A man, a plan, a canal, a data center. Over 5 million Internet properties are now faster across Panama, as Cloudflare turned up its newest data center in Panama City. This is our 102nd data center globally, and brings us to a special milestone as our network now spans 50 countries. While perhaps not quite as big an announcement as the $5B Panama Canal expansion, the websites of…
An abbreviated version of this post originally appeared on TechCrunch Looking back over 2016, we saw the good and bad that comes with widespread use and abuse of the Internet. In both Gabon and Gambia, Internet connectivity was disrupted during elections. The contested election in Gambia started with an Internet blackout that lasted a short time. In Gabon, the Internet shutdown lasted for days. Even as we write…
APIs are increasingly becoming the backbone of the modern internet - whether you're ordering food from an app on your phone or browsing a blog using a modern JavaScript framework, chances are those requests are flowing through an API. Given the need for APIs to evolve through refactoring and extension, having great automated tests allows you to develop fast without needing to slow down to run manual tests…
This piece was originally written for the Gopher Academy advent series. We are grateful to them for allowing us to republish it here. Back when crypto/tls was slow and net/http young, the general wisdom was to always put Go servers behind a reverse proxy like NGINX. That's not necessary anymore! At Cloudflare we recently experimented with exposing pure Go services to the hostile wide area network.…
Cloudflare has an automatic image optimization feature called Polish, available to customers on paid plans. It recompresses images and removes unnecessary data so that they are delivered to browsers more quickly. Up until now, Polish has not changed image types when optimizing (even if, for example, a PNG might sometimes have been smaller than the equivalent JPEG). But a new feature in Polish allows us to swap out…