📺 CFTV Anniversary: EMEA Community Jam

All right. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Community Jam of June. This time, we're a bunch of people and I just had some sound here. Okay. So yeah, I'm your host Tom today and we are hosting Cloudflare employees, Cloudflare MVPs and you at our third Cloudflare Community Jam. If you're new to Cloudflare or the Cloudflare community, the Cloudflare Community Jam is actually an opportunity for every one of you guys to get to know us as employees and to get an opportunity to get support directly from us in the community. And over lunchtime today in San Francisco, London, Singapore and all of our offices around the world, Cloudflare employees are actually coming together on Cloudflare TV and here in the Cloudflare community to like, solve and reply to posts that every one of you free can post at the moment. You'll see a link below where you can, which you can click and see everything that you need for the Community Jam. And yeah, so I'm joined today by Nick, which is the team lead here at Cloudflare and EMEA and also by our wonderful DJ Nikita. And we're here to answer your questions. So if you have any questions, please post it to the email below. And yeah, today is also a really special Community Jam because we are celebrating four years of the community and also it's Cloudflare TV's first birthday, which is actually the reason why I'm having this hat here. And yeah, while we are, while we as Cloudflare employees from all around the world are going to tune in and geek out here on Cloudflare TV. Yeah, we'll be talking about different stuff about the Community Jam, around topics that are going on. We're searching through old posts, doing all this kind of stuff, try to get as much help for you guys and as much information as we can. And yeah, if you want to participate in the special birthday jam as an employee, then just log into the community and join our internal chat room. And if you're joining us from the community itself, then we just invite you to post anything you like. Tag the hashtag JuneJam and bring us your posts. Yeah, thanks Tom. Welcome everyone. So yeah, I think as Tom was saying, so happy birthday to Cloudflare TV and to the community. And a good reminder for everyone. So for all the external audience, feel free to ask any question on the community. We're here to help you, the MVPs of the community. Once again, thanks to all of them for being active in the community and for helping us. And for all the Cloudflare employees, yeah, get out there, like the posts, mark the topic as solved, it's really important. And obviously help our customers to use our products. So if you see something, provide an answer, like the reply, mark it as solved, it's really useful. And thanks again to Nikita, our DJ today. Nikita, maybe you want to introduce yourself? Yeah, hi there. My name is Nikita. I'm team lead on customer support team at Cloudflare. And putting some songs today together. Some of them are released by my friends. Some of them are mine. Hope you enjoy the tunes. This will be interesting metadata ride in electronic music for the next one hour and a half. And hopefully this music will inspire you to respond to community threads, debug issues with our customers, debug issues with us, and kind of enjoy this jam, because it's a party after all. So we should treat it as such. And if you have any questions, send them to the community thread that we'll create for you. Or send them in the studio via the email, we will see them as well. And we'll try to respond and give our best. I actually just had the first message in about music being a little bit too loud. So we need to turn it down a little bit so that they can understand us a little bit better. Yeah, also, if you just joined the community, make sure to check out the community jam 2021 post. That's pinned to the top everywhere, basically. Contains some information about this jam. And yeah. Okay, no more questions until now. One thing that we can remind, especially for people from Cloudflare that are joining us today, you can search, you know, with the magnifying glass on the top right hand side corner. And then if you click options, you can use some options to search some specific topics. And what would be really useful is if you can help with topics that didn't get any answers so far. And so in order to do that, you can search where topics have zero replies. So I can definitely recommend to use the search function and try to find some topics without reply and help our customers with that. It's another thing to mention. We had some issues with Cloudflare TV just a couple of minutes ago. So that was fixed because I'm getting a couple of questions in the community. But it seems to be fixed. It seems to be working now. If you have any issues, please let us know. Our colleague Simon has mentioned that we don't have a community URL on the Preso anywhere. So the link is community .Cloudflare.com if you haven't guessed. And we will repeat it over and over again until you memorize it by heart. So for the internal people from Cloudflare joining us today, there's also Zane working on the community chat, internal chat. And he has posted some links there. So feel free to go ahead, check the links and ask any questions there also. Again, don't forget to add the hashtag JuneJam because it's the only way that it gets flagged to us. And yeah, everybody from Cloudflare from all departments are joining us today. So feel free to ask anything you like. I see some of our colleagues from support are active already. So that's great. So thank you for that. So as I'm going through the threads, it's really great to see that the MVPs replying to threads with the right answers. So thank you all the MVPs out there. That's really great. For everyone that doesn't know, our community MVPs are the most active Cloudflare customers, basically, that have joined on the community. And they are helping lots of lots of people every day. So huge shout out and thanks to them. So I actually just came up with a post. That's what the user wrote in Italian. So as a reminder, there are some sections in French, in German, Italian, Spanish. So if you're not great with English, you can still use the community. Go over to these categories and you can post your question. So it's the international category. So you can go there and post your question in whatever language. And we'll do our best to get someone. So there are some MVPs. We have some MVPs from Italy. We have support people that are speaking a lot of different languages. So we can always try to help. So actually, we are all not native English speakers. I'm from France. Tom is from Germany. And Nikita, you speak Spanish too, right? I attempt from time to time. Yeah, Russian is my main language. So if someone wants to talk Russian in the community, ping me there. I'll come. And if you are raising any technical problem in the community, by the way, it's always cool to follow our troubleshooting guide that we have published in the Help Center, which kind of kindly asks you to record a HAR file and give us trace routes and dig output queries. If you don't know what any of this means, this Help Center article is the best way to start. But when you are sharing this data in the community, please, please, please make sure to remove all sensitive information from whatever that is that you have captured. You don't want to share this information on the wild web. Also, we have some tutorials in our community forums. There's a category, it's called Tutorials. So yeah, MVPs create a lot of tutorials there to help you with everything you need. With the most basic and probably some advanced stuff too that we see a lot, a lot of times. So yeah, check that out too. So let's give some shout outs to people who wrote the music we're playing right now. So the first track was by Milok. The second one is Ocmikron. And this one is my track called Sweat It. I actually just got a question from an MVP, just to translate it. So our MVP, Martin, just asked if Cloudflare has an option or a way to actually pitch a new feature, a