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Cloudflare Email Routing has quickly grown to a few hundred thousand users, and we’re incredibly excited with the number of feature requests that reach our product team every week. We hear you, we love the feedback, and we want to give you all that you’ve been asking for. What we don’t like is making you wait, or making you feel like your needs are too unique to be addressed. That’s why we’re taking a different approach - we’re giving you the power tools that you need to implement any logic you can dream of to process your emails in the fastest, most scalable way possible. Today we’re announcing Route to Workers, for which we’ll start a closed beta soon. You can join the waitlist today.How this worksWhen using Route to Workers your Email Routing rules can have a Worker process the messages reaching any of your custom Email addresses.Even if you haven’t used Cloudflare Workers before, we are making onboarding as easy as can be. You can start creating Workers straight from the Email Routing dashboard, with just one click.After clicking Create, you will be able to choose a starter that allows you to get up and running with minimal effort. Starters are templates that pre-populate your Worker with the code you would write for popular use cases such as creating a blocklist or allowlist, content based filtering, tagging messages, pinging you on Slack for urgent emails, etc. You can then use the code editor to make your new Worker process emails in exactly the way you want it to - th

Here at Cloudflare we often talk about HTTP and related protocols as we work to help build a better Inteet. However, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) — used to send emails — is still a massive part of the Inteet too.Even though SMTP is tuing 40 years old this year, most businesses still rely on email to validate user accounts, send notifications, announce new features, and more.Sending an email is simple from a technical standpoint, but getting an email actually delivered to an inbox can be extremely tricky. Because of the enormous amount of spam that is sent every single day, all major email providers are very wary of things like new domains and IP addresses that start sending emails.That is why we are delighted to announce a partnership with MailChannels. MailChannels has created an email sending service specifically for Cloudflare Workers that removes all the friction associated with sending emails. To use their service, you do not need to validate a domain or create a separate account. MailChannels filters spam before sending out an email, so you can feel safe putting user-submitted content in an email and be confident that it won’t ruin your domain reputation with email providers. But the absolute best part? Thanks to our friends at MailChannels, it is completely free to send email.In the words of their CEO Ken Simpson: “Cloudflare Workers and Pages are changing the game when it comes to ease of use and removing friction to get started. So when we sat down

This post is also available in 简体中文, 日本語, Français, Español. When we announced Cloudflare Images to the world, we introduced a way to store images within the product and help customers move away from the egress fees met when using remote sources for their deliveries via Cloudflare.To store the images in Cloudflare, customers can upload them via UI with a simple drag and drop, or via API for scenarios with a high number of objects for which scripting their way through the upload process makes more sense.To create flexibility on how to import the images, we’ve recently also included the ability to upload via URL or define custom names and paths for your images to allow a simple mapping between customer repositories and the objects in Cloudflare. It's also possible to serve from a custom hostname to create flexibility on how your end-users see the path, to improve the delivery performance by removing the need to do TLS negotiations or to improve your brand recognition through URL consistency.Still, there was no simple way to tell our product: “Tens of millions of images are in this repository URL. Go and grab them all from me”.  In some scenarios, our customers have buckets with millions of images to upload to Cloudflare Images. Their goal is to migrate all objects to Cloudflare through a one-time process, allowing you to drop the exteal storage altogether.In another common scenario, different departments in larger companies use independent systems configured with varying stor

There is a famous quote attributed to a Netscape engineer: “There are only two difficult problems in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things.” While naming things does oddly take up an inordinate amount of time, cache invalidation shouldn’t. In the past we’ve written about Cloudflare’s incredibly fast response times, whether content is cached on our global network or not. If content is cached, it can be served from a Cloudflare cache server, which are distributed across the globe and are generally a lot closer in physical proximity to the visitor. This saves the visitor’s request from needing to go all the way back to an origin server for a response. But what happens when a webmaster updates something on their origin and would like these caches to be updated as well? This is where cache “purging” (also known as “invalidation”) comes in.Customers thinking about setting up a CDN and caching infrastructure consider questions like:How do different caching invalidation/purge mechanisms compare?How many times a day/hour/minute do I expect to purge content?How quickly can the cache be purged when needed? This blog will discuss why invalidating cached assets is hard, what Cloudflare has done to make it easy (because we care about your experience as a developer), and the engineering work we’re putting in this year to make the performance and scalability of our purge services the best in the industry. What makes purging difficult also makes it useful (i) ScaleThe first t

