Announcing Cloudflare Incident Alerts

A lot of people rely on Cloudflare. We serve over 46 million HTTP requests per second on average; millions of customers use our services, including 31% of the Fortune 1000. And these numbers are only growing.

Given the privileged position we sit in to help the Internet to operate, we’ve always placed a very large emphasis on transparency during incidents. But we’re constantly striving to do better.

That’s why today we are excited to announce Incident Alerts — available via email, webhook, or PagerDuty. These notifications are accessible easily in the Cloudflare dashboard, and they’re customizable to prevent notification overload. And best of all, they’re available to everyone; you simply need a free account to get started.

Lifecycle of an incident

Without proper transparency, incidents cause confusion and waste resources for anyone that relies on the Internet. With so many different entities working together to make the Internet operate, diagnosing and troubleshooting can be complicated and time-consuming. By far the best solution is for providers to have transparent and proactive alerting, so any time something goes wrong, it’s clear exactly where the problem is.

Cloudflare incident response

We understand the importance of proactive and transparent alerting around incidents. We have Continue reading

Cloudflare account permissions, how to use them, and best practices

In the dynamic landscape of modern web applications and organizations, access control is critical. Defining who can do what within your Cloudflare account ensures security and efficient workflow management. In order to help meet your organizational needs, whether you are a single developer, a small team, or a larger enterprise, we’re going to cover two changes that we have developed to make it easier to do user management, and best practices on how to use these features, alongside existing features in order to scope everything appropriately into your account, in order to ensure security while you are working with others.

What are roles?

In the preceding year, Cloudflare has expanded our list of roles available to everyone from 1 to over 60, and we are continuing to build out more, better roles. We have also made domain scoping a capability for all users. This prompts the question, what are roles, and why do they exist?

Roles are a set of permissions that exist in a bundle with a name. Every API call that is made to Cloudflare has a required set of permissions, otherwise an API call will return with a 403. We generally group permissions into a role to Continue reading

Cloudflare Stream Low-Latency HLS support now in Open Beta

Stream Live lets users easily scale their live-streaming apps and websites to millions of creators and concurrent viewers while focusing on the content rather than the infrastructure — Stream manages codecs, protocols, and bit rate automatically.

For Speed Week this year, we introduced a closed beta of Low-Latency HTTP Live Streaming (LL-HLS), which builds upon the high-quality, feature-rich HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol. Lower latency brings creators even closer to their viewers, empowering customers to build more interactive features like chat and enabling the use of live-streaming in more time-sensitive applications like live e-learning, sports, gaming, and events.

Today, in celebration of Birthday Week, we’re opening this beta to all customers with even lower latency. With LL-HLS, you can deliver video to your audience faster, reducing the latency a viewer may experience on their player to as little as three seconds. Low Latency streaming is priced the same way, too: $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered, with zero extra charges for encoding or bandwidth.

Broadcast with latency as low as three seconds.

LL-HLS is an extension of the HLS standard that allows us to reduce glass-to-glass latency — the time between something happening on the broadcast end and a user seeing Continue reading

How Cloudflare’s systems dynamically route traffic across the globe

Picture this: you’re at an airport, and you’re going through an airport security checkpoint. There are a bunch of agents who are scanning your boarding pass and your passport and sending you through to your gate. All of a sudden, some of the agents go on break. Maybe there’s a leak in the ceiling above the checkpoint. Or perhaps a bunch of flights are leaving at 6pm, and a number of passengers turn up at once. Either way, this imbalance between localized supply and demand can cause huge lines and unhappy travelers — who just want to get through the line to get on their flight. How do airports handle this?

Some airports may not do anything and just let you suffer in a longer line. Some airports may offer fast-lanes through the checkpoints for a fee. But most airports will tell you to go to another security checkpoint a little farther away to ensure that you can get through to your gate as fast as possible. They may even have signs up telling you how long each line is, so you can make an easier decision when trying to get through.

