Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

“Life is awful; it just sucks,” CloudFlare chief executive officer Matthew Prince jokes.

His company is now processing 150 billion page views every month. Every minute, it generates 30 gigabytes of server log files — records of pages and images that have been sent to web-surfers around the globe. Last year, CloudFlare had more traffic than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Instagram, and Apple combined. Now it provides sites to more global surfers than the king of online engagement itself, Facebook: 1.5 billion every month.

“We keep growing, despite our best efforts,” Prince told me last week.

CloudFlare is a content-delivery network among many other things. Add your site to its cloud with a few lines of code, and it’ll be served out by thousands of machines prepositioned all over the globe — faster and more reliably than you can yourself and (for most sites) for free. Want better performance, more analytics, guarantees, and a “2,500 percent service level” agreement? That you’ll pay for.

Source: LinkedIn

Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare

What the company is focusing on now, Prince told me, is building its own equipment direct from Quanta. In other words, like Facebook and Google, it’s no longer buying from an original equipment manufacturer like Dell or HP but designing its own servers straight from the original assembler in Asia to cut about a third of the cost, Prince says. And importantly, it’s partnering with up to 1,000 global Internet service providers to put those servers right in their data centers — as close as possible to clicking data consumers.

“It’s like a giant game of Risk,” Prince says as he talks about trying to put servers in Turkey, which is hard, and settling for Bulgaria, which is the gateway to the country. “Increasingly, ISPs are inviting us to take our servers and install them in their data centers. There’s a Chilean ISP that we sent a gigabit of data to every second of every day that is just begging us for servers.”

The key when you’re a gigantic global mover of data is to preposition the data as close as possible to where it’s needed and then replicate it and cache it locally. That not only saves on bandwidth transfer costs but also speeds up access for users. Right now, CloudFlare is in only 23 ISPs. By the end of the year, Prince plans to ramp that to 50 of the world’s largest and then to 1,000 by the end of 2014.

If he accomplishes that goal, he’ll have joined a very, very exclusive group of companies.

“Only 2 companies in history that have pulled that trick: Akamai and Google,” Prince said. “We’re joining that club.”

One country that’s particularly annoying is Australia. While Asian Internet traffic is expensive, Prince said — on the order of five times the cost of U.S. and Western Europe traffic — Australian bits cost five times more to move, making the Aussie Internet 25 times more expensive than that of the U.S. Prince blames the Aussie’s former national telephone company, Telstra, for being noncompetitive.

The other key when your bandwidth requirements are massive and doubling roughly every four months is peering.

“As you get larger, you can start peering traffic off your network,” Prince says. “ISPs are asking us to send traffic across private peering exchanges, and as we move closer to the ISPs, that’s easier.”

Peering allows other companies to use your infrastructure to transfer their data for free while they allow you to use theirs for the same price. Interestingly, when it comes to transferring traffic over other companies’ pipes, the U.S. is one of the most difficult countries in the world.

I asked Prince when he sees the company’s massive growth leveling off.

“You’d think with the law of large numbers it would slow down,” he said. “But it doubled in the last two and a half months recently … which is way scary … and it’s only accelerating.

Image credit: Viewminder/Flickr

So, a day after the third annual IPv6 day, why aren’t we adopting IPv6 faster?

If anyone should know, CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince should have a pretty good idea. A content delivery network, CloudFlare moves more data and pushes more pageviews to more people around the globe than Facebook — 150 billion pageviews a month.

Source: LinkedIn

Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare.

I talked to Prince about IPv6, CloudFlare, and the current state of adoption. Unfortunately, it pretty much sucks.

“The good news is that from Jan. 1 to today, we’re seeing 26.5 percent growth in IPv6 usage,” Prince told me yesterday. “The bad news is that it’s still just 1.5 percent of all requests. If we keep growing at this rate, then it will take until May 10 of 2148 before we can finally retire IPv4.”

(The original version of this article said 2048 — I misunderstood Prince on the phone.)

