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Articles by Zack Bloom
A Quick History of Digital Communication Before the Internet
At 12:30 am on April 4th, 1841 President William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia just a month after taking office. The Richmond Enquirer published the news of his death two days later on April 6th. The North-Carolina standard newspaper published it on April 14th. His death wasn’t known of in Los Angeles until July 23rd, 110 days after it had occurred.. An isochron map shows the travel time to various destinations from a specific starting point.
Unimog - Cloudflare’s edge load balancer
Loading... As the scale of Cloudflare’s edge network has grown, we sometimes reach the limits of parts of our architecture. About two years ago we realized that our existing solution for spreading load within our data centers could no longer meet our needs. We embarked on a project to deploy a Layer 4 Load Balancer, internally called Unimog, to improve the reliability and operational efficiency of our edge network. Unimog has now been deployed in production for over a year.
The History of the URL: Domain, Protocol, and Port
On the 11th of January 1982 twenty two computer scientists met to discuss an issue with ‘computer mail’ (now known as email). Attendees included the guy who would create Sun Microsystems, the guy who made Zork, the NTP guy, and the guy who convinced the government to pay for Unix. The problem was simple: there were 455 hosts on the ARPANET and the situation was getting out of control.
Article Series: Edge Cloud
Is edge computing the next frontier? Possibly. Once you get past the inevitable hype, you can see the value of processing data streams across distributed compute pools. If you view edge as an evolution of both infrastructure and application architecture, you recognize that our existing practices need an upgrade. How should we design systems that run in a disconnected state? How do we deploy changes to hundreds or thousands of locations? Should management be centralized or distributed?
The Modern Edge
Key Takeaways Edge computing isn't just for esoteric applications, it's a tool for every web developer It will take time for edge-computing-level performance to become a best practice npm uses Cloudflare Workers to power every single package downloaded Edge computing allows 'static' files to not be static anymore, which might eliminate the CDN as we know it In this series of InfoQ articles, we take a look at multiple dimensions of the edge story.
The History of the URL
Loading... On the 11th of January 1982 twenty-two computer scientists met to discuss an issue with ‘computer mail’ (now known as email). Attendees included the guy who would create Sun Microsystems, the guy who made Zork, the NTP guy, and the guy who convinced the government to pay for Unix. The problem was simple: there were 455 hosts on the ARPANET and the situation was getting out of control.
JavaScript Libraries Are Almost Never Updated Once Installed
Loading... Cloudflare helps run CDNJS, a very popular way of including JavaScript and other frontend resources on web pages. With the CDNJS team’s permission we collect anonymized and aggregated data from CDNJS requests which we use to understand how people build on the Internet. Our analysis today is focused on one question: once installed on a site, do JavaScript libraries ever get updated? Let’s consider jQuery, the most popular JavaScript library on Earth.
An Update on CDNJS
December 19, 2019 7:30PM When you loaded this blog, a file was delivered to your browser called jquery-3.2.1.min.js. jQuery is a library which makes it easier to build websites, and was at one point included on as many as 74.1% of all websites. A full eighteen million sites include jQuery and other libraries using one of the most popular tools on Earth: CDNJS. Beginning about a month ago Cloudflare began to take a more active role in the operation of CDNJS.
Fifty Years Ago
October 29, 2019 7:15AM This is a guest post by Steve Crocker of Shinkuro, Inc. and Bill Duvall of Consulair. Fifty years ago they were both present when the first packets flowed on the Arpanet. On 29 October 2019, Professor Leonard (“Len”) Kleinrock is chairing a celebration at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The date is the fiftieth anniversary of the first full system test and remote host-to-host login over the Arpanet.
WARP is here (sorry it took so long)
September 25, 2019 1:00PM Today, after a longer than expected wait, we're opening WARP and WARP Plus to the general public. If you haven’t heard about it yet, WARP is a mobile app designed for everyone which uses our global network to secure all of your phone’s Internet traffic. We announced WARP on April 1 of this year and expected to roll it out over the next few months at a fairly steady clip and get it released to everyone who wanted to use it by July. That didn’t happen.
The Technical Challenges of Building Cloudflare WARP
September 25, 2019 1:00PM If you have seen our other post you know that we released WARP to the last members of our waiting list today. With WARP our goal was to secure and improve the connection between your mobile devices and the Internet. Along the way we ran into problems with phone and operating system versions, diverse networks, and our own infrastructure, all while working to meet the pent up demand of a waiting list nearly two million people long.
