Wrapping up another Birthday Week celebration
2024 marks Cloudflare’s 14th birthday. Birthday Week each year is packed with major announcements and the release of innovative new offerings, all focused on giving back to our customers and the broader Internet community. Birthday Week has become a proud tradition at Cloudflare and our culture, to not just stay true to our mission, but to always stay close to our customers. We begin planning for this week of celebration earlier in the year and invite everyone at Cloudflare to participate.
Months before Birthday Week, we invited teams to submit ideas for what to announce. We were flooded with submissions, from proposals for implementing new standards to creating new products for developers. Our biggest challenge is finding space for it all in just one week — there is still so much to build. Good thing we have a birthday to celebrate each year, but we might need an extra day in Birthday Week next year!
In case you missed it, here’s everything we announced during 2024’s Birthday Week:
Monday
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What |
In a sentence… |
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Start auditing and controlling the AI models accessing your content |
Understand which AI-related bots and crawlers can access your website, and which content you choose to allow them to consume. |
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Making zone management more efficient with batch DNS record updates |
Customers using Cloudflare to manage DNS can create a whole batch of records, enable proxying on many records, update many records to point to a new target at the same time, or even delete all of their records. |
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Taking the next step in advancing security with Ephemeral IDs, a new feature that generates a unique short-lived ID, without relying on any network-level information.
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Tuesday
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What |
In a sentence… |
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Cloudflare partners to deliver safer browsing experience to homes |
Internet service, network, and hardware equipment providers can sign up and partner with Cloudflare to deliver a safer browsing experience to homes. |
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A safer Internet with Cloudflare: free threat intelligence, analytics, and new threat detections |
Free threat intelligence, analytics, new threat detections, and more. |
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Automatically generating Cloudflare’s Terraform provider
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The last pieces of the OpenAPI schemas ecosystem to now be automatically generated — the Terraform provider and API reference documentation. |
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Cloudflare helps verify the security of end-to-end encrypted messages by auditing key transparency for WhatsApp. |
Wednesday
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What |
In a sentence… |
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Speed Brain, our latest leap forward in speed, uses the Speculation Rules API to prefetch content for users’ likely next navigations — downloading web pages before they navigate to them and making pages load 45% faster. |
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Instant Purge invalidates cached content in under 150ms, offering the industry’s fastest cache purge with global latency for purges by tags, hostnames, and prefixes. |
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Zstandard compression, Encrypted Client Hello, and more speed and privacy announcements all released for free. |
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Starting today, Cloudflare Calls’ TURN service is now generally available to all Cloudflare accounts. |
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Cloudflare’s 12th Generation servers — 145% more performant and 63% more efficient |
Next generation servers focused on exceptional performance and security, enhanced support for AI/ML workloads, and significant strides in power efficiency.
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Thursday
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What |
In a sentence… |
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Startup Program revamped: build and grow on Cloudflare with up to $250,000 in credits
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Eligible startups can now apply to receive up to $250,000 in credits to build using Cloudflare’s Developer Platform. |
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More powerful GPUs, expanded model support, enhanced logging and evaluations in AI Gateway, and Vectorize GA with larger index sizes and faster queries. |
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Persistent and queryable Workers logs, Node.js compatibility GA, improved Next.js support via OpenNext, built-in CI/CD for Workers, Gradual Deployments, Queues, and R2 Event Notifications GA, and more — making building on Cloudflare easier, faster, and more affordable. |
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A deep dive into how we made Workers KV up to 3x faster. |
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Putting your application code into the storage layer, so your code runs where the data is stored. |
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Using new optimization techniques such as KV cache compression and speculative decoding, we’ve made large language model (LLM) inference lightning-fast on the Cloudflare Workers AI platform. |
Friday
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What |
In a sentence… |
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Our container platform is in production. It has GPUs. Here’s an early look.
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We’ve been working on something new — a platform for running containers across Cloudflare’s network. We already use it in production, for AI inference and more. |
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We implemented a new bug bounty VIP program this year as part of our CISA Pledge commitment. |
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Empowering builders: introducing the Dev Alliance and Workers Launchpad Cohort #4 |
Get free and discounted access to essential developer tools and meet the latest set of incredible startups building on Cloudflare. |
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Expanding our support for open source projects with Project Alexandria |
Expanding our open source program and helping projects have a sustainable and scalable future, providing tools and protection needed to thrive. |
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Network trends and natural language: Cloudflare Radar’s new Data Explorer & AI Assistant |
A simple Web-based interface to build more complex API queries, including comparisons and filters, and visualize the results. |
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Extending our AI Assistant capabilities to help you build new WAF rules, added new AI bot and crawler traffic insights to Radar, and new AI bot blocking capabilities. |
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Our free plan is here to stay, and we reaffirm that commitment this week with 15 releases that make the Free plan even better.
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One more thing…
Cloudflare serves millions of customers and their millions of domains across nearly every country on Earth. However, as a global company, the payment landscape can be complex — especially in regions outside of North America. While credit cards are very popular for online purchases in the US, the global picture is quite different. 60% of consumers across EMEA, APAC and LATAM choose alternative payment methods. For instance, European consumers often opt for SEPA Direct Debit, a bank transfer mechanism, while Chinese consumers frequently use Alipay, a digital wallet.
At Cloudflare, we saw this as an opportunity to meet customers where they are. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we are expanding our payment system and launching a closed beta for a new payment method called Stripe Link. The checkout experience will be faster and more seamless, allowing our self-serve customers to pay using saved bank accounts or cards with Link. Customers who have saved their payment details at any business using Link can quickly check out without having to reenter their payment information.
These are the first steps in our efforts to expand our payment system to support global payment methods used by customers around the world. We’ll be rolling out new payment methods gradually, ensuring a smooth integration and gathering feedback from our customers every step of the way.
Until next year
That’s all for Birthday Week 2024. However, the innovation never stops at Cloudflare. Continue to follow the Cloudflare Blog all year long as we launch more products and features that help build a better Internet.
