📺 CFTV Anniversary: NAMER Community Jam

Just a proxy for me Through you I enter myself There is no unity or yesterday And there will never be To be alone, not to be yours To be alone, not to be alone You are already in my heart And I am in your skin Hello everyone, welcome to the Cloudflare Community Jam.

I will be your host today. I'm Alex and along with me today we have Tobi and our DJ Blas Pena all streaming from Austin, Texas.

We're looking forward to have our Cloudflare colleagues here joining us on the Community Jam as well as our lovely community MVPs and the brother Cloudflare Community.

This is the third jam that we're making and for the first time ever we are on Cloudflare TV live here.

If you're generally new to the Cloudflare community, the jam is an opportunity where all the community gets together, employees and participants of the community to reach and reconnect with all of our customers.

So what is the community? You might be wondering. So the community is this lovely place that we have at community.Cloudflare.com that you can join in there and basically ask any questions or post tutorials or great tips that you have about Cloudflare and the Internet in general.

And so we congregate there towards a shared interest that aligns with the Cloudflare overarching mission, that is to help build a better Internet.

And how can we possibly build a better Internet if we don't have all the range of diverse people with different experiences and expertise participating on it.

So that is what the community is all about.

And I first of all want to thank you everybody for being here today and participating, and we're going to be laying the groundwork of how the work was, it's going to look today.

So over our lunch break here in our offices in San Francisco, in Austin, here in Austin, and our colleagues in Europe, in London and all the different locations before have done this same exercise as well as our colleagues in Singapore, last night here in our local time.

We basically take our lunch break and storm the community, looking for any threats that we can either solve, reply, or like.

All of our fellow colleagues in Cloudflare, we have a chat room where you can join us, and where we are going to be coordinating this, as well as the lounge in the community where you can interact with our MVPs.

And this jam is very special.

We are not only celebrating the fourth birthday of the community at community.Cloudflare.com, but we are also joining here on the first birthday of Cloudflare TV.

So happy birthday Cloudflare TV. And what we're going to do here in the segment, or DJ Blas, hey Blas.

How's it going? We'll be jamming some tunes here, and Toby will, from Austin too, hey Toby, how are you doing?

How's it going? Yeah, doing good. We'll be helping us wrangle questions that the community might have, and kind of help us connect with our fellow colleagues that can answer those questions.

Also on the background, and I want to thank Brian, Kevin, Tim, and Romy, who will also be helping us wrangle threats that might be interesting for this.

And towards the end of the segment, we're going to have a very special guest, Otto, joining us.

He is the Global Head of Support at Cloudflare, where he's going to be sharing his impression of how the jam progressed, and some more insights on the future of Cloudflare community.

Thank you very much for that awesome welcome speech, Alex.

Again, my name is Toby, and so here comes the next question.

How can you participate in the special birthday jam?

If you're a Cloudflare employee watching today, all you need to do is log on to the community and join the community chat room for the discussion.

Now, if you're joining us from the community, we invite you to post on the community using the hashtag June Jam, as in J-U-N-J-A-M.

Now, this will bring your post to our attention, and also we'll be answering as many questions as we can, and we look forward to your post on community .Cloudflare.com.

Now, members of the Cloudflare team are joining the jam at the moment and searching for your post, so we'll share a link in the chat internally that will take you to the handful of posts from the previous month that may have gone unnoticed.

Now, in the meantime, I'm handing over to DJ Blass, who will be playing some cool music for us while we're connecting with the community.

DJ Blass. All right. Thanks, Toby. So let's go ahead and get those jams going.

Some music provided from our very own Nikita Kano. She's a technical support engineer from EMEA.

Enjoy. Some music provided from our very own Nikita Kano.

He's a technical support engineer from EMEA.

Some music provided from our very own Nikita Kano.

He's a technical support engineer from EMEA.

Some music provided from our very own Nikita Kano. He's a technical support engineer from EMEA.

Some music provided from our very own Nikita Kano.

He's a technical support engineer from EMEA. Some music provided from our very own Nikita Kano.

He's a technical support engineer from EMEA.

Some music provided from our very own Nikita Kano.

He's a technical support engineer from EMEA.

Some music provided from our very own Nikita Kano. He's a technical support engineer from EMEA.

Some music provided from our very own Nikita Kano.

He's a technical support engineer from EMEA. Some music provided from our very own Nikita Kano.

He's a technical support engineer from EMEA.

Some music provided from our very own Nikita Kano.

He's a technical support engineer from EMEA.

Some music provided from our very own Nikita Kano.

He's a technical support engineer from EMEA.

Some music provided from our very own Nikita Kano.

He's a technical support engineer from EMEA.

Some music provided from our very own Nikita Kano. He's a technical support engineer from EMEA.

Some music provided from our very own Nikita Kano.

He's a technical support engineer from EMEA. Some music provided from our very own Nikita Kano.

He's a technical support engineer from EMEA. Some music provided from our very own Nikita Kano.

He's a technical support engineer from EMEA.

Some music provided from our very own Nikita Kano.

He's a technical support engineer from EMEA. Some music provided from our very own Nikita Kano.

He's a technical support engineer from EMEA.

Perfect, and we just found a very interesting post on the community. Can you see the community post that I'm sharing?

You might wanna go ahead and share your screen by the green button there at the bottom, Toby.

All righty, one second here. I'm seeing a terminal from, I think, Blast.

Okay, how about now?

