Tag Archives: Internships

Internship Experience: Software Development Intern

Post Syndicated from Ulysses Kee original https://blog.cloudflare.com/internship-experience-software-development-intern/

Internship Experience: Software Development Intern

Before we dive into my experience interning 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 Internet a better place for everyone. Back in December 2021, I joined Cloudflare as a Software Development Intern 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 internship.

Interview Experience

The 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 internship at Cloudflare. I had known about Cloudflare’s DNS service prior and was really excited to learn more about the internship opportunity because I really resonated with the company’s mission to help build a better Internet.

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 constantly asked about the kind of things I would like to work on and the relevance of the work that I would be doing. I felt that this thorough communication carried on throughout the internship and really was a cornerstone of my experience interning at Cloudflare.

My Internship

My internship began with onboarding and training, and then after, I had discussions with my mentor, Ayush Verma, on the projects we aimed to complete during the internship and the order of objectives. The main issues we wanted to address was the current manual process that our internal teams and partners go through when they want to duplicate the configuration settings on a zone, or when they want to compare one zone to other zones to ensure that there are no misconfigurations. As you can imagine, with the number of different configurations offered on the Cloudflare dashboard for customers, it could take significant time to copy over every setting and rule manually from one zone to another. Additionally, this process, when done manually, poses a potential threat for misconfigurations due to human error. Furthermore, as more and more customers onboard different zones onto Cloudflare, there needs to be a more automated and improved way for them to make these configuration setups.

Initially, we discussed using Terraform as Cloudflare already supports terraform automation. However, this approach would only cater towards customers and users that have more technical resources and, in true Cloudflare spirit, we wanted to keep it simple such that it could be used by any and everyone. Therefore, we decided to leverage the publicly available Cloudflare APIs and create a browser-based application that interacts with these APIs to display configurations and make changes easily from a simple UI.

With the end goal of simplifying the experience for our partners and customers in duplicating zone configurations, we decided to build a Zone Copier web application solely built on Cloudflare Workers. This tool would, in a click of a button, automatically copy over every setting that can be copied from one zone to another, significantly reducing the amount of time and effort required to make the changes.

Alongside the Zone Copier, we would have some auxiliary tools such as a Zone Viewer, and Zone Comparison, where a customer can easily have a full view of their configurations on a single webpage and be able to compare different zones that they use respectively. These other applications improve upon the existing methods through which Cloudflare users can view their zone configurations, and allow for the direct comparison between different zones.

Importantly, these applications are not to replace the Cloudflare Dashboard, but to complement it instead – for deeper dives into a single particular configuration setting, the Cloudflare Dashboard remains the way to go.

To begin building the web application, I spent the first few weeks diving into the publicly available APIs offered by Cloudflare as part of the v4 API to verify the outputs of each endpoint, and the type of data that would be sent as a response from a request. This took much longer than expected as certain endpoints provided different default responses for a zone that has either an empty setting – for example, not having any Firewall Rules created – or uses a nested structure for its relevant response. These different potential responses have to be examined so that when the web application calls the respective API endpoint, the responses are handled appropriately. This process was quite manual as each endpoint had to be verified individually to ensure the output would work seamlessly with the application.

Once I completed my research, I was able to start designing the web application. Building the web application was a very interesting experience as the stack rested solely on Workers, a serverless application platform. My prior experiences building web applications used servers that require the deployment of a server built using Express and Node.js, whereas for my internship project, I completely relied on a backend built using the itty-router library on Workers to interface with the publicly available Cloudflare APIs. I found this extremely exciting as building a serverless application required less overhead compared to setting up a server and deploying it, and using Workers itself has many other added benefits such as zero cold starts. This introduction to serverless technology and my experience deep-diving into the capabilities of Workers has really opened my eyes to the possibilities that Workers as a platform can offer. With Workers, you can deploy any application on Cloudflare’s global network like I did!

For the frontend of the web application, I used React and the Chakra-UI library to build the user interface for which the Zone Viewer, Zone Comparison, and Zone Copier, is based on. The routing between different pages was done using React Router and the application is deployed directly through Workers.

