Cloudflare Boosts Performance and Stability for Its Millions of Websites with NGINX
John Graham-Cumming, programmer at Cloudflare, explains the company’s CDN and security products succinctly: “We’re the company you don’t realize you’re using when you browse the web. If you go to one of over 4 million popular websites, you actually come to our web servers around the world, and we make them more secure and faster.”
Business Challenge
As the CDN for more than 4 million websites, Cloudflare is an essential provider for accessing businesses gaining access to customers around the globe. Companies rely on Cloudflare to weather sudden bursts in user activity, web-based security issues, and even the dreaded DDoS attack. As such, Cloudflare’s 24/7 cloud-based services cannot go offline, and must accommodate huge amounts of secure traffic in a synchronized, global fashion.
Darüber hinaus erfordert die Weiterleitung des Datenverkehrs für Kunden die gleichzeitige Ausführung einer Reihe von Aufgaben: HTTP-Routing, SSL-Routing und Inhalts-Caching müssen alle von denselben Systemen ausgeführt werden, da die Hardwarekosten minimiert werden müssen. Jede Lösung zum Aufbau eines globalen CDN muss leicht, zuverlässig und hochleistungsfähig sein, um die verfügbare Hardware optimal zu nutzen. Die Bereitstellung cloudbasierter Dienste erfordert die Arbeit in einer Mehrbenutzerumgebung. Die Lösungen müssen die bereitgestellte Hardware optimal nutzen können, auch wenn andere Dienste ausgeführt werden.
Solutions
Cloudflare would not exist without F5 NGINX.
“NGINX is core to what Cloudflare does. It is part of the foundational pieces of software we use. There’s a very small list of things that are essential to what we do, and NGINX is one of them,” says Graham-Cumming.
Er fährt fort: „Wir haben uns vor allem wegen der Leistung für NGINX entschieden. Das bedeutet, dass mehrere verschiedene Websites auf derselben Hardware laufen, weshalb wir eine hohe Leistung benötigen. Wir verwenden NGINX für unser gesamtes Web-Serving. Wir verwenden es als Reverse-Proxy auf Tausenden von Maschinen auf der ganzen Welt.“
“We’re running 4 million websites globally, and some of those are very major. We’re taking the traffic load for all of those through NGINX, and in fact, in our machines we run three different instances of NGINX. We use one for caching, one for SSL, and one for normal HTTP,” Graham-Cumming explains.
Despite intense performance and hardware optimization demands, Graham-Cumming notes that three instances of NGINX on the same machine are still able to handle the high demands of their customers’ traffic.
Ergebnisse
Bietet Leistung und Stabilität für die globale Bereitstellung von Inhalten
Even with global demand, sudden spikes, and intense security concerns at every turn, NGINX remains at the core of Cloudflare’s infrastructure, enabling their business to meet the intense demands for secure worldwide web content distribution.
- High performance NGINX technologies enable multiple different websites to run through the same hardware
- Cloudflare uses NGINX for its web serving and as a reverse proxy on thousands of machines around the world
- Drei NGINX-Instanzen auf derselben Maschine können die hohen Anforderungen des Datenverkehrs der Cloudflare-Kunden bewältigen
- As an essential provider of content delivery network (CDN) services for the internet, Cloudflare cannot go offline
- Must accommodate huge amounts of traffic routing performed by the same systems to minimize hardware costs
- App delivery services for a global CDN must be lightweight, reliable, and highly performant