Tag Archives: Cloudflare TV

Announcing our Spring Developer Speaker Series

2022-05-08 Kristian Freeman

Post Syndicated from Kristian Freeman original https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-our-spring-developer-speaker-series/

Announcing our Spring Developer Speaker Series

We love developers.

Late last year, we hosted Full Stack Week, with a focus on new products, features, and partnerships to continue growing Cloudflare’s developer platform. As part of Full Stack Week, we also hosted the Developer Speaker Series, bringing 12 speakers in the web dev community to our 24/7 online TV channel, Cloudflare TV. The talks covered topics across the web development ecosystem, which you can rewatch at any time.

We loved organizing the Developer Speaker Series last year. But as developers know far too well, our ecosystem changes rapidly: what may have been cutting edge back in November 2021 can be old news just a few months later in 2022. That’s what makes conferences and live speaking events so valuable: they serve as an up-to-date reference of best practices and future-facing developments in the industry. With that in mind, we’re excited to announce a new edition of our Developer Speaker Series for 2022!

Check out the eleven expert web dev speakers, developers, and educators that we’ve invited to speak live on Cloudflare TV! Here are the talks you’ll be able to watch, starting tomorrow morning (May 9 at 09:00 PT):

The Bootcampers Companion – Caitlyn Greffly
In her recent book, The Bootcamper’s Companion, Caitlyn dives into the specifics of how to build connections in the tech field, understand confusing tech jargon, and make yourself a stand-out candidate when looking for your first job. She’ll talk about some top tips and share a bit about her experience as well as what she has learned from navigating tech as a career changer.

Engaging Ecommerce with the Visual Web – Colby Fayock
Experiences on the web have grown increasingly visual, from displaying product images to interactive NFTs, but not paying attention to how media is delivered can impact Core Web Vitals, creating a bad UX with slow-loading pages, hurting your store’s conversion and potentially losing sales.

How can we effectively leverage media to showcase products creating engaging experiences for our store? We’ll talk about the media’s role in ecomm and how we can take advantage of it while optimizing delivery.

Testing Web Applications with Playwright – Debbie O’Brien
Testing is hard, testing takes time to learn and to write, and time is money. As developers, we want to test. We know we should, but we don’t have time. So how can we get more developers to do testing? We can create better tools.

Let me introduce you to Playwright, a reliable tool for end-to-end cross browser testing for modern web apps, by Microsoft and fully open source. Playwright’s codegen generates tests for you in JavaScript, TypeScript, Dot Net, Java or Python. Now you really have no excuses. It’s time to play your tests wright.

Building serverless APIs: how Fauna and Workers make it easy – Rob Sutter
Building APIs has always been tricky when it comes to setting up architecture. FaunaDB and Workers remove that burden by letting you write code and watch it run everywhere.

Business context is developer productivity – John Feminella
A major factor in developer productivity is whether they have the context to make decisions on their own, or if instead they can only execute someone else’s plan. But how do organizations give engineers the appropriate context to make those decisions when they weren’t there from the beginning?

On the edge of my server – Brian Rinaldi
Edge functions can be potentially game changing. You get the power of serverless functions but running at the CDN level – meaning the response is incredibly fast. With Cloudflare Workers, every worker is an edge function. In this talk, we’ll explore why edge functions can be powerful and explore examples of how to use them to do things a normal serverless function can’t do.

Ten things I love about Wrangler 2 – Sunil Pai
We spent the last six months rewriting wrangler, the CLI for building and deploying Cloudflare Workers. Almost every single feature has been upgraded to be more powerful and user-friendly, while still remaining backward compatible with the original version of wrangler. In this talk, we’ll go through some of the best parts about the rewrite, and how it provides the foundation for all the things we want to build in the future.

L is for Literacy – Henri Helvetica
It’s 2022, and web performance is now abundantly important, with an abundance of available metrics, used by — you guessed it — an abundance of developers, new and experienced. All quips aside, the complexities of the web has led to increased complexities in web performance. Understanding, or literacy in web performance is as important as the four basic language skills. ‘L is for Literacy’ is a lively look at performance lexicon, backed by enlightening data all will enjoy.

Cloudflare Pages Updates – Greg Brimble
Greg Brimble, a Systems Engineer working on Pages, will showcase some of this week’s announcements live on Cloudflare TV. Tune in to see what is now possible for your Cloudflare Pages projects. We’re excited to show you what the team has been working on!

Migrating to Cloudflare Pages: A look into git control, performance, and scalability – James Ross
James Ross, CTO of Nodecraft, will discuss how moving to Pages brought an improved experience for both users and his team building the future of game servers.