We have been operating an IPFS gateway for the last four years. It started as a research experiment in 2018, providing end-to-end integrity with IPFS. A year later, we made IPFS content faster to fetch. Last year, we announced we were committed to making IPFS gateway part of our product offering. Through this process, we needed to inform our design decisions to know how our setup performed.To this end, we've developed the IPFS Gateway monitor, an observability tool that runs various IPFS scenarios on a given gateway endpoint. In this post, you'll lea how we use this tool and go over discoveries we made along the way.Refresher on IPFSIPFS is a distributed system for storing and accessing files, websites, applications, and data. It's different from a traditional centralized file system in that IPFS is completely distributed. Any participant can join and leave at any time without the loss of overall performance.However, in order to access any file in IPFS, users cannot just use web browsers. They need to run an IPFS node to access the file from IPFS using its own protocol. IPFS Gateways play the role of enabling users to do this using only web browsers.Cloudflare provides an IPFS gateway at https://cloudflare-ipfs.com, so anyone can just access IPFS files by using the gateway URL in their browsers.As IPFS and the Cloudflare IPFS Gateway have become more and more popular, we need a way to know how performant it is: how much time it takes to retrieve IPFS-hosted content and how

Four years ago, Cloudflare went Interplanetary by offering a gateway to the IPFS network. This meant that if you hosted content on IPFS, we offered to make it available to every user of the Inteet through HTTPS and with Cloudflare protection. IPFS allows you to choose a storage provider you are comfortable with, while providing a standard interface for Cloudflare to serve this data.Since then, businesses have new tools to streamline web development. Cloudflare Workers, Pages, and R2 are enabling developers to bring services online in a matter of minutes, with built-in scaling, security, and analytics.Today, we're announcing we're bridging the two. We will make it possible for our customers to serve their sites on the IPFS network.In this post, we'll lea how you will be able to build your website with Cloudflare Pages, and leverage the IPFS integration to make your content accessible and available across multiple providers.A primer on IPFSThe InterPlanetary FileSystem (IPFS) is a peer-to-peer network for storing content on a distributed file system. It is composed of a set of computers called nodes that store and relay content using a common addressing system. In short, a set of participants agree to maintain a shared index of content the network can provide, and where to find it.Let's take two random participants in the network: Alice, a cat person, and Bob, a dog person.As a participant in the network, Alice keeps connections with a subset of participants, referred to as

Today we are excited to announce that our Ethereum and IPFS gateways are publicly available to all Cloudflare customers for the first time. Since our announcement of our private beta last September the interest in our Eth and IPFS gateways has been overwhelming. We are humbled by the demand for these tools, and we are excited to get them into as many developers' hands as possible. Starting today, any Cloudflare customer can log into the dashboard and configure a zone for Ethereum, IPFS, or both!Over the last eight months of the private beta, we’ve been busy working to fully operationalize the gateways to ensure they meet the needs of our customers!First, we have created a new API with end-to-end managed hostname deployment. This ensures the creation and management of gateways as you continue to scale remains extremely quick and easy! It is paramount to give time and focus back to developers to focus on your core product and services and leave the infrastructural components to us!Second, we’ve added a brand new UI bringing web3 to Cloudflare's zone-level dashboard. Now, regardless of the workflow you are used to, we have parity between our UI and API to ensure we fit into your existing processes and no time is wasted inteally to have to figure out ‘how we integrate’, but rather, a quick setup and start to serve content or connect your services!Third, we are pleased to say that you will soon have testnet support to ensure your new development can be easily tested, hardened, a

A little under four years ago we announced Cloudflare's first experiments in web3 with our gateway to the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). Three years ago we announced our experimental Ethereum Gateway. At Cloudflare, we often take experimental bets on the future of the Inteet to help new technologies gain maturity and stability and for us to gain deep understanding of them.Four years after our initial experiments in web3, it’s time to launch our next series of experiments to help advance the state of the art. These experiments are focused on finding new ways to help solve the scale and environmental challenges that face blockchain technologies today. Over the last two years there has been a rapid increase in the use of the underlying technologies that power web3. This growth has been a catalyst for a generation of startups; and yet it has also had negative extealities.At Cloudflare, we are committed to helping to build a better Inteet. That commitment balances technology and impact. The impact of certain older blockchain technologies on the environment has been challenging. The Proof of Work (PoW) consensus systems that secure many blockchains were instrumental in the bootstrapping of the web3 ecosystem. However, these systems do not scale well with the usage rates we see today. Proof of Work networks rely on complex cryptographic functions to create consensus and prevent attacks. Every node on the network is in a race to find a solution to this cryptographic proble

