Cloudflare Pictionary

Hello, hello. My name is Ben. I am here with Annika and Dina. We like to joke that we are the kids' table of Cloudflare.

We're the recent graduates who have come on and become product managers.

And we are so excited to bring you a special edition of Cloudflare Pictionary.

Now, Pictionary is possibly our favorite game. But for those of you who haven't played it, we figured we'd give you a little background.

Basically, with Pictionary, you get a group of friends together.

Someone chooses a word, but you can't tell everyone else what the word is.

And then that person will draw out some representation of the word and tell everyone else that has guessed it.

Now, we're not just bringing you regular Pictionary today. It's Cloudflare Pictionary.

So we have collected a group of words that are representative of Cloudflare products, of Internet topics, all sorts of fun things.

And in addition to that, we will be filling in the blank spots in between different words with some helpful tips and some fun facts.

So we want to dive into a little more about our individual backgrounds.

I actually started at Cloudflare as an intern last summer.

I was on the SSL team and got to build out our Certificate Transparency Monitoring product.

It's a really great product, and you should go sign up for it.

You can do it within your Cloudflare zone. I then went back to college, graduated in December, and I have joined as a full-time product manager with our bot management team.

I will now pass it off to Anika, and she'll give us a little background info.

We'll go around the circle and then get started.

Hey, I'm Anika. Like Ben, I was also an intern at Cloudflare last summer. I worked with the Argo team to ship origin monitoring, which tells Cloudflare users when their origin servers are down.

And now I'm back as a full-time product manager for Magic Transit, which is our Layer 3 DDoS protection product.

Dina. Hi, everyone.

I'm Dina. I'm also one of the new grads, but I've actually been at Cloudflare for about a year and a half now.

I was actually on the crypto team for a few months, and I saw crypto week through, which was really exciting.

And now I've been on the DNS team for about a year, and so our authoritative DNS, secondary DNS, and DNS firewall all fall under me.

But yeah, so as Ben said, we're going to be playing Pictionary, and so now I'm going to share my screen so we can get started.

One second. I should add that we love playing Pictionary on Friday afternoons.

We've noticed that during these crazy times, it's sometimes hard to stay connected to the people you're working with, and getting some sort of virtual activity has been really great for us, just interacting with people and having something to look forward to.

So this is a little glimpse into what we do for fun at Cloudflare.

Exactly. Can everyone see my screen? I'm going to see it.

I can see it. I will start. Oh, I'm first. Exciting. Oh, cool.

That was quick. It's a softball. Oh, okay. The low bar. I don't think we need any fun facts for this one.

Yeah. There's not an easy, difficult grouping, right?

So we don't know. We might get a really tough one next. But a fun fact is in our Everyone channel, there's a different thread every week, and someone started a thread of what was your first computer, and it was really cool to see everyone's really old Macs or whatever they had.

I think my first computer was the MacBook Air, which is pretty crazy.

Yeah, that was a fun thing because people are also talking about old games that they used to play and stuff.

Bonding. Oh, it starts with a P. Okay. I'm trying to write out a word here.

We sometimes go a little easy on the... Dina, you got it already?

Yeah, it's quick. Sometimes we get to a point where...

Oh, man. What starts with P?

Where it's like the drawer just doesn't have anything else to draw, and then you just have to stare at it and hope.

Or you add useless details that you know won't help out.

You draw the same line five times. This looks like a car dashboard, so I'm thinking dashboard stuff.

Performance. Okay. I noticed that it gave me a couple word options that were not in our Cloudflare list, so we'll have to see if it's working or not.

We might have to start it up again.

Okay. This is a picture that's very similar to one that we draw a whole lot at Cloudflare.

This is the origin server, which I ran out of room.

But specifically, Ben's kind of close over here.

Here we go.

So, the arrows are pointing to the important part of this word. Ah, got it.

Yes. And Cloudflare's edge is really big. We've expanded to 200 cities now. Pretty incredible.

I think when I started, we were at 160. That's wild. That's a lot. One of the things you'll notice about Dina through watching this competition is she's ridiculously good at Pictionary and sometimes pushes us...

Dina's the Pictionary queen.

It's not even really a competition. No. But this is... Oh, we got a word.

Okay. Three letters. Nice.

Do we have a fun fact about APIs?

We've been getting some pretty... These have been easy words so far.

Not a lot of Cloudflare-specific stuff. Oh, this is a fun one.

Another three letters. Yeah.

It's another three-letter word. I always forget to look up at the letters at the top to see what's been filled in so far.

