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Having been at Cloudflare since it was tiny it’s hard to believe that we’re hitting our teens! But here we are 13 years on from launch. Looking back to 2010 it was the year of iPhone 4, the first iPad, the first Kinect, Inception was in cinemas, and TiK ToK was hot (well, the Kesha song was). Given how long ago all that feels, I'd have a hard time predicting the next 13 years, so I’ll stick to predicting the future by creating it (with a ton of help from the Cloudflare team).
Building the future is, in part, what Birthday Week is about. Over the past 13 years we’ve announced things like Universal SSL (doubling the size of the encrypted web overnight and helping to usher in the largely encrypted web we all use; Cloudflare Radar shows that worldwide 99% of HTTP requests are encrypted), or Cloudflare Workers (helping change the way people build and scale applications), or unmetered DDoS protection (to help with the scourge of DDoS).
This year will be no different.
Winding back to the year I joined Cloudflare we made our first Birthday Week announcement: our automatic IPv6 gateway. Fast-forward to today and Cloudflare Radar says that 37% of connections to Cloudflare use IPv6, so this year there’s a special offer to help make IPv6 ever more widespread and counter those who’d try to bind us to IPv4. So let’s build an IPv6 future together.
Last year we announced Turnstile, our privacy-preserving replacement for CAPTCHAs. This year we’ll be closing a big privacy hole in the encrypted Internet and showing how cryptography can be used to make measurements anonymous and private. Plus even more encrypted, anonymous connections from your computer to the Internet. And there’s more on what’s next for Turnstile itself, and helping make fonts faster and more private too. So let’s build a privacy-preserving Internet together.
AI, of course, is a huge topic and one quarter of all this week's blog posts are about AI, machine learning, GPUs, and all things building, managing, and measuring applications that use AI and machine learning. If it’s not obvious already, it will be after this week: the future involves AI everywhere, on device, in the cloud, and deep inside the Cloudflare global network.
Cloudflare WARP wasn’t a Birthday Week announcement (it was one of our April 1 releases like 1.1.1.1) but this year we’ll be switching from Star Trek to Star Wars with a new product called Hyperdrive. You’ll have to wait until Thursday to read all about it. But if you love databases, you’ll want to make the jump to lightspeed with us.
Speaking of speed… speed! It’s not all AI, privacy, and cool products. We also need to continue our mission to explore strange new worlds help make everyone’s use of the Internet faster. So, we’ll update you on our network performance, talk about how we keep our network running smoothly in face of ever-changing Internet weather, help you stream with low latency, and use caching in new smart ways.
Lastly, we’ll be talking about the impact of Cloudflare on the climate and our climate commitments. Helping with climate change is yet another thing we need to do together.
And, of course, there’s much more than just that. But I wouldn’t want to spoil the birthday surprise by unwrapping the blogs early.
