Building Waiting Room on Workers and Durable Objects

In January, we announced the Cloudflare Waiting Room, which has been available to select customers through Project Fair Shot to help COVID-19 vaccination web applications handle demand. Back then, we mentioned that our system was built on top of Cloudflare Workers and the then brand new Durable Objects. In the coming days, we are making Waiting Room available to customers on our Business and Enterprise plans. As we are expanding availability, we are taking this opportunity to share how we came up with this design.

What does the Waiting Room do?

You may have seen lines of people queueing in front of stores or other buildings during sales for a new sneaker or phone. That is because stores have restrictions on how many people can be inside at the same time. Every store has its own limit based on the size of the building and other factors. If more people want to get inside than the store can hold, there will be too many people in the store.

The same situation applies to web applications. When you build a web application, you have to budget for the infrastructure to run it. You make that decision according to how many Continue reading

Health Check Analytics and how you can use it

At the end of last year, we introduced Standalone Health Checks - a service that lets you monitor the health of your origin servers and avoid the need to purchase additional third party services. The more that can be controlled from Cloudflare decreases maintenance cost, vendor management, and infrastructure complexity. This is important as it ensures you are able to scale your infrastructure seamlessly as your company grows. Today, we are introducing Standalone Health Check Analytics to help decrease your time to resolution for any potential issues. You can find Health Check Analytics in the sub-menu under the Traffic tab in your Cloudflare Dashboard.

As a refresher, Standalone Health Checks is a service that monitors an IP address or hostname for your origin servers or application and notifies you in near real-time if there happens to be a problem. These Health Checks support fine-tuned configurations based on expected codes, interval, protocols, timeout and more. These configurations enable you to properly target your checks based on the unique setup of your infrastructure. An example of a Health Check can be seen below which is monitoring an origin server in a staging environment with a notification set via email.

Once you set Continue reading