Cloudflare Blog

What gets published

The blog is very active, often with several posts a day during launch weeks. Posts fall into a few kinds:

• Deep technical explainers: recent examples include supporting HTTP's Vary header in the cache, saving 100TB of RAM with maths and Rust, and older classics on DNS, TLS 1.3, QUIC, BGP and DDoS mitigation.
• Post-mortems: a dedicated post-mortem tag collects incident reports, such as the outages of 18 November 2025, 5 December 2025 and 20 February 2026, a January 2026 route leak, and a resilience programme written in response.
• Product and developer news: Workers, Python Workers, AI features and security products. Useful if you use Cloudflare, skippable otherwise.
• Radar and policy posts: internet traffic trends, outages worldwide, and policy topics.

Why the incident reports matter

Most companies publish short, vague outage notes. Cloudflare's post-mortems usually include a timeline, the exact change that triggered the failure, why safeguards did not catch it, and what is changing. Reading a few teaches more about operating systems under load (configuration pushes, cascading failures, the danger of global rollouts) than most architecture material. It also shows what a good blameless write-up looks like, which is a skill you will need.

How to use it well

• Start with the post-mortem tag. Read three incident reports and, for each, write down the trigger, why it spread, and the fix.
• Follow the protocol posts when you study networking. If you are learning DNS or TLS, search the blog for that topic; the explanations are often clearer than textbooks and show real traffic.
• Skip most product announcements unless you use the product.
• Use the RSS feed or tag pages rather than the front page, which is dominated by launches.

Who it is for

Web and backend developers, SRE and platform engineers, networking and security students, and anyone who wants to understand what happens between a browser and a server. Some posts require networking basics; the explainers usually build them up as they go.

Pair it with

• Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach, or a networking course, for the fundamentals behind the protocol posts
• Google's Site Reliability Engineering book, for the theory behind post-mortems and reliability work
• High Scalability, for architecture case studies from many companies

Common questions

Is it free? Yes. All posts are free, with no sign-up.

Is it too advanced for students? Some posts are, but many explainers are written for a general technical audience. Start with topics you are studying in class.

If I only follow one engineering blog, is this the one? It is a strong pick for networking, security and reliability. For data engineering or machine learning, a different blog will serve you better.

Best for: engineers and students who want clear writing on networking and security, and honest lessons from real outages.