⚡️ Welcome to Speed Week 2023

Hello everyone and welcome to Speed Week 2023. My name is Babur Khan. I'm on the product marketing team.

I'm joined by Sam Marsh from the product team. Sam how's it going?

Yeah very well thank you. Happy to finally be here at Speed Week. It's been a long time coming but we've got a lot of great announcements to talk about this week so yeah happy it's here.

Likewise I'm super excited. This is my first innovation week to work on here at Cloudflare so you know there's a lot of stuff that we've been working on over the past couple of weeks and definitely a lot of really nice announcements.

I'm super excited. I think before we talk about some of the announcements specifically why don't we kind of go through the themes that we're trying to cover in this Speed Week and kind of look at you know what people can expect in the coming days.

So I think let's look at the overall mission. So we obviously there's a lot that we're covering but the key mission here is to be fast or the fastest at everything that we do here at Cloudflare but not just that also making it simpler for our customers to gain access to that performance not just you know claim a bunch of numbers but also make sure that our customers can see those numbers.

What are your thoughts on this Sam? Yeah that's right. I think the most important part of this week is showing how you know we're already fast you know we've always been extremely fast and the fastest in a number of areas but I think this week is showing a how we continue to get faster and kind of in a few minutes we can talk about just some of the areas and the kind of sheer breadth of kind of what speed means at Cloudflare but secondly and arguably the most important topic is if you go out there and you can find a way to show these numbers on like a stopwatch or in a controlled environment it's great but you need to make those numbers attainable for customers otherwise it's just academic you know so what we've been focused on maniacally really is finding a way to a be the fastest but b make it like two or three clicks of a button to give that performance to customers and get that performance in their hands so that they benefit from from all the hard work we've done and a number of the kind of blogs we're launching this week and one we launched today and specifically is going to help do that literally for customers they kind of click a button and things get faster compared to scripting things going in and using the API or having some employees at the company do it for them it's going to be in their hands it's going to be zero config and that's kind of the the overall mission that you say for for this week and and for us going forward love that I think yeah always I've always been a a big proponent of making things easier to use you can have the best product but if it's too complicated to use it's always going to spend its life sitting on a shelf somewhere not being deployed in production so totally love that let's move on to the next slide and see why it matters so why why do you think not just speed but making it attainable matters yeah so in terms of why speed matters you know you don't have to google very long to find just endless articles linking poor poor web page performance poor website performance poor web store performance to sales directly so we worked with Shopify last year on a product on a technology called early hints and the statistic they they kind of generated was when a buyer visits a website if that first page they experience is just 10 percent faster there's an increase in conversions by seven percent which is incredible Deloitte did one a few years back and they found basically that a point one second improvement in site speed increased the number increased the amount sorry that consumers spent by 10 percent so 100 milliseconds can really have just an enormous impact on site performance so if we can find a way to for those customers who are serving e-commerce traffic through Cloudflare for example to just give them that boost and hopefully a lot more than than 0.1 seconds of a boost then that should really kind of equate to an increase in sales for their for their kind of company in terms of why making it easier matters i think it's it's essentially obvious but if we're making these products or making these protocols these technologies which make people faster if you need to go and read a bunch of docs and join a bunch of webinars and figure stuff out on your own for days and weeks at a time then it's not really something you're going to want to invest in and spend a lot of time on and conversely if you're paying you know 20 bucks or a thousand bucks a month on this you want it to be as easy as possible to kind of get what you're paying for to get your roi so that's why we we kind of like i said been really focused hyper focused on if we say we can get it down to two seconds whatever the metric may be whatever the performance may be we want to make sure that's possible for customers and we want to make sure it's possible two or three clicks and that's again all linking back to there's a real tangible economic benefit from having a faster presence on the Internet yeah and and you know i'm personally a Cloudflare customer as well uh for my own website so definitely i mean i would like to see the numbers be reflected in real life performance and not just see them on a blog somewhere and be like oh okay so definitely makes a lot of sense to me uh let's move on yeah so you know going back to the the mission statement we are the fastest and you know we want to prove that how do we how do you think like what areas are we focusing on when we talk about being the fastest um and how are we working towards proving that yeah it's a good question the biggest issue with all of this is making it empirical so making it data-driven rather than we think we're the fastest so we're just going to say we're the fastest and that's going to be our approach all along is to show that show the test methodology and you can