Announcing Pages support for monorepos, wrangler.toml, database integrations and more!
Pages launched in 2021 with the goal of empowering developers to go seamlessly from idea to production. With built-in CI/CD, Preview Deployments, integration with GitHub and GitLab, and support for all the most popular JavaScript frameworks, Pages lets you build and deploy both static and full-stack apps globally to our network in seconds.
Pages has superpowers like these that Workers does not have, and vice versa. Today you have to choose upfront whether to build a Worker or a Pages project, even though the two products largely overlap. That’s why during 2023’s Developer Week, we started bringing both products together to give developers the benefit of the best of both worlds. And it’s why we announced that like Workers, Pages projects can now directly access bindings to Cloudflare services — using workerd under-the-hood — even when using the local development server provided by a full-stack framework like Astro, Next.js, Nuxt, Qwik, Remix, SolidStart, or SvelteKit. Today, we’re thrilled to be launching some new improvements to Pages that bring functionality previously restricted to Workers. Welcome to the stage: monorepos, wrangler.toml, new additions to Next.js support, and database integrations!
Pages now supports monorepos
Many Continue reading
Cloudflare Calls: millions of cascading trees all the way down
Following its initial announcement in September 2022, Cloudflare Calls is now in open beta and available in your Cloudflare Dashboard. Cloudflare Calls lets developers build real-time audio/video apps using WebRTC, and it abstracts away the complexity by turning the Cloudflare network into a singular SFU. In this post, we dig into how we make this possible.
WebRTC growing pains
WebRTC is the only way to send UDP traffic out of a web browser – everything else uses TCP.
As a developer, you need a UDP-based transport layer for applications demanding low latency and real-time feedback, such as audio/video conferencing and interactive gaming. This is because unlike WebSocket and other TCP-based solutions, UDP is not subject to head-of-line blocking, a frequent topic on the Cloudflare Blog.
When building a new video conferencing app, you typically start with a peer-to-peer web application using WebRTC, where clients exchange data directly. This approach is efficient for small-scale demos, but scalability issues arise as the number of participants increases. This is because the amount of data each client must transmit grows substantially, following an almost exponential increase relative to the number of participants, as each client needs to send data to n-1 other clients.
R2 adds event notifications, support for migrations from Google Cloud Storage, and an infrequent access storage tier
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We’re excited to announce three new features for Cloudflare R2, our zero egress fee object storage platform:
- Event Notifications: Automatically trigger Workers and take action when data in your R2 bucket changes.
- Super Slurper for Google Cloud Storage: Easily migrate data from Google Cloud Storage to Cloudflare R2.
- Infrequent Access Private Beta: Pay less to store data that isn’t frequently accessed. Now in private beta (sign up now).
Event Notifications Open Beta
The lifecycle of data often doesn’t stop immediately after upload to an R2 bucket – event data may need to be transformed and loaded into a data warehouse, media files may need to go through a post-processing step, etc. We’re releasing event notifications for R2 in open beta to enable building applications and workflows driven by your changing data.
Event notifications work by sending messages to your queue each time there is a change to your data. These messages are then received by a consumer Worker where you can then define any subsequent action that needs to be taken.
To get started enabling event Continue reading
Improving Cloudflare Workers and D1 developer experience with Prisma ORM
Working with databases can be difficult. Developers face increasing data complexity and needs beyond simple create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations. Unfortunately, these issues also compound on themselves: developers have a harder time iterating in an increasingly complex environment. Cloudflare Workers and D1 help by reducing time spent managing infrastructure and deploying applications, and Prisma provides a great experience for your team to work and interact with data.
Together, Cloudflare and Prisma make it easier than ever to deploy globally available apps with a focus on developer experience. To further that goal, Prisma Object Relational Mapper (ORM) now natively supports Cloudflare Workers and D1 in Preview. With version 5.12.0 of Prisma ORM you can now interact with your data stored in D1 from your Cloudflare Workers with the convenience of the Prisma Client API. Learn more and try it out now.
What is Prisma?
