Startup Program revamped: build and grow on Cloudflare with up to $250,000 in credits
Today, we’re pleased to offer startups up to $250,000 in credits to use on Cloudflare’s Developer Platform. This new credits system will allow you to clearly see usage and associated fees to plan for a predictable future after the $250,000 in credits have been used up or after one year, whichever happens first.
You can see eligibility criteria and apply to the start-up program here.
What can you use the credits for?
Credits can be applied to all Developer Platform products, as well as Argo and Cache Reserve. Moreover, we provide participants with up to three Enterprise-level domains, which includes CDN, DDoS, DNS, WAF, Zero Trust, and other security and performance products that a participant can enable for their website.
Developer tools and building on Cloudflare
You can use credits for Cloudflare Developer Platform products, including those listed in the table below.
Note: credits for the Cloudflare Startup Program apply to Cloudflare products only, this table is illustrative of similar products in the market.
Speed and performance with Cloudflare
We know that founders need all the help they can get when starting their businesses. Beyond the Developer Platform, you can also use the Startup Program for our speed Continue reading
Cloudflare’s 12th Generation servers — 145% more performant and 63% more efficient
Cloudflare is thrilled to announce the general deployment of our next generation of servers — Gen 12 powered by AMD EPYC 9684X (code name “Genoa-X”) processors. This next generation focuses on delivering exceptional performance across all Cloudflare services, enhanced support for AI/ML workloads, significant strides in power efficiency, and improved security features.
Here are some key performance indicators and feature improvements that this generation delivers as compared to the prior generation:
Beginning with performance, with close engineering collaboration between Cloudflare and AMD on optimization, Gen 12 servers can serve more than twice as many requests per second (RPS) as Gen 11 servers, resulting in lower Cloudflare infrastructure build-out costs.
Next, our power efficiency has improved significantly, by more than 60% in RPS per watt as compared to the prior generation. As Cloudflare continues to expand our infrastructure footprint, the improved efficiency helps reduce Cloudflare’s operational expenditure and carbon footprint as a percentage of our fleet size.
Third, in response to the growing demand for AI capabilities, we've updated the thermal-mechanical design of our Gen 12 server to support more powerful GPUs. This aligns with the Workers AI objective to support larger large language models and increase throughput for smaller Continue reading
New standards for a faster and more private Internet
As the Internet grows, so do the demands for speed and security. At Cloudflare, we’ve spent the last 14 years simplifying the adoption of the latest web technologies, ensuring that our users stay ahead without the complexity. From being the first to offer free SSL certificates through Universal SSL to quickly supporting innovations like TLS 1.3, IPv6, and HTTP/3, we've consistently made it easy for everyone to harness cutting-edge advancements.
One of the most exciting recent developments in web performance is Zstandard (zstd) — a new compression algorithm that we have found compresses data 42% faster than Brotli while maintaining almost the same compression levels. Not only that, but Zstandard reduces file sizes by 11.3% compared to GZIP, all while maintaining comparable speeds. As compression speed and efficiency directly impact latency, this is a game changer for improving user experiences across the web.
We’re also re-starting the rollout of Encrypted Client Hello (ECH), a new proposed standard that prevents networks from snooping on which websites a user is visiting. Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) is a successor to ESNI and masks the Server Name Indication (SNI) that is used to negotiate a TLS handshake. This Continue reading
TURN and anycast: making peer connections work globally
A TURN server helps maintain connections during video calls when local networking conditions prevent participants from connecting directly to other participants. It acts as an intermediary, passing data between users when their networks block direct communication. TURN servers ensure that peer-to-peer calls go smoothly, even in less-than-ideal network conditions.
When building their own TURN infrastructure, developers often have to answer a few critical questions:
“How do we build and maintain a mesh network that achieves near-zero latency to all our users?”
“Where should we spin up our servers?”
“Can we auto-scale reliably to be cost-efficient without hurting performance?”
In April, we launched Cloudflare Calls TURN in open beta to help answer these questions. Starting today, Cloudflare Calls’ TURN service is now generally available to all Cloudflare accounts. Our TURN server works on our anycast network, which helps deliver global coverage and near-zero latency required by real time applications.