Prince is hoping that the growth will not be steady-state but exponential, accelerating through the adoption curve. Even if that happens, however, CloudFlare predicts that full IPv6 adoption would take seven years, until January 2020.

Not impressive.

“IP” is Internet Protocol, which gives an address and location to every Internet-capable device. The current iteration, version 4, has its roots in 1980, around the time when people like Ken Olsen, the founder of Digital Equipment Corp, still said stupid stuff like: “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” Now of course, everyone has five or six, including one in their pocket, another in their TV, on for the sofa, another hooked up to their TV, a couple in their cars, and a few big ones lying around in various places throughout their homes on large flat surfaces with chairs.

IP version 6 was born in 1996, give or take, and offers 340 trillion trillion trillion unique identifiers — more than we could ever conceivably need. And it offers built-in multicasting, better tracking (which could simultaneously make the internet both more secure and less private), more efficient processing by routers, and support for larger packet sizes, which could speed deliver of large multimedia objects such as Netflix movies.

Source: Google

Google visualizes IPv6 versus IPv4

So it’s definitely better. So why the long delays in implementation?

According to the Internet Society, much of that is because technologies like NAT (network address translation) have enabled many ISPs and companies to use a single IP address for many machines. But the biggest problem is that IPv6 requires time and investment, and since there are some workarounds that have done the job until now, many organizations aren’t willing to lay out cash for no clear or immediate return.

For its part, CloudFlare says it’s there to support customers whichever way they go.

“If we’re not the largest provider of IPv6 web, then we’re close — we have over a million sites that are IPv6 enabled,” Prince told me. “But we’ve continued to roll out a dual-stack solution and let customers choose. That’s the real driver of growth … especially the U.S. government.”

Source: Wikipedia

IPv6 vs IPv4.

Interestingly, IPv4 is turning into a growth driver for CloudFlare. Asian ISPs, who can’t get new IP addresses on IPv4 anymore since Asia ran out two years ago, are turning to CloudFlare to host on IPv6, and then make sites available via CloudFlare’s IPv4 capability as well. That’s mostly for small, personal sites, but Prince takes some satisfaction in enabling budding web builders:

“We’re helping preserve $9.99 hosting, which is where a lot of good things start,” he says.

Even more interesting, however, CloudFlare — which protects sites from hacking attacks — is starting to notice IPv6-only hack attacks. While historically only a tiny fraction of hacking attacks, .3 percent, originated from IPv6 vectors, that’s taken a sharp uptick lately. This shows that even though IPv6 can be more secure than IPv4, DDOS attacks, which rely on botnets of compromised PCs which are hacked, drafted, and used as pawns by hackers to attack other sites, still work. In other words, even if you know exactly where the attack is coming from, that doesn’t always help in deflecting it.

The real driver, however, is that hackers have discovered something about legacy security products.

“We speculate that some attackers have discovered that a lot of legacy security products assume an IPv4 world,” Prince explains. “They’re doing IP address blacklisting, which doesn’t work in the IPv6 world. Since a lot of the security products were not designed for IPv6, they don’t know what to do, and just pass the traffic on … so IPv6 becomes a way of by-passing legacy security products.”

The biggest IPv6 attack that CloudFlare saw, just two weeks ago, was a 3GB/second DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, focused on CloudFlare itself, not one of its customers.

I guess the one good thing about hackers starting to use IPv6 is that it’s at least one sign of increased life in the protocol.

Which, frankly, is almost a good sign right now.

photo credit: Eva the Weaver via photopin cc

Zooming in on November and December 2012 it’s not hard to spot when Thanksgiving 2012 happened. Fully 1/5 of the attacks that CloudFlare saw in November and December (so far) happened on the Thursday and Friday of Thanksgiving:

In the past we’ve seen drops in DDoS attacks on some holidays because the home and office machines used as bots in those attacks have been turned off. For example, this year we noticed a large drop in attack activity on Earth Day (when people are encouraged to switch off their machines to save the planet). But this year’s Thanksgiving attack statistics indicate that plenty of hacked machines were online through the holiday.

