2024-09-30
5 min read
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
Tuesday
Wednesday
|
What |
In a sentence… |
|
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. |
|
|
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. |
|
|
Zstandard compression, Encrypted Client Hello, and more speed and privacy announcements all released for free. |
|
|
Starting today, Cloudflare Calls’ TURN service is now generally available to all Cloudflare accounts. |
|
|
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. |
Thursday
|
What |
In a sentence… |
|
Startup Program revamped: build and grow on Cloudflare with up to $250,000 in credits |
Eligible startups can now apply to receive up to $250,000 in credits to build using Cloudflare's Developer Platform. |
|
More powerful GPUs, expanded model support, enhanced logging and evaluations in AI Gateway, and Vectorize GA with larger index sizes and faster queries. |
|
|
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. |
|
|
A deep dive into how we made Workers KV up to 3x faster. |
|
|
Putting your application code into the storage layer, so your code runs where the data is stored. |
|
|
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
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.
Cloudflare's connectivity cloud protects entire corporate networks, helps customers build Internet-scale applications efficiently, accelerates any website or Internet application, wards off DDoS attacks, keeps hackers at bay, and can help you on your journey to Zero Trust.
Visit 1.1.1.1 from any device to get started with our free app that makes your Internet faster and safer.
To learn more about our mission to help build a better Internet, start here. If you're looking for a new career direction, check out our open positions.