Cloudflare

Overview

Cloudflare is an American company that provides a variety of network, security, and performance services to ensure the security and speed of any internet property. The company was founded in 2009 and now has one of the largest content delivery networks in the world with more than 310 nodes deployed in more than 120 countries. The main goal of Cloudflare is to facilitate the building of a more secure internet using such tools as DDoS protection, WAF, DNS resolution, load balancing, serverless computing, and zero-trust security.

In terms of functionality, Cloudflare can be called a reverse proxy that sits between a website and a visitor and between a website and an origin server. It means that when Cloudflare is used on a website, all the traffic goes through Cloudflare first before being delivered to the server where it is hosted.

In contrast to many other hosting companies, Cloudflare does not offer to buy server capacity or compute capacity. Rather, it sells edge technology, which is an intelligence and functionality layer that works in its edge network before any traffic reaches the customer’s own system. Due to the fact that it is edge technology, Cloudflare is a core service for millions of sites, APIs, applications, and enterprise network architectures, both small and large.

Another characteristic feature of Cloudflare is privacy. Transparency reports and many other privacy-focused features are offered by Cloudflare, such as free SSL/TLS certificates, DNSSEC, and DNS privacy features (1.1.1.1). Recently, the company has begun moving away from its CDN solutions to develop new cloud-based development platforms (Workers, R2 Object Storage, D1 Database), zero-trust networking (Cloudflare One), and even privacy solutions for consumers (WARP VPN).
 

Key Features

Content Delivery Network (CDN): The Cloudflare CDN stores your site’s static files like images, CSS, JavaScript, and HTML on edge servers located near the end user. It greatly enhances page load speeds, saves bandwidth expenses for the origin server, and increases overall performance. The free CDN offers unlimited bandwidth and can be set up instantly after activation.

DDoS Protection: Cloudflare offers automatic and constant DDoS protection at Layer 3, Layer 4, and Layer 7. The platform can automatically detect and mitigate volumetric attacks, protocol attacks, and application-layer floods without any human interaction. The DDoS protection in the free plan is unlimited against all kinds of attacks.

Web Application Firewall: Cloudflare WAF inspects the HTTP traffic between your web application and the internet. A managed rule set that is auto-updated by Cloudflare automatically protects you from many kinds of threats, such as SQL injection, XSS, and remote file inclusion attacks. You can also create custom rules depending on your IP address, geolocation, HTTP header, or HTTP method.

SSL/TLS Encryption: Cloudflare provides SSL/TLS certificates for every domain on its network and manages automatic certificate renewal. Cloudflare supports three encryption types (Flexible, Full, and Full Strict) and also TLS 1.3 protocol. By default, all communication between visitor, edge, and origin will be protected using SSL/TLS encryption provided by Cloudflare.

DNS Management: Cloudflare has one of the fastest and most reliable DNS services in the world. The average latency to resolve Cloudflare's nameservers is less than 10 ms. The DNS service is managed by a simple dashboard where customers can modify any DNS records. Cloudflare's DNS service works seamlessly with any domain registrar and offers features like DNSSEC, CNAME flattening, and wildcard records.

Cloudflare Workers (Serverless Compute): With Cloudflare workers, developers can execute JavaScript, WebAssembly, or even Python code at the edges of Cloudflare's global network. With Cloudflare workers, developers are able to perform such tasks as request routing, API aggregation, images optimization, A/B testing, and custom security rules without deploying servers. Free plan allows up to 100,000 requests per day.

Zero Trust Security (Cloudflare One): Cloudflare provides several solutions in terms of Zero Trust security that include Access (app authentication), Gateway (web filtering & threat prevention), Tunnel (secured connection to origin servers without public IP addresses) and Browser Isolation (untrusted code execution in the cloud). All mentioned products replace the need for traditional security models and old-fashioned solutions based on the usage of virtual private networks.

Load Balancing and Traffic Management: The Cloudflare load balancer evenly distributes traffic among a set of origin servers, checks their health statuses and automatically switches to working servers when there are issues. There are several options available for load balancing such as Geo steering (traffic routing based on user location), session affinity and weighted round-robin.

Caching and Optimization: Besides the possibility of using caching for static content, Cloudflare offers additional services such as Polish (images' optimization and compression), Mirage (lazy image loading on mobiles), Rocket Loader (async script loading), and Railgun (dynamic content compression).

Additional Security Services: Among other services, Cloudflare offers rate-limiting (preventing an IP address from making too many requests at once), bot management (differentiating between good bots and malicious ones), IP geolocation blocking, country-level blocking and email obfuscation.