And so, I'm always guessing stuff that's ridiculous given the current information that we know.

Oh, I got it. A picture of Dina. Dina's our PM for DNS. PM for DNS.

Okay. Here we go. I got a cool one. Oh, I made that really big, but Dina got it.

Here, I'll put some more detail in here.

Cool. I have one for this. This is something we're working on expanding to all of our products.

So, we just launched Cache Analytics, and we're looking at bringing similar features to our bot management product.

Super exciting. Cache Analytics is so awesome.

I'm really excited about it. All right.

Three letters. You got a lot of three-letter ones. I know. We love acronyms.

Oh, this is an acronym. Okay. Good to know. Spoiler. You got it already, Ben?

What the heck? I feel like some of this isn't fair. There's only so many three-letter words that we have added into our list.

Oh, nice.

Okay. I know a fun fact about this one, because we just learned it from one of the engineers on the TLS team, but SSL and TLS are actually the same thing.

SSL is just the older version of TLS.

So, when people today talk about SSL, mostly they're talking about TLS.

Yeah. It was a big debate over what to call our blue tab in the Cloudflare dashboard.

You guys beat me to it. Wait, Dina, you have a fun fact about IPv4, right?

Yeah. So, IPv4, there are about four billion IP addresses, but we actually started running out, which is why IPv6 was developed.

Exciting. So, these three I got, some of them were not Internet words.

So, I don't know if there's maybe some of them.

Yeah. It started to give me non-Internet words, which means we need to brainstorm a bit more.

It says we're in round three of three.

So, I think we're going to get to start over anyway. Oh, no. I forgot to set it to eight rounds.

That's okay. We'll just skip the words that we've done already.

Dina, guess the word. Bye. Okay. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Let's start it over and get the full list.

Dina's the queen, as always. As always. All right. Back to the settings, rounds.

Let's do eight. Cool. Streamer mode. This is also a great time to announce to our friends at Cloudflare, if you want in on our Friday games of Pictionary, please let us know because we're always looking to expand the group.

And we just discovered you can add more people than we thought we could, so. Or if you're not a Cloudflare and you're looking for something to do with your friends that is COVID safe, Sketchful is a great way.

Great option. And I love the fact that you can put custom words.

There's just so much opportunity. You can make a theme night.

And it's really great. I love getting people from different teams together because no one has too much to talk about right now.

There's an easy way to just meet people.

That was a pretty easy one. Oh, nice use of the fill tool. I got all ones that were not Internet ones.

I don't know. Is there a way to set it so that we get 100% Internet ones?

I thought there was. Oh. Oh, my gosh. Okay. Is there a setting?

There is. Okay. Let's start. We'll get it right this time. We've practiced about five times.

We really can only do this for Internet words. So for non-Internet words, too tough.

Oh, wait. Okay. One more time. Oh, you got to do a streamer mode.

I need to do this. There's always something. Always. Okay. Cool, cool, cool.

Ooh, okay. There we go. That looks like a complicated word. TNS stuff. I always go to TNS drawing.

Oh, oh, I got this one. Cool. Okay. So I think about the OSI model a whole lot, which is a framework for understanding the different levels of protocols and connection types and everything that is involved in making the Internet work.

And I said Magic Transit is a layer three product. Most of Cloudflare's products right now are at layer seven, which is the application layer.

And Spectrum allows us to do layer four. Layer four. Okay. Happy doodle.

I'm big into drawing stick figures lately. For some reason, this is my way to show some of these.

Oh, man. How do we get these letters? What?

How did you get? Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I totally know. Health Checks.

We have health checks all over the place in Cloudflare products that help our customers know what's going on.

And we actually recently also launched health check analytics.

More analytics. And another analytics product. All right. Gotta give our customers insights.

I don't know what happened to this guy's mouth.

Oh. Here we go.

We got another little guy. He's got a different hat. This is a pretty abstract representation of this.

Dina got it. I get the sense we're about to enter one of those 30 second awkward periods where I do not get anywhere close to the answer.

We're good. We're good. We're good. All right. Hold on.

So, there's that. And then somebody over here says that's supposed to be a Cloudflare.

Yes to the red hat guy. Because we like cool red hats. And no to this guy.

Does that help? Wait a second. I think I know. Yes. Oh, nice. So, worldbase .access is pretty great.

Because it allows you to say who in your organization can do or not do certain things.

Like get a DNS record. Because you don't want to give everyone permission to do that.

Oh. Okay. I'm excited for this one.