Here is a screenshot of the application:

Internship Experience: Software Development Intern

Presenting the prototype application

As developers will know, the best way to obtain feedback for the tool that you’re building is to directly have your customers use them and let you know what they think of your application and the kind of features they want to have built on top of it. Therefore, once we had a prototype version of the web application for the Zone Viewer and Zone Comparison complete, we presented the application to the Solutions Engineering team to hear their thoughts on the impact the tool would have on their work and additional features they would like to see built on the application. I found this process very enriching as they collectively mentioned how impactful the application would be for their work and the value add this project provides to them.

Some interesting feedback and feature requests I received were:

  1. The Zone Copier would definitely be very useful for our partners who have to replicate the configuration of one zone to another regularly, and it’s definitely going to help make sure there are less human errors in the process of configuring the setups.
  2. Besides duplicating configurations from zone-to-zone, could we use this to replicate the configurations from a best-in-class setup for different use cases and allow partners to deploy this with a few clicks?
  3. Can we use this tool to generate quarterly reports?
  4. The Zone Viewer would be very helpful for us when we produce documentation on a particular zone’s configuration as part of a POC report.
  5. The Zone Viewer will also give us much deeper insight to better understand the current zone configurations and provide recommendations to improve it.

It was also a very cool experience speaking to the broad Solutions Engineering team as I found that many were very technically inclined and had many valid suggestions for improving the architecture and development of the applications. A special thanks to Edwin Wong for setting up the sharing session with the internal team, and many thanks to Xin Meng, AQ Jiao, Yonggil Choi, Steve Molloy, Kyouhei Hayama, Claire Lim and Jamal Boutkabout for their great insight and suggestions!

Impact of Cloudflare outside of work

While Cloudflare is known for its impeccable transparency throughout the company, and the stellar products it provides in helping make the Internet better, I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about the other endeavors that the company has too.

Cloudflare is part of the Pledge 1%, where the company dedicates 1% of products and 1% of our time to give back to the local communities as well as all the communities we support online around the world.

I took part in one of these activities, where we spent a morning cleaning up parts of the East Coast Park beach, by picking up trash and litter that had been left behind by other park users. Here’s a picture of us from that morning:

Internship Experience: Software Development Intern

From day one, I have been thoroughly impressed by Cloudflare’s commitment to its culture and the effort everyone at Cloudflare puts in to make the company a great place to work and have a positive impact on the surrounding community.

In addition to giving back to the community, other aspects of company culture include having a good team spirit and safe working environment where you feel appreciated and taken care of. At Cloudflare, I have found that everyone is very understanding of work commitments. I faced a few challenges during the internship where I had to spend additional time on university related projects and work, and my manager has always been very supportive and understanding if I required additional time to complete parts of the internship project.

Concluding takeaways

My experience interning at Cloudflare has been extremely positive, and I have seen first hand how transparent the company is with not only its employees but also its customers, and it truly is a great place to work. Cloudflare’s collaborative culture allowed me to access members from different teams, to obtain their thoughts and assistance with certain issues that I faced from time to time. I would not have been able to produce an impactful project without the help of the different brilliant, and motivated, people I worked with across the span of the internship, and I am truly grateful for such a rewarding experience.

We are getting ready to open intern roles for this coming Fall, so we encourage you to visit our careers page frequently, to be up-to-date on all the opportunities we have within our teams.

Internship Experience: Research Engineer

Post Syndicated from Sudheesh Singanamalla original https://blog.cloudflare.com/internship-experience-research-engineer/

Internship Experience: Research Engineer

Internship Experience: Research Engineer

I spent my summer of 2020 as an intern at Cloudflare working with the incredible research team. I had recently started my time as a PhD student at the University of Washington’s Paul G Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering working on decentralizing and securing cellular network infrastructure, and measuring the adoption of HTTPS by government websites worldwide. Here’s the story of how I ended up on Cloudflare TV talking about my award-winning research on a project I wasn’t even aware of when the pandemic hit.

Prior to the Internship

It all started before the pandemic, when I came across a job posting over LinkedIn for an internship with the research team at Cloudflare. I had been a happy user of Cloudflare’s products and services and this seemed like a very exciting opportunity to really work with them towards their mission to help build a better Internet. While working on research at UW, I came across a lot of prior research work published by the researchers at Cloudflare, and was excited to possibly be a part of the research team and interact with them. Without second thoughts, I submitted an application through LinkedIn and waited to hear back from the team.

