Cloudflare Uses

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Cloudflare Uses

See what all you can do with Cloudflare Services. Lets's get started.

Services offered by Cloudflare:

Application Services: secure and accelerate your apps, APIs, and websites in minutes by pointing your DNS to Cloudflare. Instantly turn on performance and security services.

  • CDN
  • DNS
  • DDoS protection
  • Bot Management
  • Load Balancing
  • Rate Limiting
  • WAF
  • API Protection

Network Services: this help enterprises connect, secure, and accelerate their corporate networks without the cost and complexity of managing legacy network hardware.

  • WAN as a Service
  • Firewall as a Service
  • L3 & L4 DDoS Protection
  • Network Interconnect
  • Smart Routing

Developer Platform: deploy serverless code instantly across the globe to give it exceptional performance, reliability, and scale.

  • Workers
  • Workers KV
  • Pages
  • Durable Objects
  • Video Streaming

Zero Trust Services: stop data loss, malware and phishing with the most performant Zero Trust application access and Internet browsing solution.

  • Zero Trust Network Access with Private Routing
  • Remote Browser Isolation
  • Secure Web Gateway with CASB
  • Zero Trust Integrations

Deploy Serverless Code with Cloudflare

You can deploy serverless code to Cloudflare with the help of Cloudflare Workers. Cloudflare Workers deploy serverless code up to maximum of 100k requests for every day from across all the Cloudflare data centers to build an exceptional performance, reliability and scale. You can deploy up to 30 Worker Scripts and and 100k requests for free with Cloudflare Workers. 

They provides the working features with the two following plans and pricing:

  • Workers Free Plan - $0/month
  • Workers Paid Plan - $5/month

Build and Deploy Modern Web Projects with Cloudflare

You can build and deploy your modern web projects to Cloudflare with the help of Cloudflare Developer Platform. The Developer Platform is designed for serverless applications and to build JAMstack platform for front-end developers to deploy websites on the Cloudflare Edge Network.

The Developer Platform provides workers in the form of three categories:

Cloudflare Workers: The Cloudflare Workers deploy serverless code instantly across the globe. They provides the working features with the two following plans and pricing:

  • Workers Free Plan - $0/month
  • Workers Paid Plan - $5/month
Cloudflare Pages: The Cloudflare Pages involves JAMstack platform for front-end developers to collobrate and deploy the websites. It provides the page platform basic features with these three following plans and pricing:

  • Pages Free Plan - $0/month
  • Pages Pro Plan - $20/month
  • Pages Business Plan - $200/month
Workers KV: The Workers KV provides access to a secure key-value storage with low latency edge at all the Cloudflare data centers. The Workers KV consists of key-value storage features with these three following plans:

  • Included with Workers Free
  • Included with Workers Paid
  • Additional Usage

Test the Website Speed

You can test the speed of your website with the Cloudflare Speed Test Tool. Cloudflare basically offers a free site for testing the speed of a website and it additionally offers CDN Services to boost your website performance and reduce latency. You can also test your website speed from many online providers on the internet. All you have to do is to paste the URL of your Website into the following provided field at the Speed Test Tool site to start the test.

Speed up your WordPress site by up to 300% with Cloudflare's automatic optimization plugin. With Cloudflare Apio, you'll leverage our vast edge network of over 200 data Centers for lightning fast load times and best in class security. Every other plugin and CDN will cash your static assets, but none help you cash the actual content on your site. A PEO not only caches these static assets, but also intelligently caches the HTML content on your site, helping you achieve the next level. WordPress performance there is no difficult tweaking or optimization required. It simply just works. Apio comes with free CDN free AASLD, free DNS and unmatched DDoS protection. Download Cloudflare IPO for WordPress today.

The Cloudflare Speed Test site provides the performance metrics in the following:

Load Time: A Web Browser takes time to finish downloading and load the display of the website which is measured in milliseconds.

Time to First Byte (TTFB): The Browser measures the number of HTTP requests taken to make sure the page is fully loaded.

Requests: The Browser measures the number of HTTP requests are taken to make sure the page is fully loaded.

Protect your Team with Cloudflare

You can protect your global workforce team, employee devices and applications by implementing Zero Trust Access with the Cloudflare Zero Trust Services. The Cloudflare Zero Trust Services provides some base set of security controls which are designed to bring secure access to the internet, self-hosting and SaaS applications. You can secure the minimum 50 users in your team for free with Cloudflare Zero Trust Free Plan.

The main core features of the Zero Trust Services are to secure the users, devices, application access and networks with Zero Trust Browsing. 

All of the following features are provided by the Zero Trust Services:

  • Zero Trust Network Access
  • Private Routing to IP/Hosts
  • Network Firewall
  • Secure Web Gateway
  • DNS Resolution and Filters
  • HTTP/HTTPS inspection and Filters
  • Cloud Access Security Broker

Zero Trust Services comes with the three major following plans and pricing:

Free Plan: All core features are available for free to minimum 50 users with access up to 24 hours of DNS activity logging from limit of 3 network locations. No Service Support is available.

Standard Plan: All core features are available for $7 per user for every month with access up to 30 days of DNS activity logging from limit of 20 network locations. Service Support is available only through email and chat. It also provides Auth for automated services.

Enterprise Plan: All core features are available for Custom Billing for an year with access up to 6 months of DNS activity logging from limit of 250 network locations. Service Support is available through phone, email and chat. It also provides some additional features like Auth for automated services, Logpush to SIEM/cloud storage, Certificate based Auth for IoT and Editable IP network locations.

