Stephen Pinkerton

Author Archives: Stephen Pinkerton

Building With Workers KV, a Fast Distributed Key-Value Store

Building With Workers KV, a Fast Distributed Key-Value Store
Building With Workers KV, a Fast Distributed Key-Value Store

Your Workers now have access to a low-latency key-value data store which lives inside our network all around the world!

For those who don’t know, Cloudflare Workers is a new type of compute platform, built on top of our global network of 152+ data centers around the world. It allows you to write serverless code which runs in the fabric of the Internet itself, allowing you to engage with your users faster than other platforms can even get a packet to where your code is running. It’s built on a new architecture which eliminates cold starts and dramatically reduces the memory overhead of keeping your code running when compared to a platform like Amazon Lambda.

As powerful as this is, compute is just one component of what you need to build an application, you also need the ability to store data. We evaluated many of the available open source data stores on the market, but ultimately nothing was designed for a world with quite as many distributed nodes as our network. Instead, we have begun releasing our own vision for distributed storage, beginning today.

The Workers KV is a highly distributed, eventually-consistent, key value store. It will allow you to Continue reading

Build and Deploy Functions to Cloudflare’s 152+ Data Centers with Serverless

Build and Deploy Functions to Cloudflare’s 152+ Data Centers with Serverless
Build and Deploy Functions to Cloudflare’s 152+ Data Centers with Serverless

We’re very excited to announce that Cloudflare Workers are now integrated into the Serverless framework as a serverless cloud provider! Serverless’ open source framework has become a must-have for many developers, and we want to make it as simple as possible to harness the power of Cloudflare’s distributed computing network.

Workers have become essential to the way people build applications on the web. The expressiveness of modern JavaScript combined with sub-30 second deploys to Cloudflare’s network of 152+ datacenters means that you can truly build your application into our global compute network. Up until this point, deploying Workers required doing all of your editing through our browser-based IDE or developing one’s own custom tooling on top of our API. But many developers have their own environments and are already familiar with the Serverless framework, so it seemed natural that we build first-class support for Workers into Serverless!

You can now define the entire structure and routing behavior of your Workers scripts in code and deploy them with ease using serverless deploy from your own development environment. Store configuration files in version control alongside your application code. And feel more confident testing your application with serverless invoke, a new way Continue reading

Enable Private DNS with 1.1.1.1 on Android 9 Pie

Enable Private DNS with 1.1.1.1 on Android 9 Pie

Enable Private DNS with 1.1.1.1 on Android 9 Pie

Recently, Google officially launched Android 9 Pie, which includes a slew of new features around digital well-being, security, and privacy. If you’ve poked around the network settings on your phone while on the beta or after updating, you may have noticed a new Private DNS Mode now supported by Android.

This new feature simplifies the process of configuring a custom secure DNS resolver on Android, meaning parties between your device and the websites you visit won’t be able to snoop on your DNS queries because they’ll be encrypted. The protocol behind this, TLS, is also responsible for the green lock icon you see in your address bar when visiting websites over HTTPS. The same technology is useful for encrypting DNS queries, ensuring they cannot be tampered with and are unintelligible to ISPs, mobile carriers, and any others in the network path between you and your DNS resolver. These new security protocols are called DNS over HTTPS, and DNS over TLS.

Configuring 1.1.1.1

Android Pie only supports DNS over TLS. To enable this on your device:

  1. Go to Settings → Network & internet → Advanced → Private DNS.
  2. Select the Private DNS provider hostname option.
  3. Enter Continue reading

1.1.1.1 for Your Organization

1.1.1.1 for Your Organization

1.1.1.1 for Your Organization

A few months ago, we announced the world’s fastest, privacy-first, recursive DNS resolver, 1.1.1.1. It’s been exciting watching the community reaction to this project, and to be in a position where we can promote new standards around private DNS.

The Cloudflare network helps to make measurable improvements to the Internet by rolling out security updates to millions of websites at once. This allows us to provide free SSL certificates to any website, and to implement state-of-the-art security for our customers.

We saw the same potential impact when deciding to build 1.1.1.1. From launch, we wanted people to be able to connect to their favorite websites faster, and to ensure that no entity between their computer and the origin web server was recording their browsing history. We’re proud to have achieved that goal with the fastest public DNS resolver in the world.

Consumer adoption of the resolver has been strong, and it makes sense: new legislation allows ISPs to track and sell your web history. But, not everyone feels comfortable changing the default DNS resolver on their computer or home network. We want to empower IT departments and network administrators to change the default DNS Continue reading