From writing to debugging, SQL queries take a long time and slow developer productivity. Even before writing queries, modeling tables can quickly become unwieldy, and migrating data is a nerve-wracking process. Prisma ORM looks to resolve all of these issues by providing an intuitive data modeling language, an automated migration workflow, and Continue reading
Data Anywhere with Pipelines, Event Notifications, and Workflows
Data is fundamental to any real-world application: the database storing your user data and inventory, the analytics tracking sales events and/or error rates, the object storage with your web assets and/or the Parquet files driving your data science team, and the vector database enabling semantic search or AI-powered recommendations for your users.
When we first announced Workers back in 2017, and then Workers KV, Cloudflare R2, and D1, it was obvious that the next big challenge to solve for developers would be in making it easier to ingest, store, and query the data needed to build scalable, full-stack applications.
To that end, as part of our quest to make building stateful, distributed-by-default applications even easier, we’re launching our new Event Notifications service; a preview of our upcoming streaming ingestion product, Pipelines; and a sneak peek into our take on durable execution, Workflows.
Event-based architectures
When you’re writing data — whether that’s new data, changing existing data, or deleting old data — you often want to trigger other, asynchronous work to run in response. That could be processing user-driven uploads, updating search indexes as the underlying data changes, or removing associated rows in your SQL database when Continue reading
How Picsart leverages Cloudflare’s Developer Platform to build globally performant services
Delivering great user experiences with a global user base can be challenging. While serving requests quickly when you start out in a local market is straightforward, doing so for a global audience is much more difficult. Why? Even under optimal conditions, you cannot be faster than the speed of light, which brings single data center solutions to their performance limits.
In this post, we will cover how Picsart improved the performance of one of its most critical services by moving from a centralized architecture to a globally distributed service built on Cloudflare. Our serverless compute platform, Workers, distributed throughout 310+ cities around the world, and our globally distributed Workers KV storage allowed them to improve their performance significantly and drive real business impact.
Success driven by data-driven insights
Picsart is one of the world’s largest digital creation platforms and a long-standing Cloudflare partner. At its core, an advanced tech stack powers its comprehensive features, including AI-driven photo and video editing tools and community-driven content sharing. With its infrastructure spanning across multiple cloud environments and on-prem deployments, Picsart is engineered to handle billions of daily requests from its huge mobile and web user base and API integrations. For over a Continue reading
Continuing our work with CISA and the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative to keep vulnerable communities secure online
Internet security and reliability has become deeply personal. This holds true for many of us, but especially those who work with vulnerable communities, political dissidents, journalists in authoritarian nations, or human rights advocates. The threats they face, both in the physical world and online, are steadily increasing.
At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better Internet. With many of our Impact projects, which protect a range of vulnerable voices from civil society, journalists, state and local governments that run elections, political campaigns, political parties, community networks, and more, we’ve learned how to keep these important groups secure online. But, we can’t do it alone. Collaboration and sharing of best practices with multiple stakeholders to get the right tools into the groups that need them is essential in democratizing access to powerful security tools.
Civil society has historically been the voice for sharing information about attacks that target vulnerable communities, both online and offline. In the last few years, we see governments increasingly appreciating how cyberattacks affect vulnerable voices and make an effort to identify the risks to these communities, and the resources available to protect them.
In March 2023, the US government launched the Summit for Democracy Continue reading
Leveling up Workers AI: general availability and more new capabilities
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Welcome to Tuesday – our AI day of Developer Week 2024! In this blog post, we’re excited to share an overview of our new AI announcements and vision, including news about Workers AI officially going GA with improved pricing, a GPU hardware momentum update, an expansion of our Hugging Face partnership, Bring Your Own LoRA fine-tuned inference, Python support in Workers, more providers in AI Gateway, and Vectorize metadata filtering.
Workers AI GA
Today, we’re excited to announce that our Workers AI inference platform is now Generally Available. After months of being in open beta, we’ve improved our service with greater reliability and performance, unveiled pricing, and added many more models to our catalog.