Protect your Site from Bad Bot with Cloudflare’s Super Bot Fight Mode

Protect your site from pesky bots with Cloudflare's super Bot fight mode. Nearly 50% of the world's Internet traffic comes from bots. These bad actors will spam your site, scrape your data and break into user accounts. Super Bot Fight Mode provides an easy to use solution to your bot problem. Cloudflare uses machine learning heuristics and other advanced methods to find bots. You can block the bad ones, but allow good ones like Google or Bing to continue accessing your site. Superbat fight mode includes detailed analytics that are updated in real time from the Cloudflare dashboard. Super Bot Fight mode is included in Cloudflare's Pro and business plans. Flip the switch and start blocking bad bots today.

What is a Bot?

A bot is a software application that operates on a network. Bots are programmed to automatically perform certain tasks. Bots can be good or bad. Good bots conduct useful tasks like indexing content for search engines, detecting copyright infringement, and providing customer service. Bad bots conduct malicious tasks like generating fraudulent clicks, scraping content, spreading spam, and carrying out cyberattacks. Whether they're helpful or harmful, most bots are automated to imitate and perform simple human behaviour on the web at a much faster rate than an actual human user. For example, search engines use bots to constantly crawl web pages and index content for search, a process that would take an astronomical amount of time for any human user to execute.

What is a Botnet?

A botnet is a network of devices that are infected by malicious software programs called bots. A botnet is controlled by an attacker known as a bot. Herder bots are made up of thousands or millions of infected devices. These bots send spam, steal data fraudulently, click on ads, and engineer ransomware and DDoS attacks. There are three primary ways to takedown a botnet by disabling its control centres. Running antivirus software. Or flashing firmware on individual devices. Users can protect devices from becoming part of a botnet by creating secure passwords, periodically wiping and restoring systems and establishing good ingress and egress filtering practices.

What is a WAF?

A WAF is a security system that uses a set of rules to filter and monitor HTTP traffic between web applications and the Internet. Just as a tool booth allows paying customers to drive across a toll road and prevents non paying customers from accessing the roadway, network traffic must pass through a firewall before it is allowed to reach the server. Wafs use adaptable policies to defend vulnerabilities at a web application, allowing for easy policy modification and faster responses to new attack vectors. By quickly adjusting their policies to address new threats, wafs protect against cyber attacks like cross site forgery, file inclusion, cross site scripting, and SQL injection.

How Cloudflare finds the fastest Internet paths for application traffic?

Cloudflare's Argo smart routing improves application and web performance by routing traffic around congestion on the public Internet. It does this using up to the second latency and packet loss data from the 10s of millions of web properties on the Cloudflare network. This intelligence lets Argo speed up any traffic moving between your origin servers and any point on the planet and when cache misses occur, Argo checks nearby Cloudflare data centres for the requested content, again reducing latency, origin loads and bandwidth costs.

Configuring URL forwarding or redirects with Cloudflare Page Rules

To configure URL forwarding or redirects using Page Rules:

Step 1: Log in to your Cloudflare account.

Step 2: select your domain where you want to add URL forwarding.

Step 3: Go to Rules and access Page Rules >> click on Create Page Rule. 

  • The Create Page Rule for <your domain> dialog opens.
  • Under If the URL matches, enter the URL or URL pattern that should match the rule. 
  • In pick a Setting, choose Forwarding URL from the drop-down menu.
  • For Select status code, choose 301 (Permanent Redirect) or 302 (Temporary Redirect).
  • Enter the destination URL.

Step 4: click Save and Deploy.

Step 5: Done.

Measure Network Performance with Cloudflare Speed Test

Cloudflare Internet Speed Test allows users to measure their website network performance and to test their internet connection using a Cloudflare global edge network.

Use this Cloudflare Internet Speed Test Tool to check your Internet Speed Test.

Cloudflare Internet Speed Test Access Link - Click here or use the following link to access the page https://speed.cloudflare.com/

Cloudflare Internet Speed Test allows users to download measurement results in CSV format once the test is done.

Cloudflare will never sell user's data. Performance data is collected and anonymized and is governed by the terms.

How to use Cloudflare Internet Speed Test?

Follow the steps below to test your internet speed with Cloudflare Service.

Step 1: Open the link from your desktop browser - https://speed.cloudflare.com/

Step 2: Automatically Cloudflare Internet Speed Test will run the Speed Test.It will take 10-15 seconds.

Step 3: Once the test is done. You can check your Internet Network Measurement Report. You can also download your speed test measurement results in CSV format.

References: https://speed.cloudflare.com/about/

What is Cloudflare One and Use of Cloudflare One?

Cloudflare one a zero trust network as a service offering that provides cloud based security, performance, reliability. And merges networking and security services in one comprehensive sassy solution.

Cloudflare One provides the security and connectivity capabilities you need to connect users,
applications, and branch offices in a work-from-anywhere world.

Cloudflare one draws on the global reach of Cloudflare's network to provide fast and reliable Internet connections, no matter where your employees work.

Cloudflare applies zero trust security to every access request, authenticating all traffic, protecting your employees and data from threats, and preventing unwanted access and data loss. Plus, it works with your existing infrastructure and can all be controlled through one simple unified interface. You get a solution that's easy to use. It works for your organization no matter where you are on your digital transformation journey. The end result of fast, secure, reliable and seamless experience.

Reference: https://www.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/

Do checkout more at Cloudflare Developers Docs or use the following link https://developers.cloudflare.com/