CloudFlare: Extremely Fast and Incredibly Close

It’s really important your calculators load and get in front of your customers as quickly as possible. At Widget Works we do a lot to optimise our Widget packages, and a modern build environment helps with that. Once the packages are built, it’s a matter of getting them to consumers as quickly as possible.

We’ve been long time users of AWS services, their scalability ensures our delivery isn’t compromised by any foreseeable load. And, we’re lucky in that our software is delivered almost entirely as static files – so caching is FAR easier that in other apps.

Getting “stuff” across internet is easy, but getting it there quickly takes a bit more effort. Distance counts for milliseconds so we’re updating our CDN services to give us as many edge locations as possible. The closer we get our files to the end consumer, the sooner the Widget can fire up.

With CloudFlare’s recent enhancements we’ve been rolling out increased compression across all our tools – their security and protection offerings have been fantastic so far. We all benefit from CloudFlare’s expansion, and particularly here in “Oceania” it means we all benefit from their Sydney, Melbourne AND Auckland locations.

So that’s part of how we achieve “small, close and fast”. Now with IE8 just about out of the picture we can build against newer versions of AngularJS and enjoy their focus on “blazing” speed.