🎂 Welcome to Birthday Week 2024

Hello, everybody, and welcome to Birthday Week.

I'm Brendan Irvine-Broque. I work on workers here at Cloudflare and I'm with Kelly.

Yes, I'm Kelly. I'm the director of product on application performance.

And today or in a couple days actually is going to be Cloudflare's 14th birthday and we're really excited.

We do this every year to kind of celebrate our own birthday and kind of give back to the Internet.

And we've got a lot of exciting announcements this year, as we have every year on a different bunch of different topics.

We kick things off today on Monday. But first, before we get into all of that, I want to just start and talk a little bit about why do we do this?

Like not every company has a birthday week. I remember when I joined Cloudflare, it was a little bit new to me.

So Kelly, you want to tell us tell folks a little bit more about that?

Yeah, and I appreciate it too. You know, I joined Cloudflare actually, it was like three weeks after birthday week last year.

And I remember coming in and talking to Dina and being like, what is this? Why does the company do this?

Why do we dedicate so much time to this and was very quickly honestly impressed.

So birthday week is really a commitment to our mission.

We want to make sure that we're always staying focused on our customers and staying focused on our broader mission of building a better Internet.

And so birthday week, the whole week is focused on giving back, giving back to our customers, giving back to the broader Internet, and staying true to the importance of what we're doing every day.

So every day, there are an enormous amount of things that we release from product features to different updates, blog posts, different, I guess, bigger announcements around the things that we really care about, and why we care about them, and how we're viewing the industry, how we're viewing our customers, and how we really want to continue to lead and be at the forefront of caring about the broader Internet.

Would you add anything to that, Brendan?

No, I think it makes a ton of sense. I think maybe building on that, yesterday, Matthew and Michelle, who are the co-founders of Cloudflare, to the co -founders of Cloudflare published their annual founders letter.

And I know in that they were talking a little bit about how like, you know, just the Internet is changing so much right now, especially with AI.

And we had a couple announcements around that, or at least the first announcement of the week around AI today.

Maybe we should kind of kick things off and start talking a little bit about that.

Yeah, let's do it.

Cool. Well, so I think as Matthew was talking about in the founders letter, you know, AI is kind of changing the Internet, where the kind of he described it as like the quid pro quo of the Internet and the traditional relationship between a website and search engines is kind of shifting, right?

If before, there was this kind of, maybe some, we could argue symbiotic relationship.

Now you kind of have AI bots and scrapers that are kind of going on the Internet and using, you know, websites to kind of train their models.

And parts of that are exciting and wonderful and fun and all these new tools that are out there.

But I think it's, it's scary. For people who have websites on the Internet who are trying to navigate this for the first time, it's all very new.

It's all, at least I feel like this is changing every couple days, every every week, there's something that's, that's new out there.

And so what we the first thing that we kind of announced this morning, was a new set of tools that are built into the Cloudflare dashboard, that let you audit and start to control a little bit about which AI models and which AI scrapers, which companies are kind of able to access your website and to kind of use it, use the content on it in order to train models.

You know, Cloudflare has a, you know, decade plus of experience, kind of managing bots and kind of making your protecting your website from threats.

It kind of extended a lot of those building block technologies to say, like, okay, how do you turn something on and understand like, you know, which, which kind of scrapers are actually you may not realize it right now, scraping your own website, and then give you some controls in terms of which do you want to block and which you want to turn it turn off, which ones do you want to enable.

So we're really excited about this.

I know that this has been something that a bunch of teams have been hustling on a Cloudflare, because we're trying to kind of keep pace with this space on behalf of our customers, too.

So yeah, no, it's it's a big one. And it's one that I find really interesting, because, as I've thought about this one more, it, it aligns with intention, right?

Like AI is something that is just constantly evolving in a really fast pace right now.

But this allows us to give our customers like, more more intention on what they want to see what they want to stop what they want to enable, because, like you said, like AI is something that is just going to keep evolving.

And so it's like, we don't want to shut that down.

We love the innovation of it. There's so much value from it. But what are things that we can give to our customers to allow them to continue to make intentional decisions with AI and learn more about AI?

Again, not slow things down, but partner with both sides to that aligns with our mission on Okay, how do we partner with the innovation, innovation of AI, and also enable that with our customers, but allow them to do it in a way that fits their needs?

Yeah, 100%.

I think one of the things that I found kind of compelling about this, or that kind of gets me excited to work on things like this is that we're bringing this to a broad set of people, right?

So this is just in the dashboard, you log into your cloud floor account, you can start trying it.