I think there's still this terminal. Yeah, I see now too. It's a little smallish, so maybe you wanna zoom in there.

Okay, well, you can actually see the posts that I'm sharing, right?

So let's just go ahead and increase that size.

Is it better now? All right, perfect.

So just to give you a kind of heads up as to how we work the community, before I get started here, again, I would like to say happy birthday Cloudflare TV, and we also appreciate all our viewers out there that are able to join this session with us.

So we do have a question here from Joshi.a, and looking at this question, we're just gonna work through what the issue is and we'll decide if this is something that we're going to like, or if we already have an answer provided and moving forward.

So here we can see that the question is, we follow the steps here to delegate subdomains outside of Cloudflare.

It also included a link over here, which I won't really go to, but you can also check this post as well.

So then they gave us an example here. For instance, we have this particular URL.

So I'm gonna copy this. It should resolve, but Cloudflare isn't savvy of name server records for the root domain here, which I'm assuming is region of Waterloo.

So we can also see that for their debugging, they went ahead and ran a dig trace, our quad one, and looking at the response of the dig here, if we scroll all the way down, we can see that we're seeing the name server as umar.ns .Cloudflare.com and hu.ns.Cloudflare.com.

So this, at first I will ignore that and move on because normally this is what we're expecting to see.

These are the name servers that we're expecting to see.

So looking at what our Cloudflare team had responded here.

So the response is, hi Josh, I'm checking here. I can see the NS records being returned for this and your sub domain seems to be resolving for me when I check here.

So also when I run a dig, so we did run a dig on our side to quad one and we can see the following IPs.

And also we run a dig to quad eight as well, which is Google.

And these are the major resolvers that we have on the Internet at the moment.

And you can see that we're not seeing any errors whatsoever.

However, the customer came back and said, they're still seeing an error over here, going to quad eight, which is Google.

So if we look at the response from that dig again, right over here, we can see that it seems like something is not set up correctly.

So they did some debugging and check the SOA for their sub domain and moving down, they also check for quad nine as well.

So the problem here, so you can see that the customer actually concluded that yes, this started working again.

So the problem here is most likely a propagation delay, which is expected because again, we don't own the entire Internet.

It might take a second there for the propagation to actually take place.

So, but then looking at this walkthrough over here, this is what I call a support work, because this actually streamlined what the customer should be looking at on their hand.

So, because this is very clean, this is self -explanatory.

If you're having this kind of issue as well, you should always go to the community and search for the questions that you have before actually reaching out to support.

But because this to me looks like a good support work, first, I'm gonna go ahead and click on like for this.

And in fact, looking back again, I just feel like this is a very great work over here.

So let's go back to the customer as well.

I appreciate the fact that they actually went ahead and ran some debugging on their hand, which is what we expect for all our customers.

Because again, what we're trying to do here is to ensure that you try to help yourself before we actually step in.

Like they normally say, teach a man how to fish and he will never be hungry.

But then we give the man a fish, he will always come back and ask for more.

So this is a very good response here. And I will go ahead and tag this as the answer.

So I don't know how much time we have here.

I will check with the host just to confirm, if we can go ahead and solve another ticket here.

Yeah. Yeah. For the people that is just joining us now, you can join via the wider Cloudflare community.

So we again invite you to go to the website where Toby is at community .Cloudflare.com and post any questions that you might wanna address today with a hashtag, a June jam to bring this post to our attention.

That tag again is June jam, Juliet uniform November, Juliet alpha Mike.

And we will be answering as many questions as we can. And again, with the help from the broader community.

For all of the team members of Cloudflare tuning into the jam, please do look for these posts with this hashtag and help us answer as many conversations as you might have.

We might have threats that are not completely resolved just yet.

So we might wanna ask them if they are still experiencing the issue or like in the case that Toby was pointing out before, if the issue has been resolved, we can go ahead and mark that solution.

Or if we find an excellent tip, we can always click that heart button to like that one and come back if we need that.

So once again, please log in at community.Cloudflare.com and look for the pin thread that we have towards the top and start posting your questions.

We will be doing our best to get them all answers here. And while we work, our DJ Blas, if you can grace us with some more tunes.

That would be very nice.

♪ Oh, sounds like me, yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah, this sounds like me, yeah ♪ ♪ Oh, sounds like me, yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah, this sounds like me, yeah ♪ ♪ Oh, sounds like me, yeah ♪ ♪ This sounds like me, yeah ♪ ♪ This sounds like me, yeah ♪ ♪ This sounds like me, yeah ♪ ♪ This sounds like me, yeah ♪ ♪ This sounds like me, yeah ♪ ♪ This sounds like me, yeah ♪ ♪ This sounds like me, yeah ♪ ♪ This sounds like me, yeah ♪ ♪ Oh, sounds like me, yeah ♪ ♪ This sounds like me, yeah ♪ ♪ This sounds like me, yeah ♪ Behind the horizon, I fly without a body And I do not strive higher into the sky Through the twilight, I drop the problems And through the light I need to get out of here When I was at that age, you could drop our safe This crazy passion took my mind away We were such a match, but now you are done Look, look, look how great I've become Make a decision Make a decision Make a decision When I was at that age, you could drop our safe When I was at that age, you could drop our safe When I was at that age, you could drop our safe When I was at that age, you could drop our safe When I was at that age, you could drop our safe When I was at that age, you could drop our safe When I was at that age, you could drop our safe When I was at that age, you could drop our safe When I was at that age, you could drop our safe When I was at that age, you could drop our safe When I was at that age, you could drop our safe When I was at that age, you could drop our safe we're having issues on certain websites which display host errors.