Improved performance & reliability
With Workers AI, our goal is to make AI inference as reliable and easy to use as the rest of Cloudflare’s network. Under the hood, we’ve upgraded the load balancing that is built into Workers AI. Requests can now be routed to more GPUs in more cities, and each city is aware of the total available capacity for AI inference. If the request Continue reading
Running fine-tuned models on Workers AI with LoRAs
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Inference from fine-tuned LLMs with LoRAs is now in open beta
Today, we’re excited to announce that you can now run fine-tuned inference with LoRAs on Workers AI. This feature is in open beta and available for pre-trained LoRA adapters to be used with Mistral, Gemma, or Llama 2, with some limitations. Take a look at our product announcements blog post to get a high-level overview of our Bring Your Own (BYO) LoRAs feature.
In this post, we’ll do a deep dive into what fine-tuning and LoRAs are, show you how to use it on our Workers AI platform, and then delve into the technical details of how we implemented it on our platform.
What is fine-tuning?
Fine-tuning is a general term for modifying an AI model by continuing to train it with additional data. The goal of fine-tuning is to increase the probability that a generation is similar to your dataset. Training a model from scratch is not practical for many use cases given how expensive and time consuming they can be to train. By fine-tuning an existing pre-trained model, Continue reading
Security Week 2024 wrap up
The next 12 months have the potential to reshape the global political landscape with elections occurring in more than 80 nations, in 2024, while new technologies, such as AI, capture our imagination and pose new security challenges.
Against this backdrop, the role of CISOs has never been more important. Grant Bourzikas, Cloudflare’s Chief Security Officer, shared his views on what the biggest challenges currently facing the security industry are in the Security Week opening blog.
Over the past week, we announced a number of new products and features that align with what we believe are the most crucial challenges for CISOs around the globe. We released features that span Cloudflare’s product portfolio, ranging from application security to securing employees and cloud infrastructure. We have also published a few stories on how we take a Customer Zero approach to using Cloudflare services to manage security at Cloudflare.
We hope you find these stories interesting and are excited by the new Cloudflare products. In case you missed any of these announcements, here is a recap of Security Week:
Responding to opportunity and risk from AI
| Title | Excerpt |
|---|---|
| Cloudflare announces Firewall for AI | Cloudflare announced the development of Firewall for AI, Continue reading |
Protocol detection with Cloudflare Gateway
Cloudflare Gateway, our secure web gateway (SWG), now supports the detection, logging, and filtering of network protocols regardless of their source or destination port. Protocol detection makes it easier to set precise policies without having to rely on the well known port and without the risk of over/under-filtering activity that could disrupt your users’ work. For example, you can filter all SSH traffic on your network by simply choosing the protocol.
Today, protocol detection is available to any Enterprise user of Gateway and supports a growing list of protocols including HTTP, HTTPS, SSH, TLS, DCE/RPC, MQTT, and TPKT.
Why is this needed?
As many configuration planes move to using RESTful APIs, and now even GraphQL, there is still a need to manage devices via protocols like SSH. Whether it is the only management protocol available on a new third party device, or one of the first ways we learned to connect to and manage a server, SSH is still extensively used.
With other legacy SWG and firewall tools, the process of blocking traffic by specifying only the well known port number (for example, port 22 for SSH) can be both insecure and inconvenient. For example, if you used SSH Continue reading
Launching email security insights on Cloudflare Radar
During 2021's Birthday Week, we announced our Email Routing service, which allows users to direct different types of email messages (such as marketing, transactional, or administrative) to separate accounts based on criteria such as the recipient’s address or department. Its capabilities and the volume of messages routed have grown significantly since launch.
Just a few months later, on February 23, 2022, we announced our intent to acquire Area 1 Security to protect users from phishing attacks in email, web, and network environments. Since the completion of the acquisition on April 1, 2022, Area 1's email security capabilities have been integrated into Cloudflare's secure access service edge (SASE) solution portfolio, and now processes tens of millions of messages daily.