go back through the blogs for years now to find that as evidence to show a how we're testing so you can you can replicate that on your own if you want to our competitors can replicate this but show the data show all the data so don't just cherry pick statistics that make us look good show everything because in a few months or in a year when we run this again we can show and we have been showing how we may have only been the fastest in 43 percent now we're the fastest in 47 percent 55 and we can show that going up and if we kind of hidden those away because they weren't so glamorous then it wouldn't be quite as impactful and it wouldn't be quite as trustworthy so i think a first of all proving that we're the fastest and showing how we're proving that but the the kind of second part and the most eye-opening part i think when when we started doing this this innovation week the speed week is just the sheer breadth of everything that we're doing which we can empirically show we're the fastest in you know we started with with obviously the Cloudflare network showing how our network's the fastest amongst 3 000 kind of top across 3 000 top networks we then have on the other side of the kind of fence almost showing how our edge compute is the fastest compared to competitive competitors same with object store we've got empirical evidence on dns from an authoritative and resolve a recursive perspective so from dns to Zero Trust to cdn cash purge compute object storage we're just constantly going around the business finding these product in these product areas and challenging our teams to say can you prove you're the fastest here can we write a blog on this can we add it to to this list hence the kind of ellipses at the bottom here and i think it really underpins how performance really is central to to everything you know what what years ago probably was the purview of websites like we just spoke about um in terms of faster websites more conversions faster websites better seo which which obviously leads to um more kind of organic leads it's always been website website website but when you you start to speak to customers and you start to kind of look at the the kind of five ten years of emerging trends like Zero Trust kind of edge compute there's performance elements of those as well people want to know how quick is it to to run workloads at the edge people want to know what's the fastest Zero Trust provider for how many minutes a day are my employees wasting waiting to log in through these through these gateways what's the traffic impact if they have to go back to a certain point of presence where they may have a hardware gateway deployed what's the impact there so the more of these areas we kind of get involved in and the more of these areas that come up the more obviously it becomes the performance is is just absolutely central to them and it becomes a huge impact on on the buyer decision essentially so that's why we've been focusing on a showing our products are really great and they're very easy to use and they kind of unlock a lot of value but a but b sorry showing the potential of them showing we can be super fast here and some of the numbers you'll see in the blogs we launched this week are really eye -opening in terms of how much faster we are than some of the industry leading companies are the incumbents of these of these um of these segments so yeah i can't wait to to share some of the numbers and um and kind of really open people's eyes yeah i i know it's the start of the week so we're we're pacing ourselves but you know it's it's it's super exciting and i can't wait to see all the blogs go out but you know that's one of my favorite things about the blogs as well here at Cloudflare is that we just go into so much detail and we share all the information the transparency that we have here it's it's unbelievable and and i i'm pretty sure everyone who's reading our blogs has to appreciate and love that but yeah speed made simple that's that's the next team right that's that's one of the teams that we've seen over and over across the the multiple different blogs that we have coming out this week um do you want to share your thoughts on that yeah i mean like i said a couple of times the the ultimate goal and kind of how we try and evolve products in general is get something out there that works prove the concept proves the value get people using it get people benefiting from it and then try and find a way to iterate to a point where it's trivial to use it's trivial to configure or there's no configuration at all right and a really good example of that one we can talk about thankfully because the blog went out today is around early hints so early hints something we were working on with the google team google chrome team and shopify for the last couple of years we announced that at Cloudflare connect london last year so just over a year ago now and early hints has shown just tremendous performance results in the real world so it's a tick box on the Cloudflare dashboard and what we do is we look at the response headers sent back from a customer's origin and we effectively find a way to send files to the browser whilst the server's thinking about how to send the rest of the data basically and in the real world we've seen around a 30 percent speed improvement for lcp largest contentful paint which is enormous really is but the issue always as you'd expect with that is it still relies on users to do something it relies on users to a correctly understand their website or the web application and look at the files that are being sent from that server whether it's css html images and accurately say that's something we should early hint on that's something we shouldn't early hint on so they have to understand it really at that level and be they've then got to go and configure the link header the response header put those files in there put them in there syntactically correct which is always a challenge with do you put a space or not a space and get all that right to even send