At Cloudflare, we have the same problem. We Continue reading

Cloudflare Fonts: enhancing website font privacy and speed

We are thrilled to introduce Cloudflare Fonts! In the coming weeks sites that use Google Fonts will be able to effortlessly load their fonts from the site’s own domain rather than from Google. All at a click of a button. This enhances both privacy and performance. It enhances users' privacy by eliminating the need to load fonts from Google’s third-party servers. It boosts a site's performance by bringing fonts closer to end users, reducing the time spent on DNS lookups and TLS connections.

Sites that currently use Google Fonts will not need to self-host fonts or make complex code changes to benefit – Cloudflare Fonts streamlines the entire process, making it a breeze.

Fonts and privacy

When you load fonts from Google, your website initiates a data exchange with Google's servers. This means that your visitors' browsers send requests directly to Google. Consequently, Google has the potential to accumulate a range of data, including IP addresses, user agents (formatted descriptions of the browser and operating system), the referer (the page on which the Google font is to be displayed) and how often each IP makes requests to Google. While Google states that they do not use this data for targeted Continue reading

Traffic transparency: unleashing the power of Cloudflare Trace

Today, we are excited to announce Cloudflare Trace! Cloudflare Trace is available to all our customers. Cloudflare Trace enables you to understand how HTTP requests traverse your zone's configuration and what Cloudflare Rules are being applied to the request.

For many Cloudflare customers, the journey their customers' traffic embarks on through the Cloudflare ecosystem was a mysterious black box. It's a complex voyage, routed through various products, each capable of introducing modification to the request.

Consider this scenario: your web traffic could get blocked by WAF Custom Rules or Managed Rules (WAF); it might face rate limiting, or undergo modifications via Transform Rules, Where a Cloudflare account has many admins, modifying different things it can be akin to a game of "hit and hope," where the outcome of your web traffic's journey is uncertain as you are unsure how another admins rule will impact the request before or after yours. While Cloudflare's individual products are designed to be intuitive, their interoperation, or how they work together, hasn't always been as transparent as our customers need it to be. Cloudflare Trace changes this.

Running a trace

Cloudflare Trace allows users to set a number of request variables, allowing Continue reading

Welcome to Birthday Week 2023

Having been at Cloudflare since it was tiny it’s hard to believe that we’re hitting our teens! But here we are 13 years on from launch. Looking back to 2010 it was the year of iPhone 4, the first iPad, the first Kinect, Inception was in cinemas, and TiK ToK was hot (well, the Kesha song was). Given how long ago all that feels, I'd have a hard time predicting the next 13 years, so I’ll stick to predicting the future by creating it (with a ton of help from the Cloudflare team).

Building the future is, in part, what Birthday Week is about. Over the past 13 years we’ve announced things like Universal SSL (doubling the size of the encrypted web overnight and helping to usher in the largely encrypted web we all use; Cloudflare Radar shows that worldwide 99% of HTTP requests are encrypted), or Cloudflare Workers (helping change the way people build and scale applications), or unmetered DDoS protection (to help with the scourge of DDoS).

This year will be no different.

Winding back to the year I joined Cloudflare we made our first Birthday Week announcement: our automatic IPv6 gateway. Fast-forward to today and Continue reading

Typo traps: analyzing traffic to exmaple.com (or is it example.com?)

A typo is one of those common mistakes with unpredictable results when it comes to the Internet’s domain names (DNS). In this blog post we’re going to analyze traffic for exmaple.com, and see how a very simple human error ends up creating unintentional traffic on the Internet.

Cloudflare has owned exmaple.com for a few years now, but don’t confuse it with example.com! example.com is a reserved domain name set by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), under the direction of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It has been used since 1999 as a placeholder, or example, in documentation, tutorials, sample network configurations, or to prevent accidental references to real websites. We use it extensively on this blog.

As I’m writing it, the autocorrect system transforms exmaple.com into example.com, every time, assuming I must have misspelled it. But in situations where there’s no automatic spelling correction (for example, while editing a configuration file) it’s easy for example to become exmaple.

And so, lots of traffic goes to exmaple.com by mistake — whether it was a typoed attempt to reach example.com or due to other random reasons. Fake email accounts in Continue reading

Cloudflare Email Security now works with CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale

We are excited to announce an extended partnership between CrowdStrike and Cloudflare to bring together Cloudflare Email Security and CrowdStrike Falcon® LogScale. With this integration, joint customers who have both Falcon LogScale and Cloudflare Email Security can now send detection data to be ingested and displayed within their Falcon LogScale dashboard.