new solution, a new product to us. And if so, how can they do that? So do you want to answer, Ketom? I can answer too. Okay, so as far as I know, it's always possible to create a support ticket for feature requests and stuff like that. But if you have a really like a product that you want to pitch to leaders, as you said in the community forum. And I think, Nick, you can answer that best. So the first thing I would say is that Create -A-Thread in the community has a feedback category. So you can post your idea, your product feedback, anything. And keep in mind that there are some product managers that are active in the community. So they will review and they will take into account. So I can definitely recommend everyone to start a thread in the feedback and provide feedback. Like it's always interesting. I'm not sure. Some of our products... You can't vote, I don't think, in the community for this. Some of our, not big products, but some projects also have GitHub repositories. So you can, if it's in relation to that GitHub repo, you can actually use GitHub to raise feature requests and issues because developer teams, since they're releasing this product on GitHub, they're obviously checking the GitHub for potential issues. So that could be a third avenue you want to explore if you want to select something. I think it would also be a good start if you see anything in the feedback category where you want this feature to happen, then just like it, reply to it, let us know that you need it or that you want it. Maybe even your use case, because then we can internally escalate it to someone or to some sort of product team or product manager that can discuss whether or not this is something that we can realize or if this is something that fits Cloudflare's products. To follow up on that, the product teams or some of the people are active in the community and if for whatever reason there's no reply on the thread, the MVPs are also there to spoil it and to let us know that there's a good feedback that we can maybe action and to get the right attention from the internal people at Cloudflare. And that was a good opportunity to say thank you to our MVPs again because they're doing that as well for us. Definitely. And they're really good at it. And that's actually something also that the product manager are actually seeking proactively, like their organization, they discuss with the MVPs or some other users. That's definitely one important part of the product, of the feature's lifecycle. Yeah, again, happy birthday to Cloudflare TV and the whole team that makes that happen. I think it's a really good product. It's a really good site with lots of information. About our company and about what we do every day. And yeah, there are lots of different segments. If you don't know Cloudflare TV, it's just type it into your browser, Cloudflare.tv. It's the website. And as a schedule, you can even watch past episodes and there's lots of stuff. So if you're interested in anything IT related, check it out. There might be something there for you. And yeah. This is the first time we do this on Cloudflare TV. But this is not the first time we're doing this internally in terms of community jam. So regardless of whether you work for Cloudflare or you're just tuned in to Geek Out on Cloudflare TV, there are several simple steps that you could do to participate in community. So you could search for threats in the community and mark things as solution when they're actually solutions and they resolve the problem that's there. So mark correct answers. You can flag the answers that are not correct or some content that shouldn't be there, according to your opinion. And we will review that. And you can just search for your favorite product or topic and respond to a threat or two, helping other people to make a better use of it. It also helps those issues to get found on Google, for example. They have like a small answer box below the search results if it's marked as solved. So it definitely helps others that have the same issue. Yes, it's very important for all our viewers, whether you're internal or external, if you see a good answer in the threat, mark it as solution, like the answer. It's really important. And as Tom said, it helps everyone as the community is indexed. So it's definitely a best practice. Tom, should we maybe look at the threads? Let's see if we can find something interesting live. Sure, let's do it. Let me share my screen then. Let's see if it doesn't stop your music. Let's try it out. Oh, no, the music stopped. Oh, no. Oh, no. That's OK, we will survive. We won't survive that. I'm afraid. No, OK. Yes, so this is the Cloudflare community. Let me give you a quick tour around it. So at first, you only see the recent threads. And you can also switch to categories view at the top. And it has all the categories that you need. Getting started, security, DNS, everything related. Also to feedback, developer relations, like if you create a product with an API from us or something. Tutorials, everything that you can imagine. And you can also use the search at the top right here. And search for, for example, hashtag JuneJam. And it should result in everything tagged as JuneJam. Or you just click the tag. And yeah. One thing that you can do also when you're searching is to search where the topics have zero replies. Yeah. So especially for the Cloudflare internal people. If you really want to help with a person that never gets an answer. So you need to untick search. If you go back to the magnifier, Tom. Yep. If you untick search the JuneJam tag, then you will see the option. If you untick the box, you can click option. And then in where topics, you can select zero replies. And that's where you can find any threads where nobody had replied. So that's where our customers and our users need the most help. So it would be great for people to use that. Yeah, that's right. You can also search for posts that were posted, for example, a couple of days ago. I think we also have a link for staff members to actually have a view, like a report with all the recent tickets, threads that were opened. And you can use that too. So let's try it out. Okay, it's a lot of tutorials. So we need to exclude that too. Um, let me actually see where this reports link is. There it is. So I think it's not publicly available. It's just for staff members, but you can see basically all, uh, yeah, open topics that don't have a reply. So let's go through that. So here we don't really know what exactly the issue is, right? We can see that from the issue description that the domain results to Cloudflare frontend IPs, because these two IPs are from our range, right? And if then the request fails, it means that something is wrong with how DNS records are configured in the Cloudflare dashboard for this hostname. Or there is some sort of an underlying issue with maybe workers, page rules, depending on what you're using in your dashboard. So, um, we probably want to know more about what exactly you have configured and how we could reproduce this on, um, an account from scratch. It's always a good practice to actually share some more details that we can use to, uh, investigate this remote and to, to put as much information in as possible so that we can actually, uh, replicate it and try to figure out what the issue is. Uh, yeah. Yeah, it's, it's definitely a best practice, whether you create a community post or whether you contact support, actually always provides all the details that you have. Uh, if you, if you can also describe the replication steps or the steps reviews, it's really useful for us. Like it's, uh, it's always good not to, to assume that we will know everything or we will see the problem. So providing clear replication steps, one, go to this website to click this button. Three, you will see the arrow. It's a, it really helps, you know, whether it's Cloudflare or whether it's actually any application that you use. It's, uh, it's always very useful when you contact support, when you request some help from, from other users, from, from support personnel, it's, uh, it's really