If you want to see the full schedule for the Developer Speaker Series, go to our landing page. It shows each talk, including speaker info and timing, as well as time zones for international viewers. When a talk goes live, tuning in is simple – just visit cloudflare.tv to start watching.

New this year, we’ve also prepared a Discord channel to follow the live conversation with other viewers! If you haven’t joined Cloudflare’s Discord server, get your invite.

Announcing Cloudflare TV as a Service

2021-09-30 Fallon Blossom

Post Syndicated from Fallon Blossom original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-tv-as-a-service/

Announcing Cloudflare TV as a Service

In June 2020, Cloudflare TV made its debut: a 24/7 streaming video channel, focused on topics related to building a better Internet (and the people working toward that goal). Today, over 1,000 live shows later, we’re excited to announce that we’re making the technology we used to build Cloudflare TV available to any other business that wants to run their own 24×7 streaming network. But, before we get to that, it’s worth reflecting on what it’s been like for us to run one ourselves.

Let’s take it from the top.

Cloudflare TV began as an experiment in every way you could think of, one we hoped would help capture the serendipity of in-person events in a world where those were few and far between. It didn’t take long before we realized we had something special on our hands. Not only was the Cloudflare team thriving on-screen, showcasing an amazing array of talent and expertise — they were having a great time doing it. Cloudflare TV became a virtual watercooler, spiked with the adrenaline rush of live TV.

One of the amazing things about Cloudflare TV has been the breadth of content it’s inspired. Since launching, CFTV has hosted over 1,000 live sessions, featuring everything from marquee customer events with VIP speakers to game shows and DJ sets. Cloudflare’s employee resource groups have hosted hundreds of sessions speaking to their unique experiences, sharing a wealth of advice with the next generation of technology leaders. All told, we’ve welcomed over 650 Cloudflare employees and interns — and over 500 external guests, including the likes of Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, Gradient Ventures board partner Bonita Stewart, Broadcom CTO Andy Nallappan, and Zendesk SVP Christina Liu.

Tune In, Geek Out: A CFTV Montage

This is Cloudflare TV, so of course we put an emphasis on technical content for viewers of all stripes. When we announce a new product or protocol on the Cloudflare Blog, we often host live sessions on CFTV the same day, featuring the engineers who wrote the code that just shipped. Every week, we broadcast episodes on cryptography, on learning how to code, and on the hardware that powers Cloudflare’s network in over 250 cities around the world.

Whether you’re new to Cloudflare TV or a longtime viewer, we encourage you to pay a visit to the just-launched Discover page, where you’ll find many of our most-loved shows on demand, ranging from Latest from Product and Engineering, to perennial favorite Silicon Valley Squares, to Yes We Can, featuring women leaders from across the tech industry. You can also browse upcoming Live segments and easily add them to your calendar.

One of the most promising indicators that we’re on the right track has been the feedback we’ve gotten, not just from viewers — but from companies eager to know which platform we were using to power CFTV. To date we haven’t had much to offer them other than our sincere thanks, but as of today we’re able to share something much more exciting.

But first: a look behind the scenes.

The Production Stack

We didn’t initially set out to build Cloudflare TV from scratch. But as we explored our available options, we quickly realized that few solutions were designed for 24/7 linear streaming, and fewer still were optimized to be managed by a globally-distributed team. Thankfully, at Cloudflare, we like to build.

Our engineers worked at a blazing pace to build our own homegrown system, tapping open-source projects where we could, and inventing the things that didn’t yet exist. Among the starring components:

Brave (BBC) — Brave is an open-source project named for a highly descriptive acronym: Basic Real-Time Audio Video Editor. It serves as the Cloudflare TV switchboard, allowing us to jump from live content to commercial to a pre-recorded session and back automatically, based on our broadcast schedule. The only issue with Brave is that, as the BBC put it: it’s a prototype. One that hasn’t been updated since 2018…

Zoom — When we first designed Cloudflare TV, there was one directive that stood above the others: it had to be easy. If presenters had to deal with installing a browser plugin or unfamiliar app, we knew we’d lose many of them — especially external guests. Zoom emerged as the clear answer, and thanks to its RTMP broadcast feature, it’s worked seamlessly to facilitate live content on Cloudflare TV. In most cases, participating in a CFTV session is as simple as joining a Zoom meeting.
Cloudflare Workers — Put simply, Cloudflare TV wouldn’t exist were it not for Cloudflare Workers. Workers is the glue that brings together each of the disparate components of the platform — handling authentication, application logic, securely relaying data from our backend to our frontend, and sprinkling SEO optimizations across the site. It’s the first tool we reach for, and often the only one we need.
Cloudflare Stream — With over 1,000 episodes in our content library, we have a lot of assets to manage. Thankfully Stream makes it easy: episodes are uploaded and automatically transcoded to the appropriate bitrate, and we use Stream embeds to power Video on Demand across the entire platform. We also use the Stream API to deliver recordings to our backend switchboard so that they can be seamlessly rebroadcast alongside our Live sessions.
Cloudflare for Teams — Cloudflare TV is obviously public-facing, but there are an array of dashboards and admin interfaces that are only accessible to select members of the Cloudflare team. Thankfully the Cloudflare for Teams suite, including Cloudflare Access, makes it easy for us to set up custom rulesets that keep everything secure, without any cumbersome VPNs or authentication hurdles.

