Introducing the Cloudflare Radar Internet Quality Page

Introducing the Cloudflare Radar Internet Quality Page
Introducing the Cloudflare Radar Internet Quality Page

Internet connections are most often marketed and sold on the basis of "speed", with providers touting the number of megabits or gigabits per second that their various service tiers are supposed to provide. This marketing has largely been successful, as most subscribers believe that "more is better”. Furthermore, many national broadband plans in countries around the world include specific target connection speeds. However, even with a high speed connection, gamers may encounter sluggish performance, while video conference participants may experience frozen video or audio dropouts. Speeds alone don't tell the whole story when it comes to Internet connection quality.

Additional factors like latency, jitter, and packet loss can significantly impact end user experience, potentially leading to situations where higher speed connections actually deliver a worse user experience than lower speed connections. Connection performance and quality can also vary based on usage – measured average speed will differ from peak available capacity, and latency varies under loaded and idle conditions.

The new Cloudflare Radar Internet Quality page

A little more than three years ago, as residential Internet connections were strained because of the shift towards working and learning from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Cloudflare announced the speed.cloudflare.com Continue reading

A step-by-step guide to transferring domains to Cloudflare

A step-by-step guide to transferring domains to Cloudflare
A step-by-step guide to transferring domains to Cloudflare

Transferring your domains to a new registrar isn’t something you do every day, and getting any step of the process wrong could mean downtime and disruption. That’s why this Speed Week we’ve prepared a domain transfer checklist. We want to empower anyone to quickly transfer their domains to Cloudflare Registrar, without worrying about missing any steps along the way or being left with any unanswered questions.

Domain Transfer Checklist

Confirm eligibility

  • Confirm you want to use Cloudflare’s nameservers: We built our registrar specifically for customers who want to use other Cloudflare products. This means domains registered with Cloudflare can only use our nameservers. If your domain requires non-Cloudflare nameservers then we’re not the right registrar for you.
  • Confirm Cloudflare supports your domain’s TLD: You can view the full list of TLDs we currently support here. Note: We plan to support .dev and .app by mid-July 2023.
  • Confirm your domain is not a premium domain or internationalized domain name (IDNs): Cloudflare currently does not support premium domains or internationalized domain names (Unicode).
  • Confirm your domain hasn’t been registered or transferred in the past 60 days: ICANN rules prohibit a domain from being transferred if it has been registered or previously transferred Continue reading

Cisco Guns For InfiniBand With Silicon One G200

It was a fortuitous coincidence that Nvidia was already working on massively parallel GPU compute engines for doing calculations in HPC simulations and models when the machine learning tipping point happened, and similarly, it was fortunate for InfiniBand that it had the advantage of high bandwidth, low latency, and remote direct memory access across GPUs at that same moment. …

Cisco Guns For InfiniBand With Silicon One G200 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

How to detect and stop DDoS attacks in a Kubernetes environment

DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service attacks have been around for a while and are notorious and painful to deal with (as with any other attack). As the name suggests, a DDoS attack causes an application or service to become unavailable to users due to resources exceeding it’s capacity and causing the app to either crash or become unresponsive. DDoS is a form of DoS where the attack comes from multiple sources (bots), usually spread across geographical locations. Imagine getting thousands of spam calls on your phone within a very short time and there is one legitimate call that is trying to contact you. How will you make sure you attend the legitimate call?

In a Kubernetes environment, DDoS can hit the application from external sources when a service is exposed to the Internet. For attackers who gain a foothold of the environment within the Kubernetes cluster and are looking to infect multiple workloads with malware to further amplify a DoS attack, you need a strong zero-trust workload access control policies in place to restrict lateral movement.