Now we have verified on a server and it seems fine.

Could you please look into it as soon as possible?

Now, what we're seeing here is a five to four error, right? And obviously what we're looking at on this end is that from the high ball, which is actually the browser that is making the request, the request is actually going to Cloudflare.

But the problem here is there seems to be a disconnect between Cloudflare and the origin on the backend.

So let's go ahead and see what has actually happened here.

So this was actually solved by one of our TSEs in the APAC shift.

And we can see here, hi, have you checked that community tip five to four errors?

You know, and just stopping here for a second. Also, I want everybody listening to us here to understand that we have a lot of avenues for our customers to be able to seek answers to their questions.

You know, and some of those avenues include not just our community, we have support documents, we have dev docs that you can always check, you know, to find more information regarding what you're actually asking or the problems that you're currently facing.

And we can see here that we do have this that has been asked in the community before.

Like I said earlier, before you post in a question, it saves you a lot of time to check if the question or a similar question had already been posted, and if the answer is also included in that post as well.

And here we said five to four indicates a timeout after establishing a TCP connection and waiting for a response from your origin.

Now this can happen if your server is simply taking too long because it has too much work to do, or you're running a large data query, or you have some scripts that seems to be taking longer than expected for a TCP session time.

So here was a response and the customer came back and said, oh, thank you for the mail.

The issue is if we post Cloudflare from the site, it works fine. But when we again link up to Cloudflare issue arises, please let us know about it.

You know, so here we start digging in a little bit, like does your website load in HTTPS without Cloudflare?

What is your SSL encryption mode? Is it flexible? Flexible meaning that from the eyeball to Cloudflare will be going through HTTPS, while from Cloudflare to their origin will be running on port 80.

And also without Cloudflare, how many seconds does it take that particular resource to load on your website?

Now the response was the website takes two seconds to load with Cloudflare. Also the website is loading on HTTPS too.

I'm assuming this is without Cloudflare. Now SSL encryption mode is set to full.

And we went ahead, you know, going further down into more reasons why this 524 may also be seen on their hand.

Now we do keep a session time of 100 seconds, meaning that when a request is actually made to the origin, we wait 100 seconds.

And after that, we will close that connection if we're not receiving any response back from the origin.

So it could have been a lot of issues here, but let's keep looking further.

Now currently the site is on HTTPS and Cloudflare is paused.

We have used Cloudflare SSL certificate and it's working fine.

Now if 443 port is blocked, I should not be able to use the site from HTTPS as I am using it now.

Going further on this, I miss anything or anything or any settings on Cloudflare.

Now, in this case, it's best to contact Cloudflare support, you know, because there are certain issues that can be resolved on in the community.

Say for instance, you're having 524. Now, like we have it in a support doc, a 524 could mean anything, but mostly it points to a timeout between your origin and Cloudflare.

Now, in order for us to understand what exactly is going on, you know, why we're seeing that 524, on our hand, we will also want to check what particular resource is being delayed.

And when we ask you to contact Cloudflare support, at that time, if you go to our support docs, we've given instructions on how you can actually, what informations you need for troubleshooting, because we need those information, right?

Like say, for instance, if you're seeing HTTP errors, the first thing you want to do is capture an R file showing that particular error.

And afterwards, you also want to go ahead and send us the output of cdn.cgi slash trace, which is going to be showing what kind, which of our colos you're actually eating.

And that will also tell us where exactly the request is being made.

Now, this helps us to start digging into the issue to assist the customer to understand which of their resources is actually costing this 524 on their hand.

So this is an example of tickets that's, or it's an example of question in the community that will require you to open a support.

But normally before you do that, we believe that if you, by understanding your own origin, you know, you can start off with your origin logs, because checking your origin logs will give you more information regarding how long that particular service is taken.

And whatever the issue is, we are always here to assist.

So I think this is a good example here.

And this was actually closed by one of our facilitators seven minutes ago. So let's just see if we can look into one more here before, just one second.

Alex, do I have time to go through one more?

Hey, Toby. Yeah, actually we're gonna move to the next step that we have here.

What it's important here, you know, what community is good without some love, right?

So whenever we find posts in the community that are useful to us, let's, as they say, smash that heart button to show our fellow community member that their insights are valuable.

Again, for the brother community joining us today, please go to community.Cloudflare.com and submit any questions that you might have with John Jam.

That's Juliet, 24 November, Juliet Alta Mike as a tag to your question.

And we will be in the lookout and the brother team as well.

We'll be looking up for those particular questions to get them resolved.

As for our fellow colleagues, the brother Cloudflare team, please also, again, react to posts with that heart button so you can demonstrate if somebody has given a good next step on a thread or has provided a very neat tool that is useful to the brother community.

Okay, let us find some posts that we love around the community now and come back here while we go looking for those.

DJ Pena here has some more tunes for us.

And again, happy birthday to Cloudflare DB for many years to come.

All right, thank you, Alex and Toby. Let's keep those jams going.

What I'm gonna do now is re-share my screen and keep the party going here. Thanks so much, Blas.

You got it. ♪ Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah Bad thought on those who cry Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah I'm doing fine, I'm doing fine, I'm doing fine, I'm doing fine, I'm doing fine, I'm doing fine.