We Get By With a Little Help from Our Engs

We knew from the beginning that it wasn’t enough for Cloudflare TV to be easy for presenters — we needed to be able to run it with a relatively small team, working remotely, most of whom were juggling other responsibilities.

A special shoutout goes to the members of Cloudflare’s office and executive admin teams, whose roles were dramatically impacted by the pandemic. Each of them has stepped up and taken on the mantle of Cloudflare TV Producer, providing technical support, calming nerves, and facilitating each one of our live sessions. We couldn’t do it without them, nor would we want to.

Even so, running a TV station is a lot of work, and we had little choice but to make the platform as efficient as possible — automating away our pain points, and developing intuitive admin tools to empower our team. Here are some of the key contributors to the system’s efficiency:

The Auto-Switcher — CFTV’s schedule features hundreds of sessions every week, including weekends, which would be prohibitive if any manual switching were involved. Thankfully the system operates essentially on auto-pilot. This is no simple playlist: every minute, a program running on Cloudflare Workers syncs with the CFTV backend to queue up recordings and inputs for upcoming sessions, deleting those belonging to sessions that have already aired. If we take a week off over the holidays, Cloudflare TV will keep on humming.

The Auto-Scheduler — Scheduling CFTV content by hand (well over 250 segments per week) quickly went from a meaningful exercise to a perverse task. By week two we knew we had to figure something else out. And so the auto-scheduler was born, allowing us to select an arbitrary window of time and populate it with recordings from our content library, filling in any time slots between live segments.

Segments can be dragged, dropped, added, and removed in a couple of clicks; one person can schedule the entire week in less than an hour. The auto-scheduler intelligently rotates through each episode in the catalog to ensure they all get airtime — and we see plenty of opportunities for it to get smarter.

The Broadcasting Center — The lifeblood of Cloudflare TV is our live segments, so we naturally spend a lot of time trying to improve the experience for presenters. The Broadcasting Center is their home base: a page that loads automatically for each session’s host, providing them a countdown timer and other essentials. And because viewer engagement is a crucial part of what makes live programming special, it features a section for viewer questions — including a call-in feature, which records and automatically transcribes questions phoned in by viewers.

Meanwhile, our CFTV Producers use an administrative view of the same tool, where they check to make sure the stream is coming through clearly before each session begins. A set of admin controls allow them to troubleshoot if needed, and they can moderate viewer questions as well.

For both producers and presenters, the Broadcasting Center provides a single control plane to manage a live session. This ease-of-use goes a long way toward keeping the system running smoothly with a lean team.

There’s a sequel? There’s a sequel.

One reason we’ve invested in Cloudflare TV is that it serves as fantastic platform for dogfooding — not only are we leveraging a broad array of Cloudflare’s media products, but our 24/7 linear content makes us a particularly demanding customer, with no appetite for arbitrary constraints like time limits or maintenance downtime.

With that in mind, we’re excited to integrate many of the new technologies Cloudflare is introducing this week, which will combine to power an overhauled version of the CFTV platform that we’re calling Cloudflare TV 2.0. Namely:

Real Time Communications Platform — Today, Cloudflare announced its new Real Time Communications Platform, powered by WebRTC. In the near future, Cloudflare TV will leverage this platform to handle many of our live sessions. CFTV will continue to support Zoom, OBS, and any other application capable of outputting a RTMP stream, because convenience is one of the essential pillars in helping our presenters engage with the platform. But we see opportunities to push our creativity to new heights with custom, programmatically-controlled media streams — powered by Cloudflare’s Real-Time Communications Platform.
Stream Live — CFTV’s backend server currently handles video encoding for our live broadcast, generating a stream that is relayed to a video.js embed. Replacing this setup with Stream Live will yield several key benefits: first, we will offload video encoding to Cloudflare’s global network, resulting in improved speed, reliability, and redundancy. It also means we’ll be able to generate multiple renditions of the broadcast at different bitrates, allowing us to offer streams that are optimized for mobile devices with limited bandwidth, and to dynamically switch between bitrates as a user’s network conditions change.
Stream Connect — Today, the only way to watch Cloudflare TV is from the platform’s homepage — but there’s no reason we can’t syndicate it to other popular video platforms like YouTube. Stream Connect will become the primary endpoint for our backend mixer, and will in turn generate multiple copies of that stream, outputting to YouTube, the main broadcast, and any number of additional platforms.