a chance of benefiting benefiting from that performance and we got it working like i said we saw the performance out there there are people out there benefiting there's lots of people out there benefiting from this but we challenged ourselves and we said we're the cdn here we're the one who sees all this traffic going across our network we're the ones who have the rum data we're the ones who are frankly in a place where we can do this without the origin and sending us this header is telling us what to early hint on we should be able to do that for the customer so today we launched something called smart hints and what smart hints effectively is is the next kind of step on that journey so we launched early hints we proved the concept we proved the performance now we are building a way where the customer just clicks a button the user just clicks a button we look at the traffic coming from the server we determine which files which assets are the ones to hint on which ones aren't to hint on and we generate the hints and we generate them and send them to the to the browser and the customer just benefits from the performance there's literally nothing to do apart from click a button in the Cloudflare dashboard and that's kind of what we try and rinse and repeat over and over in every product area every feature we ship is make it easier make it easier make it easier to the point where there's just zero involvement and we almost commoditize it which is kind of the ultimate goal so super excited about about smart hints and the other area which which this benefits and we've kind of spoke about this a few times with some of the products we've launched like transform rules is it starts to give ownership back to to admins or to customers who have moved away from traditional on-prem servers that run all their stuff in like a castle and moat scenario and they're using things like salesforce or various of the sas applications in those scenarios you don't have access to the origin you can't set the response headers you can't do anything the traffic just flows out of there so having something like Cloudflare in front of those sas applications lets you take control of that traffic back lets you modify it as you'd like and this in this situation lets you use early hints and accelerate as you like so suddenly any application which you're using which you don't control you can turn early hints on through this button without having to go and set these headers so again it really kind of brings back that control to to admins and gives everybody speed you know it gives everybody that potential 30 percent lcp improvement so super excited about that and again it's just a really great example of of speed made simple yeah and i love the fact that yeah you know as a service provider we do have access to all this data but how you use that data and how you you know look at that data and give the benefit of looking at that data back to the customer that's pretty important to me and i think we do a great job at doing that especially here with early hints that's right and then yeah getting on to Cloudflare faster this i i you know this was one of the teams uh that i was pretty close to because of some of the projects that we talk about here but you know i i really enjoy how how simple we've made it for people to migrate over to Cloudflare what are your thoughts on that yeah yeah you're right i think simple is the the right word i think we've built all this really great technology right we've got empirical proof we are the fastest in so many areas but if you're using a kind of competitor of ours right now you'll probably find it's quite scary and they've made this purposefully quite scary to migrate away and that's done through confusing terminology it's done through purposefully you know change names for things we would just commonly describe as as something else and they try and lock you in and what we've been doing is like you say trying to find a way to unlock that so customers don't have to have this burden of oh it's going to be really complicated to do and this is kind of scary and should we just carry on paying this egregious bill just because it's kind of what we've always been doing and what we're looking to do is just break that wall down and like you say we've kind of got some very um interesting assets coming up which are going to help to do that and just kind help customers understand hey if you want to migrate and take advantage of all this really great stuff we're working on this enormous network which runs at crazy speeds and all these products which are just market leading we can help you get away we can help you migrate whether it's dscaler for getting away from zscaler to Cloudflare gateway whether it's the super stepper product for getting away from awss3 to r2 the new migration hub we've been working on like you say for getting away from fastly and akamai onto Cloudflare we're working through all these competitors and all these industries to just say hey look if you want to come to Cloudflare we're going to make it as easy as possible for you to do that whatever we can do we'll do it perfect um and let's let's move on to the last theme here measuring what matters so yes yeah we give people you know um a bunch of numbers about how we're fastest then we prove to them that we actually are the fastest then we give them the benefit of that performance by you know making sure that they can migrate onto our solution but i think all of that is important on on one side but making sure that people can pinpoint where the problems are within their network within their deployments and then taking an informed action based on that all of that information that we're providing them i think that is really important as well right that's right yeah that's right it's giving customers the insight to performance whatever it may be whatever vertical it may be and one of the areas that's going to be quite apparent this this week as you say around measure what matters is again it's not just traditional