TURN solves connectivity and privacy problems for real time apps
When Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4, RFC 791) was designed back in 1981, it was assumed that the 32-bit address space was big enough for all computers to be able to connect to each other. When IPv4 was Continue reading
Introducing Speed Brain: helping web pages load 45% faster
Each time a user visits your web page, they are initiating a race to receive content as quickly as possible. Performance is a critical factor that influences how visitors interact with your site. Some might think that moving content across the globe introduces significant latency, but for a while, network transmission speeds have approached their theoretical limits. To put this into perspective, data on Cloudflare can traverse the 11,000 kilometer round trip between New York and London in about 76 milliseconds – faster than the blink of an eye.
However, delays in loading web pages persist due to the complexities of processing requests, responses, and configurations. In addition to pushing advancements in connection establishment, compression, hardware, and software, we have built a new way to reduce page load latency by anticipating how visitors will interact with a given web page.
Today we are very excited to share the latest leap forward in speed: Speed Brain. It relies on the Speculation Rules API to prefetch the content of the user's likely next navigations. The main goal of Speed Brain is to download a web page to the browser cache before a user navigates to it, allowing Continue reading
Instant Purge: invalidating cached content in under 150ms
(part 3 of the Coreless Purge series)
Over the past 14 years, Cloudflare has evolved far beyond a Content Delivery Network (CDN), expanding its offerings to include a comprehensive Zero Trust security portfolio, network security & performance services, application security & performance optimizations, and a powerful developer platform. But customers also continue to rely on Cloudflare for caching and delivering static website content. CDNs are often judged on their ability to return content to visitors as quickly as possible. However, the speed at which content is removed from a CDN's global cache is just as crucial.
When customers frequently update content such as news, scores, or other data, it is essential they avoid serving stale, out-of-date information from cache to visitors. This can lead to a subpar experience where users might see invalid prices, or incorrect news. The goal is to remove the stale content and cache the new version of the file on the CDN, as quickly as possible. And that starts by issuing a “purge.”
In May 2022, we released the first part of the series detailing our efforts to rebuild and publicly document the steps taken to improve the system our customers use, Continue reading
Cloudflare helps verify the security of end-to-end encrypted messages by auditing key transparency for WhatsApp
Chances are good that today you’ve sent a message through an end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging app such as WhatsApp, Signal, or iMessage. While we often take the privacy of these conversations for granted, they in fact rely on decades of research, testing, and standardization efforts, the foundation of which is a public-private key exchange. There is, however, an oft-overlooked implicit trust inherent in this model: that the messaging app infrastructure is distributing the public keys of all of its users correctly.
Here’s an example: if Joe and Alice are messaging each other on WhatsApp, Joe uses Alice’s phone number to retrieve Alice’s public key from the WhatsApp database, and Alice receives Joe’s public key. Their messages are then encrypted using this key exchange, so that no one — even WhatsApp — can see the contents of their messages besides Alice and Joe themselves. However, in the unlikely situation where an attacker, Bob, manages to register a different public key in WhatsApp’s database, Joe would try to message Alice but unknowingly be messaging Bob instead. And while this threat is most salient for journalists, activists, and those most vulnerable to cyber attacks, we believe that protecting the privacy and integrity of Continue reading
Automatically generating Cloudflare’s Terraform provider
In November 2022, we announced the transition to OpenAPI Schemas for the Cloudflare API. Back then, we had an audacious goal to make the OpenAPI schemas the source of truth for our SDK ecosystem and reference documentation. During 2024’s Developer Week, we backed this up by announcing that our SDK libraries are now automatically generated from these OpenAPI schemas. Today, we’re excited to announce the latest pieces of the ecosystem to now be automatically generated — the Terraform provider and API reference documentation.
This means that the moment a new feature or attribute is added to our products and the team documents it, you’ll be able to see how it’s meant to be used across our SDK ecosystem and make use of it immediately. No more delays. No more lacking coverage of API endpoints.
You can find the new documentation site at https://developers.cloudflare.com/api-next/, and you can try the preview release candidate of the Terraform provider by installing 5.0.0-alpha1.