We’re also actively working on a fresh implementation of our switchboard — one that is designed to be more reliable, scalable, and customizable. This switchboard will power the core of Cloudflare TV 2.0.

It’s not TV. It’s Cloudflare TV.

Cloudflare TV 2.0 will represent a major step forward for the platform, one that leverages over a year of insights as we rearchitect the system from its core to take full advantage of the Cloudflare network. And we’re doing it with you in mind: the same technology will be used to power Cloudflare TV as a Service.

Most products at Cloudflare are designed to scale from individuals up to the largest businesses. This is not one of those. Running a 24×7 streaming network takes a lot of time and effort. While we’ve made it easier than ever before, this is a product really designed for businesses that are willing to make a commitment similar to what we have at Cloudflare. But, if you are, we’re here to tell you that running a streaming service is incredibly rewarding, and we want to enable more companies to do it.

Interested? Fill out this form and, if it looks like you’d be a good fit, we’ll reach out and work with you to help build your own streaming service.

In the meantime, don’t miss out on Stream Live and the new Real Time Communications Platform. There’s no reason you can’t start building today.

Cloudflare TV: Doing it Live, 1,000 Times and Counting

2021-06-18 Fallon Blossom

Post Syndicated from Fallon Blossom original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-tv-live-1-000-times-and-counting/

Cloudflare TV: Doing it Live, 1,000 Times and Counting

Last week, Cloudflare TV celebrated its first anniversary the only way it knows how: with a broadcast brimming with live programming spanning everything from the keynotes of Cloudflare Connect, to a day-long virtual career fair, to our flagship game show Silicon Valley Squares.

When our co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince introduced Cloudflare TV to the world last year, he described it as a platform for experimentation. By empowering Cloudflare employees to try whatever they could think up on air — bound only by restraints of common sense — we hoped to unlock aspects of our team’s talent and creativity that otherwise might go untapped in the midst of the pandemic.

The results, as they say, have been extraordinary.

Since launching in June 2020, Cloudflare TV has featured over 1,000 original live episodes covering an incredible array of topics: technical deep dives and tutorials like Hardware at Cloudflare, Leveling up Web Performance with HTTP/3, and Hacker Time. Security expertise from top CISOs and compliance experts. In-depth policy discussions. And of course, updates on Cloudflare’s products with weekly episodes of Latest from Product and Engineering, Estas Semanas en Cloudflare en Español, and launch-day introductions to Magic WAN, Magic Firewall, Cloudflare Pages, and Stream Connect.

We’ve seen a wealth of content that can only be described as inspirational — like Vets at Cloudflare exploring the journeys of military veterans, This is What a Technologist Looks Like showcasing diversity across the industry, and Yes We Can, Cloudflare co-founder, President & COO Michelle Zatlyn’s series debunking the myth that there are no women in tech. Founder Focus has shared the stories of dozens of entrepreneurs, Between Two Clouds delves into the world of customer support, and series like Home Office TV and Cooking With Cloudflare have given an inside look at the personalities (and recipes) that make the Cloudflare community so unique.

All told, Cloudflare TV has featured well over one thousand presenters and their illustrious guests. We’ve been fortunate to welcome the likes of Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom; Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; John Collison, co-founder and President of Stripe; and Jackie Smalls, Chief Programs Officer at Code.org, to name a few.

We’ve also seen amazing contributions from Cloudflare’s Employee Resource Groups — including Latinflare celebrating Cinco De Mayo, Womenflare celebrating Women’s Empowerment Month, Asianflare and Desiflare celebrating APAC Heritage Month, Afroflare celebrating Black History Month (UK & US), Mindflare (supporting mental health awareness), Cloudflare’s sustainability group, Greencloud, and Proudflare, Cloudflare’s LGBTQIA+ group, which is celebrating Pride all month long.

The feedback from fans has been extraordinary. We regularly receive messages from viewers telling us how much they were inspired by a recent guest, or sharing that they leave Cloudflare TV “playing in the background all day.” You can tell they care, because they also let us know that they don’t appreciate when the commercials are louder than the program itself (we’re working on that!)