great to bring something, give some context, provide what you want to achieve with the, with the product or with the feature, provide the steps to use. And then the person that will see your post or see your support ticket will be in the, in the best position to, to help. So basically you need to help us to help you basically. So we, we need as much detail as possible. We need context and we need the steps to reduce the issue. It's always great. Also, if you can provide screenshots, logs, any kind of, you know, any kind of details, any kind of relevant information, it's always helpful. And strip out personal information from the screenshots and logs. Exactly. That's a great advice from Nikita, like especially in the, in the, in the community. Yeah. And if, um, if the person who actually raised that previous thread was watching us and is watching us, no, we're not stripping anything from your host names when you're at the zone Cloudflare. This seems to be a classic use case for Cloudflare tunnel. What do you think, Tom? Yeah. So, so I think it would still need some more information about the setup, maybe. No, I don't, I don't think so. So, um, the customer is having, um, an application that is only available in their intranet, in their local network, right. And they want to configure, uh, an authentication for this application, um, in order to expose it to the public Internet. So if you use Cloudflare for Teams and specifically the access part of the product to, um, protect the endpoint of your application, um, for authentication, and then you, uh, expose this application, uh, via Cloudflare tunnel, or it was previously called Argo tunnel. This would mean that, uh, your application only needs to allow, uh, Cloudflare tunnel to connect to it. Uh, and then all of the, all of the packets will be passed through, uh, Cloudflare tunnel. And then what will happen is when someone from the external Internet opens the URL behind your application, they will represent it with Cloudflare access, um, front end. And then, uh, they will be able to log in using their preferred, uh, authentication methods. It's either one -time code or your SAML solution can be anything, Okta, um, Google workspace, anything. Um, yeah. And then once they are authenticated, the request will be passed back to, um, Cloudflare tunnel and we will proxy it safely. But shouldn't it be possible for them to just, uh, or to, to write us our IPs and then do a classic DNS based setup if they want to, if they want to, but here they're only, um, whitelisting their, um, their known IPs. So if they would want to do this, they will need to whitelist all of the IPs, uh, listed at Cloudflare.com slash IPs. Otherwise, um, it won't work because we won't be able to access this application from the outside. Hence the Cloudflare tunnel as a possible Zero Trust solution for this. Yeah. We can definitely recommend people to always check the documentation, what Tom did here, like add the link to the, to develop a documentation for teams. So the developer documentation actually for, for teams and for a lot of our features is actually pretty extensive. So you can find a lot of information there. So that's something we can definitely recommend to people is to, to check the, check the documentation and always, and same if you are a Cloudflare employee and if you are replying in the, in the community, or if you are, you know, an MVP or someone that is helping others in the, in the community, it's always great. It's always a best practice to point the person to the link, provide the external content that helps you to actually answer to the question. It's always a best practice also. So for the, for the Cloudflare features, basically there's two places where you can find documentation. So the developer documentation, but there's also the, the, the KB, the knowledge base. So you can, you can search for, for solution there and you can, you can try and find the solution yourself or share with, with others in the, in the community. It seems to be a big day for Cloudflare for Teams. This one is about Gateway. Right. Let's see. Unfortunately, I didn't work with Gateway that much. So let's still try to see. I think we want either to have a support ticket about this to raise a feature request, or we want to have, Sam, if you are watching us and you, and you happen to be a product manager for Cloudflare for Teams, would you mind please responding to this user when you are planning to have this feature available in your product? If it's not released yet. Tom, do you want me to take over the screen sharing so that we could have the music back and then you will just tell me. Sure. Let's do it like that. I think I'll keep this open and I'll check back later if Sam replied. If you watch this and yeah. So we are still seeing your screen, Tom. Maybe think that you want to take over. Yeah, I need Tom to stop screen sharing first. Oh, you can just, you can just start it. Oh, that was the video. Nope. Because you're the host of this meeting. Oh, okay. Nevermind. Nevermind then. So Tom, you are not sharing permissions. Okay. Great. Okay, music's back. Hey! Yeah, so guide me. What do we want to see? Where do we want to click? Well, maybe we can remind people once again that they can search for topics using the search at the top right hand side corner. Yep, that's here. And you can click option to get some more options. And especially if you can help with the topics where there is no reply. So that's where. No reply. So where topics. Have zero replies. Yes, that's what we want. Especially Cloudflare people that are watching us today. If you can join and help our users that didn't get any assistance so far. Yeah, also sorted by latest topic or latest post. Depending, it doesn't matter if it doesn't have any replies. Yeah, if no replies, yeah. Yeah, because otherwise you will see any old topics that might be locked where you can't really reply to. All right. Okay. This one seems to be about gateway as well, right? So family Cloudflare. If there is something that's not filtering the content, we have a page on Cloudflare for teams sites that allows you to flag. That's the main. So if we want to change the category, for example, on some of the sites, then we need to flag it via this form. Ah, right. Okay, I see. Um, is this about the DNS resolution then? Because here the query is going via IP address and here we will resolve this domain, right? Yeah. Right, okay. Let's leave that. What else? AS0. From IP, which seems to be a DigitalOcean. Well, let's run. This is an interesting one, actually. Yeah. I think it resolves to DigitalOcean. So yeah, this IP belongs to DigitalOcean. Um, the good way of checking this is to use a Whois. So this IP range is from DigitalOcean. If you see this in the logs and we don't have the AS number propagated correctly, the good thing that you can do is to raise a support ticket for this because we will be able to fix it for you. Okay. You want to reply or should I? Yeah, you can reply. All right. Let me put a question in the middle of this. Um, so when did you guys first see Cloudflare in action? So what was the first time where you saw Cloudflare products or saw it on a site? So for me, it was when I was browsing the Internet in 2014 or 2013. It was right before I started becoming a customer when I saw that lots of pages had these wait five seconds until your browser's checked site. And that was basically how I noticed Cloudflare. What was it for you? Yeah, I think that's the case for a lot of people. They come to know Cloudflare because of the interstitial and the attack or the capture page or. For me, I don't really remember, to be fair. Maybe it was on these kind of pages, but then it was, I think, during the hiring process. I tried to set up one of my domain on Cloudflare. So that's where I created my account, started to put my domain on Cloudflare, joined the community actually because to get some help because I was having some issues with the SSL settings. So that's where I really came across that. So as a reminder, once again, welcome everyone for this community jam and happy