I received a first call from a recruiter a few months later, asking me if I was still interested in the internship position, and informing me that the internships would be remote due to the pandemic. I was told that the research team was interested in interviewing me for the internship and  during the call also informed about the process, which included a programming task to work with an existing open source Cloudflare project, a pair programming interview task with a member of the team, followed by phone calls with some research leads. I was extremely excited and said “Yes! I’d love to try out the interview process”.

Adding Certificate Transparency Log Scans to Scan families

Within the next few hours I received a task from Nick Sullivan with a clear problem statement to add support for producing a certificate transparency report in CFSSL, an open source project from Cloudflare which contained cfssl-scan, a tool that scanned hostnames for connectivity, TLS information, TLS session support, and PKI information (certificates). I was tasked with adding a new family of scanners to look into Certificate Transparency logs (CT Logs) and integrate the information from the CT logs into the output. After a few back and forth emails with Nick and other researchers CC’d on the email thread, I set out to work and submitted a draft detailing my design rationale, supported features and examples of how different error conditions were handled by the changes to the code.

The task was very exciting because it allowed me to gain more familiarity with Go, a language I would use even more at Cloudflare during my internship. With the task complete, I was invited for a pair programming task with Watson Ladd. We discussed my current research work at the university, the areas of research which interested me and learnt about new cool projects that Cloudflare was working on and problems they were interested in solving to help make the Internet better. We then started working on a pair programming problem and discussed the design rationale for solving the problem, extensibility, code-reuse and writing test coverage.

Soon after, I had a bunch of similar calls talking about my current research work, understanding potential research problems that Cloudflare was interested in solving before finally receiving an internship offer for the summer. Yay!

The Internship

My summer internship with Cloudflare was like none other. It all started with a seamless onboarding process with clear documentation and training. The access control for the account worked flawlessly from the first day, and I had all the tools, documentation and internal resources available to get started. However, this is where the first challenge started: there are too many interesting research problems to try and tackle! It felt like a kid at a carnival. I liked everything and wanted to try everything, but I knew, given the short duration of the internship, I had to pick one research problem which interested me. After a week of deliberation, long conversations with different researchers on the team and reading highly relevant prior research relevant in the different areas, I decided to explore and work on Oblivious DNS over HTTPS (ODoH).

Initially, I was worried about not being able to make a decision regarding which project to pursue, because the interactions with other people in Cloudflare were remote, with no in-person conversations like I’d had at other companies. I also worried this setup made me overlook something that might have been easier to discuss in person. But the team was super supportive through it and ensured that I had all the relevant information before making my decision.

Oblivious DNS over HTTPS (ODoH) is a protocol proposed at the IETF with the goal of providing privacy to the clients making DNS requests using DNS over HTTPS (DoH). Cloudflare operates a popular public recursive DNS resolver to which clients can make DNS queries. However, DNS over HTTPS (DoH) requests made by clients to the resolver leak client IP addresses despite providing a secure encrypted communication channel. While DoH enhances the security of the DNS queries and responses when used instead of the default insecure UDP based DNS requests, the leakage of client IP information could be problematic. Cloudflare maintains users’ privacy through a rigorous privacy policy, audits, and purging client information.

Along with my advisors, I spent time building interoperable versions of ODoH services, and the necessary components in Go and Rust which were experimentally deployed on cloud services for performing measurements of the protocol. Through frequent conversations, we identified interesting research questions, performed the necessary measurements, found both security and performance issues, improved our design and drove towards conclusions iteratively. Then, we worked with the help of the brilliant engineering and reliability engineering teams at Cloudflare to move the support for the protocol into production, to convince the community about the advantages and practicality of the ODoH protocol.

The interoperable implementations of the protocol were made open source. They served as a reference implementation presented during the standardization process and various presentations we made at IETF and OARC, through which we obtained valuable feedback. With all the experiments in place, we submitted our work to the proceedings of Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2021) where it was accepted and awarded the Andreas Pfitzmann best student paper.