All right, thank you, thank you, thank you DJ bless. Here real quick here, please while we're still working on answering questions, posting questions, Please, let's look for posts in the community that have not been answered yet and let's see if we can give them some answers or if there are posts that have been answered as well, please go ahead and smash that love icon and yeah, we will step in and see if are actually the answers or not.

So again, just scrolling through over here, we do have a post from Kerlin and Kerlin, this was posted quite like a while back and it was an issue with the A, Quad A and the C name record.

Please, let's keep an eye on this post and also the responses that we're seeing here.

So here we have a response here that when you get the occasional error, do you get the same if you were to do it via UI?

So the question is what exactly is that customer trying to do?

So they are trying to add a new TXT record through API to validate the SSL host thing.

Now the question now is, does anybody have any idea?

Now this kind of question is not exactly too direct because again, there could be a lot of reasons for this, but this is as far as we can tell at this moment.

And when you see questions like this, it's always good to ask more questions if required.

And if it's something that you think because of the sensitivity or something that will require the exposure of certain private information like the IP address and et cetera, do you have them reach out to support if it's something that cannot be resolved in Cloudflare community?

So yes, I think this is also a good example of that.

And as you can see, I went ahead and smashed that love button.

I just, sorry, I call it love button, although it is the like icon just because it is a heart and it symbolizes love, right?

So it shows the people that are responding to this message is that we appreciate them.

We want them to keep doing what they're doing.

All right. That's exactly right, Toby. And I encourage you and everybody else to go spread that love in the community forums.

Again, if you're just now tuning in to Cloudflare TV, this is our third ever Community Jam.

And you can join us at community.Cloudflare.com where towards the top of the forum, we have a thread that explains what we're doing here today.

Basically, if you have any type of question that you want to answer about Cloudflare, please post that question and use the tag John Jam.

That's Juliet uniform November, Juliet alpha Mike again, June Jam.

We are going to be in the lookout for these questions.

And as Toby was explaining, if we do find a thread that might be not resolved, we can always vote to pick a solution in there.

So just a reminder for our fellow Cloudflareans joining us today into the jam, go look for some of those older threads now and try to find solutions for them.

And as Toby explained before, smash that love button there if there's a good answer or a good tip that you find around the community forums.

Well, let's keep the party going because as I'd like to remind you is the community's four birthdays and also Cloudflare TV's first ever birthday.

So get these things coming glass and thanks so much.

All right, let's keep the jams going here.

I got to say a big shout out to our very own Nikita Kano for providing these beats.

Y'all need to go check him out.

He's on Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud. Definitely.

Really good stuff. Very good. Thanks Nikita. And thanks Glass. Thank you.

Thank you.

So I Hello, hello, hello, hello again.

Just FYI, this is going to be a very quick session to help some of our newcomers to understand how to search the community for posts, search the community for any issues whatsoever that they're having or if they're willing to actually test their knowledge in solving some of the problems that we do find in our community.

So first here, as we're looking at this, once you get into the community, you can see on the top right corner here where we actually have the search magnifying glass in a way and once you click on it, just a quick thing, I think I'm not looking at your screen, seems to share a different desktop perhaps.

Oh, I apologize here. Share again, just the window there because I'm seeing some chat going on.

That's why you want to stop your share and restart it there.

All right, apologies for that. No worries at all. So how about now? Now it's perfect.

Thanks so much. All right. Yeah, I'm still trying to get around which I don't use it quite often, so apologies there.

Yeah, so again, back to what I was saying, this is going to be a brief intro demo for our customers or our community members that are trying to search the community for questions or search the community for questions that they might be able to answer as well.

So if you can see my screen over here, once you go to community.Cloudflare.com, on the top right corner, you can see the magnifying glass over here, which once you click on that, it will take you on a search where you can actually type in information regarding what you're looking for.

So let's just say, for instance, I'm having a DNS problem.

Say, for instance, I'm having a name server problem or even a security problem.

Whatever the issue is, you can go ahead and type it there. And then once you do that, you're going to get a response back.

This is just all showing you for the search.

And once you get a response back, it should give you something similar to what we're looking at at the moment.

And it's not too hard to search the community. It is pretty much like when you go to Google search and you type in some information and then you expect a query response back.

So if you make use of this search, it will populate and it will give you all the information that we have regarding that particular search on the lower hand over here.

Now, another way that you can actually go about that is to use our advanced search.

Now, the advanced search allows you to actually query specific information.

And this is also very useful for Cloudflare employees or even our MVP members if they are looking to actually solve some of the problems that we do have specific to their area of specialization or what they actually know about Cloudflare.

So you can see over here, you can type in.

We'll post the question if you're looking for a specific question regarding someone in the community.

You can also see on the categorized list as well. If you click on that tab, it's going to show you the categories that we have that you can actually go through.

And also in terms of tags, you can put that optionally if you're tagging, if you're looking for like DNS security or etc.

And if you move forward here, you can do a lot of things with this advanced search.

However, if you're new to Cloudflare and you feel this is a little bit too much to go through, I would just say you can always use the normal search icon over here and type in your question.

So that is just a quick recap on how to go about that. We've been seeing a lot of questions in the community.

So again, thank you very much to our viewers and our community members for doing a great job posting those questions there.

So yeah, I will pass this over to Alex for a quick second here. Thank you, Toby.