Perhaps the most meaningful impact of Cloudflare TV has been the way it’s connected the Cloudflare team. Cloudflare is growing quickly, and many team members have never set foot in a Cloudflare office. For anyone who is new to the company, Cloudflare TV has served as a way to get to know their colleagues, and vice versa. Job candidates use it to learn about the teams they aspire to work on. And we all get an excuse to talk to folks beyond the borders of our usual Zoom calls. It is, in a sense, the ultimate virtual water cooler — and the water is spiked with the adrenaline rush of live TV. It’s a potent mix that often leads to declarations of, “that was fun!”

It sure is.

Lights, Camera, Gallery View, Action

Supporting such a broad array of on-air talent is no small feat, and we have an amazing production team that helps ensure every session goes smoothly (give or take). Many of our Cloudflare TV Producers have roles at Cloudflare that were radically impacted by the pandemic, including our office management and executive admin teams. Few of them had prior TV experience. But that hasn’t kept them from becoming absolutely indispensable.

Before each and every live session — all 1,000+ of them — Cloudflare TV’s producers join our hosts to make sure they have everything they need. They provide crucial technical support, soothe pre-show jitters, and deal with the myriad tiny (and not-so-tiny) emergencies that make live TV so exciting. They are television producers in every sense of the word, and they have helped make this newfangled platform a very human experience, at a time when such things matter.

Also, our engineers are pretty great too. Speaking of which…

Next Season on Cloudflare TV…

Cloudflare TV began as an experiment, and that label still applies. We’re finding creative ways to navigate our own pain points, dogfooding Cloudflare’s newest technologies, and generally trying to take advantage of the fact that this is not well-charted territory. We’ll soon share more technical details on how we run a TV station 24/7, and some of the tools we’re building along the way. Here’s an appetizer.

Our product roadmap includes many of the things you’d expect, like an easier way to find your favorite episodes, and to hear about upcoming new ones. The rainbow bars adorning this blog post will make fewer cameos on the broadcast itself. And just like any good experiment: there will be surprises.

So tune in, geek out — and don’t touch that dial.

Untangling Compliance: Working Toward a Global Framework

2021-01-11 Jason Kincaid

Post Syndicated from Jason Kincaid original https://blog.cloudflare.com/untangling-compliance-working-toward-a-global-framework/

Untangling Compliance: Working Toward a Global Framework

As part of Cloudflare’s recent Privacy Week we hosted a series of fireside chats on security, privacy, and compliance. Many of these conversations touched on the intricate legal debate being held in Europe around data sovereignty. Here are some of the highlights.

To learn more about the solutions Cloudflare launched to help businesses navigate their compliance needs — including the new data localization suite — see our recent blog post here.

Prof. Dr. Wilfried Bernhardt
Honorary professor — University of Leipzig,
Attorney, CEO Bernhardt IT Management Consulting GmbH

Untangling Compliance: Working Toward a Global Framework

We have to agree to go down a common road, a common path. And this common path can really only consist of saying: let’s sit down together again. I’m talking about the European Commission and, above all, the new administration in the United States. We are all waiting for them expectantly.

And then we look at what our common fundamental values are and see if we don’t simply come together better than we have in the past. After all, our fundamental values are the same: human rights, democracy, the rule of law. You have to concede that there are some differences in understanding when it comes to interpreting what privacy means — well, in the US freedom of expression is sometimes considered more important than privacy. In Europe, it’s perhaps the other way around.

But if we look at it without ideological blinders, we can certainly come together. After all, when it comes to fighting terrorism and crime, it is common insights that play an important role. So it would be a great pity if we didn’t come together. But it is not permissible that, for example, American authorities simply say: we will allow ourselves access to European data of European Union citizens, we don’t have to ask anyone, and we don’t grant legal protection either. To be honest, that’s not how it works.

Watch the full interview

Iverna McGowan
Director of the Europe Office, Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT)

My hope would be that we have a more global approach to international privacy standards. And I think for 2021 in Europe, it will be all about the Digital Services Act. And of course on the individual users’ rights as well, on free expression.

I think that human rights advocates will all have a lot of work to do to make sure that we guard our own rights to express ourselves online, but also protect people from harassment and hate. Getting that balance right in law and practice, I think, is going to be really important to maintain the Internet as a free and open space where we can organize and fight to protect human rights and democracy.

We at the Center for Democracy & Technology are strong advocates and practitioners of multistakeholder approaches. So these kinds of dialogues between the private sector and civil society to get into the details of, what are the technical solutions, what does that mean in different places? I think that’s going to be really important to get some of these policy challenges right.

Watch the full interview

Marshall Erwin
Chief Security Officer, Mozilla Corporation

In the US we see a lack of a strong privacy regime, which is a problem — but also you don’t really see mandatory data retention and you don’t really see mandatory blocking in the US. Parts of Europe do have various sort of retention regimes or mandatory blocking regimes, or at least there is a desire within the policy space within Europe, to consider especially the DNS as a tool to facilitate content blocking.

