with the last session of the day and ultimately the last session of the performance boot camp of this year. Uh we just don’t have another session. We have a very special session ahead of us and it’s about CDN’s. Uh and the title of the session is the global website hack. How a CDN makes your makes you local every everywhere. And who better to call on stage to talk about CDN than the people from Cloudflare. So I’m honored and excited to call upon stage the duo from from Cloudflare. Uh the first guest for this panel discussion is Tan U. Uh I would like to call him on stage now. and he is the senior manager of solutions engineering at Cloudflare helping enterprise digital native companies tackle complex security and performance challenges. Thank you so much and for being here on this panel. Uh the other guest that we have again from Cloudflare is Trevor Jackson. He is the senior systems engineer at Cloudflare focused on building scalable secure cloud and aiml platforms with experience across Google cloud AWS and VMware. Uh I can’t thank you both enough uh for being here on this stage and doing this panel discussions panel discussion with us. Uh I will dive straight to the first question and the first question is from Trevor. uh for businesses expanding internationally, what’s the biggest performance gap that a CDN solves? Yeah, first of all, thank you very much for uh having us here. When you I think about CDN in 2026, it’s still fundamentally the same problem we’ve had, right? No matter what we do, you can’t beat the speed of light. So when you have distance between your end users, the browser, and the website they’re trying to reach, it’s going to cause problems the further that they are, right? Latency is going to be a killer. Uh GP could be a killer. There’s many things just in between the two. So CDNs are kind of a prerequisite for modern applications these days. the closer you can get the user into a pop location and actually have an an exchange where you’re doing a handshake or connection and then ride a CDN instead. Uh you’re going to have a much better experience for your end user. We don’t build out our environment like massive, you know, like the hyperscalers where we have these huge regions everywhere, right? We decided to build a massive network and Cloudflare is incredibly incredibly large about 330 cities right now we have a presence in. So odds are we have a presence where your user is today. So getting that user onto that CDN is going to give you much better experience uh and reduce all the speed issues that you’re seeing right now. It’s kind of a prerequisite honestly. Awesome. I want to talk about u config from configuring the CDN and my next question is from you. What are the most common mistakes companies make when configuring a CDN for global reach? Yeah definitely. Um, one of the biggest mistakes and some of I I guess the most obvious and easiest one to do is just set it and forget it, right? Um, you should always fine-tune your CDN to provide the utmost importance and performance for, you know, where your user base is, what kind of content you’re delivering, right? Typically also out of the box, most CDNs aren’t gonna cache um HTMLs or things that aren’t cachable or static out of the box. Obviously, you shouldn’t cache anything behind admin and login pages, right? So, be wary of that as well, but I mean honestly, you should be able to cache certain API responses. You should be able to cache dynamic content, deliver video files, things like that with chunking, right? So that’s one of the things I would say um optimize it right configure that um to to the best performance ability and then one other thing is honestly falling into when I talk to customers a lot a lot of the times we fall into the global sort of like average trap right um and the average like might not really matter right because if the performance you’re trying to optimize is specifically like 95% of your users or specifically in regions when you look at a global average a lot of that might be skewed. So what I recommend customers do is break down by regional focus. And in addition, I would say you should really push for percentilebased monitoring. P50 the medium is the experience of your typical user, right? I would really go in to measure that. Then then you can hit P95 and 99. But yeah, it’s um it it’s a it’s a common trap to to look at global global averages as well. And the last bit piece is DNS, right? So every DNS is a foundational piece on the internet for a lot of these applications, websites. No one’s memorizing IP addresses and you know try to use uh a performant DNS provider because if you fall behind and use a slow DNS provider that’s going to add additional latency for that request from end to end, right? Awesome. Um before I move on to the next question, I have a few announcements to make. One of one of them is that if you have any questions from our guest speakers over here, feel free to post that post those questions on the chat and we will try to answer those questions by the end of the session. Another announcement is that we have a an official Reddit uh subreddit on on Reddit uh that you can check out any point in time and leave your feedback around this event on that subreddit. So, our team will make