And if you think about it, you know, any of the biggest, you know, websites in the world, they've probably been exploring things around which AI scrapers they should allow, probably have can, you know, pull up on the phone and make some phone calls and talk to one of those companies and negotiate whatever relationship they want.

But really trying to think about like the broader Internet.

To me, what I've always found so compelling about the Internet is that there is this kind of long tail of interesting content, people publishing things themselves.

And I think until now, they just haven't really been tools for people who are in that situation.

And so like, that's a principle that I think we try to uphold across Cloudflare's products, but one that I'm pretty excited about today.

Agreed. Agreed. Awesome. Um, so that's, I mean, like, there's so much coming, like, Kelly, you and I have been kind of working on birthday week for the past couple months together.

And I know that like one of our the hardest things for us is just like, there's so much going on in Cloudflare can even kind of fit it all in a week.

So I think you'll maybe see a little bit of that tomorrow.

We have a couple posts this week that are like, there's so many things we had to kind of squeeze lots into one blog post to not overwhelm everybody, which is a kind of the best problem to have.

I know you've been working with a couple people on some functionality that like our customers have been looking for for quite a long time with DNS records.

Talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, I do. And, you know, exactly what you spoke to. This is something that customers have been asking for.

And, you know, as we were diving into birthday week over the past couple of months have seen so many different teams being like, hey, how can we actually like deliver this on this week, give it even more, I don't know, more love or like really push it across the line to get it to customers and DNS like batch record changes is kind of what we're calling it was one of those basically customers that use Cloudflare to manage their DNS on a really frequent basis.

A lot of times they need to create a whole batch of records, enable proxying on a lot of records, update records to a point to point to like a new target or even delete a lot of their records.

There's a lot of different use cases for kind of these like batching actions.

And again, customers have reached out a lot wanting to do this.

And as we really thought about it, we were like, you know what, this is something we need to give back.

This is really tedious. It's very manual one at a time.

How can we make this a better experience for our customers? So historically, customers have to resort to really bespoke scripts to make these changes and power to them.

Right. Like our users always figure out how to handle what they need to.

But it is our responsibility to continue to find ways to make that experience better.

So this is one of those releasing this today. You're going to hear about it today.

This lets customers make large changes in their zones much more efficiently than ever before via an API.

So the blog goes into detail about that. It's a pretty technical blog post, and that was intentional, obviously.

And so we had an engineer and a PM, many people working on this to break down technically how our customers can do this and really dive super deep, but really solving for that big use case around needing to make batches of changes for DNS, which we really wanted to help customers do.

Yeah, I think that this is one of those things that can kind of fly under the radar because you kind of you think about what it might be called and you're like, OK, well, how can that be that exciting?

Like you can have a batch of DNS records updated like and of course.

But then you kind of dig into like, OK, you mentioned kind of all the things that you need to manage when you're managing a bunch of different websites or just looking at some of the performance metrics that I know you shared in the post and how that really does move the needle and make a big difference.

And so one of those things that's kind of cool when you are operating at Cloudflare scale is that like you can make that change so much easier for just such a wide number of people.

This is kind of something that everybody has to do at some point.

Yeah. And like really thinking about their day to day, you know, I think that's something that we really try to stay focused on, especially as like a product team, engineering team, but really as a company is like the decisions we're making, what we're building, what we're releasing, how does that actually impact our customers day to day?

Like how much time are they spending trying to do these record changes?

Oh, let's help them out with that.

Like that is money to their business that they're losing. That is time that we can give back to them.

Like think about the pain that they're feeling. We can't lose sight of that, even though we are in so many different spaces and working on so many different things.

And just keeping that forefront, I think, is really important.

And this is one of those of like, how can we give them some time back and take away a little bit of a headache for them of things that we could just improve?

Totally. I think it's probably the biggest challenge working at Cloudflare is there's always new ideas for things that we could build.

And there's always so many things like this that just feel like, oh, if we made this once, you know, relatively small change, it can have such a big impact.

Again, one of those like good problems to have.

Yeah, 100 percent. Cool. And then so we also talked a little bit today about about turnstile and did a little bit of a deep dive there into some new things that we've been exploring.

For folks who don't have context, turnstile is kind of Cloudflare's answer to CAPTCHAs, the kind of, I guess, pretty annoying interstitials that you have to kind of solve a puzzle or kind of go through a series of extra steps to make sure that that site can verify that you're not a bot.

We've kind of solved this in a very, very different way. It's a lot easier for people.