Now, we think that’s a very bad idea for a number of reasons, partly because it’s bad on principle. It will result in risk to free expression. And also because it’s not a very effective way to address a lot of these serious content problems that bubble up today. And that’s the argument that I tend to make. We are actively thinking about the right set of solutions for malicious content on the Web. But blocking at this level, the stack through the DNS system — it’s a bad idea. It’s not going to work, and it will have serious free expression challenges.

Watch the full interview

Dr. Katrin Suder
Chairperson of the Advisory Council on Digitalization for the German Federal Government, Member of Cloudflare’s Board of Directors

I think a lot of realism has come in, realism about what is actually feasible and what is possible, and at the same time the recognition that we don’t want to lose the innovation that American companies in particular are bringing.

How will this continue? Of course, that’s always difficult to predict in a process like this. I think what is actually needed, and we have talked about this in various forums, is first of all a clean assessment process for the current situation. Where do we actually stand with sovereignty? We have to be honest about this. So, where are we actually dependent and how can we deal with this dependency?

Because there are dependencies where you can perhaps say, yes, so be it, maybe it’s not so bad. And then there are perhaps dependencies that are very critical. That’s where you have to invest, but not to replicate, rather to push the next generation, so to speak. And I think this process should be driven by the European Commission.

Watch the full interview

Thomas Boué
Director General, Policy — EMEA, BSA | The Software Alliance

One of the things that we spend time thinking about — and it’s going to be a long-term project, because it will not happen overnight — but it’s about: how can like-minded democracies find a way to create a standard? What will be the standard for acceptable government access to data and national security practices? What would be the ways that they would conduct these investigations? What would be the safeguards that exist? What would be the means of redress or of challenging those?

These are the things that need to happen between countries that are like-minded, that value privacy, but that also value the security of their citizens. And how can it go forward by creating this standard that would then bring a lot more clarity, a lot more certainty and a lot more appeased views in this entire debate. And that is the thing that we think is essential. We know that work is being done on this in certain fora — such as the OECD — and we very much encourage countries to think about this more, and to find a way forward.

Watch the full interview

Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and length, and translated as necessary.

A Thanksgiving 2020 Reading List

2020-11-28 Val Vesa

Post Syndicated from Val Vesa original https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-thanksgiving-2020-reading-list/

A Thanksgiving 2020 Reading List

While our colleagues in the US are celebrating Thanksgiving this week and taking a long weekend off, there is a lot going on at Cloudflare. The EMEA team is having a full day on CloudflareTV with a series of live shows celebrating #CloudflareCareersDay.

So if you want to relax in an active and learning way this weekend, here are some of the topics we’ve covered on the Cloudflare blog this past week that you may find interesting.

Improving Performance and Search Rankings with Cloudflare for Fun and Profit

Making things fast is one of the things we do at Cloudflare. More responsive websites, apps, APIs, and networks directly translate into improved conversion and user experience. On November 10, Google announced that Google Search will directly take web performance and page experience data into account when ranking results on their search engine results pages (SERPs), beginning in May 2021.

Rustam Lalkaka and Rita Kozlov explain in this blog post how Google Search will prioritize results based on how pages score on Core Web Vitals, a measurement methodology Cloudflare has worked closely with Google to establish, and we have implemented support for in our analytics tools. Read the full blog post.

Getting to the Core: Benchmarking Cloudflare’s Latest Server Hardware

At the Cloudflare Core, we process logs to analyze attacks and compute analytics. In 2020, our Core servers were in need of a refresh, so we decided to redesign the hardware to be more in line with our Gen X edge servers. We designed two major server variants for the core. The first is Core Compute 2020, an AMD-based server for analytics and general-purpose compute paired with solid-state storage drives. The second is Core Storage 2020, an Intel-based server with twelve spinning disks to run database workloads. This is a refresh of the hardware that Cloudflare uses to run analytics provided big efficiency improvements.

Read the full blog post by Brian Bassett

Moving Quicksilver into production

We previously explained how and why we built Quicksilver. Quicksilver is the data store responsible for storing and distributing the billions of KV pairs used to configure the millions of sites and Internet services which use Cloudflare. This second blog post is about the long journey to production which culminates with Kyoto Tycoon removal from Cloudflare infrastructure and points to the first signs of obsolescence.

Geoffrey Plouviez takes you through the entire story of real-world engineering challenges and what it’s like to replace one of Cloudflare’s oldest critical components: read the full blog post here.

