Introducing: Smarter Tiered Cache Topology Generation

Caching is a magic trick. Instead of a customer’s origin responding to every request, Cloudflare’s 200+ data centers around the world respond with content that is cached geographically close to visitors. This dramatically improves the load performance for web pages while decreasing the bandwidth costs by having Cloudflare respond to a request with cached content.

However, if content is not in cache, Cloudflare data centers must contact the origin server to receive the content. This isn’t as fast as delivering content from cache. It also places load on an origin server, and is more costly compared to serving directly from cache. These issues can be amplified depending on the geographic distribution of a website’s visitors, the number of data centers contacting the origin, and the available origin resources for responding to requests.

To decrease the number of times our network of data centers communicate with an origin, we organize data centers into tiers so that only upper-tier data centers can request content from an origin and then they spread content to lower tiers. This means content that loads faster for visitors, is cheaper to serve, and reduces origin resource consumption.

Today, I’m thrilled to announce a fundamental improvement to Argo Continue reading

Cloudflare’s Always Online and the Internet Archive Team Up to Fight Origin Errors

Every day, all across the Internet, something bad but entirely normal happens: thousands of origin servers go down, resulting in connection errors and frustrated users. Cloudflare’s users collectively spend over four and a half years each day waiting for unreachable origin servers to respond with error messages. But visitors don’t want to see error pages, they want to see content!

Today is exciting for all those who want the Internet to be stronger, more resilient, and have important redundancies: Cloudflare is pleased to announce a partnership with the Internet Archive to bring new functionality to our Always Online service.

Always Online serves as insurance for our customers’ websites. Should a customer’s origin go offline, timeout, or otherwise break, Always Online is there to step in and serve archived copies of webpages to visitors. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization that runs the Wayback Machine, a service which saves snapshots of billions of websites across the Internet. By partnering with the Internet Archive, Cloudflare is able to seamlessly deliver responses for unreachable websites from the Internet Archive, while the Internet Archive can continue their mission of archiving the web to provide access to all knowledge.

Enabling Always Online in the Continue reading

The Project Jengo Saga: How Cloudflare Stood up to a Patent Troll – and Won!

Remember 2016? Pokemon Go was all the rage, we lost Prince, and there were surprising election results in both the UK and US. Back in 2016, Blackbird Technologies was notorious in the world of patent litigation. It was a boutique law firm that was one of the top ten most active patent trolls, filing lawsuits against more than 50 different defendants in a single year.

In October 2016, Blackbird was looking to acquire additional patents for their portfolio when they found an incredibly broad software patent with the ambiguous title, “PROVIDING AN INTERNET THIRD PARTY DATA CHANNEL.” They acquired this patent from its owner for $1 plus “other good and valuable consideration.” A little later, in March 2017, Blackbird decided to assert that patent against Cloudflare.

As we have explained previously, patent trolls benefit from a problematic incentive structure that allows them to take vague or abstract patents that they have no intention of developing and assert them as broadly as possible. Instead, these trolls collect licensing fees or settlements from companies who are otherwise trying to start a business, produce useful products, and create good jobs. Companies facing such claims usually convince themselves that settlements Continue reading

Project Jengo Celebrates One Year Anniversary by Releasing Prior Art

Today marks the one year anniversary of Project Jengo, a crowdsourced search for prior art that Cloudflare created and funded in response to the actions of Blackbird Technologies, a notorious patent troll. Blackbird has filed more than one hundred lawsuits asserting dormant patents without engaging in any innovative or commercial activities of its own. In homage to the typical anniversary cliché, we are taking this opportunity to reflect on the last year and confirm that we’re still going strong.

Project Jengo arose from a sense of immense frustration over the way that patent trolls purchase over-broad patents and use aggressive litigation tactics to elicit painful settlements from companies. These trolls know that the system is slanted in their favor, and we wanted to change that. Patent lawsuits take years to reach trial and cost an inordinate sum to defend. Knowing this, trolls just sit back and wait for companies to settle. Instead of perpetuating this cycle, Cloudflare decided to bring the community together and fight back.

After Blackbird filed a lawsuit against Cloudflare alleging infringement of a vague and overly-broad patent (‘335 Patent), we launched Project Jengo, which offered a reward to people who submitted prior art that could Continue reading