Every year, we celebrate Cloudflare’s birthday in September when we announce the products we’re releasing to help make the Internet better for everyone. We’re always building new and innovative products throughout the year, and having to pick five announcements for just one week of the year is always challenging. Last year we brought back Crypto Week where we shared new cryptography technologies we’re supporting and helping advance to help build a more secure Internet.
Today I’m thrilled to announce we are launching our first-ever Speed Week and we want to showcase some of the things that we’re obsessed with to make the Internet faster for everyone.
How much faster is faster?
When we built the software stack that runs our network, we knew that both security and speed are important to our customers, and they should never have to compromise one for the other. All of the products we’re announcing this week will help our customers have a better experience on the Internet with as much as a 50% improvement in page load times for websites, getting the most out of HTTP/2’s features (while only lifting a finger to click the button that enables them), finding the optimal route across the Internet, and providing the best live streaming video experience. I am constantly amazed by the talented engineers that work on the products that we launch all year round. I wish we could have weeks like this all year round to celebrate the wins they’ve accumulated as they tackle the difficult performance challenges of the web. We’re never content to settle for the status quo, and as our network continues to grow, so does our ability to improve our flagship products like Argo, or how we support rich media sites that rely heavily on images and video. The sheer scale of our network provides rich data that we can use to make better decisions on how we support our customers’ web properties.
We also recognize that the Internet is evolving. New standards and protocols such as HTTP/2, QUIC, TLS 1.3 are great advances to improve web performance and security, but they can also be challenging for many developers to easily deploy. HTTP/2 was introduced in 2015 by the IETF, and was the first major revision of the HTTP protocol. While our customers have always been able to benefit from HTTP/2, we’re exploring how we can make that experience even faster.
All things Speed
Want a sneak peek at what we’re announcing this week? I’m really excited to see this week’s announcements unfold. Each day we’ll post a new blog where we’ll share product announcements and customer stories that demonstrate how we’re making life better for our customers.
Monday: An inside view of how we’re making faster, smarter routing decisions
Tuesday: HTTP/2 can be faster, we’ll show you how
Wednesday: Simplify image management and speed up load times on any device
Thursday: How we’re improving our network for faster video streaming
Friday: How we’re helping make JavaScript faster
For bonus points, sign up for a live stream webinar where Kornel Lesinksi and I will be hosted by Dennis Publishing to discuss the many challenges of the modern web “Stronger, Better, Faster: Solving the performance challenges of the modern web.” The event will be held on Monday, May 13th at 11:00 am BST and you can either register for the live event or sign up for one of the on-demand sessions later in the week.
I hope you’re just as excited about our upcoming Speed Week as much as I am, be sure to subscribe to the blog to get daily updates sent to your inbox, cause who knows… there may even be “one last thing”