WebProNews

Tag: content delivery network

  • Cloudflare Outage Takes Out Hundreds of Sites

    Cloudflare Outage Takes Out Hundreds of Sites

    A major outage at content delivery network (CDN) Cloudflare has brought down some of the biggest sites on the web across a range of industries.

    At roughly 3:00 AM ET Tuesday morning, Cloudflare tweeted that they were aware of an issue impacting services. The issues impacted Discord, DoorDash, Fitbit, NordVPN, and Peloton, as well as crypto exchanges OKX and FTX.

    Cloudflare has fixed the issue and explained the outage was the result of a change made in an ongoing effort to improve the resilience of the company’s network. The outage impacted 19 of the company’s data centers.

    A change to the network configuration in those locations caused an outage which started at 06:27 UTC. At 06:58 UTC the first data center was brought back online and by 07:42 UTC all data centers were online and working correctly.

    The company apologized to its customers and assured them steps have been taken to ensure the issue wouldn’t happen again.

    We are deeply sorry for the disruption to our customers and to all the users who were unable to access Internet properties during the outage. We have already started working on the changes outlined above and will continue our diligence to ensure this cannot happen again.

  • Cloudflare Pivots Way From Intel in Next-Gen Servers

    Cloudflare Pivots Way From Intel in Next-Gen Servers

    Cloudflare is the latest company to ditch Intel, announcing it will not be using the company’s processors in its next generation servers.

    Cloudflare’s content delivery network (CDN) and security services are used by some of the biggest names on the web. The company’s servers handle some 25 million HTTP requests every second. As result, Cloudflare chooses the technology it uses very carefully.

    When the company evaluated processors for its 11th generation servers, it evaluated Intel, AMD and the Ampere Altra ARM architecture. Cloudflare found that Intel’s latest Ice Lake Xeon processors matched AMD in performance, but their “power consumption was several hundred watts higher per server – that’s enormous. This meant that Intel’s Performance per Watt was unattractive.”

    In contrast both AMD and Ampere both made the company’s shortlist. Cloudflare ultimate went with AMD’s 64 core EPYC 7713, which provided roughly 29% better performance, while maintaining similar power consumption and thermal levels as the previous generation.

    Cloudflare’s revelation is a blow to Intel as the company is struggling to regain its former dominance in the semiconductor industry.

  • Cloudflare Rolls Out API Abuse Detection

    Cloudflare Rolls Out API Abuse Detection

    Cloudflare, one of the leading content delivery networks, has announced API Discovery and API Abuse Detection.

    Application programming interfaces (APIs) are used by companies in every industry. APIs provide a way for different programs and platforms to communicate with each other or hardware components. Many companies use hundreds, or even thousands, of APIs. Unfortunately, despite their value, APIs can be easily abused.

    Cloudflare is looking to address that issue with two tools: API Discovery and API Abuse Detection.

    API Discovery is designed to help companies keep track of the APIs they have. In some cases, companies have so many that they lose track of them, or easily confuse similar ones.

    API Abuse Detection uses a two-prong approach to detecting abuse: volume and sequence. Based on the estimated volume a company should realistically expect on a given API, Cloudflare can detect when volume is higher than it should be.

    Similarly, an API has a valid sequence of events when it’s used properly. Cloudflare can monitor an API for calls that are out of sequence, a likely indication it’s being abused.

    The new tools are currently available in early access.

  • Cloud Company CloudFlare Acquires Browser Company S2 Systems

    Cloud Company CloudFlare Acquires Browser Company S2 Systems

    BizJournal is reporting that CloudFlare, after recently raising $525 million in its IPO, has purchased S2 Systems.

    CloudFlare is a web infrastructure and security company and “is one of the world’s largest networks.” The CloudFlare service “protects websites from all manner of attacks, while simultaneously optimizing performance.” CloudFlare allows websites to scale with demand and ensures high performance with data centers in 200 cities around the world.

    S2 creates browser isolation technology. This is a relatively new approach to browser security “that allows customers to launch browser code in the cloud rather than users’ devices. This technology is designed to be more secure.” As a result, if there is malicious code, the customer’s computers are insulated from the potential attack.

    The purchase is a logical addition to CloudFlare’s suite of security tools, and the company had been looking for some time at adding the capability. According to BizJournal, the company had approached a number of startups, as well as Symantec, to explore different options. S2 was the only one that the right blend of performance and security.

    “They have a similar culture and outlook as us. We have an engineering-driven culture where we like to tackle big hard tasks. I think that resonated with S2. We also are interested in making the Internet more accessible to the other half of the world who does not have it. This is part of our larger vision that we share,” CEO Matthew Prince told BizJournal’s Dawn Kawamoto.

    In spite of this acquisition, Prince said the company does not plan to go on a purchasing spree, preferring home-grown solutions.

  • StumbleUpon Looks To Get Faster

    StumbleUpon is going with a new content delivery network – NetDNA’s MaxCDN. This, according to the two parties involved, will help increase web page download speed on StumbleUpon.com.

    “The social media market is crowded, therefore it is imperative that we provide our users with an experience that is superior to all other discovery engines,” said Anoakie Turner, software architect for StumbleUpon. “MaxCDN allows us to do just that and we are incredibly pleased with the performance we’ve achieved to this point.”

    “With more than 25 million users worldwide, StumbleUpon was in need of a web performance optimization solution that scales worldwide,” said Samir Said, vice president of MaxCDN sales. “It is an honor to be selected by StumbleUpon and we look forward to a successful relationship with the company.”

    Last year, StumbleUpon placed more of an emphasis on its own site as a content destination discovery. Historically, StumbleUpon has been mainly about pointing you to content on other sites, with little need to visit StumbleUpon.com itself.

    To a major extent, it’s still about pointing you other pages on other sites, but with the recent redesign, there is more of a reason to stick around on StumbleUpon’s own site to at least browse thumbnails, channels, and other users’ profiles before selecting the content you want to venture to.

    Despite these changes, the site is still a major traffic driver to sites all over the web.