Building Cloudflare on Cloudflare
Cloudflare’s website, application security and performance products handle upwards of 46 million HTTP requests per second, every second. These products were originally built as a set of native Linux services, but we’re increasingly building parts of the system using our Cloudflare Workers developer platform to make these products faster, more robust, and easier to develop. This blog post digs into how and why we’re doing this.
System architecture
Our architecture can best be thought of as a chain of proxies, each communicating over HTTP. At first, these proxies were all implemented based on NGINX and Lua, but in recent years many of them have been replaced - often by new services built in Rust, such as Pingora.
The proxies each have distinct purposes - some obvious, some less so. One which we’ll be discussing in more detail is the FL service, which performs “Front Line” processing of requests, applying customer configuration to decide how to handle and route the request.
This architecture has worked well for more than a decade. It allows parts of the system to be developed and deployed independently, parts of the system to be scaled independently, and traffic to be routed to different nodes in Continue reading