Building Black Friday e-commerce experiences with JAMstack and Cloudflare Workers

In this blog post, we explore how Cloudflare Workers continues to excel as a JAMstack deployment platform, and how it can be used to power e-commerce experiences, integrating with familiar tools like Stripe, as well as new technologies like Nuxt.js, and Sanity.io.

Read the full blog post and get all the details and open-source code from Kristian Freeman.

A Byzantine failure in the real world

When we review design documents at Cloudflare, we are always on the lookout for Single Points of Failure (SPOFs). In this post, we present a timeline of a real-world incident, and how an interesting failure mode known as a Byzantine fault played a role in a cascading series of events.

Tom Lianza and Chris Snook’s full blog post describes the consequences of a malfunctioning switch on a system built for reliability.

ASICs at the Edge

At Cloudflare, we pride ourselves in our global network that spans more than 200 cities in over 100 countries. To accelerate all that traffic through our network, there are multiple technologies at play. So let’s have a look at one of the cornerstones that makes all of this work.

Tom Strickx’ epic deep dive into ASICs is here.

Let us know your thoughts and comments below or feel free to also reach out to us via our social media channels. And because we talked about careers in the beginning of this blog post, check out our available jobs if you are interested to join Cloudflare.

Looking Ahead: Five Opportunities on The Horizon According to Tech Leaders

2020-11-03 Jason Kincaid

Post Syndicated from Jason Kincaid original https://blog.cloudflare.com/looking-ahead-five-opportunities-on-the-horizon-according-to-tech-leaders/

Looking Ahead: Five Opportunities on The Horizon According to Tech Leaders

Dozens of top leaders and thinkers from the tech industry and beyond recently joined us for a series of fireside chats commemorating Cloudflare’s 10th birthday. Over the course of 24 hours of conversation, these leaders shared their thoughts on everything from entrepreneurship to mental health — and how the Internet will continue to play a vital role.

Here are some of the highlights.

On the global opportunity for entrepreneurs

Anu Hariharan
Partner, Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund

Looking Ahead: Five Opportunities on The Horizon According to Tech Leaders

Fast forwarding ten years from now, I think entrepreneurship is global, and you’re already seeing signs of that. 27% of YC startups are headquartered outside the US. And I’m willing to bet that in a decade, at least 50% of YC startups will be headquartered outside the US. And so I think the sheer nature of the Internet democratizing information, more companies being global, like Facebook, Google, Uber — talent is everywhere. I think you will see multi-billion dollar companies coming out of other regions.

People have this perception that everything is a zero sum game, or that we are already at peak Internet penetration. Absolutely not. The global market cap is ~$85 trillion. Less than 10% is e-commerce. Internet enabled businesses is $8 trillion. So even if you play this out for another twenty years, Internet enabled businesses should be at least $66 trillion. So we have a lot more to go. And I think the zero sum game that investors tend to think of, what we’ve gotten wrong is — most of these Internet enabled businesses are expanding TAM.

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On democratizing and normalizing mental health

Karan Singh
Co-founder and COO of Ginger

Our vision is a world where mental health is never an obstacle, and that’s a never-ending vision. I don’t think that will be done in 10 years, but I am hopeful that in 10 years or even well before that, this whole new virtual-first sort of care paradigm can really start to take shape, where you start digitally and then progress to an in-person should you need it.

And for some people who are more acute, or in specific situations, they absolutely do need to see an in-person provider. But for many people, starting virtual — virtual being the default — feels like a more democratic and equitable experience in the world.

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On leveling the playing field

Jennifer Hyman,
CEO and co-founder of Rent the Runway

Where I’m optimistic is that I think that in a life post-vaccine, when kids are back in school, when things are a little bit more normal, businesses are no longer going to require their employees to come to work five days a week in the same way and in the same structure that existed in the past. We realize that because of technology, we can work more flexibly, we can work more virtually.

And I think that that is going to have unlocks for everyone, don’t get me wrong, but it’ll have huge unlocks for women who are often the ones making the sacrifice to spend more time with the kids, be at home, do all of the house-related leadership, so I think that this will be a great equalizer in many ways.

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On expecting the unexpected

Eric Schmidt
Former CEO & Executive Chairman, Google
Co-Founder, Schmidt Futures

It seems to me that the gains in machine learning and the investment that everyone, including Cloudflare, Google, et cetera, is putting in it — are going to yield a whole new set of applications.

We should expect more of the unexpected because of the level of investment. And so the people who sit there and say, oh, you know, it’s Apple and Google and Amazon and Microsoft and so forth, and it’s all done. They’re missing the narrative. The narrative is that there’s a new platform emerging which the big guys and the new guys, the new little guys are going to compete over. And that competition will generally be incredibly helpful. It will produce very significant large companies as they figure out a way to monetize. But more importantly, it’ll have an impact on society, both in terms of entertainment, as we saw with TikTok and its predecessors, but also in terms of information and productivity.

