Cloudflare just got faster and more secure, powered by Rust
2025-09-26
We’ve replaced the original core system in Cloudflare with a new modular Rust-based proxy, replacing NGINX. ...
NGINX
Upgrading one of the oldest components in Cloudflare’s software stack
2023-03-31
Engineers at Cloudflare have improved the release procedure of our largest edge proxy server. The improved process allows us to significantly decrease the amount of memory used during the version upgrade. As a result, we can deploy code faster and more reliably...
ROFL with a LOL: rewriting an NGINX module in Rust
2023-02-24
Cloudflare engineers rewrote cf-html, an old NGINX module, in Rust. This project revealed much about NGINX, potentially leading to its full replacement in Cloudflare's infrastructure....
How we built Pingora, the proxy that connects Cloudflare to the Internet
2022-09-14
Today we are excited to talk about Pingora, a new HTTP proxy we’ve built in-house using Rust that serves over 1 trillion requests a day...
Keepalives considered harmful
2020-03-19
You’d think keepalives would always be helpful, but turns out reality isn’t always what you expect it to be. It really helps if you read Why does one NGINX worker take all the load? first....
The problem with thread^W event loops
2020-03-18
Back when Cloudflare was created, the dominant HTTP server used to power websites was Apache httpd. However, we decided to build our infrastructure using the then relatively new NGINX server....
Experiment with HTTP/3 using NGINX and quiche
2019-10-17
Just a few weeks ago we announced the availability on our edge network of HTTP/3, the new revision of HTTP intended to improve security and performance on the Internet. Everyone can now enable HTTP/3 on their Cloudflare zone...
NGINX structural enhancements for HTTP/2 performance
2019-05-22
My team: the Cloudflare PROTOCOLS team is responsible for termination of HTTP traffic at the edge of the Cloudflare network. We deal with features related to: TCP, QUIC, TLS and Secure Certificate management, HTTP/1 and HTTP/2....
SEO Best Practices with Cloudflare Workers, Part 2: Implementing Subdomains
2019-02-15
In Part 1, the pros and cons of subdirectories vs subdomains were discussed. The subdirectory strategy is typically superior to subdomains since subdomains suffer from keyword and backlink dilution. ...
SEO Best Practices with Cloudflare Workers, Part 1: Subdomain vs. Subdirectory
2019-02-15
Alice and Bob are budding blogger buddies who met up at a meetup and purchased some root domains to start writing. Alice bought aliceblogs.com and Bob scooped up bobtopia.com....
Know your SCM_RIGHTS
2018-11-29
As TLS 1.3 was ratified earlier this year, I was recollecting how we got started with it here at Cloudflare. We made the decision to be early adopters of TLS 1.3 a little over two years ago. It was a very important decision, and we took it very seriously....
Optimizing HTTP/2 prioritization with BBR and tcp_notsent_lowat
2018-10-12
Getting the best end-user performance from HTTP/2 requires good support for resource prioritization. While most web servers support HTTP/2 prioritization, getting it to work well all the way to the browser requires a fair bit of coordination across the networking stack....
How we scaled nginx and saved the world 54 years every day
2018-07-31
10 million websites, apps and APIs use Cloudflare to give their users a speed boost. At peak we serve more than 10 million requests a second across our 151 data centers. Over the years we’ve made many modifications to our version of NGINX to handle our growth. This is blog post is about one of them....
HTTP Analytics for 6M requests per second using ClickHouse
2018-03-06
One of our large scale data infrastructure challenges here at Cloudflare is around providing HTTP traffic analytics to our customers. HTTP Analytics is available to all our customers via two options:...
However improbable: The story of a processor bug
2018-01-18
Processor problems have been in the news lately, due to the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. But generally, engineers writing software assume that computer hardware operates in a reliable, well-understood fashion, and that any problems lie on the software side of the software-hardware divide....
The end of the road for Server: cloudflare-nginx
2017-12-11
Six years ago when I joined Cloudflare the company had a capital F, about 20 employees, and a software stack that was mostly NGINX, PHP and PowerDNS (there was even a little Apache). ...
Perfect locality and three epic SystemTap scripts
2017-11-07
In a recent blog post we discussed epoll behavior causing uneven load among NGINX worker processes. We suggested a work around - the REUSEPORT socket option....
Why does one NGINX worker take all the load?
2017-10-23
Scaling up TCP servers is usually straightforward. Most deployments start by using a single process setup. When the need arises more worker processes are added. ...
HPACK: the silent killer (feature) of HTTP/2
2016-11-28
If you have experienced HTTP/2 for yourself, you are probably aware of the visible performance gains possible with HTTP/2 due to features like stream multiplexing, explicit stream dependencies, and Server Push. ...
Open sourcing our NGINX HTTP/2 + SPDY code
2016-05-13
In December, we released HTTP/2 support for all customers and on April 28 we released HTTP/2 Server Push support as well....