Understanding end user-connectivity and performance with Digital Experience Monitoring, now available in beta
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Organizations that replace their corporate network and security appliances with a cloud-based solution trust that provider with how their employees work each and every day. Cloudflare One, our comprehensive Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) offering, helps more than 10,000 organizations deploy a remote access and Internet security solution that is faster than industry competitors. Starting today, administrators can measure that experience on their own and hold us accountable to that standard.
Cloudflare’s Digital Experience Monitoring (DEX) product gives teams of any size the same toolkit that we use to measure our own global network that powers nearly one-fourth of the Internet each day. Customers of Cloudflare One can now measure the experience that their team members have connecting to the Internet - whether they need that data for troubleshooting, evaluating carrier and ISP performance, or just understanding how their employees work.
We are excited to share today that DEX is now in open beta for all Cloudflare One customers. Administrators can begin running tests and evaluating network performance with any device enrolled using the Cloudflare One agent. Today’s announcement opens up these tools to every customer, but we are just getting started - Continue reading
Network performance update: Speed Week 2023
We constantly measure our own and other networks' performance, and look for ways to improve our performance; and share our results.
In this post we are going to share the most recent updates, and tell you about our tools and processes that we use to monitor and improve our network performance.
First, the results
In July, 2022, we started taking a more granular look down to every single network and taking actions for the specific networks where we have some room for improvement. Cloudflare was already the fastest provider for most of the networks around the world (we define a network as country and AS number pair). Taking a closer look at the numbers, Cloudflare was ranked #1 in 33% of the networks and was within 2 ms or 5% of the #1 provider for 8% of the networks that we measured in terms of the 95th percentile TCP Connection Time. For reference, our closest competitor on that front was the fastest for 20% of networks.
As of May 31, 2023 those numbers have improved significantly. Today, Cloudflare is the fastest provider for 46% of networks—and was within 2 ms (95th percentile TCP Connection Time) or 5% of the fastest Continue reading
Benchmarking dashboard performance
In preparation of Cloudflare Speed Week 2023, we spent the last few weeks benchmarking the performance of a Cloudflare product that has gone through many transformations throughout the years: the Cloudflare dashboard itself!
Limitations and scope
Optimizing for user-experience is vital to the long-term success of both Cloudflare and our customers. Reliability and availability of the dashboard are also important, since millions of customers depend on our services every day. To avoid any potential service interruptions while we made changes to the application’s architecture, we decided to gradually roll out the improvements, starting with the login page.
As a global company, we strive to deliver the best experience to all of our customers around the world. While we were aware that performance was regional, with regions furthest from our core data centers experiencing up to 10 times longer loading speeds, we wanted to focus on improvements that would benefit all of our users, no matter where they geographically connect to the Dashboard.
Finally, throughout this exercise, it was important to keep in mind that our overall goal was to improve the user experience of the dashboard, with regards to loading performance. We chose to use a Lighthouse Performance score as Continue reading
How we think about Zero Trust Performance
Cloudflare has done several deep dives into Zero Trust performance in 2023 alone: one in January, one in March, and one for Speed Week. In each of them, we outline a series of tests we perform and then show that we’re the fastest. While some may think that this is a marketing stunt, it’s not: the tests we devised aren’t necessarily built to make us look the best, our network makes us look the best when we run the tests.
We’ve discussed why performance matters in our blogs before, but the short version is that poor performance is a threat vector: the last thing we want is for your users to turn off Zero Trust to get an experience that is usable for them. Our goal is to improve performance because it helps improve the security of your users, the security of the things that matter most to you, and enables your users to be more productive.
When we run Zero Trust performance tests, we start by measuring end-to-end latency from when a user sends a packet to when the Zero Trust proxy receives, forwards, and inspects the packet, to when the destination website processes the packet and Continue reading
Globally distributed AI and a Constellation update
During Cloudflare's 2023 Developer Week, we announced Constellation, a set of APIs that allow everyone to run fast, low-latency inference tasks using pre-trained machine learning/AI models, directly on Cloudflare’s network.