For my fellow Firefox users out there, actually you can go here on the search whenever you are at community.Cloudflare.com and you can click this little guy over here to add the search to directly search from your search bar on Firefox.

There was this quick question I wanted to highlight. There was during this jam one of our community members from India raised a question about our SNI checker not working correctly on Firefox 89.

In this particular case, we see here that a fellow member actually picked my solution here.

But we have another community participant, Ricardo from Lisbon, who gave us some good tips.

So I'm going to like that.

And the end of the story here is that basically our friends at Mozilla dropped ESNI support on Firefox 85 and then switched to the next iteration of this security protocol, which is the encrypted client hello.

So that is the reason that this particular test is currently not working.

So I invite everybody to smash that love button.

And joining us today, thanks everybody for participating on this very fun chat over here.

Joining us today, we have the global head of support at Cloudflare, Otto.

Thanks for joining us.

Hey, Alex. Good to see you. What's going on? Well, we just had a blast here on the community.

Thanks for joining us today. We had dozens, if not hundreds of our colleagues helping in the community here today.

And we thank you for joining us here.

We have a brief interview panel here for you, if you don't mind. Oh, cool. Yeah.

Thanks, everybody who's joined the community jam. Thank you. Thank you. It's so cool seeing so many Cloudflareans and so many customers and so many users.

It's really cool.

And thanks for organizing this, Alex, Toby, Vlas. This is really cool.

Thanks. And thanks to the brother team. Toby, take it away, please, with a question for Otto.

All right. Thank you. Thank you, Alex. Thank you, everybody, viewers out there.

I hope you've been enjoying this so far. Yeah. Hi, Otto. Nice to have you here.

Welcome on board. So I guess the first question here will be, thinking of this day and age, it's understandable why community is very important.

But from your own point of view, what do you think the community is all about?

Yeah. So community means a bunch of things. Overall, on the Internet, I think community, all the different communities on the Internet are super important because it's peer-to-peer.

It's people helping each other, talking to each other, sharing ideas.

And so it's one of the core concepts of the Internet. And it's really blossomed.

And you see it in Reddit and Hacker News and Cloudflare. The Cloudflare community is key.

So you can see today, just all the things you've been highlighting here, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of posts per week, tens of thousands of users.

I love the community jam because then we get hundreds of other employees, not just support, not just our MVPs in here.

And it's people understanding that they're not the only ones that have this problem.

And the thing about support is we love talking to customers.

We're always here to help. It's very rewarding solving problems.

But when you're a customer, you just want it to work.

You don't necessarily want to have to throw in an email and sit and wait and hope that they write back.

We do always write back. But when you're in the community, you can see other people having similar use cases, similar problems.

I use WordPress.

I use Argo Tunnel. I can see, I can get ideas. And so it's less high pressure, more rewarding for people to see how other people are using it.

And one of the real keys is it lowers the barrier so that anyone in any country of any age can just come and show that, learn, but see their peers.

So that's really rewarding is seeing people from every country in the world, every skill level and age group coming and talking to each other, as opposed to having to be a huge enterprise customer and have a network team in order to get help from us, anybody.

And you see that here.

You said in our MVPs who are a wide range of backgrounds and countries. So yeah, community is awesome.

Thank you very much, Ato. I mean, thank you for that very detailed explanation on your take on the community.

But so far today, was there anything that surprised you about the jam today?

Has there been anything that actually wowed you?

Like, okay, wow, that's quite interesting. The biggest wow is the engagement from the rest of the company at Cloudflare.

And so again, I just want to say thank you to all of the product managers and solutions engineers and managers and individual contributors all over the company who are jumping in and engaging.

So that always brings a tear to my eye when I see all of our co-workers coming and talking to customers.

There's no better way to learn about Cloudflare than talking to customers and how they use it.

I guess the one thing that really wows me is the depth of technical knowledge that people display here.

And it's just astounding, like some of the tickets you were just looking at is really digging in deep and showing each other how to troubleshoot and solve these problems is really amazing.

When some of the first communities I saw, I used to work for a big computer manufacturer 15 or 20 years ago.

And we had kind of very simplistic kind of forums.

And it wasn't our forum, but I was looking at different best practices and saw HP printers.

There were forums where people would talk about how to troubleshoot your printer hardware and what's wrong with it.

And some of the biggest contributors, like thousands and thousands of answers were just normal people answering about printer drivers.

And so there was like this woman in Florida who was like the preeminent expert on how to troubleshoot your printer drivers in 2005 and just doing it to help people for free.

And it seems like the most unexciting thing to be an expert on, but she knew everything backwards and forwards.

And she should have been like a manager and been paid tons of money for all of her deep knowledge.

And she was just sharing, it's like, I'm really good at this.

And I like people seeing how good I am at this. And that kind of stuck with me.

It's like, well, it's not movies or music or anime or cutting edge, it's printer drivers.

And so people can get excited about that. Then you can have a community of everything.

And now like 15 years later, you see that there's communities around everything.

And so people just love sharing, showing and sharing their knowledge.

So anyway, so kind of the deep technical answers that I'm seeing in the community are really amazing.

And our engineers can learn stuff from our customers here and they do.

And that's really cool. Awesome. Thank you very much for that answer.

And also, I believe that if you really know something, it's, I mean, the easiest way to test your knowledge is to actually share it with other people because once you can share that knowledge with other people, it's a knowledge reinforcement.

It means that you actually know it. So yeah, moving on to the next question.

