The Future of Work at Cloudflare

The Future of Work at Cloudflare
The Future of Work at Cloudflare

During Impact Week, we've shared how Cloudflare is providing tools for our customers to minimize their environmental impact as well as what we, as a company, are doing to help society at large. But some critical stakeholders we haven’t talked much about yet are Cloudflare's more than 2,000 employees: who build our services, support and educate our customers, keep our finances in order, work through difficult policy issues, and empower us to accomplish everything we have.

Over the last year and a half, we've all challenged a lot of the assumptions about what it means to "work." Prior to the start of the pandemic, Cloudflare was very much a work-from-office culture. And so when, on March 13, 2020, we closed all our offices and asked everyone to work from home, the two of us were extremely nervous.

And then something unexpected happened: a lot of things got better.

As a company, productivity increased — when measured by our success selling our products, our pace of shipping new products, and even things like the time it takes for our finance team to close our books.

Other day-to-day things got better, too. We noticed a marked increase in participation in Continue reading

The Cloudflare Startup Enterprise Plan: helping new startups bootstrap

The Cloudflare Startup Enterprise Plan: helping new startups bootstrap
The Cloudflare Startup Enterprise Plan: helping new startups bootstrap

Early in the life of most startups, there is a time of incredible hustle, creative problem solving, and making the impossible possible through out-of-the-box thinking and elbow grease. Grizzled veterans, who have lived through those days of running on coffee and shoestring budgets, look back on that time and fascinate the newcomers with war stories of back in the day, of adventures and first wins, when they kept the lights on by sheer force of will.

To help early stage startups get going, Cloudflare is giving away one year of the Startup Enterprise plan to all early stage startups in participating accelerator programs. That early stage time is special for product development, and entrepreneurs unlock worlds of possibilities when they have advanced tools on their hands, such as the power of the Cloudflare network.

What’s included in the Startup Enterprise plan?

In addition to the core offerings in the Pro and Business plans (e.g., CDN, DNS, WAF, custom SSL cert, 50 page rules), when founders sign up for the Startup Enterprise plan they’ll get special access to:

Cloudflare is joining Pledge 1%

Cloudflare is joining Pledge 1%
Cloudflare is joining Pledge 1%

One theme we've prioritized this year at Cloudflare is how we can “level up” — level up service to our customers, level up the growth of our network, level up speed and creativity as we innovate.

In addition to our products and business, “leveling up” should also apply to the way Cloudflare gives back. Since our founding, giving back has been part of Cloudflare’s DNA, whether it’s through free services like Unmetered DDoS Mitigation or Universal SSL, giving gifts to the Internet every year during Birthday Week, or through free programs like Project Galileo that helps protect at-risk public interest organizations all over the world: for example, human rights activists and journalists. As the capabilities of our network continue to grow, we know there is more we can do. As we started to plan our first Impact Week, it seemed like the right time to figure out how we can level up how we give back to our communities.

To help us get there, I am excited to announce that Cloudflare is joining Pledge 1%. We're joining the more than 12,000 companies in 100 countries that are committed to making a tangible, positive impact in their communities. As part of Continue reading

Building a sustainable workforce, through communities

Building a sustainable workforce, through communities
Building a sustainable workforce, through communities

At Cloudflare, we have our eyes set on an ambitious goal: to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks that powers approximately 25 million Internet properties. This is made possible by our 1,900 team members around the world. We believe the key to achieving our potential is to build diverse teams and create an environment where everyone can do their best work.

That is why we place a lot of value on the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion. Diversity, equity, and inclusion lead to better outcomes through improved decision-making, more innovative teams, stronger financial returns and simply a better place to work for everyone.

Building a sustainable workforce, through communities

To become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive, we believe it’s important to focus on communities within and around our company.

Building internal communities at Cloudflare

At Cloudflare, like most workplaces, there are built-in communities: your direct team, your cross-functional partners and (because we take onboarding very seriously) your new hire class. These communities, especially the first two, are important to help you get your job done. But we want more than that for our team at Cloudflare. We believe that community builds connection and fosters a sense Continue reading

Introducing Greencloud

Introducing Greencloud
Introducing Greencloud

Over the past few days, as part of Cloudflare’s Impact Week, we’ve written about the work we’re doing to help build a greener Internet. We’re making bold climate commitments for our own network and facilities and introducing new capabilities that help customers understand and reduce their impact. And in addition to organization-level initiatives, we also recognize the importance of individual impact — which is why we’re excited to publicly introduce Greencloud, our sustainability-focused employee working group.

What is Greencloud?

Greencloud is a coalition of Cloudflare employees who are passionate about the environment. Initially founded in 2019, we’re a cross-functional, global team with a few areas of focus:

  1. Awareness: Greencloud compiles and shares resources about environmental activism with each other and the broader organization. We believe that collective action — not just conscious consumerism, but also engagement in local policy and community movements — is critical to a more sustainable future, and that the ability to affect change starts with education. We’re also consistently inspired by the great work other folks in tech are doing in this space, and love sharing updates from peers that push us to do better within our own spheres of influence.
  2. Support: Our membership includes Cloudflare Continue reading

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization
How Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can change an organization

Employee resource groups (ERGs) are important to a company’s success. They foster community and a sense of belonging, help drive organizational change, and improve the overall quality of an organization’s culture. Most importantly, they help organizations become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. I’d love to share the history of ERGs at Cloudflare, as well as how they function and help influence the company.