That's less friction. I mean, anybody can enable it on their website.

But today we talked a little bit about, you know, some some changes to how we are able to identify who is a bot, who's not.

How do we kind of understand that identity and how to build that up, that context up for ourselves?

You want to talk a little bit about what some of the what went into there?

Yeah, it's funny, you know, I was chatting with my wife, Heather, about this one last night, actually, and she was nerding out because she's like, oh, every time I hit one of those, it just enrages me.

And I was like, yeah, I think it does. A lot of people, when you hit that caption, it's like you do want to prove that you're a real person.

And the way that Cloudflare has gone about that, like really is very sophisticated.

But, you know, the Internet is even more complex than it ever has been.

Right. And thinking through that and thinking through turnstile and kind of this next evolution is what we're announcing for birthday week this week.

And really speaking to that, this next evolution of turnstile is more catching more than just bots.

Right. Like, how can we continue to become more sophisticated and really evolve with the way that the Internet is continuing to grow?

So this makes relying on like IP addresses alone a weak method.

Right. It's like, hey, we need to go bigger than that.

We're solving this complexity, you know, with the CAPTCHA alternative.

But today we're really taking that next step in advancing security with ephemeral IDs, which is a new feature that generates basically a unique short-lived ID without relying on any network level information.

So really, again, that next level of really making this a much easier experience, but better overall.

What else would you add to that? I feel like, you know, this one even more detailed than I do.

I'm still so new here. So what else would you add to the value of that?

Because I know this is huge. I mean, that's kind of the funny thing about doing some of the birthday week stuff is that you're you're diving into posts alongside other people who maybe work in totally different areas.

But one of the things that's that's I think is compelling about this is that, you know, there are people obviously would try to try to get around any kind of detection that's purely based on an IP address and the kind of like rotate through a different IPs in order to generate different forms of attacks.

Like there's all kinds of things with credential stuffing, like people trying to rotate through a million passwords to kind of leak something out.

And what ephemeral IDs kind of give you effectively as a customer is protect you against these other types of cases where somebody is kind of going above and beyond to try to attempt to work around how we might identify abuse and identify bots.

Basically, like we can think in terms not just of identifiers, but actual patterns and connect behavior that might even originate from different IP addresses to try to kind of deduce that rather than just be maybe a little bit more more more literal about the different signals in a way that's easier to gain.

Yeah, that's a really good way of putting it. And, you know, it I don't know, I can't stop thinking about when I when I did my final call with Matthew, when I was deciding whether to come over to Cloudflare, he said something that like has just never left my brain.

He said, you know, as as users of the Internet, we're using the Internet in a way it wasn't designed for.

And it's our job to think through the complexity of that.

And what what are the things that we can clean up and make better?

And what are things that we just need to have a strong opinion about and do something different, try something different?

Don't be afraid to push the boundaries. And I feel like this one is a really good example of that.

And it may seem like kind of small of just like captures.

And it's like, oh, no, this is actually, to your point, much broader than that.

And it actually solves many problems in a really big way and overall just makes the Internet not only safer, which we deeply care about, but also just a more seamless experience and take some fear away when you're on the Internet.

Totally. Yeah, I think like a thing that I don't know if I had internalized before I had joined Cloudflare and completely was like just kind of the scale of attacks and how many different threat actors there really were out there.

You know, I was a software engineer before this.

I built a lot of things. You know, I'd seen a fair share of this, you know, building applications.

But you get a really unique view when you work on a platform directly and we get to kind of see a pretty large chunk of the Internet.

And so, you know, in this post, we were kind of sharing a couple of stats that were just kind of like numbers that are hard to kind of comprehend in your own brain.

Like, you know, as we've grown trend style, it's been able to block over a trillion bots.

It's protecting 350,000 domains right now. And so it's just I think it's really interesting to be able to get that type of lens into thinking about not just what am I building on the Internet, but the Internet more broadly.

One of the things I'll plug here is if you haven't played around with it before, we have this thing called Cloudflare Radar.

It's free on the Internet. You can go check it out.

And we kind of take some of the aggregated data about our visibility into the Internet, different Internet service providers, different traffic patterns, and share it back with the world and with a set of interactive tools that lets you kind of slice and dice and understand Internet traffic and give yourself a little bit of that same type of view into what's happening that the kind of we have at Cloudflare.

Love. Love it. Cool. So those are kind of announcements for the day.

We talked a little bit about network performance as we do every Innovation Week.

And, you know, there's a whole lot still coming this week. It's only Monday.