Why Terraform?
For anyone who is unfamiliar with Terraform, it is a tool for managing your infrastructure as code, much like you would with your application code. Many of our customers (big and small) rely Continue reading
Cloudflare partners with Internet Service Providers and network equipment providers to deliver a safer browsing experience to millions of homes
A committed journey of privacy and security
In 2018, Cloudflare announced 1.1.1.1, one of the fastest, privacy-first consumer DNS services. 1.1.1.1 was the first consumer product Cloudflare ever launched, focused on reaching a wider audience. This service was designed to be fast and private, and does not retain information that would identify who is making a request.
In 2020, Cloudflare announced 1.1.1.1 for Families, designed to add a layer of protection to our existing 1.1.1.1 public resolver. The intent behind this product was to provide consumers, namely families, the ability to add a security and adult content filter to block unsuspecting users from accessing specific sites when browsing the Internet.
Today, we are officially announcing that any ISP and equipment manufacturer can use our DNS resolvers for free. Internet service, network, and hardware equipment providers can sign up and join this program to partner with Cloudflare to deliver a safer browsing experience that is easy to use, industry leading, and at no cost to anyone.
Leading companies have already partnered with Cloudflare to deliver superior and customized offerings to protect their customers. By delivering this service Continue reading
A safer Internet with Cloudflare: free threat intelligence, analytics, and new threat detections
Anyone using the Internet likely touches Cloudflare’s network on a daily basis, either by accessing a site protected by Cloudflare, using our 1.1.1.1 resolver, or connecting via a network using our Cloudflare One products.
This puts Cloudflare in a position of great responsibility to make the Internet safer for billions of users worldwide. Today we are providing threat intelligence and more than 10 new security features for free to all of our customers. Whether you are using Cloudflare to protect your website, your home network, or your office, you will find something useful that you can start using with just a few clicks.
These features are focused around some of the largest growing concerns in cybersecurity, including account takeover attacks, supply chain attacks, attacks against API endpoints, network visibility, and data leaks from your network.
More security for everyone
You can read more about each one of these features in the sections below, but we wanted to provide a short summary upfront.
If you are a cyber security enthusiast: you can head over to our new Cloudforce One threat intelligence website to find out about threat actors, attack campaigns, and other Internet-wide Continue reading
Making zone management more efficient with batch DNS record updates
Customers that use Cloudflare to manage their DNS often need to create a whole batch of records, enable proxying on many records, update many records to point to a new target at the same time, or even delete all of their records. Historically, customers had to resort to bespoke scripts to make these changes, which came with their own set of issues. In response to customer demand, we are excited to announce support for batched API calls to the DNS records API starting today. This lets customers make large changes to their zones much more efficiently than before. Whether sending a POST, PUT, PATCH or DELETE, users can now execute these four different HTTP methods, and multiple HTTP requests all at the same time.
Efficient zone management matters
DNS records are an essential part of most web applications and websites, and they serve many different purposes. The most common use case for a DNS record is to have a hostname point to an IPv4 address, this is called an A record:
example.com 59 IN A 198.51.100.0
blog.example.com 59 IN A 198.51.100.1
ask.example.com 59 IN A 198.51. Continue reading
Network performance update: Birthday Week 2024
When it comes to the Internet, everyone wants to be the fastest. At Cloudflare, we’re no different. We want to be the fastest network in the world, and are constantly working towards that goal. Since June 2021, we’ve been measuring and ranking our network performance against the top global networks. We use this data to improve our performance, and to share the results of those initiatives.
In this post, we’re going to share with you how our network performance has changed since our last post in March 2024, and discuss the tools and processes we are using to assess network performance.