sure to drop that subreddit link over here. And the final announcement is that uh especially for the people residing in Mumbai uh we are hosting a cloudways developers and agency meetup in Mumbai uh on March 28th. So if you live in Mumbai and you’re watching this session I would highly advise you to register for that event u and uh our team will make sure to drop the link of that event in the comment section so you can go and register for that event and attend that event as well. So yeah that was that was the announcements. Uh Trevor, I would like to talk about some dynamic and static content. Now, how do you decide which assets to cache at the edge and which to serve dynamically? Absolutely. So, great question. Actually, a lot of the basics gets overlooked. So, when we talk to customers, they’ll ask those questions. What is what’s the best approach uh strategy, right? Static versus dynamic. Um typically, it was always the same answer, right? you would have your images, your CSS, your JavaScript, fonts, things like that always cached. That’s still pretty much best practices today. But again, these days, the edge is becoming much more intelligent. What you can actually cache and how uh can get a lot more granular. So almost like the edge computing kind of paradigm, right? Instead, so you still don’t want to necessarily cache, you know, somebody’s going to a login box or something like that, but we can actually dynamically bypass that now as it’s coming through. um and then determine which one should be cached and then which one should go around it. Another approach as well is maybe you have users that are coming to your website that are anonymous, right? Maybe we want to cache that information first, but then somebody issues a cookie or something like that. All right, then we’re going to bypass it instead or something like that. What we can do is actually start using uh cache rules that was part of even inside of like Cloudflare itself. So if we cache something that’s uh an image, maybe your hero image or something and it’s not in one of our publications, we actually have uh cache taring. So if it’s not there, it may actually be in a regional cache location as well. So we can get a lot more intelligent about how we actually cache content and what it is, but cache as much as humanly possible if you can. Uh there’s really no reason not to. It’s going to make everything faster. It’s going to make your vitals like you spoke about earlier um have higher scores which leads to better results and more people visiting your site. Awesome. Uh my next question is from you Tan. Um how do CDNs help protect against DDoS attacks, B traffic or sudden traffic spikes? Yeah, definitely. Um that’s a great question. I I would say in this day and age for sure you have to consider both security and performance in tandem right um I truly feel like if you’re not considering security your performance eventually is going to hurt and you know your servers get overloaded etc things like that so when you look for a provider think of a provider who can do both typically and who can do things in line where you know that reverse proxy or CDM provider can also provide the security functions, right? Because otherwise, if everyone is requesting um your assets from a CDN, one, you’re going to see a super high bill if you’re really not, you know, filtering out DOS attacks, bot attacks, and things like that. Um, and two, you want to make sure like at the end of the day, even with using a CDN, that your content and your assets are going to a valuable resource. Hopefully it’s a human eyeball or if you have you know a handshake that you’re doing with agents totally okay as well as long as assets are getting delivered to the right people right so again really important to pair CDN which is a very heavy performance functionality with security um you really I would say don’t consider that uh that trade-off awesome u Trevor we talked a lot about you know core web vital uh today in different sessions and even yesterday as well and I want to make sure that we touch upon that uh in this session as well. How does CDN deployment affect core web vitals and perceived site speed for end users? Yeah, absolutely. The core web vitals when used in conjunction with the CDN, the CDN almost becomes really like a cheat sheet, right? As we’ve heard from a couple of other people before already, having that content be accessible and fast to the user when tools like Google Analytics are going to go and rate your site, things like that. You’re going to want to try and get at least, you know, I think the base we talked about was about two and a half seconds, right, to get your hero image and things like that. Otherwise, your LCP scores going to way down. Um, having your images, your hero image, most of your site actually cached in a CDN, right? It’s going to be closer. Google is going to be able to actually look at those things and give you a better rating. Imagine if they were doing it and your website was, you know, 4,000 miles away. Uh, you have a CDN, what’s your performance going to be, right? That paint is going to be awfully slow. From a user perception as well, websites these days are loaded with integrations, there’s scripts, there’s, you know, CRM tools that are