most exciting developments in computing and music videos. We had three basic requirements for Cloudflare TV:

1. Guest participation should be as simple as joining a Zoom call

2. There should be 24x7 programming. Something interesting should be playing all the time

3. Everything should happen in the cloud and we should never have to ask anyone “to leave their computer on” to have the stream running 24 hours a day

Building a lot of the technology behind Cloudflare TV from scratch was not part of the plan, especially given our aggressive timeline. So why did we decide to pursue it? After evaluating multiple live streaming solutions, we reached the following conclusion:

• 24x7 linear streaming is not something that is a priority for most video streaming platforms. This makes sense: the rise of video-on-demand and event-based live streaming has come at the expense of linear streaming.

• Most broadcasting platforms have their own guest apps which must be downloaded and set up in advance. This introduces unnecessary friction compared to clicking a link in the calendar invite to join a video call.

One of the core goals of Cloudflare TV was to make it easy for presenters, and what’s easier than letting them use the tools they already know? Everyone on our team is familiar with Zoom, and so are many of the guests who will be appearing on Cloudflare TV. Better yet, Zoom almost always "just works".

So when we discovered that Zoom lets you push live video to any RTMP end point, we started experimenting with the feature.

“RTMP” stands for Real-Time Messaging Protocol and was originally developed to facilitate low-latency communication using TCP via Macromedia Flash. RTMP has outlived Flash and is widely used by platforms, including YouTube, to enable live video streaming. RTMP is a push protocol and platforms like YouTube provide RTMP endpoints which are simply URLs. Most video broadcast apps will let you configure multiple RTMP endpoints, which tells the app “hey send my live video feed from my phone or computer to these services.” If you find yourself watching a live video that is being broadcasted on multiple services, it is very likely made possible by RTMP.

Zoom lets you provide RTMP endpoints and instruct it to send the live video feed of Zoom calls to, in our case, Cloudflare TV’s RTMP. Before we could use this feature, we needed to be able to ingest RTMP video feeds.

First, we set up an NGINX server with the RTMP module:

apt-get install build-essential libpcre3 libpcre3-dev libssl-dev git zlib1g-dev -y
mkdir ~/build && cd ~/build
git clone git://github.com/arut/nginx-rtmp-module.git
wget http://nginx.org/download/nginx-1.14.1.tar.gz
tar xzf nginx-1.14.1.tar.gz
cd nginx-1.14.1
sudo ./configure --with-http_ssl_module --add-module=../nginx-rtmp-module
sudo make
sudo make install

Next, we configured nginx.conf so NGINX can not only ingest the RTMP feed, but also make it streamable to the end user. A browser typically can’t stream from an RTMP source. We need NGINX to take the RTMP feed and create HLS/DASH segments.

We defined an application called live inside nginx.conf. Within the live application, we can add directives to ingest RTMP and output HLS:

...
rtmp {
    server {
        ...
        application live {
            allow play all;
            live on;

            # sample HLS
            hls on;
            hls_path /mnt/hls/;
            hls_fragment 1;
            hls_playlist_length 4;
            hls_sync 100ms;
        }
    }
}

Once we had NGINX set up to ingest RTMP and HLS, we followed Zoom’s instructions on Custom Live Streaming. And soon enough, we had a basic prototype of live streaming Zoom calls using the Cloudflare network!

So we met our number one requirement of making the guest experience as easy as joining a video call. But Cloudflare TV isn't going to be one never-ending call. We needed a way to smoothly transition between multiple calls over the course of the day, and to replay some of our favorite segments.

For example, we may have live programming from 1000 to 1100 followed by two hours of pre-recorded (or replayed) content. When the live programming ends at 1100, the video experience would break and the user would need to hit refresh to see the next show on the schedule.

So how do we fix this? We determined we needed the following:

1. Ability to set the programming (the “what plays when?”) many days in advance

2. Have “virtual rooms” ingesting video from different sources (live events, pre-recorded videos stored using our Cloudflare Stream product)

Once we have a schedule and “virtual rooms”, we can dynamically switch what is currently playing on-air to the appropriate “virtual room” streaming the content.