So what are you most proud of about the community at Cloudflare?

What would be that thing of pride that you're like, yes, we've actually, we've been able to accomplish this in just a very short period?

Yeah, I guess two big things.

One is the steady and large growth of the community over the past couple of years.

I forget how long it's been now. It's three or four years since we launched it.

And there was skepticism of, do we really need this? What is a community?

We're a very technical company. Are people going to use this?

And a lot of us were like, yes, absolutely. Cloudflare is exactly the kind of company with passionate users all over the world, all different types of people who want this and it will take off.

And our community managers really have shown that and have nurtured it.

And it's really seen steady organic growth with no marketing, no big push, just people finding it and engaging in it and growing and growing.

So that's been really rewarding to see passionate Cloudflare users finding it and engaging in it.

And then the other thing that's really rewarding are all of our really engaged users, our MVPs who have identified themselves and really come like the woman who used to answer printer driver questions 15 years ago, just because she liked helping people.

We see that today at Cloudflare at a different level with different types of products of people just showing themselves to be experts and empathetic, supportive sort of people and contributing so much.

And it's really beautiful to see. And thank you to all of our MVPs.

We love you and you're doing a fantastic job. T-shirts for everyone. Awesome.

I will probably take you up on that as well. Yeah, I better find the T -shirts real quick.

I don't know where they are. I haven't been to the office in a while, but we'll find them.

Thanks for that, Otto. I'm going to change direction here slightly.

And I wonder if you'd be willing to share us a little bit about your journey at Cloudflare.

So when did you first join and what is that attracted you to this Internet betterment shop?

Yeah, it was that making a better Internet that really caught my eye at Cloudflare.

I joined in the beginning of 2016. So almost five and a half years ago now.

And to be honest, had not heard of Cloudflare before I applied for the job.

I've been a customer support manager and VP at large companies and small companies for 10 or 12 years, 15 years before that in San Francisco in the Bay Area.

And so support is one of those things where once you do it for several years, you often become a lifer.

And once you get good at it, there's always a need for support.

And a lot of people get distracted into other career paths, which is fine.

And we see that on our team as well. But if you stick with it for a while, you become a team lead, become a manager, become a director, a VP over time.

And so I've been doing that. I had not heard of Cloudflare and I found it and dug in to see what it was a bit more.

I had started in support at ISPs and service providers in San Francisco.

And so I had seen how hard it was for a normal person to set up a website and to set up DNS and SSL.

Again, like 2000, 2001, you would have to be a system administrator and log in in a terminal and no detailed instructions.

And if you got it wrong, you'd break the whole thing. And I saw that Cloudflare was providing really sophisticated services for free with a nice, easy to use dashboard with buttons so that anyone like me could easily set up a website for free and make it more secure and faster.

And so I immediately saw the appeal of that after having to work with sysadmins and support teams where it was hard and people would have to come to you or have to get a well-trained person to do it.

So that was super appealing. So five and a half years ago, the team was about 20 support people and about 300 people at Cloudflare.

And we've grown and grown and grown, a lot more customers, a lot more support engineers.

And it's really been great.

It's been very organic. And I feel like the support team is really well respected and supported within Cloudflare.

And that's been very appealing because at some companies in Silicon Valley, it's easy to dismiss the importance of support and say, well, it's a necessary evil.

We don't want to talk to customers. We will hide support and try and minimize it.

Here at Cloudflare, we want to make a better Internet.

So that's a core value of the company. But it's also a complex set of products.

And it's gotten more complex every day. You guys know better than I do. It's become impossible for one person to know everything about all of our products.

And so people need support.

They need the community. There's always going to be something new, some new combination of different products that acts unexpectedly.

And so that's kind of cemented the need and the respect and the empathy for the support team within the company, which is great.

And so you all know we work really closely with product and engineering and with sales and success and solutions to make sure they know what customers are saying and to take that back to customers.

So the journey has been growing the team along with the products, along with the languages and the countries and all of our 4 million free customers and hundreds of thousands of paying customers.

So it's trying to stay one step ahead of our engineering and product teams.

So keep on running. Yeah, thanks for sharing that, Otto.

This leads me to our next question that we have here. If you could share with our viewers here, what does your role entail and what do you believe is the best part of this role?

Yeah, definitely. So like I was saying, we're kind of at the middle of the company and interacting with all different parts and customers.

The best part of it for me is the support team.

I think we built a really fantastic team.

It's around 120 people around the world today in eight different cities. And we hire all kinds of people.

We hire people straight out of college. We hire people with 20 years experience.

We need all different levels of people on the team.

And I just love working with the team because people are very empathetic, very collaborative.

Again, it's that thing where no one can know everything. So you can't be the hero or the super expert where I know everything and that kind of attitude.

Everyone realizes very quickly that you have to be able to turn to the person next to you and ask for help.

And I encourage everyone, ask a million questions.

It's going to take you a thousand tickets and a thousand questions before you start getting comfortable with all the different things you need to know.

And the only way that works is if you have someone you trust and respect sitting next to you where you can turn and ask that question and they don't mind you asking over and over again.

So the support team is my favorite part of it. Really being able to work with all the different teams is really cool as well.

So having input into what's going on with product engineering, helping the sales and success and solutions teams, get on calls with customers all the time and answer questions for them and get their feedback on what we can be doing better and where we need to focus our people to help them more.

