Using CloudFlare to mix domain sharding and SPDY
2013-12-26
It’s common knowledge that domain sharding, where the resources in a web page are shared across different domains (or subdomains), is a good thing. ...
Keeping our open source promise
2013-12-22
Back in October I wrote a blog post about CloudFlare and open source software titled CloudFlare And Open Source Software: A Two-Way Street which detailed the many ways in which we use and support open source software....
Introducing USV: CloudFlare's newest investor
2013-12-17
It's been an exciting day here at CloudFlare. We are happy to finally introduce our newest investors, Union Square Ventures. This blog post was written by Brad Burnham, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures, and previously appeared on the USV blog....
Ask CloudFlare: How do I make my website faster?
2013-12-10
We get asked this question all the time: How do I make my website faster? So, on Thursday, we're holding a webcast to go through our recommendations and also answer your questions live....
Red October: CloudFlare’s Open Source Implementation of the Two-Man Rule
2013-11-21
At CloudFlare, we are always looking for better ways to secure the data we’re entrusted with. This means hardening our system against outside threats such as hackers, but it also means protecting against insider threats. ...
The two reasons to be an engineer at CloudFlare
2013-11-12
If you're thinking about joining a startup as an engineer we'd like you to think of CloudFlare. The two most important reasons to think of CloudFlare are... because of who your colleagues would be and who our customers are (and who their customers are)....
What we've been doing with Go
2013-11-11
Almost two years ago CloudFlare started working with Go. What started as an experiment on one network and concurrency heavy project has turned into full, production use of Go for multiple services....
Cloud-o-ween
2013-10-31
Over the weekend, I happened by a pumpkin carving contest in Monterey. One of the winning pumpkins was a low-relief scene of a pirate ship. The hull was created by carving the pumpkin in the traditional way....
A (Relatively Easy To Understand) Primer on Elliptic Curve Cryptography
2013-10-24
Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is one of the most powerful but least understood types of cryptography in wide use today. At CloudFlare, we make extensive use of ECC to secure everything from our customers' HTTPS connections to how we pass data between our data centers....
CloudFlare And Open Source Software: A Two-Way Street
2013-10-07
CloudFlare uses a great deal of open source and free software. Our core server platform is nginx (which is released using a two-clause BSD license) and our primary database of choice is postgresql (which is released using their own BSD-like license). ...
How I created the viral sensation: isthegovernmentopen.com
2013-10-04
A few years ago, amidst the final crunch of a project deadline, a friend and former colleague looked me directly in the eye and said, "It's like I don't even know how to build a website anymore."...
Patching a WHMCS zero day on day zero
2013-10-03
A critical zero-day vulnerability was published today affecting any hosting provider using WHMCS. As part of building a safer web, CloudFlare has added a ruleset to our Web Application Firewall (WAF) to block the published attack vector....
Ensuring Randomness with Linux's Random Number Generator
2013-10-03
When building secure systems, having a source of random numbers is essential. Without them, most cryptographic systems break down and the privacy and authenticity of communications between two parties can be subverted....
Cloudflare: Happy 3rd Birthday
2013-09-27
Today is CloudFlare's birthday. We opened to the public exactly three years ago today, September 27, 2010. In those three years we've grown to power more than 1.5 million websites and sit in front of more than 4% of all web requests....
Why some cryptographic keys are much smaller than others
2013-09-20
If you connect to CloudFlare's web site using HTTPS the connection will be secured using one of the many encryption schemes supported by SSL/TLS. ...
Why secure systems require random numbers
2013-09-13
If you've been following recent news about technical spying by the US National Security Agency and the UK's Government Communications Headquarters you may have come across a claim that the NSA was involved in weakening a random number generator. ...
SXSW 2014: Get your PanelPicker votes in today!
2013-09-05
CloudFlare is headed to the Interactive portion of SXSW in Austin from March 7-11, 2014. We are very excited to share some of the knowledge and experiences we’ve gained since our CloudFlare journey began. ...
Details Behind Today's Internet Hacks
2013-08-27
At 1:19pm (PDT) today, a researcher noticed that the New York Times' website wasn't loading. We know the New York Times tech team, so we sent an email to check in. A few minutes later, the CTO of the NYT called us back. ...
The story of a little DNS easter egg
2013-08-27
About a year ago, we realized that CloudFlare's current DNS infrastructure had some challenges. We were using PowerDNS, an open source DNS server that is popular with hosting providers. ...
Recycling memory buffers in Go
2013-08-24
This blog post is very old now. You probably don't want to use the techniques described here. GO'S sync.Pool is a better way to go....