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On the future of video conferencing

Eric Yuan
Founder and CEO of Zoom

For now, if we all work from home, from a productivity perspective there’s no productive loss. However, social interaction is a problem. Mental health is another problem. The reason why, no matter how good we think it is now — it cannot deliver a better experience than a face-to-face meeting.

If I didn’t see you for a while, and I wanted to give you a big hug — you cannot feel my intimacy over Zoom, right? And if you are getting a cup of coffee, I can not enjoy the smell, not like when you and I are in a Starbucks.

I think that technology-wise, in the future with those cutting edge technologies, we should believe that videoconferencing like Zoom can deliver a better experience than a face-to-face meeting. I shake hands with you remotely, you can feel my hand-shaking. And even if you speak a different language, with AI, with real-time language translation — I think those technologies can truly help make sure that online communication is better than face to face meeting. In the next 10 or 15 years, I think we will get there with some technology.

Watch the full interview

Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Birthday Week on Cloudflare TV: Announcing 24 Hours of Live Discussions on the Future of the Internet

2020-09-28 Jason Kincaid

Post Syndicated from Jason Kincaid original https://blog.cloudflare.com/birthday-week-on-cloudflare-tv-announcing-24-hours-of-live-discussions-on-the-future-of-the-internet/

Birthday Week on Cloudflare TV: Announcing 24 Hours of Live Discussions on the Future of the Internet

This week marks Cloudflare’s 10th birthday, and we’re excited to continue our annual tradition of launching an array of products designed to help give back to the Internet. (Check back here each morning for the latest!)

We also see this milestone as an opportunity to reflect on where the Internet was ten years ago, and where it might be headed over the next decade. So we reached out to some of the people we respect most to see if they’d be interested in joining us for a series of Fireside Chats on Cloudflare TV.

We’ve been blown away by the response, and are thrilled to announce our lineup of speakers, featuring many of the most celebrated names in tech and beyond. Among the highlights: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, OpenTable CEO Debby Soo, Stripe co-founder and President John Collison, Former CEO & Executive Chairman, Google // Co-Founder, Schmidt Futures. Eric Schmidt, former McAfee CEO Chris Young, Magic Leap CEO and longtime Microsoft executive Peggy Johnson, former Seal Team 6 Commander Dave Cooper, Project Include CEO Ellen Pao, and so many more. All told, we have over 24 hours of live discussions scheduled throughout the week.

To tune in, just head to Cloudflare TV (no registration required). You can view the details for each session by clicking the links below, where you’ll find handy Add to Calendar buttons to make sure you don’t miss anything. We’ll also be rebroadcasting these talks throughout the week, so they’ll be easily accessible in different timezones.

A tremendous thank you to everyone on this list for helping us celebrate Cloudflare’s 10th annual Birthday Week!

Birthday Week on Cloudflare TV: Announcing 24 Hours of Live Discussions on the Future of the Internet

Jay Adelson

Founder of Equinix and Chairman & Co-Founder of Scorbit

Thursday, October 1, 10:00 AM (PDT) // Add to Calendar

Shellye Archambeau

Fortune 500 Board Member and Author & Former CEO of MetricStream

Thursday, October 1, 6:30 PM (PDT) // Add to Calendar

Abhinav Asthana

Founder & CEO of Postman

Wednesday, September 30, 3:30 PM (PDT) // Add to Calendar

Azeem Azhar

Founder of Exponential View

Friday, October 2, 9:00 AM (PDT) // Add to Calendar

John Battelle

Co-Founder & CEO of Recount Media

Wednesday, September 30, 8:30 AM (PDT) // Add to Calendar

Christian Beedgen

CTO & Co-Founder of SumoLogic

Details coming soon

Scott Belsky

Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President, Creative Cloud at Adobe

Wednesday, September 30, 11:00 AM (PDT) // Add to Calendar

Gleb Budman

CEO & Co-Founder of Backblaze

Wednesday, September 30, 2:00 PM (PDT) // Add to Calendar

Hayden Brown

CEO of Upwork

Details coming soon

Stewart Butterfield

CEO of Slack

Thursday, October 1, 8:30 AM (PDT) // Add to Calendar

John P. Carlin

Former Assistant Attorney General for the US Department of Justice’s National Security Division and current Chair of Morrison & Foerster’s Global Risk + Crisis Management practice

Tuesday, September 29, 12:00 PM (PDT) // Add to Calendar