Cloudflare strongly believes in transparency. The effects of this are visible within the company, from open and inclusive discussions about social and technological issues, to the way people across the company can collaborate and share information with the public. I was fortunate to present and share some work on ODoH on Cloudflare TV. I was definitely nervous about presenting the work on live Internet TV, but it became possible with the support and encouragement of the TV team and members of the research team.

Outside work

While the work that I did during my time as an intern at Cloudflare was exciting, it was not the only thing that kept me occupied. It was very easy to interact with engineers, designers, sales and marketing teams within the company, learn about their work, their experiences and gain an understanding of all the amazing work happening throughout the company. The internship also provided me an opportunity to engage in random engineer chats — a program which randomly matched me with other engineers, and researchers, allowing me to learn more about their work. The research team at Cloudflare operated very similarly to an academic research lab and frequently discussed papers during scheduled reading group meetings. The weekly intern hangouts allowed me to build friendships with the other interns in the team. However, not everything was rosy: it was hard to make it to all the intern hangouts, and time zone differences did add to the challenges for scheduling time to get to know the other interns.

Takeaways

Cloudflare is an incredibly transparent company built for scale, and a brilliant place to work with a lot of interesting research and engineering work that could move from prototype to production. The transparent collaboration between different teams, academia, and the shared mission to help build a better Internet make it possible to leverage the strengths of various teams, and highly motivated people to contribute to a project. In retrospect, I strongly believe that I got lucky working on a problem which interested me, and had value for Cloudflare’s mission. And while I get to write this blog post about my experience, this experience and the work I was able to do during my time at Cloudflare wouldn’t have been possible without the hundreds of motivated and brilliant people in various teams (media, content, design, legal etc.) with whom I interacted, along with the direct involvement of the research, engineering and reliability teams. The internship experience was truly humbling!

If this sort of experience interests you, and you would love to join an innovative and collaborative environment, Cloudflare Research is currently accepting applications for 2022 internships!

How We Ran a Successful Remote Internship Program in 2020

Post Syndicated from Ellie Jamison original https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-ran-a-successful-remote-internship-program-in-2020and-how-we-are-planning-to-do-it-again-in-2021/

And how we are planning to do it again in 2021…

How We Ran a Successful Remote Internship Program in 2020

How We Ran a Successful Remote Internship Program in 2020

On March 5, I sat in a small conference room with a few key contributors in creating and hiring for the Cloudflare summer intern program. With the possibility of office shutdowns looming, the group discussed what an internship would look like without in-person mentorship. How would the managers cope? How would the interns cope? Would it even be worthwhile? After a few minutes of discussions, we settled on ‘absolutely’. A remote summer internship at Cloudflare would be worthwhile for students, mentors, buddies, and managers alike. After all, Cloudflare is an Internet company and we were ready to trust the Internet with a whole lot more than we had anticipated.

The months leading up to the summer were a blur, all I remember is that we did a lot of planning, interviewing and hiring. And I mean, a lot. On April 2, Matthew Prince announced that Cloudflare would be doubling the size of our 2020 intern class in response to other companies cutting their intern programs all together. Due to these cuts, many talented students lost their opportunities for the summer. We knew we couldn’t hire them all so we created a list of peer organizations actively hiring and a three-month webinar program to give all applicants (whether they joined Cloudflare or not) mentorship from our executive team.

The program kicked off on May 18 with our first intern orientation group of the summer. Over the next month and a half, they were joined by six more orientation groups bringing the total intern class to 90 students. Being remote had its advantages, we were able to welcome students from all over the world and on nearly every team at Cloudflare — from Product Management to Engineering to Legal. We were proud to host a diverse class with nearly half of the students being from an underrepresented gender identity or racial ethnic minority.

A question I hear often is, “How do you replicate the benefits from an in-person experience to a remote one?”. The short answer is “You don’t”, but you adapt and stay positive and creative to help bring benefits that otherwise wouldn’t exist for the students. Throughout last summer, we held weekly Zoom lunches, created bi-weekly newsletters to share the various intern projects, and hosted hour-long executive “fireside chats” for the interns to directly meet our executive team. We had a buddy program and a mentor program; opportunities for each intern to be paired with a Cloudflare employee outside of their team as well as on their team respectively. We celebrated “Intern Week” at the end of July to facilitate students from different teams, regions, and continents in getting to know each other. To end the program, we hosted five “Intern Presentation Sessions” where each intern presented virtually about their projects and experiences to a company-wide audience.