To implement this, we used Contentful, Workers, and Brave (an open-source video editor).

Brave is an open-source project started by the BBC. Using Brave, we were able to set up multiple virtual rooms and smoothly make any virtual room go on-air.

Under the hood, Brave is doing two key things:

1. pulling multiple video feeds from various sources and placing them in virtual rooms

2. pushing the final (“on air feed”) to NGINX every second of the day

Contentful is a headless content management platform designed to be API-first; it eliminated the need for a database and helped us build our scheduling feature rapidly.

Most of the necessary fields are pretty straightforward for a CMS: title, presenters, and, of course, the time slot. Each of these is automatically synced with the publicly-facing schedule at cloudflare.tv/schedule.

We are able to use Workers to fetch events from Contentful:

export async function fetchEventRaw(id: string) {
  let r = await fetch(`${CONTENTFUL_API}/entries/${id}`, {
    headers: {
      'Content-Type': 'application/json',
      Authorization: `Bearer ${CONTENTFUL_ADMIN}`,
    },
  })
  return unwrap(r, 'Failed to retrieve event')
}

The more complex piece was integrating this with Zoom. Each segment needs its own Zoom meeting, and it’d be pretty arduous to create these manually. So when we publish in Contentful, Contentful makes a call to a Worker endpoint. The Worker endpoint automatically generates a Zoom meeting — and provides the Programming Team with the customized invite to send to the guest.

For example, when a new event is added to Contentful, Contentful notifies our Worker endpoint which creates a new meeting and configures it so it is being pushed to Cloudflare TV:

export async function createMeeting(ev: TVEvent) {
  const headers = await zoomHeaders()

  const alternative_hosts = ev.altHosts ? ev.altHosts.join(',') : ''

  ev.zoomPassword = genPassword()

  let r = await fetch(`https://api.zoom.us/v2/users/${ev.studio}@cloudflare.com/meetings`, {
    method: 'POST',
    headers,
    body: JSON.stringify({
      topic: ev.title,
      type: 2,
      start_time: ev.start,
      duration: ev.duration,
      timezone: 'UTC',
      agenda: ev.description,
      password: ev.zoomPassword,
      settings: {
        host_video: true,
        participant_video: false,
        alternative_hosts,
        cn_meeting: false,
        in_meeting: false,
        join_before_host: true,
        mute_upon_entry: true,
        watermark: false,
        use_pmi: false,
        approval_type: 2,
        audio: 'both',
        auto_recording: 'cloud',
        enforce_login: false,
      },
    }),
  })
  let data = await unwrap(r, 'Failed to create ZOOM meeting')
  log('zoom: ', data)

  ev.meetingId = data.id
  ev.zoomUrl = data.join_url

  // push livestream configuration data to meeting
  r = await fetch(`https://api.zoom.us/v2/meetings/${ev.meetingId}/livestream`, {
    method: 'PATCH',
    headers,
    body: JSON.stringify({
      //TODO: make configurable
      stream_url: CFTV_RTMP_ENDPOINT,
      stream_key: ev.studio,
      page_url: 'https://cloudflare.tv',
    }),
  })
  await unwrap(r, 'Failed to update LiveStream config')

  return ev
}

The other upside to using Contentful is that many members of our team already have familiarity with it, so it reduces the overhead of learning a new tool.

So far, we’ve described the different pieces of the backend (NGINX, Brave, Contentful) that make Cloudflare TV possible. How do we bring them all together? Cloudflare Workers serves as the glue that brings these systems together. The Cloudflare TV frontend is built on Worker Sites. The frontend calls our Worker endpoints to fetch data, such as the programming calendar.

