Photo by Liu Zai Hou / Unsplash
In Q2, Cloudflare released several products which enable a better Internet “end-to-end” — from the mobile client to host infrastructure. Now, anyone from an individual developer to large companies and governments, can control, secure, and accelerate their applications from the “perimeter” back to the “host.”
On the client side, Cloudflare’s Mobile SDK extends control directly into your mobile apps, providing visibility into application performance and load times across any global carrier network.
On the host side, Cloudflare Workers lets companies move workloads from their host to the Cloudflare Network, reducing infrastructure costs and speeding up the user experience. Argo Tunnel lets you securely connect your host directly to a Cloudflare data center. If your host infrastructure is running other TCP services besides HTTP(S), you can now protect it with Cloudflare’s DDoS protection using Spectrum.
So for end-to-end control that is easy and fast to deploy, these recent products are all incredible “workers” across the “spectrum” of your needs.
But there’s more to the story
End users want richer experiences, such as more video, interactivity, and images. Meeting those needs can incur real costs in bandwidth, hardware, and time. Cloudflare addresses these with three products that improve video delivery, reduce paint times, and shrink the round-trip times.
Cloudflare now simplifies and reduces delivery cost of video with Stream Delivery. Pages using plenty of Javascript now have faster paint times and wider mobile-device support with Rocket Loader. If you’re managing multiple origins and want to ensure fastest delivery based on the shortest round-trip time, Cloudflare Load Balancer now supports Dynamic Steering.
Attackers are shifting their focus to the application layer. Some security features, like CAPTCHA and Javascript Challenge, give you more control and reduce false-positives when blocking rate-based threats at the edge, such as layer 7 DDoS or brute-force attacks.
Finally, Cloudflare extended privacy to consumers through the launch of our DNS resolver 1.1.1.1 on 4/1/2018! Now users who set their DNS resolvers to 1.1.1.1 can browse faster while protecting browser data with Cloudflare’s privacy-first consumer DNS service.
Here is a recap from April to June of the features we released in Q2
Dynamic Steering
Tue, July 10, 2018Dynamic steering is a load balancing feature that automates traffic steering across origins in multiple geographic regions. Round-trip time (RTT) for health checks is calculated across multiple pools of load balanced servers and origins to determine the fastest server pools. This RTT data enables the load balancers to identify the fastest pools, and to direct user requests to the most responsive origins.
Support for New DNS Record Types
Thu, July 5, 2018Cloudflare's Authoritative DNS now supports the following record types: CERT, DNSKEY, DS, NAPTR, SMIMEA, SSHFP, TLSA, and URI via the web and API.
Developer Portal Q2 Update
Mon, June 11, 2018The Developer Portal has been updated in Q2 to include improved search, documentation for new products, and listings of upcoming Cloudflare community events.
Rocket Loader Upgrade
Fri, June 1, 2018Rocket Loader has been updated to deliver faster performance for website paint & load times by prioritizing website content over JavaScript. Majority of mobile devices are now supported. Increased compliance with strict content security policies.
Stream Delivery
Thu, May 31, 2018Cloudflare’s Stream Delivery solution offers fast caching and delivery of video content across our network of 150+ global data centers.
Deprecating TLS 1.0 and 1.1 on api.cloudflare.com
Tue, May 29, 2018On June 4, Cloudflare will be dropping support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 on api.cloudflare.com. Additionally, the dashboard will be moved from www.cloudflare.com/a to dash.cloudflare.com and will require a browser that supports TLS 1.2 or higher.
Rate Limiting has new Actions and Triggers
Mon, May 21, 2018Rate Limiting has two new features: challenges (CAPTCHA and JS Challenge) as an Action; and matching Header attributes in the response (from either origin or the cache) as the Trigger. These features give more control over how Cloudflare Rate Limiting responds to threshold violations, giving customers granularity over the types of requests to "count" to fit their different applications. To learn more, go to the blog post.
Support purge-by-tag for large tag sizes
Thu, May 10, 2018The Cache-Tag header now supports up to 1000 tags and a total header length of 16kb. This update simplifies file purges for customers who deploy websites with Drupal.
Multi-User Access on dash.cloudflare.com
Wed, May 2, 2018Starting May 2 2018, users can go to the new home of Cloudflare’s Dashboard at dash.cloudflare.com and share account access. This has been supported at our Enterprise level of service, but is now being extended to all customers.
Support full SSL (Strict) mode validation for CNAME domains
Thu, April 12, 2018Cloudflare is now able to validate origin certificates that use a hostname's CNAME target in Full SSL (Strict) mode. Previously, Cloudflare would not validate any certificate without a direct match of the HTTP hostname and the certificate's Common Name or SAN. This update allows SSL for SaaS customers to more easily enable end-to-end security.
Cloudflare Spectrum
Thu, April 12, 2018Spectrum protects TCP applications and ports from volumetric DDoS attacks and data theft by proxying non-web traffic through Cloudflare’s Anycast network.
Workers Can Control Cache TTL by Response Code
Wed, April 11, 2018Cloudflare workers can now control cache TTL by response code. This provides greater control over cached assets with Cloudflare Workers.
Argo Tunnel
Thu, April 5, 2018Argo Tunnel ensures that no visitor or attacker can reach your web server unless they first pass through Cloudflare. Using a lightweight agent installed on your origin, Cloudflare creates an encrypted tunnel between your host infrastructure and our nearest data centers without opening a public inbound port. It’s more secure, more performant, and easier to manage than exposing your services publically.