To gauge the success of the program, we asked the students to anonymously submit how they felt about their teams, projects, and the intern events. In answering the question, “Did your internship experience meet your overall expectations?”, we received a 100% “Yes” response and 98% of the interns would consider working for Cloudflare again. See below for specific comments.

How We Ran a Successful Remote Internship Program in 2020

Many of our interns also detailed their virtual experiences on The Cloudflare Blog including Selina Cho, who reflected on personal and professional growth during her Product Management internship. Kevin Frazier, a Legal intern highlighted the sense of community and inclusiveness as “a common thread woven throughout the internship experience.” Ryan Jacobs outlined his journey in discovering the process, problem and solution of how Cloudflare uses Cloudflare Spectrum during his internship on the Spectrum team. We are always grateful and eager to read what our interns have to say about their time at Cloudflare.

What’s next? Summer 2021, of course!

As we look ahead, we are planning for an even bigger intern class filled with more engaging programs, nurturing events, and challenging projects. This year we are thrilled to nearly double (again) our intern class size and hire talented students for the exciting summer ahead. If you are interested in applying to one of our summer internship opportunities, check out our Careers page under the “University” section or reach out directly to us at [email protected]. Special thanks to Judy Cheong, our Head of University Programs, the Executive team, the Recruiting team, and all intern hiring managers and mentors for not only making the remote internship program possible, but a success!

Announcing Spectrum DDoS Analytics and DDoS Insights & Trends

Post Syndicated from Selina Cho original https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-spectrum-ddos-analytics-and-ddos-insights-trends/

Announcing Spectrum DDoS Analytics and DDoS Insights & Trends

Announcing Spectrum DDoS Analytics and DDoS Insights & Trends

We’re excited to announce the expansion of the Network Analytics dashboard to Spectrum customers on the Enterprise plan. Additionally, this announcement introduces two major dashboard improvements for easier reporting and investigation.

Network Analytics

Cloudflare’s packet and bit oriented dashboard, Network Analytics, provides visibility into Internet traffic patterns and DDoS attacks in Layers 3 and 4 of the OSI model. This allows our users to better understand the traffic patterns and DDoS attacks as observed at the Cloudflare edge.

When the dashboard was first released in January, these capabilities were only available to Bring Your Own IP customers on the Spectrum and Magic Transit services, but now Spectrum customers using Cloudflare’s Anycast IPs are also supported.

Protecting L4 applications

Spectrum is Cloudflare’s L4 reverse-proxy service that offers unmetered DDoS protection and traffic acceleration for TCP and UDP applications. It provides enhanced traffic performance through faster TLS, optimized network routing, and high speed interconnection. It also provides encryption to legacy protocols and applications that don’t come with embedded encryption. Customers who typically use Spectrum operate services in which network performance and resilience to DDoS attacks are of utmost importance to their business, such as email, remote access, and gaming.

Spectrum customers can now view detailed traffic reports on DDoS attacks on their configured TCP/ UDP applications, including size of attacks, attack vectors, source location of attacks, and permitted traffic. What’s more, users can also configure and receive real-time alerts when their services are attacked.

Network Analytics: Rebooted

Announcing Spectrum DDoS Analytics and DDoS Insights & Trends

Since releasing the Network Analytics dashboard in January, we have been constantly improving its capabilities. Today, we’re announcing two major improvements that will make both reporting and investigation easier for our customers: DDoS Insights & Trend and Group-by Filtering for grouping-based traffic analysis.

First and foremost, we are adding a new DDoS Insights & Trends card, which provides dynamic insights into your attack trends over time. This feature provides a real-time view of the number of attacks, the percentage of attack traffic, the maximum attack rates, the total mitigated bytes, the main attack origin country, and the total duration of attacks, which can indicate the potential downtime that was prevented. These data points were surfaced as the most crucial ones by our customers in the feedback sessions. Along with the percentage of change period-over-period, our customers can easily understand how their security landscape evolves.

