At Cloudflare, we have an ambitious mission of helping to build a better Internet. Partnerships are a core part of how we achieve this mission. Last year we joined forces with IBM. Their expertise and deep relationships with the world's largest organizations are highly complementary with Cloudflare's cloud-native, API-first architecture that provides superior security, performance, and availability for Internet-facing workloads. Our shared goal of enabling and supporting a hybrid and multi-cloud world is becoming a greater component of our combined message to the market.
As we prepare for the IBM Think customer conference in San Francisco this week, the Cloudflare team is excited about the opportunities ahead. We closed 2018 with momentum, bringing several of the world’s leading brands onto the Cloud Internet Services (CIS) platform in 2018. Customers have used CIS for several purposes, including:
The CIS Global Load Balancer provides high availability across IBM Cloud regions for customers in Europe, North America, and Latin America
CIS caching capabilities have ensured availability and performance for world spectator events with high traffic spikes
The CIS authoritative DNS delivers greater availability and performance for Internet-facing workloads supporting thousands of developers
At Think, please visit Cloudflare at our booth (#602). In addition, you may want to visit these interesting discussions:
Simplifying Enterprise Workloads with Modern Cloud Infrastructure
Hear from Satinder Sethi, GM of IBM Cloud Infrastructure, and Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince, discuss the trade-offs of current and emerging technologies for infrastructure design, particularly for organizations operating in a hybrid or multi-cloud environment.
Securing the Network Edge for Your Cloud Apps
An overview of the benefits of IBM Cloud Internet Services, seamlessly integrated with IBM Cloud platform security controls.
How Weather.com Uses Edge Computing to Create the Future of Web Performance
Find out how, after years of iteration, the team at The Weather Company has found a unique way of using edge computing to assemble heterogeneous website resources into a single, highly reliable and performant site.
We’re also thrilled to support IBM Cloud’s announcement of the addition of new Cloudflare capabilities to the CIS suite of security and performance features. These capabilities make the CIS offering even more useful to IBM’s customers who desire to make their Internet-facing applications and APIs secure, resilient, and fast.
Here is a short list of use cases for the new features that IBM is releasing in the CIS Enterprise Plan:
Enable robust analytics and forensics
We are introducing CIS Enterprise Log Share which enables CIOs and security leaders to ingest log data into their data repository, business intelligence tool, and/or Security Incident Event Management system of choice. This will enable correlation analysis to develop insights about attacks.
Protect and accelerate non-HTTP traffic
Many of our joint customers run applications that utilize non-HTTP traffic. To serve these customers, Cloud Internet Services Range allows the mitigation of Layer 3 and 4 volumetric DDoS attacks to keep all TCP and UDP-based services online and secure across ports that run TCP and UDP protocols. It will also protect these ports from data snooping and theft by encrypting traffic with SSL/TLS.
Run custom logic on the edge
Serverless computing is increasingly attractive to application developers for a variety of reasons: lower latency, more granular control, greater security, and savings on store and compute resources.
With CIS Edge Functions, now available in beta, Customers can realize serverless computing benefits by running complex logic and code at the network edge. IBM Cloud Internet Services Edge Functions allows JavaScript to be deployed on the Cloudflare network, enabling customers to deploy their code to over 165 data centers around the world in less than 30 seconds. Use cases include: intercept and modify any request made to an application, make outbound requests to any URL on the Internet, and maintain fine-grained control over how users manage traffic that interacts with Internet-facing workloads.
Customers who are running mission-critical Enterprise applications that cannot afford downtime or suboptimal performance should also be aware of these existing CIS Enterprise features:
For applications with a global user base, leverage CIS Smart Routing to effectively route requests effectively globally
For high-value applications that tend to receive a variety of Layer 7 attack types, which require only the right visitors to gain access, use CIS Custom WAF rules
For applications that need constant monitoring and failover, five-second health checks are available
All of these capabilities are available through the CIS Enterprise Plan. To get started with any of these capabilities, please review the plans here.
The IBM and Cloudflare partnership advances both organizations’ missions, and it helps IBM customers accelerate and protect anything connected to the internet. To find out more about the partnership, please see here.