Cloudflare Research: Two Years In

This post details the evolution of Cloudflare Research over its first two years, outlining five operating principles: innovation from all places, a question-oriented approach, building tools for future issues, and fostering collaboration. It highlights three case studies: privacy-preserving password security (involving support engineering, external experts, and WAF integration), SSL/TLS recommender (using scanning/crawling tools to improve security posture), and IP address agility (experimenting with serving free customers from a single IP in a region to challenge assumptions about IP-to-server mapping). The post emphasizes the full-stack nature of research engineering, from conception to production code, and the importance of embedding researchers within product and engineering teams.