CloudFlare And Open Source Software: A Two-Way Street

jeremy · 10-08-2013, 11:13 AM

Quote:

CloudFlare uses a great deal of open source and free software. Our core server platform is nginx (which is released using a two-clause BSD license) and our primary database of choice is postgresql (which is released using their own BSD-like license). We've talked in the past about our use of Kyoto Tycoon (which is released under the GNU General Public License) and we've built many things on top of OpenResty.

And, of course, we make use of open source tools such as gcc, make, the Go programming language, Lua, python, Perl, and PHP, and projects like Sentry, Kibana, and nagios. And, naturally, we use Linux.

It would take a while to write down all the software that we use to build CloudFlare, but all that software has one thing in common: it's open source or free software. Our stack consists of either software we've built ourselves or an open source project (which we've sometimes forked).

It's probably obvious to most readers why we use open source software: it's reliable, it's easy to modify and it's easy to maintain. But there's another benefit that should not be overlooked: using and working on open source software brings a great deal of job satisfaction for programmers and it helps us hire the best.

We encourage our programmers to release changes they've made to open source software and to release projects through the CloudFlare GitHub page.

More at the CloudFlare Blog...

--jeremy