Processing millions of email messages each day on behalf of our customers gives us a unique perspective on the threats posed by malicious emails, spam volume, the adoption of email authentication methods like SPF, DMARC, and DKIM, and the use of IPv4/IPv6 and TLS by email servers. Today, we are launching a new Email Security section on Cloudflare Radar to share these perspectives with you. The insights in this new section can help you better understand the state of email security Continue reading
Network performance update: Security Week 2024
We constantly measure our own network’s performance against other networks, look for ways to improve our performance compared to them, and share the results of our efforts. Since June 2021, we’ve been sharing benchmarking results we’ve run against other networks to see how we compare.
In this post we are going to share the most recent updates since our last post in September, and talk about how we are getting as fast as we are.
How we stack up
Since June 2021, we’ve been taking a close look at the most reported eyeball-facing ISPs and taking actions for the specific networks where we have some room for improvement. Cloudflare was already the fastest provider for TCP Connection time at the 95th percentile for 44% of the networks around the world (we define a network as country and AS number pair). We chose this metric to show how our network helps make your websites faster by getting you to where your customers are. Taking a look at the numbers, in July 2022, Cloudflare was ranked #1 in 33% of the networks and was within 2 ms (95th percentile TCP Connection Time) or 5% of the #1 provider for Continue reading
Harnessing chaos in Cloudflare offices
In the children’s book The Snail and Whale, after an unexpectedly far-flung adventure, the principal character returns to declarations of “How time’s flown” and “Haven’t you grown?” It has been about four years since we last wrote about LavaRand and during that time the story of how Cloudflare uses physical sources of entropy to add to the security of the Internet has continued to travel and be a source of interest to many. What was initially just a single species of physical entropy source – lava lamps – has grown and diversified. We want to catch you up a little on the story of LavaRand. This blog post will cover the new sources of “chaos” that have been added to LavaRand and how you can make use of that harnessed chaos in your next application. We’ll cover how public randomness can open up uses of publicly trusted randomness — imagine not needing to take the holders of a “random draw” at their word when they claim the outcome is not manipulated in some way. And finally we’ll discuss timelock encryption which is a way to ensure that a message cannot be decrypted until some chosen time in the Continue reading
Log Explorer: monitor security events without third-party storage
Today, we are excited to announce beta availability of Log Explorer, which allows you to investigate your HTTP and Security Event logs directly from the Cloudflare Dashboard. Log Explorer is an extension of Security Analytics, giving you the ability to review related raw logs. You can analyze, investigate, and monitor for security attacks natively within the Cloudflare Dashboard, reducing time to resolution and overall cost of ownership by eliminating the need to forward logs to third party security analysis tools.
Background
Security Analytics enables you to analyze all of your HTTP traffic in one place, giving you the security lens you need to identify and act upon what matters most: potentially malicious traffic that has not been mitigated. Security Analytics includes built-in views such as top statistics and in-context quick filters on an intuitive page layout that enables rapid exploration and validation.
In order to power our rich analytics dashboards with fast query performance, we implemented data sampling using Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) analytics. This is a great fit for providing high level aggregate views of the data. However, we received feedback from many Security Analytics power users that sometimes they need access to a more granular view Continue reading
Introducing Requests for Information (RFIs) and Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIRs) for threat intelligence teams
Cloudforce One is our threat operations and research team. Its primary objective: track and disrupt threat actors targeting Cloudflare and the customer systems we protect. Cloudforce One customers can engage directly with analysts on the team to help understand and stop the specific threats targeting them.
Today, we are releasing in general availability two new tools that will help Cloudforce One customers get the best value out of the service by helping us prioritize and organize the information that matters most to them: Requests for Information (RFIs) and Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIRs). We’d also like to review how we’ve used the Cloudflare Workers and Pages platform to build our internal pipeline to not only perform investigations on behalf of our customers, but conduct our own internal investigations of the threats and attackers we track.
What are Requests for Information (RFIs)?
RFIs are designed to streamline the process of accessing critical intelligence. They provide an avenue for users to submit specific queries and requests directly into Cloudforce One's analysis queue. Essentially, they are a well-structured way for you to tell the team what to focus their research on to best support your security posture.
