Nick Wondra
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Nick Wondra
Magic Transit: Network functions at Cloudflare scale
Today we announced Cloudflare Magic Transit, which makes Cloudflare’s network available to any IP traffic on the Internet. Up until now, Cloudflare has primarily operated proxy services: our servers terminate HTTP, TCP, and UDP sessions with Internet users and pass that data through new sessions they create with origin servers. With Magic Transit, we are now also operating at the IP layer: in addition to terminating sessions, our servers are applying a suite of network functions (DoS mitigation, firewalling, routing, and so on) on a packet-by-packet basis.
Over the past nine years, we’ve built a robust, scalable global network that currently spans 193 cities in over 90 countries and is ever growing. All Cloudflare customers benefit from this scale thanks to two important techniques. The first is anycast networking. Cloudflare was an early adopter of anycast, using this routing technique to distribute Internet traffic across our data centers. It means that any data center can handle any customer’s traffic, and we can spin up new data centers without needing to acquire and provision new IP addresses. The second technique is homogeneous server architecture. Every server in each of our edge data centers is capable of running every task. We Continue reading
Coming soon to a university near you
Attention software engineering students: Cloudflare is coming to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and we want to meet you! We will be attending UW–Madison’s Career Connection on Wednesday, February 7 and UIUC’s Startup Career Fair on Thursday, February 8. We’ll also be hosting tech talks at UIUC on Friday, February 2 at 6:00pm in 2405 Siebel Center and at UW–Madison on Tuesday, February 6 (time and location coming soon).
Cloudflare staff at YHack 2017. Photo courtesy Andrew Fitch.
Built in Champaign
In early 2016, Cloudflare opened an engineering office in Champaign, IL to build Argo Smart Routing. Champaign's proximity to the University of Illinois, one of the nation's top engineering schools, makes it an attractive place for high-tech companies to set up shop and for talented engineers to call home. Since graduating from UIUC in 2008, I've had opportunities to work on amazing software projects, growing technically and as a leader, all while enjoying the lifestyle benefits of Champaign (15 minute commute, anyone?).
Cloudflare has attended annual recruiting events at UIUC since the Champaign office was opened. This year, we've started to expand our search to other top engineering schools in the midwest. Continue reading