The history of ERGs at Cloudflare

When I joined Cloudflare in 2017, one of the first things I did was search “LGBTQ” in our company chat. A chat room of a dozen or so employees titled “LGBT at Cloudflare'' popped up. There was evidence of some historic chatter in the room, and it was clear some employees had gathered for drinks after work before. I immediately introduced myself to the group, and asked if they would be okay with me setting up a meet & greet event. We booked a conference room, ordered lunch, found an article to discuss, introduced ourselves, and collectively decided we wanted to continue hosting such events. In our second meeting, we decided we should make things official by deciding on a name. This was the birth of Proudflare, our employee resource group Continue reading

Cloud Foundry HTTP/2 Support Thwarted by GoLang Indifference

A Go Router reverse proxy removes headers that would let a CF application know it can send and receive HTTP/2 traffic. Such capability could be coded in, bypassing the Go language library entirely, but the project team doesn’t want to take on the responsibility for supporting such a potentially widely-used function. spoke about this challenge at this year’s virtual

OpenFlow Realities, 2021 Edition

I thought I was too harsh every now and then, but I’m a complete amateur when compared to Minh Ha’s take on OpenFlow.

Indeed Quantum Computing and OpenFlow have a lot in common. They both create stories that have emotional appeal, they both require invention of new physics, and they’re both filled with grand vision, grandstanding, and empty promises. But there’s no shortage of PhDs, high hopes, cash infusion from VCs, and a Cambrian explosion of research papers, many of which content is not even worth the papers it’s printed on.

Read more …

OpenFlow Realities, 2021 Edition

I thought I was too harsh every now and then, but I’m a complete amateur when compared to Minh Ha’s take on OpenFlow.

Indeed Quantum Computing and OpenFlow have a lot in common. They both create stories that have emotional appeal, they both require invention of new physics, and they’re both filled with grand vision, grandstanding, and empty promises. But there’s no shortage of PhDs, high hopes, cash infusion from VCs, and a Cambrian explosion of research papers, many of which content is not even worth the papers it’s printed on.

Read more …

Turbocharging AKS Networking with Calico eBPF

Reza Ramezanpour Reza is a developer advocate at Tigera, working to promote adoption of Project Calico. Before joining Tigera, Reza worked as a systems engineer and network administrator. A single Kubernetes cluster expends a small percentage of its total available assigned resources on delivering in-cluster networking. We don’t have to be satisfied with this, though, achieving the lowest possible overhead can provide significant cost savings and performance improvements if you are running network-intensive workloads. This article explores and explains the improvements that can be achieved in Microsoft Azure using Calico instructions for installing Calico’s network policy engine with AKS use a version of Calico that pre-dates eBPF mode. Accelerating Network Performance Test Methodology To show how Calico accelerates AKS network performance using eBPF, the Calico team ran a series of network Continue reading

Real-Time Data Access Across Highly Distributed Environments

The goal is straightforward, but getting there has proven to be a challenge: how to offer real- or near real-time access to data that is continually refreshed on an as-needed basis across a number of different distributed environments. Consequently, as different systems of data and their locations can proliferate across different network environments — including multiclouds and on-premises and, in many cases, geographic zones — organizations can struggle to maintain low-latency connections to the data their applications require. The challenges are especially manifest when users require and increasingly demand that their experiences, which are often transactional-based, are met in near- or real-time that require data-intensive backend support. Many organizations continue to struggle with the challenges of maintaining and relying on data streaming and other ways, such as through so-called “speed layers” with cached memory, to maintain low-latency connections between multicloud and on-premises environments. In this article, we describe the different components necessary to maintain asynchronously updated data sources consisting of different systems of record for which real-time access is essential for the end-user experience. For the CIO, the challenges consist of the ability for applications to have low-latency access to data, often dispersed across a number of often highly distributed Continue reading

Cloudflare’s Athenian Project Expands Internationally

Cloudflare's Athenian Project Expands Internationally
Cloudflare's Athenian Project Expands Internationally

Over the course of the past few years, we’ve seen a wide variety of different kinds of online threats to democratically-held elections around the world. These threats range from attempts to restrict the availability of information, to efforts to control the dialogue around elections, to full disruptions of the voting process.

Some countries have shut down the Internet completely during elections. In 2020, Access Now’s #KeepItOn Campaign reported at least 155 Internet shutdowns in 29 countries such as Togo, Republic of the Congo, Niger and Benin. In 2021, Uganda's government ordered the "Suspension Of The Operation Of Internet Gateways" the day before the country's general election.

Even outside a full Internet shutdown, election reporting and registration websites can face attacks from other nations and from parties seeking to disrupt the administration of the election or undermine trust in the electoral process. These cyberattacks target not only electronic voting or election technologies, but access to information and communications tools such as voter registration and websites that host election results. In 2014, a series of cyberattacks including DDoS, malware and phishing attacks were launched against Ukraine’s Central Election Commission ahead of the presidential election. These sophisticated attacks attempted to infiltrate the internal Continue reading

Working with those who protect human rights around the world

Working with those who protect human rights around the world
Working with those who protect human rights around the world

Over the past few years, we’ve seen an increasing use of Internet shutdowns and cyberattacks that restrict the availability of information in communities around the world. In 2020, Access Now’s #KeepItOn coalition documented at least 155 Internet shutdowns in 29 countries. During the same period, Cloudflare witnessed a five-fold increase in cyberattacks against the human rights, journalism, and non-profit websites that benefit from the protection of Project Galileo.

These disruptive measures, which put up barriers to those looking to use the Internet to express themselves, earn a livelihood, gather and disseminate information, and participate in public life,  affect the lives of millions of people around the world.

As described by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), the Internet is not only a key means by which individuals exercise their rights to freedom of opinion and expression, it “facilitates the realization of a range of other human rights” including “economic, social and cultural rights, such as the right to education and the right to take part in cultural life and to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications, as well as civil and political rights, such as the rights to freedom of association and assembly.” The effect of Continue reading

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