So I guess not being the same every day is kind of one of the most rewarding things, being able to have a part in all the different parts of the company.

Yeah. And touching on that, actually, our next question here is if someone was interested in joining us here, what top pieces of advice would you share with them and what would be like the best path for them to approach us and hopefully join us?

Yeah, for sure. We're always hiring. So please go to Cloudflare.com slash jobs, I think.

There's probably a couple of links. And check out the support section.

I would recommend setting up a website on Cloudflare.

One of the keys to our company is that we offer so many of our services for free.

So whenever I explain to someone what Cloudflare is, I say everyone in the world should be using Cloudflare for free.

It's going to make your site faster. It's going to make your site more secure.

And so if you're thinking about is this an interesting job, that's where you would want to go set it up and see about DNS and SSL and caching and page rules and start getting familiar with those basic things and seeing how they work and seeing your website from kind of creation to speeding it up and using all the different features.

Maybe the first part, when we hire people, the three things I really look for in a successful support engineer, and we can train you on one or two of these, but you need to have one or two to start with.

One is the technical skill. And so I generally say we can hire a smart person and train them because it's changing all the time.

But some kind of familiarity with the Internet and being smart and able to learn things quickly is really key.

On the reverse side is empathy and caring about your fellow human being and being able to listen and being able to put yourself in their shoes and empathize and really want to help.

You can't really fake that. You can't really just say, oh, I'm going to throw out an answer and maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but they'll go away.

They won't. And you're not going to succeed in the job if you're not honestly trying to help them solve that problem.

And some people can be introverts, and we can kind of train you more on that about how to learn those skills if you want to learn those.

So the technical side and the empathy. And the third is confidence. And that's something that you can be trained on as well, but it helps to have it to begin with.

And it can't be a false confidence like I'm a know-it-all, I know everything, listen to me pontificate.

It's more confidence that you've learned and you've looked for the right answer, and you're 95% sure this is the right answer.

And you're sending it to one of the biggest companies in the world who's a customer, and you can't spend all day double checking and triple checking and going back and asking five different people.

You've got to have that confidence to send it, and you're going to be wrong 5 % of the time.

And then when they write back and say, no, I tried that already, you've got to go, okay, sorry about that.

Let's go on to plan B and plan C.

Because a lot of times when these biggest customers are contacting us, it's really complicated stuff.

And it's the interaction of four different weird things going on.

It's not just one thing where it's easy to solve.

So you have to have that confidence to fail and to send them the wrong answer and then figure it out the second time.

And that's hard. I've seen people get really stuck with that, super smart people who are empathetic, but they spend all day triple checking things and don't get anything done.

So you've got to just pull the trigger sometimes.

So those are the three things I look for. If you're thinking about Cloudflare, join the community, see what people are talking about, talk to each other, and set up a website for free and figure out how it works, play around with the dashboard.

Yeah. So those would be the things I would recommend.

Check out our site. We're always hiring. Thanks, Otto.

Definitely. And I wouldn't finish a community session if I didn't ask you, what is your favorite taco, Ian?

What is your favorite taco there? I always start my community threads with which taco are you having?

I like all tacos. In San Francisco, it would probably be Papalote.

There's two locations, one at 24th and Valencia, and the other one is in Minopa somewhere.

They have an awesome mole, and all their tacos are good.

So Papalote and they have really good hot sauce you can buy and take them.

In Austin, I haven't lived in Austin. I moved to San Francisco from Austin 20 years ago, but when I go back, my friends take me to places, and I can't remember the names of places, but there's a really good one on the south side that has Rahas tacos, and I had not had Rahas before a year or two ago, and that really impressed me.

You told me Rahas is shredded peppers.

Definitely, you cannot really go wrong with tacos in Austin. That's something that I really appreciate moving in here from Mexico.

I thought I would be missing tacos.

I have not. Are they vastly different? Are they prepared differently or different ingredients, or is it just better?

I think it's different ingredients, so the experience definitely is.

An Austin taco for me is not going to be the same that a Monterey taco will ever be, or even a Zacatecas one, but definitely, like you said, I love all my tacos equally as well.

Well, thank you very much, Otto, for joining us here today.

We really appreciate all the insight and experiences that you shared with us here.

Once again, happy birthday here to Cloudflare TV on their first year, and yeah, very happy fourth birthday to the community.

As you say, you build, and we all at Cloudflare have built something beautiful here, so I commend you for pushing for the community to exist because now we have this great place where we share advice around how to make the Internet better for everybody.

Yeah, on that note, thank you so much to everybody who participated on our jam today.

Oh, I'm sorry there.

It seems like my space bar failed me. All right, so I was just saying happy birthday to Cloudflare TV, happy first birthday, happy fourth birthday to the community, and especially thanks to everybody on both Cloudflare and the brother community that participated in the jam today.

We are going to continue looking for those questions that are tagged with Joan Jam and continue answering today and in the future, and not only today but always join us posting questions on the community.

It's always a pleasure to go and share knowledge with our community members in there, and especially thank you to the people that were off screen supporting us here.

Thanks, Kevin. Thanks, Romy. Thanks, Tim. Thanks, Brian and everybody else at Cloudflare here, hammering those forums there with answers and likes and solutions, and as well my fellow colleagues here in support.

Blas, thank you so much. You're welcome. Definitely some good tunes that we got from Nikita here, but thanks for mixing those up for us.