Each RFI filed is routed to an Continue reading
Cloudflare’s URL Scanner, new features, and the story of how we built it
Today, we’re excited to talk about URL Scanner, a tool that helps everyone from security teams to everyday users to detect and safeguard against malicious websites by scanning and analyzing them. URL Scanner has executed almost a million scans since its launch last March on Cloudflare Radar, driving us to continuously innovate and enhance its capabilities. Since that time, we have introduced unlisted scans, detailed malicious verdicts, enriched search functionality, and now, integration with Security Center and an official API, all built upon the robust foundation of Cloudflare Workers, Durable Objects, and the Browser Rendering API.
Integration with the Security Center in the Cloudflare Dashboard
Security Center is the single place in the Cloudflare Dashboard to map your attack surface, identify potential security risks, and mitigate risks with a few clicks. Its users can now access the URL scanner directly from the Investigate Portal, enhancing their cybersecurity workflow. These scans will be unlisted by default, ensuring privacy while facilitating a deep dive into website security. Users will be able to see their historic scans and access the related reports when they need to, and they will benefit from automatic screenshots for multiple screen sizes, enriching Continue reading
Cloudflare protects global democracy against threats from emerging technology during the 2024 voting season
In 2024, more than 80 national elections are slated to occur, directly impacting approximately 4.2 billion individuals in places such as Indonesia, the United States, India, the European Union, and more. This marks the most extensive election cycle worldwide until the year 2048. Elections are a cornerstone of democracy, providing citizens with the means to shape their government, hold leaders accountable, and participate in the political process.
At Cloudflare, we’ve been supporting state and local governments that run elections for free for the last seven years. As we look at the upcoming elections around the world, we are reminded how important our services are in keeping information related to elections reliable and secure from those looking to disrupt these processes. Unfortunately, the problems that election officials face in keeping elections secure has only gotten more complicated and requires facilitating information sharing, capacity building, and joint efforts to safeguard democratic processes.
At Cloudflare, we support a range of players in the election space by providing security, performance, and reliability tools to help facilitate the democratic process. With Cloudflare Impact projects, we have found a way to protect a range of stakeholders who play an important role in the election process Continue reading
Building secure websites: a guide to Cloudflare Pages and Turnstile Plugin
Balancing developer velocity and security against bots is a constant challenge. Deploying your changes as quickly and easily as possible is essential to stay ahead of your (or your customers’) needs and wants. Ensuring your website is safe from malicious bots — without degrading user experience with alien hieroglyphics to decipher just to prove that you are a human — is no small feat. With Pages and Turnstile, we'll walk you through just how easy it is to have the best of both worlds!
Cloudflare Pages offer a seamless platform for deploying and scaling your websites with ease. You can get started right away with configuring your websites with a quick integration using your git provider, and get set up with unlimited requests, bandwidth, collaborators, and projects.
Cloudflare Turnstile is Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA alternative solution where your users don’t ever have to solve another puzzle to get to your website, no more stop lights and fire hydrants. You can protect your site without having to put your users through an annoying user experience. If you are already using another CAPTCHA service, we have made it easy for you to migrate over to Turnstile with minimal effort needed. Check out the Continue reading
Free network flow monitoring for all enterprise customers
A key component of effective corporate network security is establishing end to end visibility across all traffic that flows through the network. Every network engineer needs a complete overview of their network traffic to confirm their security policies work, to identify new vulnerabilities, and to analyze any shifts in traffic behavior. Often, it’s difficult to build out effective network monitoring as teams struggle with problems like configuring and tuning data collection, managing storage costs, and analyzing traffic across multiple visibility tools.
Today, we’re excited to announce that a free version of Cloudflare’s network flow monitoring product, Magic Network Monitoring, is available to all Enterprise Customers. Every Enterprise Customer can configure Magic Network Monitoring and immediately improve their network visibility in as little as 30 minutes via our self-serve onboarding process.
Enterprise Customers can visit the Magic Network Monitoring product page, click “Talk to an expert”, and fill out the form. You’ll receive access within 24 hours of submitting the request. Over the next month, the free version of Magic Network Monitoring will be rolled out to all Enterprise Customers. The product will automatically be available by default without the need to submit a form.
How it works
Cloudflare customers Continue reading