The Climate and Cloudflare
Power is the precursor to all modern technology. James Watt’s steam engine energized the factory, Edison and Tesla’s inventions powered street lamps, and now both fossil fuels and renewable resources power the trillions of transistors in computers and phones.
Announcing AMP Real URL
The promise of the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project was that it would make the web, and, in particular, the mobile web, much more pleasant to surf. The AMP HTML framework was designed to make web pages load quickly, and not distract the user with extraneous content that took them away from focusing on the web page’s content.
Cloud Computing without Containers
Cloudflare has a cloud computing platform called Workers. Unlike essentially every other cloud computing platform I know of, it doesn’t use containers or virtual machines. We believe that is the future of Serverless and cloud computing in general, and I’ll try to convince you why. Isolates Two years ago we had a problem. We were limited in how many features and options we could build in-house, we needed a way for customers to be able to build for themselves.
Isolates are the Future of Cloud Computing – Zack Bloom – Medium
Cloud Computing Without Containers I work on a cloud computing platform. Unlike essentially every other cloud computing platform I know, it doesn’t use containers or virtual machines. I think that is the future of Serverless and cloud computing in general, and I’ll try to convince you why. (I’m a part of Cloudflare, where we have our Workers platform, making me incredibly biased.
Comparing Serverless Performance for CPU Bound Tasks
This post is a part of an ongoing series comparing the performance of Cloudflare Workers with other Serverless providers. In our past tests we intentionally chose a workload which imposes virtually no CPU load (returning the current time). For these tests, let's look at something which pushes hardware to the limit: cryptography. tl;dr Cloudflare Workers are seven times faster than a default Lambda function for workloads which push the CPU.
Serverless Performance: Cloudflare Workers, Lambda and Lambda@Edge
A few months ago we released a new way for people to run serverless Javascript called Cloudflare Workers. We believe Workers is the fastest way to execute serverless functions. If it is truly the fastest, and it is comparable in price, it should be how every team deploys all of their serverless infrastructure. So I set out to see just how fast Worker execution is and prove it.
The History of Stock Quotes
In honor of all the fervor around Bitcoin, we thought it would be fun to revisit the role finance has had in the history of technology even before the Internet came around. This was adapted from a post which originally appeared on the Eager blog. On 10th of April 1814, almost one hundred thousand troops fought the battle of Toulouse in Southern France. The war had ended on April 6th. Messengers delivering news of Napoleon Is abdication and the end of the war wouldn’t reach Toulouse until April 12th.
The History of Email
This was adapted from a post which originally appeared on the Eager blog. Eager has now become the new Cloudflare Apps. The ARPANET (a precursor to the Internet) was created “to help maintain U.S. technological superiority and guard against unforeseen technological advances by potential adversaries,” in other words, to avert the next Sputnik.
The Languages Which Almost Became CSS
The history of all the languages which almost became CSS and the development of the styled web. When Tim Berners-Lee announced HTML in 1991 there was no method of styling pages. How a given HTML tag was rendered was determined by the browser, often with significant input from the user’s preferences. To many, it seemed like a good idea to create a standard way for pages to ‘suggest’ how they might prefer to be rendered stylistically.
The History of Stock Quotes - Eager Blog
On 10th of April 1814, almost one hundred thousand troops fought the battle of Toulouse in Southern France. The war had ended on April 6th. Messengers delivering news of Napoleon Is abdication and the end of the war wouldn’t reach Toulouse until April 12th. The issue was not the lack of a rapid communication system in France, it just hadn’t expanded far enough yet. France had an elaborate semaphore system.
The Languages Which Almost Became CSS
In fact, it has been a constant source of delight for me over the past year to get to continually tell hordes (literally) of people who want to – strap yourselves in, here it comes – control what their documents look like in ways that would be trivial in TeX, Microsoft Word, and every other common text processing environment: “Sorry, you’re screwed.” — Marc Andreessen 1994 When HTML was announced by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 there was no method of styling pages.
Bulletproof Demos
We all like to build software which is reliable, but every once in a while it seems like a good idea to demo something still in its unreliable infancy. Google Chrome has a little known feature which can help. Record modes let you record every request Chrome makes. Playback mode serves requests out of that recorded cache just as if they were being loaded on the spot. It doesn't record where you click or what you open, just every request as it moves over the wire.
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