anniversary to Cloudflare TV, happy birthday Cloudflare TV, Cloudflare community. So if you are watching us, whether you're from Cloudflare or from externally, please like the thread. If you see a good answer to a thread, you can tag it as a solution. So that's really helpful for everyone. If you see an answer that you like, you can actually like it on the community. So that's once again really helpful to make sure that what we see on the community, when it's the right answer, when it's a useful answer, when it gets tagged as such. That's actually something I'm doing right now because I see some people from Cloudflare that are replying, some people from the support team. So Damian is putting some good answers out there. So I'm flagging them. So should we search for some of the answers to show how to flag them as a solution? Yeah, sure. Maybe there's a search option where you can check for if something doesn't have a solution. So and probably have more than one response, right? Yeah, we're looking at the same thing. I would just say let's open a couple of them and then just check if there are any good replies yet. Yeah, oh, I spot a Spanish one. Interesting. I'm not sure why we are greeting Alejandro. Is there any particular Alejandro in our community? If so, then Alejandro, you're wanted at the stress, please respond back. Okay, so email delivery issue with Donweb. Everything is configured properly, but the emails are not arriving. I can send emails, but I can't receive anything. Don't know how to fix it in Cloudflare panel. What do I do? Okay, so the key point here is I can send stuff, but I cannot receive stuff, right? And this is how email delivery works. In order to send stuff, you need to connect to SMTP server to send the message. But in order to receive stuff, you need to have a valid MX record that points to a receiving mail server and it needs to resolve at any given time. Otherwise, the sending server will not know where to send your message, right? So this is kind of expected if your MX record is not configured correctly or if the listening mail server behind it does not respond, you will still be able to send your messages, but you will not receive them. So in this case, it is definitely MX record problem. Make sure you are not marking it as proxy because we are not proxying mail traffic by default. If you want to proxy your mail traffic through Cloudflare, the only way to do this is by using the product called Spectrum. And yeah, you just want to debug your MX records. And if you're using CNAME for it, make sure that your CNAME chain ends up in the right place. So Michael gave the perfect response here. The only thing I would mention is that if an MX record points to an orange clouded host name, then we have a workaround which is supplied in the background, which then basically shows the IP address. So it will leak your IP address if you have MX records and not just Spectrum. So that's the only bad thing with it. Let's go here just to give a quick glance at what the MX record is. So it looks like this. And this value needs to resolve to a correct IP. So how do I go from here to our help center is the question. That's actually interesting. So we were talking about content that is available, so in the developer documentation or in the support center. So that's the support center with our knowledge base. But previously, Nikita was in the learning section of our website. So the learning section is more for anything that is not necessarily related to Cloudflare. So in this case, it was about the MX records that are not something specific for Cloudflare. So it's generic knowledge. So if you want to learn about DDoS attacks, about how DNS works, about how cache works, so you can definitely go to the learning section of the Cloudflare website. The guy, yeah, that's in Spanish. So I probably want to respond in Spanish. So here is the help center, right? Which would be the best place to start troubleshooting this. And basically, it tells you the same thing. And there is even a video that you can play that gives you a better understanding of how MX records work. And here is the bar, which Tom was referring to, which explains what we do if you intentionally or unintentionally orange clouded or proxy it via L7 proxy in Cloudflare, your mail traffic. We will create, let's say, technical record, which starts with DC. It will point to your origin mail server, because we are not proxying this traffic. And your CNAME chain for your mail subdomain, or whatever subdomain you're using for MX record will end up here. This way, we will not affect your mail traffic. Otherwise, it just won't go anywhere, right? So these two articles are the best to start with, if you're having any issues with mail delivery, and you're not sure if it's related to Cloudflare or not. Actually, our MVP Dom just mentioned that we have a report for literally anything. For example, for topics that have replies, but no solutions, there's a report for that, like a report page where we can see all of those threads. My Spanish. Yeah, I'm not sure I can help you with that. My Spanish is very rusty. Let's try to do it like this. This question actually about... Sorry, Tom, go ahead. No, you go ahead. No worries. Okay, so this question about emails trouble and email not deliverable, that's something that we see. I would not say often, but we see regularly on the community, but also on the support tickets. And the knowledge base article that Nikita was sending and was mentioning is definitely the right place to start. So check the MX, check if the MX are correctly configured, correctly resolving, and that they are returning the expected values. So there's also records like TXT records that your email service provider will provide you. What are the records that are expected? What are the expected values? And so you need to make sure that these are aligned and maybe check with your email service provider. If you don't know them, they can confirm with you. It's always a good place to start asking hosting providers and email providers because they can troubleshoot this a little bit faster than we can, probably. Because always keep in mind Cloudflare has lots of customers with lots of questions. And if you don't get a question in time, then just go ahead to your hosting partner or your hosting provider and ask them too, because maybe they have a quick solution for it. And yeah, it takes your time down to wait. Or you can also try the community, of course, which will also help others to figure out if they have the same issue as you. So another kind of example of an error message that should involve you contacting your hosting provider is the status code 524 that you have on the screen, which is timeout occurred. And it can be confusing because you see a Cloudflare parenthesis here. But the ultimate reason for this error message to be returned, as you can see in MianMian's answer. MianMian is from the support team at APAC. It's a timeout. So your origin web server did not respond to us within 100 seconds with the full response headers. So for all of our 500s, the best place is this article. And we have a specific one for 524. So by default, it's 100 seconds. If you happen to have an enterprise contract with us, we can raise it to 600 seconds. If you open a ticket with support. But it's generally not a good practice to have your application waiting for so long to respond with full response. So if you're seeing this, contact your hosting provider. Or if you are a very geeky developer and this is your application, configure it to serve status code before you send all of the response headers. And this way, you will work around this timeout. So here, I will mark MianMian's response as a solution. Awesome. So again, a quick happy birthday to Cloudflare TV's first birthday. And as today's EMEA special, basically, we have Gordon White joining us as our Cloudflare customer support manager in a bit. So stay tuned. And if you have any questions, again, just write in. And you have the email below. And let us know. So once again, for everyone, keep liking the threads like Nikita