Introduce yourself and tell us about your company.
My name is Matt Weinberg. I'm the Co-Founder and President of Technology at Happy Cog. We have a large variety of clients. So, some of our clients are Fortune 100 companies that you know are asking us to do big enterprise grade type systems. Some of our clients are small, well-funded startups that need a marketing site for their SaaS application. Some of our clients are well known newsrooms, investigative journalism, publishers, ecommerce. We work with a lot of higher education institutes, so we're doing a lot of projects for Harvard, Yale, and others. The legal world... some of the biggest law firms in the country work with us. So it's really a huge variety of clients. Our clients are really creative. They always want really creative solutions.
What challenges were you facing that led you to start using Cloudflare?
It's the usual challenges that pretty much every website in the world faces. Speed, security, reliability, all of those things that Cloudflare has always excelled at. On the other hand, there's developer efficiency and developer speed. Our clients are pushing us hard to give them creative solutions to move very quickly, to launch fast, to iterate, to have fast follow features. We use Cloudflare with all of our clients for the CDN, the Web Application Firewall, for Zero Trust.
But our developers use Cloudflare Workers so that we can build products for our clients that we can move quickly on, that we can iterate quickly on, that we can get a development environment set up super quickly. We can deploy instantly. We don't have to worry about spending time on server management or anything else.
Tell us about a time Cloudflare supported you with a client.
One client we've worked with Cloudflare a lot on is ProPublica. ProPublica is a well known and highly trafficked investigative journalism, publishing source.
A lot of ProPublica's articles go viral and get a tremendous spike of traffic really quickly. Before we implemented Cloudflare, ProPublica would have to either pre-scale all of their frontend servers which cost them a tremendous amount of money, or if it's auto-scaled there'd be a lag time or the site would slow down, crash, be unavailable and just be a poor user experience. So we use Cloudflare to build a custom Workers based caching system that prevents anybody on the Internet from doing any kind of direct connection or direct request from ProPublica's origin servers. We built a Workers system that gets the content, caches it into Workers KV, and uses that to serve all of the content to users. If there's a big reports that gets a big spike of traffic it doesn't even have a blip on ProPublica systems. They were able to reduce their front end server capacity by 40% saving them a tremendous amount of money.
What is the biggest benefit of working with Cloudflare?
Our clients will come to us if their site crashes, and our clients will be unhappy with us if their site crashes. Our developers love that we can easily implement Cloudflare's caching, we can clear it as we need to with API calls. Super easy to integrate with, and we can basically not worry about a lot of the scaling issues that a lot of other sites have. Our developers also love Workers because it's JavaScript. It doesn't require learning a new language. It doesn't require learning a whole new dependency, ecosystem or anything.
Why do you continue to work with Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is innovative but secure. I am constantly impressed at the speed at which Cloudflare iterates on its products. I would say I choose Cloudflare because they take care of the things that we don't want to have to worry about, So that we can focus on offering value to our clients.