But what does this tell us about the coming Christmas holiday period? To answer that we can look back to December 2011. CloudFlare has DDoS data for December 11, 2011 to January 1, 2012 which shows two distinct peaks of attack activity: one just before Christmas and one just after.

So, if 2011 is a guide DDoS attackers will be taking a few days off over Christmas, but will be keeping the pressure on just before and immediately after. That’s probably not a surprise as some fo the attackers will be attempting to disrupt businesses during critical periods for pre- and post-Christmas sales.

Even though there’s a Christmas lull, that doesn’t mean that CloudFlare staff will be letting down their guard, however. We’ll be here working to ensure that whenever attacks arise and from whereever we’re ready to absorb and deflect them.

John Graham-Cumming is the lead programmer at CloudFlare, the content delivery and security network. Prior to CloudFlare he worked at a number of startups and created the award-winning POPFile email machine learning software. He knows way too much about GNU Make having self-published a book entitled GNU Make Unleashed. He joined CloudFlare to take on the task of ‘patching the Internet.’

photo credit: kevin dooley via photopin cc

Tom Paseka works for CloudFlare, the content delivery network that handles more traffic than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Instagram, and Apple combined, delivering more than two billion pageviews per employee. The company knows a few things about the Internet.

What Paseka knew last night, apparently before any Google employees noticed, was that Google’s services appeared to be offline. Tracing the problem, he noticed an Indonesian Internet service provider in the path to Google — odd by any standard.

Particularly when CloudFlare is just a few miles from Google, not an ocean away.

It turns out, Paseka learned, that the Indonesian ISP Moratel was giving its users an incorrect route to Google. And because Moratel was trusted by other networks upstream, the incorrect route was propagating around the globe. As Paseka writes:

And, quickly, the bad routes spread. It is unlikely this was malicious, but rather a misconfiguration or an error evidencing some of the failings in the BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) Trust model.

The fix was simply notifying Moratel about the issue, which Paseka did. Three minutes later, the problem was fixed and Google’s services were back online. Of course … they had never gone down. But they had been inaccessible.

You may not have noticed unless you were in Hong Kong. Paseka estimated that the entire outage affected only about 3-5 percent of the Internet population.

No word on whether Google engineers sent their CloudFlare colleagues a box of donuts or a Google hoodie in thanks.

photo credit: GustavoG via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Content delivery network-on-steroids CloudFlare is adding 30,000 customers a week, opened 10 new data centers on four continents in just the past month, and just passed two billion pageviews per employee.

Oh, and the company is growing revenue 20 percent monthly.

I last spoke to CloudFlare chief executive Matthew Prince in July, when the company hit 65 billion page views a month. His secret sauce is CloudFlare’s capability to drive the cost of delivering a million pageviews down to perhaps a tenth of Google’s or Facebook’s: just $7.

The company’s new growth, however, pushes its per-employee pageview count to over two billion. No other company, Prince says, has ever hit more than one billion pageviews per employee. While most companies, of course, don’t manage sites for tens of thousands of other firms, that’s still almost incredibly impressive, given other major players in the CDN space such as Akamai, Amazon, and Level 3.

Yesterday I asked him how a company sets up 10 data centers in a month.

Source: LinkedIn

Matthew Prince

“We don’t own any data centers or any buildings, and it’s unlikely that we ever will,” said Prince. “Instead, we find someone with a building and lease a subset of that space. We tend to go into some of the older data centers that have the most dense network topologies available.”

In addition to “picking locations where packets are going anyways” and keeping costs down by leasing rather than constructing mammoth data centers, à la Google, Facebook, and Apple, one of CloudFlare’s real innovations is turning commodity hardware from basically any manufacturer — whoever makes the best equipment at the best price any given day — and turning it into a CloudFlare server without ever physically touching it.

“We’ve created a construction guide that we give to a crew on the ground or the facility itself, showing them the steps. They plug everything in,” says Prince.