We’re just getting started with Cloudflare TV. We have a long wish list of features we’d really like to see. Here are some of the features we can’t wait to work on:

• Improve the viewing experience by adding closed-caption support

• Enable our viewers to call in and ask questions and contribute to the conversation

• Bring Cloudflare TV to platforms like Apple TV and Roku

I'm excited to announce the upcoming launch of Cloudflare TV. A 24x7 live television broadcast, streamed globally via the Cloudflare network. You can tune in to the pre-broadcast station and check out the upcoming schedule at: cloudflare.tv

I'm kicking off the first live broadcast starting at 12:00pm Pacific (1900 UTC) on Monday, June 8 with a conversation with Chris Young (add to calendar). Chris was most recently the CEO of McAfee and has had a career defining the cyber security industry, from his own startup Cyveillance in the 1990s, to leadership positions at AOL, RSA, VMWare, Cisco, and Intel. I hope you'll tune in and then stay tuned for all the content our team has in store.

Which leaves the question: why on earth is Cloudflare launching a 24x7 television station?

I was born in the 70's, am a child of the 80's, and got started in my career in the 90's. In the background, throughout much of it, was linear television we watched together. Over the last few months I've learned that Michelle Zatlyn, my co-founder and Cloudflare's COO, and I shared a love of Children's Television Network's education program "3-2-1 Contact." John Graham-Cumming, Cloudflare's CTO, and I spent much of the late-90's and early-00’s watching programs like "Call for Help" and "The Screensavers" on TechTV. Talking to many people across the Cloudflare team, we all shared common touchstones in our lives geeking out on nerdy programming about technical topics.

In some ways, a bit of that shared experience has been replaced by the modern tech conference. Tech conferences have four key features that keep people coming back in, I think, the following order of importance (from least to most): 1. Keynotes from interesting people; 2. Product and new feature demos; 3. Conversations with technical experts; and 4. Social interactions with peers.

Tech conferences have a lot of downsides too. Everyone complains about going to the Consumer Electronic Show or RSA because, in a lot of ways, spending a lot of money to be away from families, stay in difficult to book hotels, eat unhealthy food, and get herded around like cattle is awful. And yet, the value of the four things above is enough that we all continue to attend.

Or… we did. But, given the current pandemic, it feels like a long time before we're going to be attending tech conferences again. So, at Cloudflare, we started to wonder, is there a way to replicate their best features (and not suffer their worst) in a COVID-19 world?

Cloudflare has offices in Asia, and we source the hardware for our equipment from the region, and so, since the virus hit those parts of the world first, we were aware of its impacts early. We adjusted our work and travel policies in our Asian offices early. Then we did something else: call around to companies in the impacted regions to ask them what they were doing that was still working even when everyone was working from home.

The answer that stood out from multiple companies was empowering more of their team to experiment with new ideas to reach customers. I remember a conversation with a cosmetics company that, prior to the conference, had used in-person events to sell most of their products. They were forced to invent new strategies as soon as the pandemic hit. They didn't know what would work — no one did. So they empowered everyone on their sales team to run experiments. "Some of them proved so successful," the head of marketing for this firm told me, "that I don't think we'll ever go back to in-person events even after this time of the virus has passed."

So, as we shut down conferences and travel, and transitioned to remote work globally, I went to Jake Anderson, who runs Cloudflare's marketing team, and asked him to pivot to empower everyone on our sales and marketing team to be able to run experiments. That's the sort of thing that makes a ton of sense to a founder-CEO like me. It's the sort of thing that strikes abject terror in the mind of any experienced marketing professional like Jake.

Jake took a deep breath and explained the danger of that strategy. Hundreds of different people on our team each running their own experiments may result in some good things, but also potentially a lot of chaos along the way. "Your last company was an anti-spam company, right?" he asked, rhetorically. "Do you really want the risk of everyone on the team thinking sending out mass emails is a good idea?" And now you understand why Jake runs our marketing team.

But he was a good sport and didn't fully nix the idea. Instead we started brainstorming whether there could be a way to let our team run experiments — let them even be zany, crazy ideas — but do it in a way that had some structure and a framework and where any missteps could be contained. And that’s how the idea for Cloudflare TV was born.

If you read the history, it's actually not that different from how MTV was born. It was an experiment. No one knew if the format would work. Early hosts were given a lot of leeway to try new things. And, out of it, many incredible things emerged. In the process, it brought a community and a generation together.

