Reaffirming our commitment to free

Cloudflare launched our free tier at the same time our company launched — fourteen years ago, on September 27, 2010. Of course, a bit has changed since then — there are now millions of Internet properties behind Cloudflare. As we’ve grown in size and amassed millions of free customers, one of the questions we often get asked is: how can Cloudflare afford to do this at such scale?

Cloudflare always has, and always will, offer a generous free version for public-facing applications (Application Services), internal private networks and people (Cloudflare One), and developer tools (Developer Platform). Counterintuitively: our free service actually helps us keep our costs lower. Not only is it mission-aligned, our free tier is business-aligned. We want to make abundantly clear: our free plan is here to stay, and we reaffirmed that commitment this week with 15 releases across our product portfolio that make the Free plan even better.

Understanding our Cost of Goods Sold

To understand the economics of Free, you need to understand our Cost of Goods Sold (COGS). Cloudflare hasn’t outsourced its network — we built it ourselves, and it spans more than 330 cities. We design and ship Continue reading

Our container platform is in production. It has GPUs. Here’s an early look

We’ve been working on something new — a platform for running containers across Cloudflare’s network. We already use it in production for Workers AI, Workers Builds, Remote Browsing Isolation, and the Browser Rendering API. Today, we want to share an early look at how it’s built, why we built it, and how we use it ourselves.

In 2024, Cloudflare Workers celebrates its 7th birthday. When we first announced Workers, it was a completely new model for running compute in a multi-tenant way — on isolates, as opposed to containers. While, at the time, Workers was a pretty bare-bones functions-as-a-service product, we took a big bet that this was going to become the way software was going to be written going forward. Since introducing Workers, in addition to expanding our developer products in general to include storage and AI, we have been steadily adding more compute capabilities to Workers:

2020

Cron Triggers

2021

Durable Objects

Write Workers in Rust

Service Bindings

2022

Queues

Email Workers

Durable Objects Alarms

2023

Workers TCP Socket API 

Hyperdrive

Smart Placement

Workers AI

2024

Python Workers

JavaScript-native RPC

Node.js compatibility

SQLite in Durable Objects

With each of these, we’ve faced a question — can Continue reading

AI Everywhere with the WAF Rule Builder Assistant, Cloudflare Radar AI Insights, and updated AI bot protection

The continued growth of AI has fundamentally changed the Internet over the past 24 months. AI is increasingly ubiquitous, and Cloudflare is leaning into the new opportunities and challenges it presents in a big way. This year for Cloudflare’s birthday, we’ve extended our AI Assistant capabilities to help you build new WAF rules, added AI bot traffic insights on Cloudflare Radar, and given customers new AI bot blocking capabilities.  

AI Assistant for WAF Rule Builder

At Cloudflare, we’re always listening to your feedback and striving to make our products as user-friendly and powerful as possible. One area where we've heard your feedback loud and clear is in the complexity of creating custom and rate-limiting rules for our Web Application Firewall (WAF). With this in mind, we’re excited to introduce a new feature that will make rule creation easier and more intuitive: the AI Assistant for WAF Rule Builder. 

By simply entering a natural language prompt, you can generate a custom or rate-limiting rule tailored to your needs. For example, instead of manually configuring a complex rule matching criteria, you can now type something like, "Match requests with low bot score," and the assistant will generate the rule for Continue reading

Running a Simple HTTP Server with Python

Running a Simple HTTP Server with Python

I think this is going to be the shortest blog post of all time because running a Python HTTP server is incredibly straightforward. Python's HTTP server module lets you create a basic web server using just a single command. This server can serve files from a directory over the network, making it an excellent tool for quick testing and file sharing without the complexity of setting up a full-fledged web server.

You can start the Python HTTP server with the command python -m http.server 8000, which serves files from the current directory on port 8000. You can choose any port number by replacing 8000 with your preferred port. However, if you select a lower port number, such as 80, you might need administrator privileges to run the server.

💡
You don't even need to have a Python file or any code to run this, just this single command does the trick.

In this example, I have two files in a directory - one is a text file with a list of domains and the second is a simple YAML file.

Running a Simple HTTP Server with Python

If I run the command python -m http.server 8000, it starts a web server and I Continue reading

Builder Day 2024: 18 big updates to the Workers platform

To celebrate Builder Day 2024, we’re shipping 18 updates inspired by direct feedback from developers building on Cloudflare. Choosing a platform isn't just about current technologies and services — it's about betting on a partner that will evolve with your needs as your project grows and the tech landscape shifts. We’re in it for the long haul with you.

