Cloudflare’s Year in Review: security fixes, public CA plans, DNS memory savings, and new developer tools

# Snapshot: what changed Cloudflare published a retrospective at its 16th anniversary describing how the web and Cloudflare's platform have shifted since its founding. The post covers traffic trends, a security incident in container storage, infrastructure optimizations that freed large amounts of memory, a public CA initiative, and several new developer tools and platform experiments.

# Traffic and the rise of automated agents Cloudflare says the web entered a rapid change around mid-2025 after a long flat period. Two concrete trends matter:

• A surge of new sites and creators using tooling that lets people build and deploy apps without deep programming skills. Cloudflare's platform now serves more than 7 million developers.

# Security: container storage issue and adaptive WAF testing

Cloudflare addressed the problem in stages. It turned block wiping back on for new allocations (stopping the reported technique), then retired affected disks, cleared caches, drained hosts during quiet hours, and restarted servers. The researchers confirmed the proof-of-concept no longer worked on Sept 14, and Cloudflare completed cleanup on Sept 19 before disclosing the issue publicly a few days later.

# Infrastructure work: DNS cache and memory savings Cloudflare redesigned its DNS cache and said the change saved about 100 TB of memory. The work leaned on Rust optimizations. The DNS savings are presented alongside other Rust-related efficiency stories within Cloudflare's recent engineering work.

# Product and platform updates Cloudflare announced several developer-facing updates and experiments:

• cf CLI: a command-line tool for interacting with Cloudflare services.
• Turnstile Spin: a new product variant related to their bot/challenge service.
• EmDash migration: internal migrations to new systems.
• Experimental Rust/Emscripten support on Workers: exploring new runtime options for edge code.
• Public Certificate Authority: Cloudflare plans to offer a public CA that will issue TLS certificates and support post-quantum cryptographic material.

# What this means for site operators and developers

• Track Cloudflare's public CA plans if you manage TLS procurement or require post-quantum certificates.
• Take advantage of new tools like cf CLI and experimental runtimes to test deployments and performance on Workers.

# Bottom line