integrating all kinds of things. You really want that to be as fast as humanly possible. So offloading as much of that from your actual site or browser if you can into the edge where it’s already distributed is going to give you a massive improvement in uh metrics and both the perceived performance from a user as well. So that instantaneous feel, right? Even the CDN itself will try and use something like early hints. Okay, that will tell a browser like I think that this um this image or the CSS file is probably going to be loaded next and go ahead and just prefetch that and load it ahead of time as well. So kind of like when a browser is anticipating what you’re going to click on next, we’re going to do the same thing just to get that content delivered as fast as humanly possible. So it all works in conjunction with each other. Awesome. uh ten you want to chime in on this as well because uh I understand that you know core web vital is is an important topic and a lot of our people a lot of the audience u in on this event wants to know more about what you think what cloud thinks about core web vital so if you want to chime in on this question as well you’re uh always monitor it like um Trevor already touched on a a lot of pieces as well u but you know when you’re monitoring core web vitals another thing that could be important is also considering like again speed is everything on that right so protocol efficiency as well um think about switching to HTTP3 a little bit different from what we’ve been talking about but you know from legacy TCP plus TLS switching to HTTP3 will reduce that round trip from three round trips to one or sometimes zero right so another thing that kind of you should consider about core web vitals um because at the end of the day that’s just measuring your your base performance. Awesome. Uh I want to touch upon DOS and bot traffic as well. So how do how do CDNs help protect against DOS attacks, bot traffic or certain traffic spikes? Uh I think we did that one last uh which I’ll answer. Uh the question was about I think core web vital uh and if I’m not wrong and sequencing my questions. Uh we should be on number seven now, Danish, I believe, because uh before we went to core web vitals, I was the one that talked about um DDoS and combining CDN with a security provider as well. All right. So for for SMBs versus enterprise clients, is the CDN always necessary or are there alternative approaches? Uh Trevor, my question is from you. Yeah, of course. Uh if you’re an SMB, I would say these days a CDN is almost like your insurance policy. It’s not it’s not a luxury item anymore, right? Um a small business is not going to have like a dedicated DevOps team to go and handle a sudden traffic spike or even a small DDUS attack, right? The CDN almost acts as as Than was alluding to earlier, that set it and forget it kind of protection, right? if something does happen, maybe you are, you know, you invent the next greatest thing and all of a sudden you get a huge, you know, wave of people coming in. Uh, are you prepared to handle that? Right? It’s uh, it seems kind of simplistic in nature, but these things happen all the time. We’ve seen websites get overwhelmed uh, and come turn on CDN support, be able to grow their uh, their website for an SMB. Anyway, on an enterprise, right, it’s more about like efficiency, compliance, things like that. Uh CDNs aren’t just caching devices anymore, right? They have load balancing. They’ve got firewalling. They’ve got localized like residency. Where is this data actually needing to be? Things like that. Um maybe I have to to host things inside of the EU. Otherwise, what’s the alternative, right? These days, you’re going to go buy a data center full of, you know, hardware, have a bunch of boxes for independent tasks and things like that. We just kind of don’t live in that world anymore. It’s not very practical these days. You just need features. You need to be able to build and go fast. In the age of AI, you need to be able to go up as fast as possible because somebody else is probably iterating a little bit quicker than you as well. Any any benefit you can get. Uh, awesome. I want to talk about latency reduction now. Tan, uh, how much latency reduction can businesses realistically expect from deploying a global CDN? Yeah. Um typically the reduction is from hundreds to tens of milliseconds especially once things are optimized fully cached on at the edge right if it’s unoptimized I mean could could even be longer than that right and at the end of the day um we’re we’re fighting for attention if your website does not load you know in a very performant matter most likely folks are going to go elsewhere so very very missionritical Um yeah, typically the key is from hundreds from 300s plus to 50 milliseconds or so. Um and on Cloudflare in particular um still depends as well. There are customers who focus only on performance and there are there is ability to get that down even lower if you wanted to deactivate some of our security functions. Don’t recommend it though, however. But again, if you’re very very latency sensitive, you can um I guess back to protocol efficiency, definitely that will help um uh cut that milliseconds down as well because we’re reducing roundtrip