Starting today, you can:

We’ve brought key features from Pages to Workers, allowing you to: 

Four things are going GA and are officially production-ready:

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 bigger, better, faster AI platform

Birthday Week 2024 marks our first anniversary of Cloudflare’s AI developer products — Workers AI, AI Gateway, and Vectorize. For our first birthday this year, we’re excited to announce powerful new features to elevate the way you build with AI on Cloudflare.

Workers AI is getting a big upgrade, with more powerful GPUs that enable faster inference and bigger models. We’re also expanding our model catalog to be able to dynamically support models that you want to run on us. Finally, we’re saying goodbye to neurons and revamping our pricing model to be simpler and cheaper. On AI Gateway, we’re moving forward on our vision of becoming an ML Ops platform by introducing more powerful logs and human evaluations. Lastly, Vectorize is going GA, with expanded index sizes and faster queries.

Whether you want the fastest inference at the edge, optimized AI workflows, or vector database-powered RAG, we’re excited to help you harness the full potential of AI and get started on building with Cloudflare.

The fast, global AI platform

The first thing that you notice about an application is how fast, or in many cases, how slow it is. This is especially true of AI applications, Continue reading

Making Workers AI faster and more efficient: Performance optimization with KV cache compression and speculative decoding

During Birthday Week 2023, we launched Workers AI. Since then, we have been listening to your feedback, and one thing we’ve heard consistently is that our customers want Workers AI to be faster. In particular, we hear that large language model (LLM) generation needs to be faster. Users want their interactive chat and agents to go faster, developers want faster help, and users do not want to wait for applications and generated website content to load. Today, we’re announcing three upgrades we’ve made to Workers AI to bring faster and more efficient inference to our customers: upgraded hardware, KV cache compression, and speculative decoding.

Thanks to Cloudflare’s 12th generation compute servers, our network now supports a newer generation of GPUs capable of supporting larger models and faster inference. Customers can now use Meta Llama 3.2 11B, Meta’s newly released multi-modal model with vision support, as well as Meta Llama 3.1 70B on Workers AI. Depending on load and time of day, customers can expect to see two to three times the throughput for Llama 3.1 and 3.2 compared to our previous generation Workers AI hardware. More performance information for these models can be found Continue reading

Zero-latency SQLite storage in every Durable Object

Traditional cloud storage is inherently slow, because it is normally accessed over a network and must carefully synchronize across many clients that could be accessing the same data. But what if we could instead put your application code deep into the storage layer, such that your code runs directly on the machine where the data is stored, and the database itself executes as a local library embedded inside your application?

Durable Objects (DO) are a novel approach to cloud computing which accomplishes just that: Your application code runs exactly where the data is stored. Not just on the same machine: your storage lives in the same thread as the application, requiring not even a context switch to access. With proper use of caching, storage latency is essentially zero, while nevertheless being durable and consistent.

Until today, DOs only offered key/value oriented storage. But now, they support a full SQL query interface with tables and indexes, through the power of SQLite.

SQLite is the most-used SQL database implementation in the world, with billions of installations. It’s on practically every phone and desktop computer, and many embedded devices use it as well. It's known to be blazingly fast and rock solid. But Continue reading

We made Workers KV up to 3x faster — here’s the data

Speed is a critical factor that dictates Internet behavior. Every additional millisecond a user spends waiting for your web page to load results in them abandoning your website. The old adage remains as true as ever: faster websites result in higher conversion rates. And with such outcomes tied to Internet speed, we believe a faster Internet is a better Internet.

Customers often use Workers KV to provide Workers with key-value data for configuration, routing, personalization, experimentation, or serving assets. Many of Cloudflare’s own products rely on KV for just this purpose: Pages stores static assets, Access stores authentication credentials, AI Gateway stores routing configuration, and Images stores configuration and assets, among others. So KV’s speed affects the latency of every request to an application, throughout the entire lifecycle of a user session. 

Today, we’re announcing up to 3x faster KV hot reads, with all KV operations faster by up to 20ms. And we want to pull back the curtain and show you how we did it. 

Workers KV read latency (ms) by percentile measured from Pages

Optimizing Workers KV’s architecture to minimize latency

At a high level, Workers KV is itself a Worker that makes requests to central Continue reading

NAN074: Integrate and Collaborate with Codespaces and Containerlab

GitHub Codespaces aims to simplify spinning up a developer environment in the cloud. Containerlab, which provides virtual lab environments for network engineers, is now integrated with Codespaces to make it easy to set up and share network labs. On today’s Network Automation Nerds show, we delve into this innovative use of GitHub Codespaces and containerlab... Read more »

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

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:

  1. “How do we build and maintain a mesh network that achieves near-zero latency to all our users?”

  2. “Where should we spin up our servers?”

  3. “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

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

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

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