Cloudflare is a global edge network and internet infrastructure company that provides CDN, DDoS protection, DNS, and an increasingly powerful developer platform. For web applications, Cloudflare sits between your users and your origin server, caching content at over 300 data centers worldwide to reduce latency and block malicious traffic. In custom web application development, I use Cloudflare extensively. This very website is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, their static site hosting product that deploys directly from a directory with zero build configuration. Beyond static hosting, Cloudflare Workers lets you run serverless JavaScript at the edge, R2 provides S3-compatible object storage with no egress fees, and D1 offers a serverless SQLite database. The security layer is equally important: automatic HTTPS, WAF rules, bot management, and rate limiting protect applications without any additional infrastructure. Cloudflare has become foundational internet infrastructure.
Cloudflare was founded in 2009 by Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, and Michelle Zatlyn. The idea originated from Project Honey Pot, an open-source project Prince had created to track online fraud and abuse. Prince and Zatlyn met at Harvard Business School, where they developed the concept into a business plan that won the school's business plan competition. They launched the product at TechCrunch Disrupt in September 2010. The company went public on the NYSE in September 2019. Lee Holloway, the engineering co-founder who wrote much of Cloudflare's early core code, was later diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, a story that became widely known through a Wired feature article in 2021.
Cloudflare generates cryptographic randomness for its security systems using a wall of lava lamps in their San Francisco office lobby. A camera continuously photographs approximately 100 lava lamps, and the random patterns of the bubbling wax are fed into a cryptographic random number generator. This system, called LavaRand, provides an entropy source that is physically impossible to predict or replicate. The company also has similar analog randomness sources in other offices, a chaotic pendulum system in London and a radioactive source in Singapore.
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