Who DDoS’d Austin?

It was a scorching Monday on July 22 as temperatures soared above 37°C (99°F) in Austin, TX, the live music capital of the world. Only hours earlier, the last crowds dispersed from the historic East 6th Street entertainment district. A few blocks away, Cloudflarians were starting to make their way to the office. Little did those early arrivers know that they would soon be unknowingly participating in a Cloudflare time honored tradition of dogfooding new services before releasing them to the wild.

6th East Street, Austin Texas

Dogfooding is when an organization uses its own products. In this case, we dogfed our newest cloud service, Magic Transit, which both protects and accelerates our customers’ entire network infrastructure—not just their web properties or TCP/UDP applications. With Magic Transit, Cloudflare announces your IP prefixes via BGP, attracts (routes) your traffic to our global network edge, blocks bad packets, and delivers good packets to your data centers via Anycast GRE.

We decided to use Austin’s network because we wanted to test the new service on a live network with real traffic from real people and apps. Continue reading