just did. Keep marking the answers as the solution. That's really helpful for everyone, whether it's internally or externally. So Cloudflare people that are joining us today in the jam, please try to find some answer that you can reply. And if you see some thread where you see the right answer, please mark it as a solution, like it. It's really useful. Maybe we should also explain why it's a good thing to actually interact with the community and to push posts with likes and replies and so on. Thing is, as more active the community gets, as more people it's going to help, and it's more become searchable for the whole Internet, basically. So as more questions are asked there, and tickets being redirected there, and as more soft solutions or replies are marked as, then, yeah, basically, it's easier to find solutions to issues you're having as a customer or as a Cloudflare partner. And I mean, a lot of people are now using the Cloudflare services or the solutions. So whatever the issue you're encountering, there's a good chance that some other users have encountered the issue or encountered the problem or got stuck at the same point as you. So it's always great. Go over, ask around, ask if anyone has seen the problem, and maybe someone will say, yes, I've seen the issue. You need to do this and that. And so it's always great to mark this response as the solution so that people know that if they are encountering this issue, then they can trust that this answer is the right solution for them. So that's really the principle of the community. And marking the threats as solution, liking the threat, liking the answers, it's really helpful for everyone. Like it's helpful for the users right now, but for the users in the future, like there's a very good chance, once again, if you encounter an issue, someone else will run into the issue. We're really thankful as a support team for everyone helping in the community and responding to posts, replying there or just giving input because it essentially helps us as a support team to focus on the more urgent and important stuff that's coming in, like really under-tech tickets, stuff like downtime that's caused by some weird bugs. It really helps us to deflect some of this burden to the community, basically, and therefore allows us to improve the products even faster. And there's also some categories like the developers category where you can actually find some assistance or find some help on some use cases that are not necessarily related to Cloudflare, but that are involving the Cloudflare features. So for example, if you think about workers, so you have a specific use case in mind, the support team, we are not all very proficient in JavaScript, but maybe in the community, you will find an actual web developer, an actual specialist in JavaScript that can help you write your worker, that can help you debug your worker and move your solution further. That's a good point. People are in the community that are really having fun developing stuff, writing software, writing code, who are really experts in these areas. And it's a really good way to get help on stuff that's not really covered by support, for example. Which is workers, code debugging. For example, yeah, of course. It's also a good platform to share experiences, I guess, like experience you had previously when deploying Cloudflare for any project you had. Okay. So do you want to take a look at a few more threats before Gordon comes? Sure, let's go ahead. Website email is going to spam. I like that one because it's with DNS and email. Wait, do you see that? Ah, right. Interesting. For our club internal emails only. Yeah, that's interesting. So first of all, generally, not really connected to the ticket, or maybe it's connected, I'm not sure yet. So emails are a really special thing in the Internet. It contains more than half emails sent are spam. So email providers have to take some security measures to actually prevent lots of spam from happening. And in order to do that, there are a couple of security measures, basically. One of them is SPF, Center Policy Framework, which allows you to basically provide a low list of IP addresses, domains that should be allowed to send mail and that will not land in spam then. Also, there are some other technologies like DKIM and DMARC, which you can see in this reply from... Oh, it's from you, Nikita. So all of them basically increase your trust score. It could also be, of course, that your email or your IP address is on the blacklist with some providers like Spamhaus or... What was the other big one? Spamhaus and Spamcop, I guess? There are several real-time blacklists, like Barracuda, for example. That one too, yeah. Yeah, that people are using. But the overall troubleshooting is always the same. You have usually three ways to authenticate. SPF, which authenticates the sending server, its hostname or IP. DKIM, which is a hashed key that you include in your DNS records. And then if the sending server presents the same key, then it's authenticated. And DMARC, which is your instruction for the receiving mail servers on how strict they should be in regards to checking SPF and DKIM for the messages that arrive from your domain or pretend to be arriving from your domain. So I had a response that explains all of this. Yeah, also one thing to mention is there's no 100% guarantee that your emails go through. You can only increase your chances basically by employing these mentioned security measures. For this, just contact your email provider. They will be happy to provide everything you need. And most of those stuff is especially added via DNS records. So make sure that they are up to date. Yeah, another good thing is to actually ask the recipient of the email or to check with your email provider. If you have any SMTP errors that were returned, might also help debug if there were any blacklisting going on or something. But yeah, at the end, it's always related to the email provider or to your email setup. And we can't really help with that. We can just check if your DNS records are set up correctly, basically. For everything else, I would recommend just reaching out to email provider and checking with them. Here we have 5-to-5. 5-to-5 is an SSL certificate problem. So 5-to-5 is returned. You will have three modes in the dashboard that you have. You can have flexible, you can have full, and you can have full strict. So when you're using flexible SSL modes, we are connecting to your origin over port 80. So over HTTP. And there is no TLS handshake happening at all. If you select full, we are connecting over port 443. And we expect your web server to present a certificate to finish the TLS handshake. But in full mode, we do not expect this to be a valid certificate. And it can be expired. And it doesn't necessarily need to cover the hostname that you are using to access your website. And then there is full strict, which works as any other SSL service in the World Wide Web. It requires your certificate to be up -to-date and cover the hostname that you're requesting. So 5-to-5 is when we connect over 443, but the TLS handshake was not finished. So it's likely that your web server did not present any SSL certificate at all over port 443. Or there was a network connectivity issue. So we did not get the full details of your certificate before the connection was closed. And 5-to-6, which is a very similar error to this, is when there is a certificate presented, but you're using full strict. So it either does not cover the hostname that you are querying, or your certificate expired, or you're using the cipher suite that is not allowed by your certificate chain. All right. And on that, I think we're going to invite Gordon, right? Yeah. So thanks a lot, Nikita, for sharing your screen and for troubleshooting these issues with us. So let's welcome Gordon White, our Customer Support Manager here at Cloudflare. And yeah, hi, Gordon. Hey, great to be here. You guys are doing an amazing job. I'm really entertained, as well as informed. Entertained and informed, the best way. Thanks a lot. So do you want to quickly