1. Our CloudFlare Experience
Nick Malcolm
CTO at ThisData

2. ThisData monitors and analyzes
a company’s cloud activity,
and stops Bad Things from happening

3. In the time it takes to hear this talk,
you could set up CloudFlare.

4. Overview
● Why to use CloudFlare
● How to set it up
● Our Results & Mistakes

5. Why?
● DDoS Protection
● Page Speed

8. How do I set it up?
● Sign up, and use them as your nameserver

9. What if I use SSL?
● Set it up, but don’t click the orange clouds yet.
● Add your SSL certificate details
● Turn on the orange clouds

10. What gets blocked?
● Adjustable security levels to challenge visitors
● White/black list by IP, Country
● DDoS Protection
○ Turn on “I’m under attack!” mode to analyze ALL
visitors & stop the baddies

11. What gets cached?
● All static assets (images, JS, CSS)
● Not HTML, by default.
● You can turn it on with white- or black-list rules
● Or via Cache-Control headers
● Can’t cache requests returning cookies

12. Results
● Protection from baddies!
● Response time decreased from 2.5s to 1.5s
● Content size reduced by 300kb
● Everything feels faster!

16. Mistakes
● GeoIP stopped working, as every request looks
like it’s from CloudFlare
● CloudFlare blocked a partner who sends us
webhooks

18. OOPS

19. Considerations:
● Breaks the 1-Bus rule
○ multi-user is enterprise only, starting at $2k :O
● You need to know what to cache
● Not a silver bullet for performance

20. Give it a go
It’s free! Or $20/m for moar features

21. Questions?
Thanks!
@nickmalcolm https://thisdata.com