There's a couple of days that have more blog posts than today. Everything kind of goes in different waves.

One thing I wanted to shout out a little bit is that this Thursday we're going to be hosting Builder Day.

And Builder Day is our developer day this week.

We're going to be hosting a live stream at 11 a.m.

Pacific time, California time. And we're going to be hosting events in all the different Cloudflare offices, too, and talking about all the things that we're building for our developer platform, a bunch of new stuff that's coming and try to bring people together who are building apps on Cloudflare.

So trying to kind of also do some other fun, interactive things live with everybody.

And we do a Twitter Spaces the same day.

It should be should be pretty fun. No, it's definitely like such a fun day.

And it feels like such a like, I don't know, like really creative day.

Right. You have all these people that are like building, creating. And it's like giving a whole day just focused on that and how we can continue to support really like that bigger community is just such a fun day.

So I'm glad you called that out. Yeah, there's just something that I've been overly like, I don't know, even just like pretty, pretty shocked about getting involved with Birthday Week is just seeing to something you've said multiple times of just the number of teams that work on Birthday Week, the number of ideas, the commitment, the care for customers, the amount of announcements, projects, releases that came our way back in what, July, August, when we were kind of starting to build out the initial list so that we could get here to today to be able to announce all these things was wild.

Honestly, like the number of things that came in and being able to sort through all of those and say, man, all of these have value.

How do we kind of couple these together into bigger stories so that people can really get excited?

Because obviously, internally, we're all excited about all of these things.

We love all the different things we're working on.

We wouldn't be working on them if we didn't feel they were impactful.

So the one of the biggest challenges, I think, was, again, like coupling them together, putting things together and broader announcements so that we can be excited throughout the whole week of things that we're giving back.

And tomorrow is no different. Like I'm looking at this list of things that are going out tomorrow, and we have so many exciting things just hitting even tomorrow that are going to be just so fun to be able to talk through from different things with partners, but even more from like how we continue to secure the Internet, a little bit of teasers, I guess, for tomorrow that we won't go deep into.

But so many, honestly, really impressive things coming throughout the week.

And then, yeah, Thursday being developer day and on from there. That's awesome.

Is there anything you know, don't don't give it all away, but like, is there anything you wanted to hint at from the rest of the week that you're particularly excited about?

I'm particularly excited about things on Wednesday. Maybe it's just because, like, I don't know, I have I've always been a nerd.

I'm proud to be a nerd and work in the space that I work in.

And there's a few coming out on Wednesday around like speed, cash, purge, new standards that we have for just like overall continuing to care about speed and performance just as much as security.

And there's some really, really cool things coming out on Wednesday that I think people will be really stoked about.

That's awesome. I think there's a lot of us who have been dropping little hints around the Internet over the past week about various things.

One that I'll maybe plug in here while we have a couple of minutes is we've been making a bunch of different performance improvements that are exciting to workers KB and workers KB is a key value store.

That's so actually a ton of different Cloudflare products use.

We build a lot of things at Cloudflare on top of our own platform.

And so it's been fun to watch the evolution of this one because we've been able to, you know, shave off a number of milliseconds on a product that's already fairly fast.

And that in and of itself is fun. But when you think about how many things use workers KB at Cloudflare or other products outside of Cloudflare, you kind of start to think about like, wait, like you shave a couple of milliseconds, you make the Internet faster, more broadly.

And those are the types of things that are just just very cool to kind of connect the dots between, you know, making a change that helps developers, but it's also broadly impacting the performance of the Internet.

So excited to see. And we're going to do a lot of details on how we did it on Thursday.

But if you if you follow folks online, you'll see a lot of down and down into the right charts in a good way.

Love that.

Love that. Yeah, it's like you don't you don't necessarily think about the much broader impact.

You look at it and you're like, oh, cool, like we made an improvement.

But really that that downstream effect and overall just like far reaching effect of that maybe like small improvement is actually huge.

Love it.

Cool. Awesome. Well, this has been great. Appreciate everybody joining us today.

And please stay tuned for the rest of the rest of birthday week. Yeah. And go seriously, like read the blogs like like these were written with so much incredible content.

Take time. Go dive into these things. Get get to understand the things that we're releasing so that you can speak to them more broadly.

They're really fun to read.

And it's also just really impressive to see the different things that teams are working on across the company.

So welcome to birthday week. We're just getting started, as Michelle would say.

So today's Monday. Stay tuned. Rest of the week.

Indeed, stay tuned. Thanks, everybody. Thank you.