introduce yourself? Sure. So I'm Gordon White. I've been with Cloudflare now, oh, there's a question. Come up six months to join just before the end of the year. Take over responsibilities for running the support team in Europe, where we have about 30 support engineers based here. And we form part of a global support team that's about 120 strong these days. In Europe, we're positioned in between the UK, London primarily, Lisbon increasingly, and a team in Munich as well. So multilingual support engineers like these wonderful guys and many other superb colleagues that they have. My personal background actually is in support. I'm a support thoroughbred these days. I spent about 10 years with Oracle building up their European support team there. Five years with Siebel Systems, actually working in the US. And more recently with Quest Software here in the UK. Again, looking after support, building support teams, building support portals. I love it. I think it's the combination of getting close to customers, getting close to the products, and working in a team environment, which is great for me. I love it. Awesome. So you joined just six months ago, and I actually really liked when you took the time to speak to everyone basically in the team, or at least in our customer support team. Sorry. Sorry, I really love that. But what actually attracted you to join Cloudflare? I knew a little bit about Cloudflare, but I was recommended by a colleague, as it were, a colleague of mine who works in Asia Pacific near you, who said this company is exceptional. So I took a sounding. I spoke to a few people. I trusted. That's a good thing. It's a good learning from there. Trust some of your ex-colleagues. They tend to know you better than you know yourself. So I trusted near you, and I spoke to a few people, and did a bit of research. And yeah, I like kind of disruptive technology. I like businesses where they're trying to change for the better. So it kind of appealed to me at a number of levels. And the more people I met in Cloudflare, the more switched on I was. And that's been validated actually over the last few months. I have to say, I don't think I've worked with a better bunch of professionals ever in my career. So no doubts about my decision on that front. That's for sure. That's good. You can tell us. So today is the birthday of the community, the Cloudflare community. So have you used VR, or have you participated in these kind of communities before joining Cloudflare or in your previous companies? And how do you think they are useful? I'm a massive fan. Hence, the key is to participate here. Yes is the answer. Yes, yes, and yes. For me, it has to go into the actual heart, the strategy of your go-to-market. And I don't mean that just with my support hat on. I mean that just with my business hat on. Because it's about your reputation. It's about your credibility. It's about servicing customers effectively. It's about helping customers service themselves. It's about generating enthusiasm in what you're taking to market. So yeah, I'm a big believer. And I've had lots and lots of success building up communities from scratch to being a very effective channel for partners and customers to participate in. And so yes, I'm a big believer. I think it needs to be nurtured. It needs to be developed. I think we need to continue to invest in it as we're doing with this type of session today. But on an ongoing basis, which is why I'm keen to see support and other members of the product and consulting teams participate in the communities on an ongoing basis. And yeah, and a big call out to the MVPs. Without participation at that kind of level or on an ongoing basis, you just won't gain the momentum and the credibility and the value that I was talking about. And we've certainly got that here, all thanks to Tim and the MVPs and what we've built. And yeah, so I will continue to be a big supporter of communities until my dying day. Good question. And I think I'll just add on to that. I think there's something that certainly we've got an eye on over the next few quarters is how the community fits in the self-services that we're looking to develop. So I think there is some scope maybe to have it slightly more integrated into our help center. I think certainly we're looking at our help center, our support portal, to have enhanced federated search right up top where we can span the likes of not just our KB and our dev docs, but also the community threads. And then try and encourage people to be looking at community activity and community solutions right up front. I think it'll be a better experience for the customer as well as clearly. My old boss used to say the best demand to support is zero demand. So if there is a way that you can have customers researching, finding out solutions. And here's something to keep in mind. I mean, as I mentioned earlier, there's only 120 Cloudflare support engineers. There is millions of Cloudflare users. So there's a really good opportunity to get a faster response actually through the community than through a ticket. So just keep that in mind. So yeah, a lot of value in the community today. And I think there's more as we can integrate it more with our own help center processes and portals. He actually took away my next question because we talked a while ago about the future of the community. And I was actually just going to ask how you think that it's going to change in the future. So good answer to that. Well, I think it's, I mean, this is not like a situation I've been in in the past where you're building a community from scratch. We have an incredibly rich community. We have committed MVPs thanks to Tim who's nurtured them and increased the participation levels. So this is an amazing platform. And I just think what we need to do is to continue to participate in it. And I think which we're doing, thanks for you, Tom and others, but I think we need to begin, as I say, I think there's opportunities for us to begin to cross-reference some of the other content that we're bringing out. I think there's opportunities to integrate it more from a kind of user perspective. So if a user is coming to the health, my dream in my mind is customers come to support.Cloudflare .com. And from there, the avenues open up to be able to find in a kind of structured path to be able to find magic transit or gateway issues and maybe be able to kind of guide customers down to a particular information source. And that kind of, so I think we need to think about the design of that portal. And then obviously the reach of any kind of federated SERPs that takes place. And then related to that is the content that we're creating. So it's all very well about having the greatest portal in the world, but if the content is not there in the community or the content's not there in your KBs or the content's not there in your videos or tutorials or walkthroughs or dev docs, then you won't serve as customers. So I think we need to work on the content design as well as the kind of interface design, if you will. I think we really need to work on having the support center and having the community really link together and also to kind of fit everyone, not just like the experts of the community, not just the beginners, but everyone. Like there must be resources and learning centers for starters that don't know much about DNS, for example, but also for people who are more advanced and want to build their big infrastructure basically based on us. I think that's a really good point. The art of support, often I think the art of support is getting into the right wavelength of the customer or the partner that you're dealing with because the skills levels could be from a beginner to an expert. So I think you're right. I think you need to tune the services that you provide to fit and get in that wavelength. And the same applies to the self-service. So I think we need to have more walkthrough tutorials, beginners, so people can find that quite easily. And then the deeper expertise, have other sources they can go to to find more scenario-based material, more complex kind of