It was really quite a different thing to be jamming to some good music and great tunes while we were solving here questions from our community, and Toby, thanks so much to you for sharing all that wealth of knowledge on how to navigate the community forums, how to do searches, how to correctly tag posts.

Really, really, really appreciate all of your help today.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, just to resound what Alex has said, thank you all.

It's been great. We appreciate you listening to us today, and for those that came in to join us, it's been awesome.

And yes, happy birthday, Cloudflare TV.

Again, there are a lot of people in the back end of this TV segment that they are not here today in person, like in order for you to see them, but I will also say thank you very much.

They've done a great job, and without them, we wouldn't be here.

Thank you, Hodo. We appreciate your time, and what a great day with the Cloudflare community today.

So I would advise that please still work on those new coming problems in the community.

Keep posting. We will like to see your posts.

We like to learn from you as much as you learn from us, and take care, everyone.

It's been a pleasure. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, everybody.

See you all on the next jam. See you. Cheers. Everybody should have access to a credit history that they can use to improve their situation.

Hi, guys.

I am Tiffany Fong. I'm head of growth marketing here at Kiva. Hi. I'm Anthony Brutas, and I am a senior engineer on the Kiva protocol team.

Great. Tiffany, what is Kiva, and how does it work, and how does it help people who are unbanked?

Micro-lending was developed to give unbanked people across the world access to capital to help better their lives.

They have very limited or no access to traditional financial banking services, and this is particularly the case in developing countries.

Kiva.org is a crowdfunding platform that allows people like you and me to lend as little as $25 to these entrepreneurs and small businesses around the world.

So anyone can lend money to people who are unbanked. How many people is that?

So there are 1.7 billion people considered unbanked by the financial system.

Anthony, what is Kiva protocol, and how does it work? Kiva protocol is a mechanism for providing credit history to people who are unbanked or underbanked in the developing world.

What Kiva protocol does is it enables a consistent identifier within a financial system so that the credit bureau can develop and produce complete credit reports for the citizens of that country.

That sounds pretty cutting edge.

You're allowing individuals who never before had the ability to access credit to develop a credit history.

Yes. A lot of our security models in the West are reliant on this idea that everybody has their own personal device.

That doesn't work in developing countries. In these environments, even if you're at a bank, you might not have a reliable Internet connection.

The devices in the bank are typically shared by multiple people.

They're probably even used for personal use.

And also, on top of that, the devices themselves are probably on the cheaper side.

So all of this put together means that we're working with the bare minimum of resources in terms of technology, in terms of a reliable Internet.

What is Kiva's solution to these challenges? We want to intervene at every possible network hop that we can to make sure that the performance and reliability of our application is as in control as it possibly can be.

Now, it's not going to be in total control because we have that last hop on the network.

But with Cloudflare, we're able to really optimize the network hops that are between our services and the local ISPs in the countries that we're serving.

What do you hope to achieve with Kiva?

Ultimately, I think our collective goal is to allow anyone in the world to have access to the capital they need to improve their lives and to achieve their dreams.

If people are in poverty and we give them a way to improve their communities, the lives of the people around them, to become more mobile and contribute to making their world a better place, I think that's definitely a good thing.

My name is Justin Hennessy.

I'm the VP of Engineering at NITO. Okay, so I understand NITO is an e-commerce platform based in Australia.

Tell us a little bit more about it.

NITO is an omnichannel sales platform for retailers and wholesalers. So essentially what it allows us to do is enable the retailers and wholesalers to sell their products in multitudes of sales channels.

Tell us about the importance of automation in your business.

I came on board as the lead automation engineer. So I think automation is key to anything in this day and age.

If you're not looking at ways to automate the low-value work and then put your people in the high-value areas or high-leverage areas, I think you're just going to get left behind.

So as a technology company, obviously it's critical for us to make sure that automation is at the core of what we do.

When did NITO begin working with Cloudflare?

So in the beginning, when NITO was looking to migrate from an old cloud provider, we also wanted to improve what we call our go-live flow or our onboarding flow for merchants.

And a big part of that was obviously provisioning a website, a custom domain name, and a custom SSL certificate.

Requesting and getting granted that certificate in the old process took two domain experts full time.

It was a very lengthy and technical process, which sometimes took up to two, three weeks.

So you can imagine a customer who's itching to get online, that kind of barrier presents a pretty big problem.

So what Cloudflare enabled us to do was to literally automate that onboarding or go -live process to almost a one-click process.

And it also allowed us to diversify the people that could actually do that process.

So now anybody in the business can make that, you know, set a customer live with a very simple process and it's very rapid.

So that's where we started.

What are some of the security challenges you face in your business and how are you managing them?

Any online service has to take security very seriously and at Neto, security is job zero.

So we always bake in thinking and process and tooling around security.

So what Cloudflare does for us is literally gives us a really good protective layer on the very edge of our platform.

So things like DDoS mitigation, web application firewall protection, all of that is then translated into a really solid base of security for all of our metrics as well.

Security is obviously front of mind for Neto as a business.

And online e-commerce presents a lot of security challenges.

So denial of service attacks, cross-app scripting, we have automated attacks that are trying to find exploits in our forms and our platform generally.

So prior to having Cloudflare, obviously we had measures in place.

But what we've gained from Cloudflare is a consolidation of that strategy.

So we are able to look through a single lens and we can look at all of the aspects of our security for the platforms.

And I think it's probably safe to say that now more than ever, a good online strategy is crucial to success.

Thank you.