Digging into the data
Cloudflare has been measuring network performance across these top networks from the top 1,000 ISPs by estimated population (according to the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC)), and optimizing our network for ISPs and countries where we see opportunities to improve. For performance benchmarking, we look at TCP connection time. This is the time it takes an end user to connect to the website or endpoint they are trying to reach. We chose this metric to show how our network helps make your websites faster by serving your traffic where Continue reading
Introducing Ephemeral IDs: a new tool for fraud detection
In the early days of the Internet, a single IP address was a reliable indicator of a single user. However, today’s Internet is more complex. Shared IP addresses are now common, with users connecting via mobile IP address pools, VPNs, or behind CGNAT (Carrier Grade Network Address Translation). This makes relying on IP addresses alone a weak method to combat modern threats like automated attacks and fraudulent activity. Additionally, many Internet users have no option but to use an IP address which they don’t have sole control over, and as such, should not be penalized for that.
At Cloudflare, we are solving this complexity with Turnstile, our CAPTCHA alternative. And now, we’re taking the next step in advancing security with Ephemeral IDs, a new feature that generates a unique short-lived ID, without relying on any network-level information.
When a website visitor interacts with Turnstile, we now calculate an Ephemeral ID that can link behavior to a specific client instead of an IP address. This means that even when attackers rotate through large pools of IP addresses, we can still identify and block malicious actions. For example, in attacks like credential stuffing or account signups, where fraudsters attempt to disguise Continue reading
Start auditing and controlling the AI models accessing your content
Site owners have lacked the ability to determine how AI services use their content for training or other purposes. Today, Cloudflare is releasing a set of tools to make it easy for site owners, creators, and publishers to take back control over how their content is made available to AI-related bots and crawlers. All Cloudflare customers can now audit and control how AI models access the content on their site.
This launch starts with a detailed analytics view of the AI services that crawl your site and the specific content they access. Customers can review activity by AI provider, by type of bot, and which sections of their site are most popular. This data is available to every site on Cloudflare and does not require any configuration.
We expect that this new level of visibility will prompt teams to make a decision about their exposure to AI crawlers. To help give them time to make that decision, Cloudflare now provides a one-click option in our dashboard to immediately block any AI crawlers from accessing any site. Teams can then use this “pause” to decide if they want to allow specific AI providers or types of bots to proceed. Once that Continue reading
Cloudflare’s 2024 Annual Founders’ Letter
This week Cloudflare will celebrate the fourteenth anniversary of our launch. We think of it as our birthday. As is our tradition ever since our first anniversary, we use our Birthday Week each year to launch new products that we think of as gifts back to the Internet. For the last five years, we also take this time to write our annual Founders’ Letter reflecting on our business and the state of the Internet. This year is no different.
That said, one thing that is different is you may have noticed we've actually had fewer public innovation weeks over the last year than usual. That's been because a couple of incidents nearly a year ago caused us to focus on improving our internal systems over releasing new features. We're incredibly proud of our team's focus to make security, resilience, and reliability the top priorities for the last year. Today, Cloudflare's underlying platform, and the products that run on top of it, are significantly more robust than ever before.
With that work largely complete, and our platform in its strongest shape ever, we plan to pick back up the usual cadence of new product launches that we're known for. This Continue reading
Removing uncertainty through “what-if” capacity planning
Infrastructure planning for a network serving more than 81 million requests at peak and which is globally distributed across more than 330 cities in 120+ countries is complex. The capacity planning team at Cloudflare ensures there is enough capacity in place all over the world so that our customers have one less thing to worry about - our infrastructure, which should just work. Through our processes, the team puts careful consideration into “what-ifs”. What if something unexpected happens and one of our data centers fails? What if one of our largest customers triples, or quadruples their request count? Across a gamut of scenarios like these, the team works to understand where traffic will be served from and how the Cloudflare customer experience may change.
This blog post gives a look behind the curtain of how these scenarios are modeled at Cloudflare, and why it's so critical for our customers.
Scenario planning and our customers
Cloudflare customers rely on the data centers that Cloudflare has deployed all over the world, placing us within 50 ms of approximately 95% of the Internet-connected population globally. But round-trip time to our end users means little if those data centers don’t have the capacity Continue reading
Cloudflare incident on September 17, 2024
On September 17, 2024, during routine maintenance, Cloudflare inadvertently stopped announcing fifteen IPv4 prefixes, affecting some Business plan websites for approximately one hour. During this time, IPv4 traffic for these customers would not have reached Cloudflare, and users attempting to connect to websites assigned addresses within those prefixes would have received errors.