issues and access, the kind of higher level of expertise that they're looking for, for sure. And I think that's been translates through to how we're delivering a service now where we're looking to make sure within support that we can bring the right expertise to the right customer profile at the right time. And I think every customer is completely different. And the trick and the art and support is to make sure that you can bring the right expertise in the right subject area. And that's a challenge in Cloudflare because it's such a broad product area and depth. So right now within support, we're looking at how we can specialize expertise into particular technology areas or solutions areas so that we can bring the right expertise. Because I think the days where a support engineer is gonna be a master of everything is probably behind us. So it's a challenge. I mean, it's not just the number of products that we have. It's also that you combine them in any way possible and it provides so much stuff that needs to be checked when, for example, an enterprise customer comes to us and has an issue versus when a beginner comes that just uses DNS and DDoS protection, for example. Yes, yes. Yeah, you're right. And I think, and we're now working with a number of partners. I mean, I know the subject came up the other week in a discussion. I think we do need to think about how we offer some form of certification potentially or formalized training. I know we've got some brilliant internal training that we board our own support engineers with. But I think there's definitely scope for, as we work with more partners who will be operating as intermediaries between us and the customer, that we make sure they have access to the similar level of training and technical guidance. Maybe even to the point where there's some kind of certification, I can see us heading in that direction so that we're actually kind of rubber stamping a level of expertise that's out there in the marketplace. And I think, again, from past experiences, I think there's some market credibility that goes with that. We know about VMware certification, VCP. If someone is Cloudflare certified, I can see some kudos being associated with that. Awesome. Nikita, do you guys have any questions so far? Gordon has proven to be very successful at predicting the questions and answering them as well. You were comfortable. I'm going to get a comfortable laugh from Nikita, I know. So you were talking a bit about enterprise, and historically, enterprise segment is not really active in community because apparently, by default, it doesn't really fit their needs, right? Not only with Cloudflare, but with any other IT company, right? So I wanted to know whether you have any interesting ideas about how we could make the community more beneficial for enterprise and high-tier customers. If they were to actively participate in it, what would that be? Yeah, good question. I've taken different approaches to that before. I think there's a generic marketing. Classically, I do find that people in the... And I even put myself, tower myself with the same brush here, is that people in more technical roles, typically, are not the greatest marketeers in the world. So I do think there's more we could do in getting the message out, even to our enterprise customers, around the value of the community and the value that we will soon have, even increasingly, to our support portal and our help center. So I do think we need to push that because those guys can be, again, in my experience, can have some of the most competent, most knowledgeable, because perhaps they've invested and used the product for a long time. And with an expanding set of products, they've got a lot to contribute. So I wouldn't discount the value that communities could bring. I just think we need to encourage increased participation. And how do we do that? I think every single one of us in support needs to be pushing the community more. I think our customer success managers who are talking on a more one-to-one level will know the key technical participants and begin to encourage the contributions from that source. So I would never discount. I think they should be participating in the community as it stands today. One thing that perhaps we could look at ahead is more of a, as we did, and potentially we could look at here, where there's maybe a partner forum that is slightly separate or a premium forum that's slightly separate where you can have, maybe share additional information, almost like a kind of added value to a particular forum for a particular customer segment. So that is something we could look at. But for now, I think there's huge value to be had if we just encourage the right participation levels. Yeah. Right, great. There's maybe one question I wanted to ask you, Golan. So, and that's something that we actually discussed a bit, but we want the engineering team and the product management team to be involved in the community, but maybe you can discuss a bit more on how do we interact with them as a support team? Yes, yeah, good question. Yes, because again, I know you talk about opportunity and potential within a services delivery organisation. And I think the two biggest opportunities, in addition to obviously servicing our customers as effectively as possible, is the influence that you have on the product side, for sure. So the back office, how we can begin to use that intelligence. And then again, taking the voice of the customer, which we're receiving every day, perhaps feeding that back through, as we do with customer satisfaction feedback, through to sales and accounts team. So I think that the way that we work with support is that for me is perfect position because it's like a rich intelligence source that can feed temperature, it can feed information to sales and the kind of proactive way because we're getting obviously about what we're handling about 4,000 tickets a week. So we have many, many customer touch points. So it's using that intelligence to good force. I think from a support to sales, massive opportunity. And as you ask, yeah, from a support to product, again, is huge. And I think the best organisations are the ones that take that intelligence, that data value and convert it through good analysis and good feedback processes into the product team. So what does that mean? That means what trends are we seeing from the coalface, if you will, that might help our product managers or engineering teams look at inherent design, look at supportability characteristics, look at ease of use, ease of deployment, configuration options, diagnostics. So how easy is it to troubleshoot and diagnose issues? So all this information that we're gathering, which quite often is generating threads and communities and generating tickets to support. So how do we leverage that and make sure that we're making the best possible value of it in terms of prioritising development work or considering a product design or product features that's going to help the customer help themselves? Because as I say, the best support is zero support. The best demand is zero demand. So I think what you need to do is just look at how you can convert that information into the best possible value for the customer in terms of their experience. We also never reach the zero, right? It's a theoretical work, otherwise we're out of a job. So I don't think... Exactly, exactly. So in your experience... I want to say, keep in mind though, because you know where my passion lies. I do think I want to get to the point where we're creating, we're spending more time, a larger proportion of our time working with the product teams as we do to a degree today. So increased effort in that area and then increased effort in creating and influencing content. So rather than 100% on reactive ticket response, which is our job, don't get me wrong, guys, but I just think we need to apportion a little bit more time to the preventative medicine, which is creating KBs, it's influencing or suggesting content, it's influencing the product. I mean, that really should be part of our job. So this