Announcing Spectrum DDoS Analytics and DDoS Insights & Trends
Trends Insights

Troubleshooting made easy

In the main time series chart seen in the dashboard, we added an ability for users to change the Group-by field which enables users to customize the Y axis. This way, a user can quickly identify traffic anomalies and sudden changes in traffic based on criteria such as IP protocols, TCP flags, source country, and take action if needed with Magic Firewall, Spectrum or BYOIP.

Announcing Spectrum DDoS Analytics and DDoS Insights & Trends
Time Series Group-By Filtering

Harnessing Cloudflare’s edge to empower our users

The DDoS Insights & Trends, the new investigation tools and the additional user interface enhancements can assist your organization to better understand your security landscape and take more meaningful actions as needed. We have more updates in Network Analytics dashboard, which are not covered in the scope of this post, including:

  • Export logs as a CSV
  • Zoom-in feature in the time series chart
  • Drop-down view option for average rate and total volume
  • Increased Top N views for source and destination values
  • Addition of country and data center for source values
  • New visualisation of the TCP flag distribution

Details on these updates can be found in our Help Center, which you can now access via the dashboard as well.

In the near future, we will also expand Network Analytics to Spectrum customers on the Business plan, and WAF customers on the Enterprise and Business plans. Stay tuned!

If you are a customer in Magic Transit, Spectrum or BYOIP, go try out the Network Analytics dashboard yourself today.

If you operate your own network, try Cloudflare Magic Transit for free with a limited time offer: https://www.cloudflare.com/lp/better/.

A Virtual Product Management Internship Experience

Post Syndicated from Selina Cho original https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-virtual-product-management-internship-experience/

A Virtual Product Management Internship Experience

A Virtual Product Management Internship Experience

In July 2020, I joined Cloudflare as a Product Management Intern on the DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) team to enhance the benefits that Network Analytics brings to our customers. In the following, I am excited to share with you my experience with remote working as an intern, and how I acclimatized into Cloudflare. I also give details about what my work entailed and how we approached the process of Product Management.

Onboarding to Cloudflare during COVID19

As a long-time user of Cloudflare’s Free CDN plan myself, I was thrilled to join the company and learn what was happening behind the scenes while making its products. The entering internship class consisted of students and recent graduates from various backgrounds around the world – all with a mutual passion in helping build a better Internet.

The catch here was that 2020 would make the experience of being an intern very different. As it was the case with many other fellow interns, it was the first time I had taken up work remotely from scratch. The initial challenge was to integrate into the working environment without ever meeting colleagues in a physical office. Because everything took place online, it was much harder to pick up non-verbal cues that play a key role in communication, such as eye contact and body language.

To face this challenge, Cloudflare introduced creative and active ways in which we could better interact with one another. From the very first day, I was welcomed to an abundance of knowledge sharing talks and coffee chats with new and existing colleagues in different offices across the world. Whether it was data protection from the Legal team or going serverless with Workers, we were welcomed to afternoon seminars every week on a new area that was being pursued within Cloudflare.

Cloudflare not only retained the summer internship scheme, but in fact doubled the size of the class; this reinforced an optimistic mood within the entering class and a sense of personal responsibility. I was paired up with a mentor, a buddy, and a manager who helped me find my way quickly within Cloudflare, and without which my experience would not have been the same. Thanks to Omer, Pat, Val and countless others for all your incredible support!

Social interactions took various forms and were scheduled for all global time zones. I was invited to weekly virtual yoga sessions and intern meetups to network and discover what other interns across the world were working on. We got to virtually mingle at an “Intern Mixer” where we shared answers to philosophical prompts – what’s more, this was accompanied by an UberEats coupon for us to enjoy refreshments in our work-from-home setting. We also had Pub Quizzes with colleagues in the EMEA region to brush up on our trivia skills. At this uncertain time of the year, part of which I spent in complete self-isolation, these gatherings helped create a sense of belonging within the community, as well as an affinity towards the colleagues I interacted with.