Why you should invest in a DDoS solution for your container application

Before we look at the technical aspects of a DDoS attack Continue reading

AMD to spend $135M on chip R&D in Ireland for AI, data center, mobile tech

AMD has unveiled plans to invest $135 million over the next four years in several strategic research and development projects in Ireland. To support its R&D efforts there, targeted at developing technology for data centers, networking, 6G infrastructure, and next generation AI, AMD said it will hire 290 engineers and researchers, in addition to a number of additional support roles.To read this article in full, please click here

AMD to spend $135M on chip R&D in Ireland for AI, data center, mobile tech

AMD has unveiled plans to invest $135 million over the next four years in several strategic research and development projects in Ireland. To support its R&D efforts there, targeted at developing technology for data centers, networking, 6G infrastructure, and next generation AI, AMD said it will hire 290 engineers and researchers, in addition to a number of additional support roles.To read this article in full, please click here

AMD to spend $135M on chip R&D in Ireland, aiming at AI, data center, mobile tech

AMD has unveiled plans to invest $135 million over the next four years in several strategic research and development projects in Ireland. To support its R&D efforts there, targeted at developing technology for data centers, networking, 6G infrastructure, and next generation AI, AMD said it will be hiring 290 skilled engineers and researchers, in addition to a number of additional support roles.To read this article in full, please click here

AMD to spend $135M on chip R&D in Ireland, aiming at AI, data center, mobile tech

AMD has unveiled plans to invest $135 million over the next four years in several strategic research and development projects in Ireland. To support its R&D efforts there, targeted at developing technology for data centers, networking, 6G infrastructure, and next generation AI, AMD said it will be hiring 290 skilled engineers and researchers, in addition to a number of additional support roles.To read this article in full, please click here

Speeding up your (WordPress) website is a few clicks away

Speeding up your (WordPress) website is a few clicks away
Speeding up your (WordPress) website is a few clicks away

Every day, website visitors spend far too much time waiting for websites to load in their browsers. This waiting is partially due to browsers not knowing which resources are critically important so they can prioritize them ahead of less-critical resources. In this blog we will outline how millions of websites across the Internet can improve their performance by specifying which critical content loads first with Cloudflare Workers and what Cloudflare will do to make this easier by default in the future.

Popular Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress have made attempts to influence website resource priority, for example through techniques like lazy loading images. When done correctly, the results are magical. Performance is optimized between the CMS and browser without needing to implement any changes or coding new prioritization strategies. However, we’ve seen that these default priorities have opportunities to improve greatly.

In this co-authored blog with Google’s Patrick Meenan we will explain where the opportunities exist to improve website performance, how to check if a specific site can improve performance, and provide a small JavaScript snippet which can be used with Cloudflare Workers to do this optimization for you.

What happens when a browser receives the response?

Before we Continue reading

Descale your network with Cloudflare’s enhanced Descaler Program

Descale your network with Cloudflare’s enhanced Descaler Program
Descale your network with Cloudflare’s enhanced Descaler Program

Speed matters, especially when it comes to exiting a slower service and transitioning to a new one. Back in March, 2023, we announced the Descaler Program, a frictionless path to migrate existing Zscaler customers to Cloudflare One. This program makes it easy for customers to make the switch to a faster, simpler, and more agile foundation for security and network transformation with Cloudflare.

Through repeated engagements with customers of all sizes, we've improved the Descaler tooling to allow Zscaler to Cloudflare configuration migrations to be completed in hours, not days. This accelerated transition has helped organizations meet migration deadlines and eliminate countless hours of manual migration effort without skipping a beat. Today we’re excited to share more stories from customers and the amount of time it took them to ‘descale’.

Cloudflare One and the Descaler Program

As a quick recap, Cloudflare One is our Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform that combines network connectivity services with Zero Trust security services on one of the fastest, most resilient and most composable global networks. The platform dynamically connects users to enterprise resources, with identity-based security controls delivered close to users, wherever they are.

At its core, the Descaler Program helps Continue reading

Understanding end user-connectivity and performance with Digital Experience Monitoring, now available in beta

Understanding end user-connectivity and performance with Digital Experience Monitoring, now available in beta

This post is also available in Français.

Understanding end user-connectivity and performance with Digital Experience Monitoring, now available in beta

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

Benchmarking dashboard performance

Benchmarking dashboard performance
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

Network performance update: Speed Week 2023

Network performance update: Speed Week 2023
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

How we think about Zero Trust Performance

How we think about Zero Trust Performance
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

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