We’re very sorry for this outage.
This outage was the result of an internal software error and not the result of an attack. In this blog post, we’re going to talk about what the failure was, why it occurred, and what we’re doing to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
Background
Cloudflare assembled a dedicated Addressing team in 2019 to simplify the ways that IP addresses are used across Cloudflare products and services. The team builds and maintains systems that help Cloudflare conserve and manage its own network resources. The Addressing team also manages periodic changes to the assignment of IP addresses across infrastructure and services at Cloudflare. In this case, our goal was to reduce the number of IPv4 addresses used for customer websites, allowing us to free up addresses for other purposes, like deploying infrastructure in new locations. Since IPv4 addresses are a finite Continue reading
How Cloudflare is helping domain owners with the upcoming Entrust CA distrust by Chrome and Mozilla
Chrome and Mozilla announced that they will stop trusting Entrust’s public TLS certificates issued after November 12, 2024 and December 1, 2024, respectively. This decision stems from concerns related to Entrust’s ability to meet the CA/Browser Forum’s requirements for a publicly trusted certificate authority (CA). To prevent Entrust customers from being impacted by this change, Entrust has announced that they are partnering with SSL.com, a publicly trusted CA, and will be issuing certs from SSL.com’s roots to ensure that they can continue to provide their customers with certificates that are trusted by Chrome and Mozilla.
We’re excited to announce that we’re going to be adding SSL.com as a certificate authority that Cloudflare customers can use. This means that Cloudflare customers that are currently relying on Entrust as a CA and uploading their certificate manually to Cloudflare will now be able to rely on Cloudflare’s certificate management pipeline for automatic issuance and renewal of SSL.com certificates.
CA distrust: responsibilities, repercussions, and responses
With great power comes great responsibility Every publicly trusted certificate authority (CA) is responsible for maintaining a high standard of security and compliance to ensure that the certificates they issue are trustworthy. Continue reading
Protecting APIs from abuse using sequence learning and variable order Markov chains
Consider the case of a malicious actor attempting to inject, scrape, harvest, or exfiltrate data via an API. Such malicious activities are often characterized by the particular order in which the actor initiates requests to API endpoints. Moreover, the malicious activity is often not readily detectable using volumetric techniques alone, because the actor may intentionally execute API requests slowly, in an attempt to thwart volumetric abuse protection. To reliably prevent such malicious activity, we therefore need to consider the sequential order of API requests. We use the term sequential abuse to refer to malicious API request behavior. Our fundamental goal thus involves distinguishing malicious from benign API request sequences.
In this blog post, you’ll learn about how we address the challenge of helping customers protect their APIs against sequential abuse. To this end, we’ll unmask the statistical machine learning (ML) techniques currently underpinning our Sequence Analytics product. We’ll build on the high-level introduction to Sequence Analytics provided in a previous blog post.
API sessions
Introduced in the previous blog post, let’s consider the idea of a time-ordered series of HTTP API requests initiated by a specific user. These occur as the user interacts with a service, such as while browsing Continue reading
How the Harris-Trump US presidential debate influenced Internet traffic
Much has changed in the 2024 United States presidential election since the June 27 debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, then the presumptive nominees for the November election. Now, over two months later, on September 10, the debate was between Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, and Donald Trump, the Republican nominee. In this post, we will explore the event's impact on Internet traffic in specific states where there was a bigger impact than during the Biden-Trump debate, as well as examine cyberattacks, email phishing trends, and general DNS data on candidates, news, and election-related activity.
We’ve been tracking the 2024 elections globally through our blog and election report on Cloudflare Radar, covering some of the more than 60 national elections this year. Regarding the US elections, we have previously reported on trends surrounding the first Biden vs. Trump debate, the attempted assassination of Trump, the Republican National Convention, and the Democratic National Convention.
Typically, we have observed that election days don’t come with significant changes to Internet traffic, and the same is true for debates. Yet, debates can also draw attention that impacts traffic, especially when there is heightened anticipation. The 2024 debates were not only Continue reading