Constellation update
We now have a few thousand accounts onboarded in the Constellation private beta and have been listening to our customer's feedback to evolve and improve the platform. Today, one month after the announcement, we are upgrading Constellation with three new features:
Bigger models
We are increasing the size limit of your models from 10 MB to 50 MB. While still somewhat conservative during the private beta, this new limit opens doors to more pre-trained and optimized models you can use with Constellation.
Tensor caching
When you run a Constellation inference task, you pass multiple tensor objects as inputs, sometimes creating big data payloads. These inputs travel through the wire protocol back and forth when you repeat the same task, even when the input changes from multiple runs are minimal, creating unnecessary network and data parsing overhead.
The client API now supports caching input tensors resulting in even better network latency and faster inference times.
XGBoost runtime
Constellation started with the ONNX runtime, but our vision is to Continue reading
Donning a MASQUE: building a new protocol into Cloudflare WARP
When we originally announced WARP, we knew we were launching a product that was different from other VPNs. Cloudflare has not only hundreds more data centers than your typical VPN provider, but also a unique purview into the adoption of open Internet standards. The confluence of these two factors have led us to today’s announcement: support for MASQUE, a cutting-edge new protocol for the beta version of our consumer WARP iOS app.
MASQUE is a set of mechanisms that extend HTTP/3 and leverage the unique properties of the QUIC transport protocol to efficiently proxy IP and UDP traffic. Most importantly, it will make your Internet browsing experience faster and more stable without sacrificing privacy.
Like many products at Cloudflare, we’re offering this first as a free, consumer offering. Once we’ve had an opportunity to learn from what it’s like to operate MASQUE on mobile devices, at scale, we plan to integrate it into our Zero Trust enterprise product suite.
We’re not saying goodbye to Wireguard
When we first built WARP we chose to go with Wireguard for many reasons – among them, simplicity. This is where Wireguard shines: ~4,000 lines of code that use public-key cryptography to create an encrypted Continue reading
Summer Break 2023
Long story short: it’s time for another summer break, as people reporting my bloopers – THANK YOU!!! – know only too well. I plan to be back in early autumn rolling out tons of new content.
I’ll do my best to reply to support requests (it will take longer than usual), and probably won’t be able to resist publishing a few lightweight netlab-related blog posts. If you get bored there’s still over 400 hours of existing content, over 100 podcast episodes, and thousands of blog posts.
In the meantime, get away from work, turn off the Internet, and enjoy a few days in your favorite spot with your loved ones!
Summer Break 2023
Long story short: it’s time for another summer break, as people reporting my bloopers – THANK YOU!!! – know only too well. I plan to be back in early autumn rolling out tons of new content.
I’ll do my best to reply to support requests (it will take longer than usual), and probably won’t be able to resist publishing a few lightweight netlab-related blog posts. If you get bored there’s still over 400 hours of existing content, over 100 podcast episodes, and thousands of blog posts.
In the meantime, get away from work, turn off the Internet, and enjoy a few days in your favorite spot with your loved ones!
Geo-blocking at the BGP Level
The post Geo-blocking at the BGP Level appeared first on Noction.
Case study: Calico helps Upwork migrate legacy system to Kubernetes on AWS and enforce zero-trust security
Upwork is a freelancing platform that connects a global base of clients to freelancers via job postings. Since going public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2019, the company has become one of the leading freelance platforms worldwide and was named on Time’s list of the 100 Most Influential Companies of 2022.
Upwork’s platform team was running containerized workloads on Consul and Spring Cloud, which required service owners to manually switch to a new code library each time Upwork’s platform team had a new release, and vice versa. This manual switching happened as often as every two months, which was inefficient for a company with over 800 microservices. Also, service owners were not adopting new libraries immediately and could not add upstream and downstream dependencies as needed without going through a review process. Combined, these problems meant that service owners and the cloud engineering and InfoSec teams lacked visibility, were highly susceptible to zero-day attacks and had a slow incident mitigation response.
To solve these problems, Upwork needed to adopt a distributed architecture from the application layer to the network layer. To do this, they required Kubernetes. The switch to Kubernetes meant Upwork’s containers needed to adhere to cloud-native Continue reading
Iperf3 vs. Iperf3: Just Start Measuring
Tony Fortunato of The Technology Firm walks you through testing scenarios using iPerf3 on different devices.Cloudflare Snippets is now available in alpha
Today we are excited to announce that Cloudflare Snippets is available in alpha. In the coming weeks we will be opening access to our waiting list.