What is CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale?

CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale enables organizations to ingest, aggregate and analyze massive volumes of streaming log data from a wide array of sources at petabyte scale. It offers search and visualization capabilities, enabling users to easily query and explore their log data to gain valuable insights and identify security threats or anomalies.

Falcon LogScale helps customers by providing:

Log Ingestion It supports the collection of logs from diverse sources and can handle high volumes of log data in real time.

Real-Time Search Users can perform fast searches across their log data, enabling quick detection and investigation of security incidents or operational issues.

Dashboards and Visualizations Falcon LogScale offers customizable dashboards and visualizations to help teams gain insights from their log data.

All of these capabilities enable proactive threat hunting by leveraging advanced analytics. It helps security teams identify potential threats, detect anomalies, and quickly remediate Continue reading

How Waiting Room makes queueing decisions on Cloudflare’s highly distributed network

Almost three years ago, we launched Cloudflare Waiting Room to protect our customers’ sites from overwhelming spikes in legitimate traffic that could bring down their sites. Waiting Room gives customers control over user experience even in times of high traffic by placing excess traffic in a customizable, on-brand waiting room, dynamically admitting users as spots become available on their sites. Since the launch of Waiting Room, we’ve continued to expand its functionality based on customer feedback with features like mobile app support, analytics, Waiting Room bypass rules, and more.

We love announcing new features and solving problems for our customers by expanding the capabilities of Waiting Room. But, today, we want to give you a behind the scenes look at how we have evolved the core mechanism of our product–namely, exactly how it kicks in to queue traffic in response to spikes.

How was the Waiting Room built, and what are the challenges?

The diagram below shows a quick overview of where the Waiting room sits when a customer enables it for their website.

Waiting Room is built on Workers that runs across a global network of Cloudflare data centers. The requests to a customer’s website can Continue reading

New! Rate Limiting analytics and throttling

Rate Limiting rules are essential in the toolbox of security professionals as they are very effective in managing targeted volumetric attacks, takeover attempts, scraping bots, or API abuse. Over the years we have received a lot of feature requests from users, but two stand out: suggesting rate limiting thresholds and implementing a throttle behavior. Today we released both to Enterprise customers!

When creating a rate limit rule, one of the common questions is “what rate should I put in to block malicious traffic without affecting legitimate users?”. If your traffic is authenticated, API Gateway will suggest thresholds based on auth IDs (such a session-id, cookie, or API key). However, when you don’t have authentication headers, you will need to create IP-based rules (like for a ‘/login’ endpoint) and you are left guessing the threshold. From today, we provide analytics tools to determine what rate of requests can be used for your rule.

So far, a rate limit rule could be created with log, challenge, or block action. When ‘block’ is selected, all requests from the same source (for example, IP) were blocked for the timeout period. Sometimes this is not ideal, as you would rather selectively block/allow requests to Continue reading

Making Content Security Policies (CSPs) easy with Page Shield

Modern web applications are complex, often loading JavaScript libraries from tens of different sources and submitting data to just as many. This leads to a vast attack surface area and many attack types that hackers may leverage to target the user browser directly. Magecart, a category of supply chain attack, is a good example.

To combat this, browser vendors (Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, etc.) have agreed on a standard that allows application owners to control browser behavior from a security perspective. This standard is called Content Security Policies (CSPs). Content Security Policies are implemented by application owners as a specially formatted HTTP response header that the browser then parses and enforces. This header can be used, for example, to enforce loading of JavaScript libraries only from a specific set of URLs. CSPs are good as they reduce the attack surface, but are hard to implement and manage, especially in a fast-paced development environment.

Starting today, Page Shield, our client-side security product, supports all major CSP directives. We’ve also added better reporting, automated suggestions, and Page Shield specific user roles, making CSPs much easier to manage.