Everything isn't Cloudflare.

Oh, man. You guys. We didn't put all the LavaRan stuff in the list.

We should have done that. Iconic Cloudflare. Is that an attacker? And that's an alien.

Alien attackers. Good use of colors here. That's why we like Sketchful.

Right? It has better art. And a better art palette. Better art. Yeah. Yeah.

Lots of options. Oh, man. Not DDoS. Oh.

Yes. You got this? You'll see why. When did he get it? I should have gotten it a lot earlier.

So, there's good ones. Oh, my gosh. So, yes. Bots. This is the product I work on.

There are bots. Actually, up to 40% of Internet traffic is generated by automated bots.

Give me a second to choose my word here. And, yeah. Bots are a huge issue.

But Cloudflare can help you block them. What's one of the ways we determine whether or not a request is coming from a bot?

You're actually about to find out based on what I'm drawing here.

Oh. Got it. That's a good way.

Do you want to explain it? Yeah. Machine learning is one of the three engines that we run to check all the traffic that comes into Cloudflare.

We actually rate traffic from 1 through 99, where 1 represents traffic that almost definitely is coming from an automated source, and 99 is almost definitely coming from humans.

So, machine learning helps us figure that out. I like how we both – We both misspelled it.

How do you actually spell certificate? No one knows.

Let's see. Oh, no.

I should have drawn – okay. They're like holding hands, okay? But this guy's hand is very, very long.

Oh, man.

I guess there's a lot of – okay. This part's important. But you're really good.

Oh. Uh-oh.

Like – I can't give a specific example. Yeah. Ben's struggling over here. I'm thinking.

Oh, here, here, here, here. No. Ah, I know what it is. Nice! I was going to try to draw, like, free.

Project Galileo is our awesome partnership with organizations that are at risk on the Internet, and we give them clubs or services for free so that they can continue to operate and do the amazing work that they're doing without having to worry about being under cyber attacks.

So important, especially during times like now.

Ignore that. Uh.

Got it.

This is pretty abstract. What does that say?

Secure. Secure. That's fair, though.

The C could be, like, a C or a U or an L, or. Ugh. Not handshake.

Secure. Secure. Secure. No, no, no.

I'm running out of time. No. Oh, HTTPS. No, no, no. I literally – I had, like, half of the word almost written.

Oh, my gosh. Do we have any fun HTTPS facts? Uh.

If you're an Internet newbie, if you want to know if the site that you're at supports HTTPS, the little lock that's up in the address bar of your browser, if it's locked, then you're safe.

If it's not locked or it says not secure, that means that they're not using HTTPS.

The other thing about HTTPS is in the Cloudflare dashboard, you can set – you can set your settings so you use only HTTPS instead of just HTTP, which is great.

Yeah. I remember one time I went on my parents' site and I didn't see the lock, and I was like, wait, this doesn't have a certificate.

And so I onboarded them to Cloudflare and everything was set up in less than 15 minutes.

Nice. Good guesses. Good guesses.

Chocolate.

Ooh.

Nice. Yeah, I didn't even have to draw the browser, but the WAF stands for Web Application Firewall, which is another one of our security products and the ways that we keep websites safe from attackers.

Ooh. WAF is also just fun to say. Three words.

I've always seen this one before. Maybe not. Um. This looks like a bathing suit.

Different. Yeah, I see. This is my way of drawing the world. This is a world map.

This is the way. Oh my gosh. What, Ben?

You got it already? APS.

I'll say I think this product is possibly the coolest thing we do. It's maybe my favorite thing.

Oh. Oh my gosh. Okay, that was a good hint, but that was kind of a giveaway.

Argo Smart Routing is dope. It's like ways for the Internet. Makes all of your traffic go faster because network paths are very complicated and there can be congestion in different parts of the Internet.

And so Argo Smart Routing makes dynamic decisions to make sure that your traffic gets to where it's going in the fastest way possible.

Oh man.

Okay, this is USA. Yeah. Green, though. It's an interesting color choice. Is that significant?

I don't think it is. And I'll also say I was very impressed with Dina's drawing of the world, but this product I'm drawing out is not exclusive to the US in any way.

It's totally, it works worldwide. BGP, the Border Gateway Protocol.

If you've ever studied computer science in college, it's sort of how Dijkstra's algorithm works, but it's really the way the Internet communicates and how it's all strung together.

That's wild because, oh man, this is supposed to be a hand.

I'm so sorry. I don't know why we have a spiky claw.