What happens to the Inteet traffic in countries where many observe Ramadan? Depending on the country, there are clear shifts and changing pattes in Inteet use, particularly before dawn and after sunset.This year, Ramadan started on April 2, and it continued until May 1, 2022, (dates vary and are dependent on the appearance of the crescent moon). For Muslims, it is a period of introspection, communal prayer and also of fasting every day from dawn to sunset. That means that people only eat at night (Iftar is the first meal after sunset that breaks the fast and often also a family or community event), and also before sunrise (Suhur).In some countries, the impact is so big that we can see in our Inteet traffic charts when the sun sets. Sunrise is more difficult to check in the charts, but in the countries more impacted, people wake up much earlier than usual and were using the Inteet in the early moing because of that.Cloudflare Radar data shows that Inteet traffic was impacted in several countries by Ramadan, with a clear increase in traffic before sunrise, and a bigger than usual decrease after sunset. All times in this blog post are local. The data in the charts is bucketed into hours. So, for example, when we show an increase in traffic at 0400 we are showing that an increase occurred between 0400 and 0459 local time.Indonesia is a clear example of that, showing trends that continued until the end of Ramadan:In the next table, we show a country ranking by order

In September 2021, we shared extensive benchmarking results of 1,000 networks all around the world. The results showed that on a range of tests (TCP connection time, time to first byte, time to last byte), and on different measures (p95, mean), Cloudflare was the fastest provider in 49% of networks around the world. Since then, we’ve worked to continuously improve performance, with the ultimate goal of being the fastest everywhere and an intermediate goal to grow the number of networks where we’re the fastest by at least 10% every Innovation Week. We met that goal during Security Week (March 2022), and we’re carrying the work over to Platform Week (May 2022).We’re excited to update you on the latest results, but before we do: after running with this benchmark for nine months, we've also been looking for ways to improve the benchmark itself — to make it even more representative of speeds in the real world. To that end, we're expanding our measured networks from 1,000 to 3,000, to give an even more accurate sense of real world performance across the globe.In terms of results: using the old benchmark of 1,000 networks, we’re the fastest in 69% of them. In this new expanded view of 3,000 networks, we’re the fastest in 42% of them. We’ve demonstrated a consistent ability to improve our performance against what we measure, and we’re excited to optimize our performance and lift our ranking in these smaller networks all around the world.In addition to sharing a general update on wher

After many announcements from Platform Week, we’re thrilled to make one more: our Spring Developer Challenge!The theme for this challenge is building real-time, collaborative applications — one of the most exciting use-cases emerging in the Cloudflare ecosystem. This is an opportunity for developers to merge their ideas with our newly released features, ea recognition on our blog, and take home our best swag yet.Here’s a list of our tools that will get you started:Workers can either be powerful middleware connecting your app to different APIs and an origin — or it can be the entire application itself. We recommend using Worktop, a popular framework for Workers, if you need TypeScript support, routing, and well-organized submodules. Worktop can also complement your existing app even if it already uses a framework,  such as Svelte.Cloudflare Pages makes it incredibly easy to deploy sites, which you can make into truly dynamic apps by putting a Worker in front or using the Pages Functions (beta).Durable Objects are great for collaborative apps because you can use websockets while coordinating state at the edge, seen in this chat demo. To help scale any load, we also recommend Durable Object Groups.Workers KV provides a global key-value data store that securely stores and quickly serves data across Cloudflare’s network. R2 allows you to store enormous amounts of data without trapping you with costly egress services.Last year, our Developer Spotlight series highlighted how devel

In Cloudflare’s global network, every server runs the whole software stack. Therefore, it's critical that every server performs to its maximum potential capacity. In order to provide us better flexibility from a supply chain perspective, we buy server hardware from multiple vendors with the exact same configuration. However, after the deployment of our Gen X AMD EPYC Zen 2 (Rome) servers, we noticed that servers from one vendor (which we’ll call SKU-B) were consistently performing 5-10% worse than servers from second vendor (which we'll call SKU-A).The graph below shows the performance discrepancy between the two SKUs in terms of percentage difference. The performance is gauged on the metric of requests per second, and this data is an average of observations captured over 24 hours.Machines before implementing performance improvements. The average RPS for SKU-B is approximately 10% below SKU-A.Compute performance via DGEMMThe initial debugging efforts centered around the compute performance. We ran AMD’s DGEMM high performance computing tool to determine if CPU performance was the cause. DGEMM is designed to measure the sustained floating-point computation rate of a single server. Specifically, the code measures the floating point rate of execution of a real matrix–matrix multiplication with double precision. We ran a modified version of DGEMM equipped with specific AMD libraries to support the EPYC processor instruction set.The DGEMM test brought out a few points related to t