If you are a Page Shield enterprise customer, log in to your Continue reading

Building companies means building careers: why I joined Cloudflare as Chief People Officer

One piece of advice I received early in my career was to get into a transformative industry. Those words have followed me ever since, and it’s a goal I’ve encouraged many others to pursue.

For me, it meant first launching into biotechnology where I learned my passion for working with deeply technical and disruptive businesses doing things that hadn’t been done before.

I later joined Amazon at a time when it was best known as a retailer instead of a technology company as it is today. While there, I led HR for some of their most technical businesses from eCommerce to AWS. As all these businesses scaled over the next decade, I became increasingly focused, and then finally fully dedicated to, leading HR for AWS. During that time, I had the opportunity to serve as a thought partner to the AWS CEO and leadership team as the organization grew from 400 employees to 30,000.

It was at this point in my career that I realized my passion for scaling a company with practices that reinforce the mission and building programs with intention to nurture the culture. To have any impact, all this work must be in support of promoting a Continue reading

Elevate load balancing with Private IPs and Cloudflare Tunnels: a secure path to efficient traffic distribution

In the dynamic world of modern applications, efficient load balancing plays a pivotal role in delivering exceptional user experiences. Customers commonly leverage load balancing, so they can efficiently use their existing infrastructure resources in the best way possible. Though, load balancing is not a ‘one-size-fits-all, out of the box’ solution for everyone. As you go deeper into the details of your traffic shaping requirements and as your architecture becomes more complex, different flavors of load balancing are usually required to achieve these varying goals, such as steering between datacenters for public traffic, creating high availability for critical internal services with private IPs, applying steering between servers in a single datacenter, and more. We are extremely excited to announce a new addition to our Load Balancing solution, Local Traffic Management (LTM) with deep integrations with Zero Trust!

A common problem businesses run into is that almost no providers can satisfy all these requirements, resulting in a growing list of vendors to manage disparate data sources to get a clear view of your traffic pipeline, and investment into incredibly expensive hardware that is complicated to set up and maintain. Not having a single source of truth to dwindle down ‘time to resolution’ Continue reading

Cloudflare One for Data Protection

This post is also available in 日本語, 한국어, Deutsch, Français.

Data continues to explode in volume, variety, and velocity, and security teams at organizations of all sizes are challenged to keep up. Businesses face escalating risks posed by varied SaaS environments, the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and the exposure and theft of valuable source code continues to keep CISOs and Data Officers up at night.

Over the past few years, Cloudflare has launched capabilities to help organizations navigate these risks and gain visibility and controls over their data — including the launches of our data loss prevention (DLP) and cloud access security broker (CASB) services in the fall of 2022.

Announcing Cloudflare One’s data protection suite

Today, we are building on that momentum and announcing Cloudflare One for Data Protection — our unified suite to protect data everywhere across web, SaaS, and private applications. Built on and delivered across our entire global network, Cloudflare One’s data protection suite is architected for the risks of modern coding and increased usage of AI.

Specifically, this suite converges capabilities across Cloudflare’s DLP, CASB, Zero Trust network access (ZTNA), secure web gateway (SWG), remote Continue reading

What’s next for Cloudflare One’s data protection suite

Today, we announced Cloudflare One for Data Protection — a unified suite to protect data everywhere across web, SaaS, and private applications. This suite converges capabilities including our data loss prevention (DLP), cloud access security broker (CASB), Zero Trust network access (ZTNA), secure web gateway (SWG), remote browser isolation (RBI), and cloud email security services. The suite is available and packaged now as part of Cloudflare One, our SASE platform.

In the announcement post, we focused on how the data protection suite helps customers navigate modern data risks, with recommended use cases and real-world customer examples.

In this companion blog post, we recap the capabilities built into the Cloudflare One suite over the past year and preview new functionality that customers can look forward to. This blog is best for practitioners interested in protecting data and SaaS environments using Cloudflare One.

DLP & CASB capabilities launched in the past year

Cloudflare launched both DLP and CASB services in September 2022, and since then have rapidly built functionality to meet the growing needs of our organizations of all sizes. Before previewing how these services will evolve, it is worth recapping the many enhancements added Continue reading

Connection coalescing with ORIGIN Frames: fewer DNS queries, fewer connections

This blog reports and summarizes the contents of a Cloudflare research paper which appeared at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference, that measures and prototypes connection coalescing with ORIGIN Frames.