web traffic it's not just traditional cdn here we're talking about Zero Trust performance we're talking about stream performance we're talking about obviously cdn performance as well api performance api traffic performance there's just so many different vectors here um just again to highlight performance is central people want to be fast but people want to understand how fast they are where those bottlenecks are and how they can make it even faster and we're giving people the tools to to do that understanding and optimization again all within the Cloudflare dashboard awesome um so before we move on sam i had a question what what's different this year compared to uh the previous innovation weeks we've had in general but also the previous speed weeks or what do you think is is different this year what do you think is something that we should definitely be thinking about as we go further into this week yeah i think it's there's a few blogs we posted today which kind of give a peek into this there's just a a real enormous breadth like last the last speed which was two years ago now was quite broad in terms of what we talked about which product areas but i would definitely say the subject matter of what we're talking about this speed week having been across all the blogs is is extremely diverse you know there's pretty much every angle and every facet of what we do discussed from a performance perspective which is so incredible to see obviously there's kind of a lot of influencing factors in terms of market trends so how ai is affecting our network how ai is affecting all the products we're building how we're building with it how we're trying to benefit from it you know that's that's obviously the topic du jour and we'll be discussing that um the other areas are are mainly around um Zero Trust talking about some of the really interesting things we've been doing on Zero Trust um which is actually really interesting for someone who's not particularly close to it to see some of the really great uh tools and the really great products that the teams have been working on it's been really fun to read about and really fun to to play around with um and ultimately there's just a lot of big improvements in in the application performance space so i won't spoil it for people but we've got a really great announcement coming out tomorrow which is basically rebooting application performance in the dashboard giving it a brand new home and just making it super easy for customers to be fast so very excited about that trend of speed made simple and just putting that power and that performance into customers hands at a few clicks of a button i think that's the that's the best news we could give people i i know what you're talking about in terms of the announcement tomorrow and you know if i had to list one of my favorites here for this week that would have made it uh in the top three but yeah this is a controversial question probably but if you had to pick a favorite in today's announcements which one would that be and why today's yeah so today's i would i would have to pick the smart hints one i'm sorry to all the other authors um purely because you know it's it's just a really great example we love we love examples of where we've kind of come up with an idea we put it out there we've proven there's demand in it and now we've iterated and we've taken that power and we've put it behind a single button and we're using our intelligence we're using our position on the Internet to just make it faster for people there's no reading books there's no having to edit scripts and configs on service it's just turn this on get faster and and you know that's the slogan that i can trademark i would because that that should be the mission in everything we do and and i think right after this session uh in fact right after speed week i'm gonna try to enable that on my website as well see what the performance changes are there and i'm sure it's gonna be awesome um let's move on to the last slide then uh yeah so quickly before we leave i just wanted to you know go through a little bit of what you can expect in this week and where you can find more information if you want to check out the announcements that we're making every day throughout the week please make sure that you tune into Cloudflare tv we're going to be talking about the day's announcements every single day so keep an eye out for that um the blogs obviously sam mentioned the blogs um they're highly technical go into a lot of depth um they will be talking about all of the solutions that are coming out all of the announcements that we're making this week so make sure you're looking at those there are also some really cool um uh customer stories in there as well and then obviously if you're not following us follow us on twitter and linkedin because we're going to be sharing a lot of these blogs and stories there as well and finally try it out the product we a lot of these um solutions that we're going to be talking about they're even available for our free customers but also you know if you're a customer make sure you try a lot of these solutions out uh as many as are relevant to your your you know business your website your applications and make sure you get you get the benefit of the performance boost that we're giving our customers um and with that sam any final thoughts before we start speed week yes like i said get involved share get in touch on social media let us know what you think let us know what your thoughts are let us know if it's related to something else you'd like to see us build and just yeah get in get in touch and um let us know what you think and um thanks for watching and like baba says join in every every week uh every day this week we'll be discussing all the posts um we have and we'll be talking with some of the authors uh about what they've been shipping why they've been shipping it and what the benefits are so make sure you do join in to to learn a lot more about each of those announcements cool thank you everyone thank you