CloudFlare And Open Source Software: A Two-Way Street

Cloudflare extensively uses open-source software in its operations, including nginx, postgresql, Kyoto Tycoon, OpenResty, gcc, make, Go programming language, Lua, python, Perl, PHP, Sentry, Kibana, and nagios. The company believes that using open-source software provides reliability, ease of modification, and maintenance. Additionally, it fosters job satisfaction for programmers and helps in hiring the best talent. Cloudflare encourages its engineers to contribute modifications to open-source projects and release their own projects through GitHub. They also sponsor external open-source projects where they see significant impact. The company's strong bias is to open source everything it has built, with exceptions for highly specific or high-support-cost components. Cloudflare believes that its competitive advantage lies in the network it has built, data collected on making the web faster and safer, and the people it attracts.