time. Another thing that we also offer and also other folks should just think about is different sort of regional cache tiering. So you know if your customers and assets that you believe uh from a particular region are going to request more store your static assets closer to them ahead of time and there is cash expiry and things like that right but you know push cash on that particular pop that you expect things on. So regional sort of layering your tiered cache approach will also be helpful in avoiding kind of round trips back to your origin. Awesome. I want to talk about agencies now because a lot of the people in our audiences are agencies and they want to know about CDNs and if the investment is actually worth it. So how should agencies advise clients who are weighing CDN investment against other performance optimizations? And this question is from you both by the way. So I would like Tan uh to start first and then Trevor to follow up. Sure. Um with other performance optimizations. Um I mean egress is another thing. Uh I think egress is one of the top of- mind things you should for sure think about between CDN and other optimization right like of course in CDN delivery you will it’s a it’s a cost you’re taking on but you’re going to be saving in the long run egress cost that you’re hitting that’s hitting your EC2s your storage buckets things like that so um that’s definitely something that you should be thinking about and actually want Trevor to to dive deeper on this uh afterwards because he’s actually one of our develop veloper and AI experts but edge computing is a huge um um thing you should consider as well and I don’t want to think about edge computing as a diversion from your CDN investment it should actually be complimementaryary and it should actually be part of your performance and CDN offerings right with edge computing you could really deliver um regional focus AB testing for your customers things like that and make decisions on the fly. A [snorts] lot of customers here that we see deliver ads real time and make decisions based on which region, which device, what kind of habits in particular region that they’re taking on. So combining that next level edge computing and delivery um performance traditional performance factor like CDN is is really like the combination in my opinion you should be looking for. Awesome. Trevor, you want to chime in? Yeah, I’ll just add on top of that a little bit because he’s F is right on. If you are not considering what is the next couple of years look like for your applications, uh you’re doing yourself a disservice. We’re we’re in a time right now where we’ve never experienced this type of growth. Like what is the application delivery mechanism look like for the next couple of years, right? Gone are the days where it’s okay to just have your application served out of, you know, one region. A lot of our customers only operate out of one zone, one region, and that’s kind of what they do. But think about that from your competitive standpoint now, right? If you’re going to try and run inference because AI is being integrated into literally everything at this point. Are you just going to run a model that’s across the country, across the world, wherever you can get capacity, right? The cloud providers only have a finite amount of GPUs. Have you ever had an experience trying to, you know, access a resource and you just get a 429 all over and over and over again? it happens. Instead, think about edge computing in the concept of what if we did inference at the edge itself right where your applications are as well. Your data is already there. If we’re going to ask a question of the data, doesn’t it make sense to do it there too? Lower latency. Uh speed is definitely going to be faster because you’re right there and the availability of it because it’s all over the place and closer to your user. They’re going to get a better performance and a better experience overall. Anyway, so if you’re not thinking about it now, highly look into it, see what that actually looks like. Activate your AI at the edge and um see what you can get for performance. But happy to work with people on that as well. Uh Trevor, on that one last note, would you mind explaining to the folks if about what markdown is and in the new world of agentic AI like how would folks even request this versus traditional HTML? Yeah. Yeah. For those of you who have ever tried to train a model, all right, the models themselves see the vast majority of the data that exists on the internet. But the truth of it is the data on the internet is messy and it has a lot of noise in it and a lot. So instead, if you can actually feed the model clean data or structured data, then you’re going to get better results, right? There’s less in there’s less tokens you’re going to burn because the world is definitely moving towards a a token first cost optimization strategy. So we actually have a new service you can check it out on our blog as well where you can actually request a website to give you a version of the site presented in only markdown as well. Uh we’ve got a couple of versions of this actually something hit the blog today uh as well where we can actually have a remote browser instance visit the website on your behalf and