Cloudflare for Speed and Security
Scale faster and save big with the global edge cloud platform
PDF, Kindle & Epub
Early Access
Buy The Ebook Now!
What if I told you that you could shrink your cloud bills all while increasing the performance, scalability and security of your web applications and services?
Sounds too good to be true?
Almost unnoticed a few years ago, Cloudflare is now the fastest growing cloud platform. Best known for its Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Web Application Firewall (WAF), Cloudflare has become the easiest to use all-in-one developer platform with services ranging from object storage (R2) to serverless hosting (Workers), passing by video streaming, all while being cheaper and more reliable than the big 3 incumbents of the cloud landscape.
Their secret sauce is that hey care about developer experience and their products are secure by design. No more bucket with sensitive data publicly left exposed. No more database left wide open. No more ultra-complex security policies that lead to mistakes and leaks. No more dashboard more complex than a nuclear plant. No more surprise bill because someone targeted a while true; do curl ... at your servers and made your bandwidth balloon.
But, Cloudflare is not magic, you will need to learn new design patterns and have a deep understanding of protocols to get the most out of the global coud platform.
From theory to practice, you will learn how low-level network and security protocols work. How to configure Cloudflare to secure and scale your web applications. How to create serverless applications and which database to chose with serverless functions. How to optimize your caching policies. How to distribute videos globally. And a lot of other things, all of that while significantly reducing your cloud bill.
Maybe I should not tell you that, but I will literally explain you how to fire your devops team. With Cloudflare you will never ever have to manage servers, clusters or SSH keys again.
The ebooks are DRM free, of course :)
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Early Access
Between writing, editing and technical review, it can take some time to complete a book. This is why I release my books before they are completed. First, so that you can start learning today, but also, so I can get feedback and refine the content of the book with your feedback.
Bonuses
If you purchase Cloudflare for Speed and Security before November 4, 2023, you will get my best seller Black Hat Rust for free! Yes, you read it right, two books for less than the price of one!
Also, all early-access supporters will get the checklist that I use to quickly setup a new domain on Cloudflare with the right balance between security, performance, and user experience.
Finally, the price is likely to increase once the book is out of Early Access, so don't wait until it's too late to get your copy.
Date of final publication: mid-January 2024
Buy Now!
If have you already purchased Black Hat Rust, please let me know and I will gladly give your another book for free.
Who this book is for
This is NOT a 1000th tutorial on how to set up a CDN, nor will it teach you the fundamentals of programming.
Instead, it's a from-theory-to-practice guide and you may enjoy it if any of the following:
- You think that speed is a fundamental part of the user experience
- You keep screaming "show me the code!" when reading about scaling
- You want to understand how low-level network protocols work and their impact on your applications
- You think that security should be "by design"
- Your cloud bill is too bug and you want to take back control
- You are a developer and want to learn security
- You believe that the best defense is thinking like an attacker
- You learn by building and love to look under the hood
- You value simplicity and pragmatism
- You prefer getting things done over analysis paralysis
But I repeat, this book is NOT a computer science book.
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Table of contents
1 - Introduction
- How to manage multiple environments (dev, staging, production)
- The principal differences between Cloudflare and other cloud providers
2 - Optimize your applications with the CDN
- What are Autonomous Systems
- What is BGP
- Why peering matters
- TTFB your said?
- The difference between SSL and TLS
- How TLS work
- How QUIC/HTTP3 work
- Understanding the tiered caching architecture
- Shrink your cloud bill with the bandwidth alliance
- How to reach a near-perfect cache hit ratio
3 - Secure your services with the Web Application Firewall
- How attackers bypass Cloudflare and how to protect your websites
- How to use Cloudflare Tunnel to avoid exposing your services to internet
- How to block malicious traffic without blocking legitimate your users
4 - Store and distribute assets faster and cheaper with R2
- The insanity of egress pricing of other cloud providers
- How to migrate from S3 to R2 without downtime and shring your cloud bill
- The relation between latency and bandwidth
- How to get the best throughput out of your network interfaces
- Why you should not use the
r2.devdomain
5 - Deploy at the edge with Cloudflare Workers and Pages
- Smart runtimes: a new paradigm?
- How Cloudflare is dogfooding Workers to build other Cloudflare services
- How to avoid vendor lock-in by developing apps that can be deployed on any provider
- How to create compute-intensive workers wit Rust and WebAssembly
- How to connect to your database: TCP or HTTP and why the impact on your app's performance is immense
- Which database to use for your serverless app
- When serverless function make sense, and when they don't, with case studies
- How to deploy a full-stack app on Cloudflare pages with Functions
- How to build a smart reverse proxy to say goodbye to CORS and other nasty issues
- How to setup CI/CD for Cloudflare Workers and Pages
6 - Automate everything with Workers AI
- How Large Language Models (LLMs) work
- How to specialize your AI agent
- Embeddings vs fine-tuning
- What is a vector database and when do you need one
7 - Distribute videos for a global audience with Stream
- What are the alternatives and how to save even more on your streaming costs
8 - Secure your assets with Cloudflare Access
Conclusion
- Future risks ahead
- Reduce your business' overhead with unified billing
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Talk is cheap, show me the code
As always, the code accompanying the book will be freely available on GitHub: https://github.com/skerkour/cloudflare-for-speed-and-security
FAQ
How does it work?
After purchasing the ebook, you will be able to access it with the bonuses in your account. All future updates are free.
Can I purchase multiple books for my team/organization?
Sure! You can adjust the quantity on the checkout page.
How are payments secured?
The payments are secured by Stripe.
Any problem?
Feel free to contact me.
Changelog
You'll find all the updates in the Changelog: https://github.com/skerkour/cloudflare-for-speed-and-security/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md