We’re excited to announce the availability of Network Analytics Logs. Magic Transit, Magic Firewall, Magic WAN, and Spectrum customers on the Enterprise plan can feed packet samples directly into storage services, network monitoring tools such as Kentik, or their Security Information Event Management (SIEM) systems such as Splunk to gain near real-time visibility into network traffic and DDoS attacks.What’s included in the logsBy creating a Network Analytics Logs job, Cloudflare will continuously push logs of packet samples directly to the HTTP endpoint of your choice, including Websockets. The logs arrive in JSON format which makes them easy to parse, transform, and aggregate. The logs include packet samples of traffic dropped and passed by the following systems:Network-layer DDoS Protection RulesetAdvanced TCP ProtectionMagic FirewallNote that not all mitigation systems are applicable to all Cloudflare services. Below is a table describing which mitigation service is applicable to which Cloudflare service: .tg {border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:0;} .tg td{border-color:black;border-style:solid;border-width:1px;font-family:Arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px; overflow:hidden;padding:10px 5px;word-break:normal;} .tg th{border-color:black;border-style:solid;border-width:1px;font-family:Arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px; font-weight:normal;overflow:hidden;padding:10px 5px;word-break:normal;} .tg .tg-1wig{font-weight:bold;text-align:left;vertical-align:top} .tg .tg-baqh{te

Before we dive into my experience inteing at Cloudflare, let me quickly introduce myself. I am currently a master’s student at the National University of Singapore (NUS) studying Computer Science. I am passionate about building software that improves people’s lives and making the Inteet a better place for everyone. Back in December 2021, I joined Cloudflare as a Software Development Inte on the Partnerships team to help improve the experience that Partners have when using the platform. I was extremely excited about this opportunity and jumped at the prospect of working on serverless technology to build viable tools for our partners and customers. In this blog post, I detail my experience working at Cloudflare and the many highlights of my inteship.Interview ExperienceThe process began for me back when I was taking a software engineering module at NUS where one of my classmates had shared a job post for an inteship at Cloudflare. I had known about Cloudflare’s DNS service prior and was really excited to lea more about the inteship opportunity because I really resonated with the company's mission to help build a better Inteet.I knew right away that this would be a great opportunity and submitted my application. Soon after, I heard back from the recruiting team and went through the interview process – the entire interview process was extremely accommodating and is definitely the most enjoyable interview experience I have had. Throughout the process, I was constan

There’s only one song contest that is more than six decades old and not only presents many new songs (ABBA, Celine Dion, Julio Iglesias and Domenico Modugno shined there), but also has a global stage that involves 40 countries — performers represent those countries and the public votes. The 66th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest, in Turin, Italy, had two semi-finals (May 10 and 12) and a final (May 14), all of them with highlights, including Ukraine’s victory. The Inteet was impacted in more than one way, from whole countries to the fan and official broadcasters sites, but also video platforms.On our Eurovision dedicated page, it was possible to see the level of Inteet traffic in the 40 participant countries, and we tweeted some highlights during the final.#Ukraine just won the #Eurovision in Turin, #ItalyVideo platforms DNS traffic in Ukraine today, during the event, was 22% higher at 23:00 CEST compared to the previous Saturday. The @Eurovision final is being transmitted live via YouTube.— @Cloudflare data. pic.twitter.com/juBmtDj1FP— Cloudflare Radar (@CloudflareRadar) May 14, 2022 First, some technicalities. The baseline for the values we use in the following charts is the average of the preceding week, except for the more granular minute by minute view that uses the traffic average of May 9 and 10 as baseline. To estimate the traffic to the several types of websites from the 40 participating countries, we use DNS name resolution data. In this blog post, w

“Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”— Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, 1789The famous expression highlighting that only “death and taxes” seem cer

At Cloudflare, we are on a mission to help build a better Inteet. We continue to grow our network, and it is important for us to do so responsibly.Since Earth Day 2021, some pieces of this effort have included:Making a commitment to powering our network with 100% renewable energyHosting our first