Perhaps an even more difficult task is managing services for not just thousands of corporations and sovereign nations such as Egypt, Turkey, Mexico, Costa Rica, and yes, the United States … but also some of those entities’ not-quite-sworn enemy, Wikileaks.

“We protect everything from national governments to individual people,” says Prince. “About a month ago Wikileaks had a fairly withering denial of service attack and was out for a week.”

Wikileaks contacted CloudFlare on a weekend, joined the service the following Monday, and was up and running the same day. Which partially explains how the company is continuing to grow without a single body in a marketing or sales role.

What’s next?

CloudFlare continues to add data centers, saying that every time the company adds another node, the network becomes stronger, helping it withstand just about any kind of attack.

Which makes sense.

Given the rapid customer and traffic growth, it doesn’t appear likely than any hackers can generate a more intensive attack on CloudFlare than business as usual.

photo credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This post is part of a consultation series that we’re doing along with our friends at The Next Web and Trend Hunter. Each of the three sites has picked a company that’s effectively utilizing new technologies to get them ahead in their space. Here’s our take on The Next Web’s pick, CloudFlare:

CloudFlare is the internet you’ve never heard of. More than just a content delivery network, the service optimizes massive chunks of the web for delivery, screens out hacking and malware attacks, provides analytics, and more. And the service is growing like wildfire.

A year ago, CloudFlare served about five billion page views a month. Today, the yes-we’re-a-content-delivery-network-but-more serves up an astounding 65 billion pages per month.

“We do more traffic than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Zynga, AOL, Apple, Bing, eBay, PayPal and Instagram combined,” chief executive Matthew Prince told VentureBeat. “We’re about half of a Facebook, and this month we’ll surpass Yahoo in terms of pageviews and unique visitors.”

And it’s all based on a foundation of free.

Most of CloudFlare’s 1500 daily new clients pay the company precisely zero dollars … and never will. And that’s just fine, because they’re the best marketing a company has ever had.

“Soon after we launched we got a big wave of signups from Turkey, all adult sites, Turkish escort services,” says Prince. “We called up a webmaster and he explained that due to the countries liberal government but conservative population, their services were legal but hated.”

To escape the denial of service (DOS) attacks that Turkish hackers started, the escort services turned to CloudFlare. And then they told all their friends.

“We started to get some small Turkish business,” said Prince, “and they paid us a bit.” Larger companies followed, paying more, and today CloudFlare powers the sites of almost every political party in Turkey, many major businesses, and several large government sites … all bringing in considerable revenue.

But it’s not just about marketing. It’s also about the data.

Later that year, CloudFlare hosted the EuroVision finals. The organizers, who typically get 150 million visitors in the final weeks of the singing competition, were dealing with a denial of service attack. Hearing about CloudFlare, they signed up and five minutes later, were back online.

When the CloudFlare engineers analyzed the attack, they realized that the work they’d done to protect the Turkish escort sites was the key piece of the puzzle protecting EuroVision. In other words, the data from the free protected the large, paid account.

That’s how the 65 billion pages served make sense.

But if you’re going to serve that many pages, you had better be very, very efficient. CloudFlare won’t reveal how many servers the company has, but Prince did say that the company has 14 data centers today, and that it is adding nine more over the next 30 days. And, he told VentureBeat, the company still has the vast majority of the $20 million in venture capital that it raised in 2011.

“Our cost to serve a million pages is about $7, and that includes hardware depreciation, salaries, bandwidth, and more,” Prince told VentureBeat. “That’s a metric we track very closely.”

$7 to deliver a million pages is almost unbelievably efficient, and Prince says that number is about 10 times more efficient, as far as CloudFlare can tell, than either Google or Facebook. He adds the caveat that they are doing some different things than CloudFlare, but it’s still an amazing statistic.

Perhaps Google and Facebook will soon be calling to deliver their pages through CloudFlare.

Image credit: Eclipse Digital/ShutterStock