Product Management at Cloudflare

My internship also offered a unique learning experience from the Product Management perspective. I took on the task of increasing the value of Network Analytics by giving customers and internal stakeholders improved  transparency in the traffic patterns and attacks taking place. Network Analytics is Cloudflare’s packet- and bit-oriented dashboard that provides visibility into network- and transport-layer attacks which are mitigated across the world. Among various updates I led in visibility features is the new trends insights. During this time the dashboard was also extended to Enterprise customers on the Spectrum service, Cloudflare’s L4 reverse-proxy that provides DDoS protection against attacks and facilitates network performance.

I was at the intersection of multiple teams that contributed to Network Analytics from different angles, including user interface, UX research, product design, product content and backend engineering, among many others. The key to a successful delivery of Network Analytics as a product, given its interdisciplinary nature, meant that I actively facilitated communication and collaboration across experts in these teams as well as reflected the needs of the users.

I spent the first month of the internship approaching internal stakeholders, namely Customer Support engineers, Solutions Engineers, Customer Success Managers, and Product Managers, to better understand the common pain points. Given their past experience with customers, their insights revealed how Network Analytics could both leverage the existing visibility features to reduce overhead costs on the internal support side and empower users with actionable insights. This process also helped ensure that I didn’t reinvent wheels that had already been explored by existing Product Managers.

I then approached customers to enquire about desired areas for improvements. An example of such a desired improvement was that the display of data in the dashboard was not helping users infer any meaning regarding next steps. It did not answer questions like: What do these numbers represent in retrospect, and should I be concerned? Discussing these aspects helped validate the needs, and we subsequently came up with rough solutions to address them, such as dynamic trends view. Over the calls, we confirmed that – especially from those who rarely accessed the dashboard – having an overview of these numbers in the form of a trends card would incentivize users to log in more often and get more value from the product.

A Virtual Product Management Internship Experience
Trends Insights

The 1:1 dialogues were incredibly helpful in understanding how Network Analytics could be more effectively utilized, and guided ways for us to better surface the performance of our DDoS mitigation tools to our customers. In the first few weeks of the internship, I shadowed customer calls of other products; this helped me gain the confidence, knowledge, and language appropriate in Cloudflare’s user research. I did a run-through of the interview questions with a UX Researcher, and was informed on the procedure for getting in touch with appropriate customers. We even had bilingual calls where the Customer Success Manager helped translate the dialogues real-time.

In the following weeks, I synthesized these findings into a Product Requirements Document and lined up the features according to quarterly goals that could now be addressed in collaboration with other teams. After a formal review and discussion with Product Managers, engineers, and designers, we developed and rolled out each feature to the customers on a bi-weekly basis. We always welcomed feedback before and after the feature releases, as the goal wasn’t to have an ultimate final product, but to deliver incremental enhancements to meet the evolving needs of our customers.

Of course, all my interactions, including customer and internal stakeholder calls, were all held remotely. We all embraced video conferencing and instant chat messengers to make it feel as though we were physically close. I had weekly check-ins with various colleagues including my managers, Network Analytics team, DDoS engineering team, and DDoS reports team, to ensure that things were on track. For me, the key to working remotely was the instant chat function, which was not as intrusive as a fully fledged meeting, but a quick and considerate way to communicate in a tightly-knit team.

Looking Back

Product Management is a growth process – both for the corresponding individual and the product. As an individual, you grow fast through creative thinking, problem solving and incessant curiosity to better understand a product in the shoes of a customer. At the same time, the product continues to evolve and grow as a result of synergy between experts from diverse fields and customer feedback. Products are used and experienced by people, so it is a no-brainer that maintaining constant and direct feedback from our customers and internal stakeholders are what bolsters their quality.

It was an incredible opportunity to have been a part of an organization that represents one of the largest networks. Network Analytics is a window into the efforts led by Cloudflare engineers and technicians to help secure the Internet, and we are ambitious to scale the transparency across further mitigation systems in the future.

The internship was a successful immersive experience into the world of Network Analytics and Product Management, even in the face of a pandemic. Owing to Cloudflare’s flexibility and ready access to resources for remote work, I was able to adapt to the work environment from the first day onwards and gain an authentic learning experience into how products work. As I now return to university, I look back on an internship that significantly added to my personal and professional growth. I am happy to leave behind the latest evolution of Network Analytics dashboard with hopefully many more to come. Thanks to Cloudflare and all my colleagues for making this possible!