Each year we celebrate our launch on September 27, 2010 with a week of product announcements. We call this Birthday Week, but rather than receiving gifts, we give them away. This year is no different, except that it is… Cloudflare is 10 years old.
Before looking forward to the coming week, let’s take a look back at announcements from previous Birthday Weeks.
A year into Cloudflare’s life (in 2011) we launched automatic support for IPv6. This was the first of a long line of announcements that support our goal of making available to everyone the latest technologies. If you’ve been following Cloudflare’s growth you’ll know those include SPDY/HTTP/2, TLS 1.3, QUIC/HTTP/3, DoH and DoT, WebP, … At two years old we celebrated with a timeline of our first two years and the fact that we’d reached 500,000 domains using the service. A year later that number had tripled.
In 2014 we released Universal SSL and gave all our customers SSL certificates. In one go we massively increased the size of the encrypted web and made it free and simple to go from http:// to https://. Other HTTPS related features we’ve rolled out include: Automatic HTTPS Rewrites, Encrypted SNI and our CT Log.
In 2017 we unwrapped a bunch of goodies with Unmetered DDoS Mitigation, our video streaming service, Cloudflare Stream, the ability to control where private SSL keys stored through Geo Key Manager. And, last but not least, our hugely popular serverless platform Cloudflare Workers. It’s hard to believe that it’s been three years since we changed the way people think about serverless with our massively distributed, secure and fast to update platform.
Two years ago Cloudflare became a domain registrar with the launch of our “at cost” service: Cloudflare Registrar. We also announced the Bandwidth Alliance which is designed to reduce or eliminate high cloud egress fees. We rolled out support for QUIC and Cloudflare Workers got a globally distributed key value store: Workers KV.
Which brings us to last year with the launch of WARP Plus to speed up and secure the “last mile” connection between a device and Cloudflare’s network. Browser Insights so that customers can optimize their website’s performance and see how each Cloudflare tool helps.
We greatly enhanced our bot management tools with Bot Defend Mode, and rolled out Workers Sites to bring the power of Workers and Workers KV to entire websites.
No Spoilers Here
Here are some hints about what to expect this year for our 10th anniversary Birthday Week:
Monday: We’re fundamentally changing how people think about Serverless
If you studied computer science you’ll probably have come across Niklaus Wirth’s book “Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs”. We’re going to start the week with two enhancements to Cloudflare Workers that are fundamentally going to change how people think about serverless. The lambda calculus is a nice theoretical foundation, but it’s Turing machines that won the day. If you want to build large, real programs you need to have algorithms and data structures.
Tuesday and Wednesday are all about observability. Of an Internet property and of the Internet itself. And they are also about privacy. We’ll roll out new functionality so you can see what’s happening without the need to track people.
Thursday is security day with a new service to protect the parts of websites and Internet applications that are behind the scenes. And, finally, on Friday it’s all about one click performance improvements that leverage our more than 200 city network to speed up static and dynamic content.
Welcome to Birthday Week 2020!