Cloudflare's fourteenth birthday arrived in 2024, and with it the company's annual Birthday Week — a stretch of announcements that has become a fixture of both its product calendar and its culture. Planning begins months in advance, with teams across the company invited to submit ideas. Proposals ranged from implementing new standards to building new products for developers, and the volume of submissions was large enough that fitting everything into a single week remains the hard part. As the company notes, there is still plenty left to build.
Below is a recap of everything announced during the week.
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What |
In a sentence… |
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Start auditing and controlling the AI models accessing your content |
Understand which AI-related bots and crawlers can access your website, and which content you choose to allow them to consume. |
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Making zone management more efficient with batch DNS record updates |
Customers using Cloudflare to manage DNS can create a whole batch of records, enable proxying on many records, update many records to point to a new target at the same time, or even delete all of their records. |
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Taking the next step in advancing security with Ephemeral IDs, a new feature that generates a unique short-lived ID, without relying on any network-level information. |
Adding Link to the payment stack
Cloudflare's customer base spans millions of customers and their domains across nearly every country. That reach makes payments complicated, because card usage in North America does not reflect the rest of the world: 60% of consumers across EMEA, APAC and LATAM choose alternative payment methods. European customers often reach for SEPA Direct Debit, a bank transfer mechanism, while Chinese customers frequently use the Alipay digital wallet.
The company is expanding its payment system in response, starting with a closed beta for Stripe Link. Through the new method, self-serve customers can pay using bank accounts or cards saved with Link, producing a faster checkout — anyone who has already stored payment details with Link at another business can complete a purchase without re-entering them.
These are described as first steps. Further payment methods will roll out gradually, with the company gathering customer feedback along the way.
Beyond Birthday Week
Birthday Week 2024 is over, but Cloudflare says it will continue shipping products and features through the rest of the year on its blog.