That's a long word.

So fingerprinting is a really important part of bot management.

This is one of the ways we gather the signals.

And the more signals you can grab, the better job you can do at detecting bots.

What does that mean? Fingerprinting? Yeah. It's basically looking at, a lot of times it helps us gather specific attributes from a machine.

So if we do fingerprinting, it might help us figure out that a particular machine is using Google Chrome or something like that.

Cool. We tried.

We're just going to skip more lines. This is the part where we just start drawing more lines.

Oh. Nice.

So at Cloudflare, it's very important for us to keep our customers' origins protected.

And so you can set up things like health checks to make sure that you're only serving content from healthy origins.

Here's an abstract interpretation.

So full disclaimer, we did a practice round and then drew this.

And it took me and Anika the whole time to figure it out.

So now it's just engraving. OK.

This is going to be a little more abstract. But here we go. Maybe not even. Oh, man.

I shouldn't have picked this word. Hmm. OK. This is the part. This is the thing that we're paying attention to.

It's this guy. What does this look like in real life?

A fence? Close. Oh, man.

So I guess we have 40 seconds left. But the fence was close. Is this an abstract interpretation?

Yeah. I should have picked a different one here. I'm going to put it.

This is sort of cheating. But that's actually a really good picture.

I don't know why I didn't guess that. Fence was so close.

Fence and gate, super close. I don't actually know a whole bunch about our API gateway.

We should ask some of our friendos to do a knowledge share about it. Oh, yeah.

We haven't even told people about our knowledge shares. We tend to meet up on a weekly basis and do a lunch where we'll teach each other about our different product areas, which is really fun, especially because Cloudflare has so many different products that are in different security areas that sometimes you can work at a company and not even understand some of the other things that we're shipping.

So it's always cool to learn about other Cloudflare areas. Oh, I fell behind on this one.

I wasn't paying attention. It's great. You were giving a great explanation.

I think that's also something that I've been telling some of my younger friends who are still in college is they're asking about what can I do during my internship to make sure that I really stay engaged.

And I think that's something that's been really helpful for me, even if we're learning about things that don't directly touch our product areas, to be able to get the experience and the knowledge from other places in the company you never know when it could come in handy down the road.

And also, it's just great to always keep learning. All right.

What do we got? Doug. So the last one, Athenian, that's a project similar to Galileo that protects government election websites.

I remember when I was applying, I thought that was really cool that we do that.

Harry Potter? It totally does look like Harry Potter.

Oh. Anika, this is on you.

That's a good abstract interpretation. Magic Transit is the product that I work on at Cloudflare.

And when we were launching and trying to pick a name and eventually pick Magic Transit, the product manager, my boss Rustam, wore a wizard suit around the office for a couple of days to promote it.

Oh, man.

I didn't even get to draw the rest of the rainbow. OK. Cloudflare is one of our ERDs, Employee Resource Groups, that was founded by an employee, the awesome Andrew Fitch at Cloudflare, I think, a couple of years ago now.

And since then, we've expanded and have tons of other ERDs for lots of other minority groups at Cloudflare, which is awesome.

Ben, you're close.

Oh, I know what it is. What? Oh.

I don't know if the dots count as characters. I'm in such an IPv4-oriented mindset right now.

Yeah. Do we give a fun fact about IPv4 yet? I don't think so. We gave one about IPv6.

I actually looked up how many IPv6 addresses there are. And it is 2 to the 128, which is- That's crazy.

That's probably enough for a while. Yeah. It goes way beyond the billions and millions.

Let me see what it's called. So the really important part of this diagram is the specific people that are doing this action.

I realized I've drawn this horribly. Oh, no. We only have a minute left, too.

So this has got to be- Uh, uh. Um, I don't know.

Uh, they're like- They're like doing something to the building.

Oh, it's something- Oh, my gosh. Uh. Yes. Guys, we're out of paper. She's basically out of time.

Yeah, we're basically out of time. Should we wrap things up here?

Wrap it up. All righty. Well, thank you to everyone who's joined us so far.

We hope you had a little bit of fun and you learned a little bit about Cloudflare.

Monica and Dina, anything you want to add before we jump into some Pictionary after this goes off the air?

No, I think just, yeah, play Sketchful if you're looking for something to do.

And hopefully we helped you learn some stuff about the Internet as we've done this along the way.

We'll try to get more turns for the next one.

Oh, yeah. We'll have to do a round two. All righty. Thanks, everyone.

Bye. Bye. Bye, Cloudflare TV.