Cloudflare's Holiday Reading: What's New in the Network Engineering Trenches

With the US team offline for Thanksgiving, Cloudflare's EMEA branch is hosting a full day of live programming for #CloudflareCareersDay. If you prefer a quieter, more technical way to spend the weekend, the company published a batch of deep-dive engineering posts this past week. Here is a condensed tour of the most significant developments.

Web Vitals and Search Rankings

Speed has always been a Cloudflare priority, and it's about to have direct SEO implications. Starting in May 2021, Google will factor page experience signals into its Search rankings via the Core Web Vitals metrics.

Rustam Lalkaka and Rita Kozlov document how Cloudflare has collaborated with Google on this methodology and implemented support for it in their analytics tools. The full post explains how these metrics will influence SERP placement and why site owners should care.

Inside the Core Server Refresh

The servers running Cloudflare's Core infrastructure process logs and compute analytics across the entire network. In 2020, those machines needed upgrading, leading to a hardware redesign that mirrors the company's Gen X edge servers.

Two variants emerged: the AMD-based Core Compute 2020, which pairs with SSDs for analytics and general-purpose work, and the Intel-based Core Storage 2020, armed with twelve spinning disks to handle database loads. Brian Bassett's write-up details the efficiency gains from the refresh.

Quicksilver Reaches Production

Quicksilver is the data store handling billions of KV pairs that configure millions of Cloudflare-operated sites. A follow-up to the original announcement, this piece by Geoffrey Plouviez chronicles the data store's long road to full production deployment.

The journey concludes with the complete removal of Kyoto Tycoon from Cloudflare's infrastructure. The post lays out the real-world engineering challenges of replacing one of the company's oldest critical components and the first signs that the legacy system had become obsolete.

JAMstack Commerce for Black Friday

Cloudflare Workers continues to prove itself as a JAMstack deployment platform. A new post by Kristian Freeman demonstrates how to leverage Workers for e-commerce traffic, integrating with established tools like Stripe alongside newer frameworks such as Nuxt.js and the Sanity.io content platform. All code is open source.

A Real-World Byzantine Failure

Every design review at Cloudflare scans for single points of failure, but some faults are more insidious than others. This incident analysis by Tom Lianza and Chris Snook reconstructs a production timeline where a malfunctioning switch triggered a cascading failure through a system built for high reliability.

The post examines how the Byzantine fault mode—where components behave inconsistently or deceptively—manifested in practice and what it means for distributed systems.

Custom Silicon at the Edge

Cloudflare's network spans more than 200 cities across over 100 countries. Beneath that scale lies a foundational piece of hardware often overlooked: application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs).

Tom Strickx offers an extensive dive into how ASICs accelerate traffic and why they're integral to the network's operation.