Some readers might be surprised to hear that a single visit to a web page can cause a browser to make tens, sometimes even hundreds, of web connections. Take this very blog as an example. If it is your first visit to the Cloudflare blog, or it has been a while since your last visit, your browser will make multiple connections to render the page. The browser will make DNS queries to find IP addresses corresponding to blog.cloudflare.com and then subsequent requests to retrieve any necessary subresources on the web page needed to successfully render the complete page. How many? Looking below, at the time of writing, there are 32 different hostnames used to load the Cloudflare Blog. That means 32 DNS queries and at least 32 TCP (or QUIC) connections, unless the client is able to reuse (or coalesce) some of those connections.

Each new web connection not only introduces additional load on a server's processing capabilities – potentially leading to scalability challenges during peak usage hours Continue reading

Improving Worker Tail scalability

Being able to get real-time information from applications in production is extremely important. Many times software passes local testing and automation, but then users report that something isn’t working correctly. Being able to quickly see what is happening, and how often, is critical to debugging.

This is why we originally developed the Workers Tail feature - to allow developers the ability to view requests, exceptions, and information for their Workers and to provide a window into what’s happening in real time. When we developed it, we also took the opportunity to build it on top of our own Workers technology using products like Trace Workers and Durable Objects. Over the last couple of years, we’ve continued to iterate on this feature - allowing users to quickly access logs from the Dashboard and via Wrangler CLI.

Today, we’re excited to announce that tail can now be enabled for Workers at any size and scale! In addition to telling you about the new and improved scalability, we wanted to share how we built it, and the changes we made to enable it to scale better.

Why Tail was limited

Tail leverages Durable Objects to handle coordination between the Worker producing messages and Continue reading

Cloudflare Radar’s 2023 overview of new tools and insights

Cloudflare Radar was launched in September 2020, almost three years ago, when the pandemic was affecting Internet traffic usage. It is a free tool to show Internet usage patterns from both human and automated systems, as well as attack trends, top domains, and adoption and usage of browsers and protocols. As Cloudflare has been publishing data-driven insights related to the general Internet for more than 10 years now, Cloudflare Radar is a natural evolution.

This year, we have introduced several new features to Radar, also available through our public API, that enables deeper data exploration. We’ve also launched an Internet Quality section, a Trending Domains section, a URL Scanner tool, and a Routing section to track network interconnection, routing security, and observed routing anomalies.

In this reading list, we want to highlight some of those new additions, as well as some of the Internet disruptions and trends we’ve observed and published posts about during this year, including the war in Ukraine, the impact of Easter, and exam-related shutdowns in Iraq and Algeria.

We also encourage everyone to explore Cloudflare Radar and its new features, and to give you a partial review of the year, in terms of Internet Continue reading

Cloudflare’s tenant platform in action: Meter deploys DNS filtering at scale

In January 2023, we announced support for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and other businesses to create 'parent-child' and account-level policy configurations when deploying Cloudflare for DNS filtering. Specifically, organizations leverage the integration between our Tenant API and Cloudflare Gateway, our Secure Web Gateway (SWG) to protect their remote or office end users with web filtering and inspection. Already, customers like the US federal government, MalwareBytes, and a large global ISP take advantage of this integration to enable simpler, more flexible policy management across larger deployments across their end customers

Today, we're excited to showcase another similar story: Meter, a provider of Internet infrastructure, is leveraging the Tenant API integration for DNS filtering to help their clients enforce acceptable Internet use policies.

How Meter deploys Cloudflare to secure Internet browsing

Meter, headquartered in San Francisco and founded in 2015, provides Internet infrastructure that includes routing, switching, wireless, and applications. They help deliver faster, more efficient, more secure networking experiences for a diverse range of corporate spaces, including offices, warehouses, retail, manufacturing, biotech, and education institutions.

Meter integrates with the Cloudflare Tenant API to provide DNS filtering to their customers. With the Meter dashboard, Meter customers can set policies to Continue reading