then give you just clean HTML afterwards. So definitely check those things out if you are building anything with aentic AI and you need to feed a model or you’re doing any type of rag environment, anything like that at all or you’re trying to build out data or do maybe you need a crawler things like that. Um but 100% for agendic when you’re trying to to have agents do things on your behalf which seems to be the pattern that is emerging for this year. Highly highly recommended to check that out. Awesome. I would like to divert our attention to some of the questions in the Q&A section from our audience. Uh and I want to take a question that I just saw seemed very interesting and it’s related to e-commerce. Uh and it says how should WooCommerce store automate cache purging when updating products or promotions? [snorts] Yeah, it really depends I would say uh of your preference. Uh a lot of folks prefer a cache key. Um you know you can say you can cash tags is another piece right like uh for products promotions you could when you’re um uploading not necessarily [clears throat] uploading but when you introduce an intermediary like a CDN in the middle um as long as your origin or wherever you have have readable cache tags cache keys like that CDN should typically respect that right and based off of that you don’t have to purge by URL you don’t have to purge by absolute whole domains. Um you could just easily do it by those tags and keys which is a lot more efficient than if you were to um but again it depends at the end of the day how your store and website is structured as well. If you are already structuring that on a path where it’s easy to purge that way, sure, totally works. But most of the time, um, what from what we’ve seen, uh, folks will typically have those hashtags and keys that you can use on a CDN to just quickly purge. Awesome. Trevor, you want to add your thoughts into this? Uh, ju just one thought again, it goes back to the basics. There’s so many conversations we have with customers where they don’t explicitly like create their tags or they don’t have a strategy, you know, ahead of that when they start their site. So, just consider like what is the CDN strategy as you build a new app as like as part of the design or the PRD as you kind of go forward rather than like a reactive state. It’ll save you so much time. Awesome. Let’s take a few more questions from uh the chat here. Uh I think Yep. Is there a point where adding a CDN alone isn’t enough and deeper architectural changes like multi-reion hosting or edge computing becomes necessary? Yeah, I can take that. The you’re hitting the nail on the head there, right? At the point uh I would say the point is already here, right? We we’ve had the cloud era already, right? We tried to do the centralized model uh for a long time. Uh what’s the performance like? Are you still having issues with speed? Are users still saying it’s not, you know, fast enough? What’s the mobile environment look like? Plus the new environment, right? Is your site or is your more aptly called your data accessible to humans but also agents at the same time, right? Having it uh in one strategic location, probably not the best, you know, idea at this point. If you can have something more spread out, more distributed, say something happens, right? Maybe there’s an issue in a zone, a region, or a geographic part of the country. Power outages. I mean, all kinds of things can happen. If you can have that data available everywhere and do your caching, your compute, your hosting, serving, everything from the uh absolute closest place to a user, their experience is just going to be better, which means your business is going to grow faster. You’ll get more conversions, things like that. So, it’s always a win-win. So, I would say look at it, start looking at it now if you aren’t already. All right, Tan, you want to go uh add some thoughts? Yeah. Um, aside from the sort of edge computing use cases that I mentioned with, you know, local delivery, um, AB testing, etc., things like that, like, um, I think, yeah, definitely like those are all the the the things that you should be thinking about and security-wise as well, right? A lot of regions have regional compliance requirements, you know, so in addition to CDN, make sure that the proxy or the provider you go with can meet those local requirements without causing performance issues, right? GDPR is huge. For example, in order to do business in Europe, there’s each regional focus and compliance requirements as well. So um understand you know how your data is proxied, how your data is encrypted, decrypted things like that for the compliance reasons um as well. Awesome. I think the these are all the questions that we can take uh in the time frame. So this is it for this session folks. I would like to thank Trevor and and Tan for for being here and being part of this panel and uh enlightening us with their CDN knowledge. Uh so thank you so much. Thank you Trevor for for being here. Uh as for you folks uh this was the last session of the performance boot camp but we are not done yet because right after this we will be announcing the winners of the activities that we did today and yesterday also the winners of the leader in just a couple of minutes.