What are Snippets?
Over the past two years we have released a number of new rules products such as Transform Rules, Cache Rules, Origin Rules, Config Rules and Redirect Rules. These new products give more control to customers on how we process their traffic as it flows through our global network. The feedback on these products so far has been overwhelmingly positive. However, our customers still occasionally need the ability to do more than the out-of-the-box functionality allows. Not just adding an HTTP header - but performing some advanced calculation to create the output.
For these cases, Cloudflare Snippets comes to the rescue. Snippets are small pieces of user created JavaScript that are run by Cloudflare before your website, API or application is served to the user. If you're familiar with Cloudflare Workers, our robust developer platform, then you'll find Snippets to be a familiar addition. For those who are not, Snippets are designed to be easily created, tested, and deployed. Providing you with the ability to deploy your custom JavaScript Snippet to Continue reading
Part 2: Rethinking cache purge with a new architecture
In Part 1: Rethinking Cache Purge, Fast and Scalable Global Cache Invalidation, we outlined the importance of cache invalidation and the difficulties of purging caches, how our existing purge system was designed and performed, and we gave a high level overview of what we wanted our new Cache Purge system to look like.
It’s been a while since we published the first blog post and it’s time for an update on what we’ve been working on. In this post we’ll be talking about some of the architecture improvements we’ve made so far and what we’re working on now.
Cache Purge end to end
We touched on the high level design of what we called the “coreless” purge system in part 1, but let’s dive deeper into what that design encompasses by following a purge request from end to end:
Step 1: Request received locally
An API request to Cloudflare is routed to the nearest Cloudflare data center and passed to an API Gateway worker. This worker looks at the request URL to see which service it should be sent to and forwards the request to the appropriate upstream backend. Most endpoints of the Cloudflare API are currently handled by Continue reading
Spotlight on Zero Trust: We’re fastest and here’s the proof
In January and in March we posted blogs outlining how Cloudflare performed against others in Zero Trust. The conclusion in both cases was that Cloudflare was faster than Zscaler and Netskope in a variety of Zero Trust scenarios. For Speed Week, we’re bringing back these tests and upping the ante: we’re testing more providers against more public Internet endpoints in more regions than we have in the past.
For these tests, we tested three Zero Trust scenarios: Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), and Remote Browser Isolation (RBI). We tested against three competitors: Zscaler, Netskope, and Palo Alto Networks. We tested these scenarios from 12 regions around the world, up from the four we’d previously tested with. The results are that Cloudflare is the fastest Secure Web Gateway in 42% of testing scenarios, the most of any provider. Cloudflare is 46% faster than Zscaler, 56% faster than Netskope, and 10% faster than Palo Alto for ZTNA, and 64% faster than Zscaler for RBI scenarios.
In this blog, we’ll provide a refresher on why performance matters, do a deep dive on how we’re faster for each scenario, and we’ll talk about how we measured performance for each product.
Continue reading
It’s never been easier to migrate thanks to Cloudflare’s new Migration Hub
We understand the pain points associated with CDN migrations. That's why in late 2021 we introduced Turpentine, a project to the process of translating the old Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) into Cloudflare Workers with just a push of a button. After nearly two years of testing and user feedback, we’ve tailored the migration processes for different user groups.
Today, we are thrilled to relaunch Turpentine, and introduce Cloudflare's new Migration Hub. The Migration Hub serves as a one-stop-shop for all migration needs, featuring brand-new migration guides that bring transparency and simplicity to the process.
We also know that a large number of customers aren't comfortable doing migrations themselves. Years of built up business logic makes unpacking and translating CDN configurations between different vendors difficult and locks businesses into subpar products and services. To help these customers we have established a Professional Services group to ensure smooth migrations for customers transitioning to Cloudflare’s first-class products. Going forward, we plan to continue to invest resources in Turpentine to ensure that moving to any part of Cloudflare is easy and you have the help you need.
Why choose Cloudflare?
Cloudflare has gained immense popularity among businesses seeking to improve website performance, security, Continue reading