Cloudflare is unlikely to morph into a television network. But I am excited to give our team a place to experiment and connect with the Cloudflare community, even while we're locked down. And that community shares common interests in topics like web performance, Internet security, edge computing, and network reliability. And, with more than 2.8 million Cloudflare customers as part of our community, that's more than 4 times MTV's 2018 viewership. So who knows!

What can you expect? We'll have some regular weekly programs. I plan on hosting a show featuring conversations with fellow entrepreneurs and business leaders I admire (add to calendar). Michelle Zatlyn, Cloudflare co-founder and COO, is doing a weekly series called “Yes We Can” highlighting women entrepreneurs and debunking the myth that there are no women in tech (add to calendar). John Graham-Cumming, our CTO, is doing a program called "This Week in Net" — looking at interesting trends we're seeing from traffic patterns across Cloudflare's network (add to calendar).

Nick Sullivan, who leads our research team, is planning a fireside chat format with heavyweights in computer science research in areas such as cryptography, artificial intelligence, databases, and more (add to calendar). Chris Scharff, on our Solutions Engineering team, will be our own Alex Trebek hosting weekly “Online Team Trivia” (add to calendar). Chaat Butsunturn on our sales team and Watson Ladd on our crypto team are hosting "Cooking with Cloudflare," combining their favorite technical and edible recipes (add to calendar). And Dan Hollinger on our partnerships team hosting "Silicon Valley Squares," a send up of the old game show "Hollywood Squares" (add to calendar).

We'll also host some special programming. This week, Rita Kozlov, who is a Product Manager on our Workers team, is interviewing the people behind the COVID-19 response program Mask a Hero NY (add to calendar). Junade Ali, on our technical support operations team, is talking about the privacy-ensuring design of Pwned Passwords (add to calendar). And Bethany Sonefeld, on our Product Design team, is doing a program on dark patterns, bottomless feeds, and other manipulative software (add to calendar). And much, much more!

We were originally scheduled to launch Cloudflare TV last week. Given the horrific violence targeting Black communities in the United States, we decided to delay the launch by a week. We've been inspired by the peaceful protests around the world, but we're under no illusion that the systemic problems that inspired them have been fixed. We all have a lot of work to do.

What we have done over the course of the last week was add more content to Cloudflare TV highlighting the importance of diversity on our team. We've always believed that diverse teams with people who have different perspectives are more likely to find the best and most creative solutions to fulfill our mission of helping build a better Internet. I'm looking forward to sessions like those led by Cloudflare's Black community, Afroflare, discussing their career paths and experiences (add to calendar), "Spotlight on Latino Excellence" interviewing Latino members of Cloudflare's team (add to calendar), and "Everyone at the Table" looking at the topics of the day from a diverse set of perspectives (add to calendar).

We as a company, and the tech community overall, have a lot of work to do in order to bring in more diversity. I'm hopeful that Cloudflare TV can provide one forum to highlight the incredible professionals from communities that have been underrepresented in tech on our team and at other organizations we admire. I'm looking forward to kicking off that conversation with Chris Young on Monday (add to calendar).

We're aiming to make as much of the content interactive as possible. We'll be interviewing existing customers and partners. We’re hosting as much of the content live so that the hosts of many programs will respond to questions from the audience. If you tune in, you'll get to hear from the product managers and engineers that are building Cloudflare, ask them questions, and get responses live.

There will be lots of snafus. None of us have ever been television producers before. In MTV's early days, they regularly failed to a blank screen. The production quality was low. And some experiments didn't work. If we're lucky, this won't be any different. But, if we're really lucky, hopefully some great things will also come out of it. I keep reminding our team that if we're trying to follow in the footsteps of MTV — and its greatest success was "Jersey Shore" — then the bar is pretty low.

So hope you'll tune in, geek out, feel part of our community, and learn more about Cloudflare and the people who are building it. And, if it works, maybe none of us will ever need to go to RSA again.

Check out the Cloudflare TV Guide: cloudflare.tv/schedule