is the exit point, right? KB, solution, feature request, product engineering. Let's talk about the entry points. From your experience, not necessarily the Cloudflare one, what is the best channel to contact support and why? Yeah, okay. Well, what we're doing today is a superb entry point. I think, as I had next thing earlier, I think something to keep in mind, especially with quite often a complex solution area is that the better qualified the issue or the better researched or the more information that's provided to a support organization, the better equipped that support organization will be to service you very effectively. We'll reduce the iterations and we'll get to the nub of the matter much quicker. So with that in mind, I would always encourage customers to, you know, default community for sure. Default support.Cloudflare.com for sure. There's riches there in terms of content, videos, best practices, configuration guidance. The beauty of the community is that it's vibrant at the moment, which is superb. And it's that one-to-many impact. If you raise a ticket with support, we will respond, we'll provide you the solution. It's not, unless we create a KB, which you will, create a trigger from that, it's less visible to the greater mass. And I think the community, that's the power of the community is that a response in the community, if our search is good, which it does, but I think I'd like it to be more of a federated search from the portal, which it will be, then you really get a bigger bang for the buck in terms of self -service, customer experience and reduced demand to support. So I think the portal, to answer your question, definitely the community, definitely the portal, where there's a wealth of information. And then obviously, if, you know, and there's blogs, there's lots of information on a community site, but from a technical perspective, those are the two primary sources. And certainly if still, you know, no solutions, then ticket submission, which is available from the portal. And there's a really interesting prompts. We have got a federated search from within the ticket submission where we're prompting good information there. We're doing some suggested diagnostic capture for the customer that will help feed that back to us as well. So I think those are the, the kind of three main avenues. So community, the support portal, and then the ticket submission where we will also begin to kind of prompt using our helper bot, we'll be able to prompt some suggested solutions. So those are the best approaches. Yeah, also the community MVPs and some community members helped us recently a couple of times actually to spot some issues that we had in our products. Like for example, we had a downtime in Athens in Greece. We also had some issues sometime with the direct connect records for MX records and DNS. And they really helped us spot them and helped us fixing them really quickly. So what do you think about that? I think it's amazing. I mean, I don't want to be relying on the community to uncover issues on the cloud first. But the fact that, that obviously, you know, we have our own monitoring and that we don't cover such errors. But the fact that in parallel to that, we have a community that is done on MVPs, which is flagging information through the wires that could potentially impact a broader set of our customers. It's huge. It just shows you for me that that's kind of indication of the power of our user community. And the quicker that we get information flagged through to us in that form or any others, again, supplementing our own monitoring and alerting is fantastic. And it allows us to react really quickly and address these issues as we did an incident. In that instance, I know that an incident was declared pretty quickly and mitigated and overcome. So, but, you know, I just want to say a personal thank you for the MVPs and keep it coming. Let's hope it's not too often that it's needed. But I mean, but yeah, certainly value all that kind of feedback for sure. What I think is... Let's just correct something for the network team. Sorry, Tom. We didn't have downtime in Athens. Oh, sorry. It wasn't a downtime. It was a network connectivity issue between the Cloudflare Edge data center in Athens and a certain origins. So this was less visible to us, but customers and people in community could spot it easier. And hence, we really thank them for doing that. That's amazing. I definitely take that back then with the downtime. Yeah, but I think what really speeded up was that in the community, people could just reply to a thread and say, hey, yeah, it's not down. It had an issue for me too. But if it would be in support tickets, we would probably just ask for more information first and it would take time for everyone to get back for us to actually connect those tickets and realize that it's a broader issue. So I think that the community really helped there. Yeah, absolutely. It's not always easy because the structure of a support organization is by design reactive. It's available to receive. So you're kind of waiting on issues to be fed through to you. So any form of kind of problem, whether we've recently introduced the SOC as a service, which is fantastic. That's a step towards getting more proactive because we're actually monitoring customers' environments for any potential security threats. So I think any opportunity to get ahead of the reactive curve is good for sure. So, Gordon, you're actually mentioning the SOC, which is definitely an enterprise service that we provide to our high-end customers. And so maybe do you want to talk a bit more about what is the relationship between support and the customer success or the sales organization that is servicing the biggest customers? For me, that's just, thanks for asking. That's, I used to run a premier support organization in a previous life. And I know in Cloudflare that it's within the sales organization, which I think is a better structure than under the support organization. However, I think that, again, jumping back to the previous point, support is by design a reactive function. It has to be. It has to be. It has to be geared to handle service requests as they come through. So how do you get a little bit upstream? We talked about product, get upstream with the product. How do you get upstream with customers about what are they planning on doing? How can we get the right guidance at the right time and avoid problems before they materialize? And for me, that's where the CSMs are massive because they are intimately connected with the customers deployment organization or security operations or whatever. But they are, they've got that level of intimacy that a support reactive function will always struggle to achieve. We're waiting on the problem to meet and then when we spring into gear. So I think working closely with the CSMs is a key to success, and no pun intended there. But I think the way that we share information, and I have to say, within Cloudflare, it's been amazing the way that the collaboration and I have weekly kind of meetings with a local regional CSM. So that kind of level of intimacy and information sharing that takes place on a two-way basis is huge. It helps us. Anyway, with community as well. Yes. Actually, I unfortunately need to cut us off here because our time's nearly up. But thanks so much for taking the time, Gordon. Thanks so much also Nikita for the music and of course for being here. Also, Nik, thanks for being here. Thanks also so much. Thank you, Tom, for being here. Thanks. Also, thanks to the Cloudflare TV team. Happy birthday again. And to everyone who participated. Who participated in the community. Also, yeah, MVPs, of course. MVPs, community members, everyone. Just everyone. Really, thank you very much. Really tries us. And yeah. And we really hope that once this is over, you will still go to the community. You will still make solutions. You will still respond. Like it all. Because we will definitely do that and we will really appreciate your input on this. Okay, time's up. Thanks, everyone. And have a great day. Cheers. Bye-bye.