Cloudflare

Cloudflare: An Overview

Cloudflare, Inc. is a global content delivery network (CDN) and web infrastructure company that provides security, performance, and reliability services. Founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn, Cloudflare is headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA. Known for its strong focus on security and performance, Cloudflare offers a comprehensive suite of services that protect and accelerate any online application. Cloudflare went public in 2019 and has since continued to innovate and expand its offerings.

Features

Comparison with Top CDN Providers

Notable Outages and Events

• July 2019: Cloudflare experienced a widespread outage caused by a bad software deployment, leading to downtime for many of its customers. The issue was quickly identified and resolved, and measures were taken to prevent future occurrences.
• August 2020: Cloudflare had a significant outage affecting several regions due to a network route leak. The incident was mitigated promptly, and the company enhanced its network safeguards.

Notable Customers

• Shopify
• Medium
• Discord
• Zendesk
• Udacity
• LendingTree
• IBM
• DigitalOcean

Technology

Cloudflare operates a large network of PoPs worldwide to deliver content efficiently and securely. The company provides advanced security features, including a Web Application Firewall (WAF) and comprehensive DDoS protection, along with support for modern protocols like HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. Cloudflare’s global Anycast network ensures high availability and low latency for its services. Additionally, Cloudflare offers a suite of developer-friendly tools and supports edge computing to enhance application performance and functionality.

Contributions to Open Source

Cloudflare is an active contributor to the open-source community, supporting various projects and initiatives. Some notable open-source projects and contributions by Cloudflare include:

• Workers: Cloudflare Workers is a serverless application platform built on their global network.
• Argo Tunnel: A secure way to connect your web server to Cloudflare without opening ports on your server.
• Flan Scan: A lightweight network vulnerability scanner.

Pricing

Cloudflare offers a range of pricing plans, from a free tier for personal and small business websites to enterprise plans for large-scale businesses. Below is a general overview of potential pricing components:

For detailed and tailored pricing, businesses are encouraged to visit the Cloudflare pricing page or contact Cloudflare directly for a customized quote based on their specific needs.