In Episode 15 of netstack.fm, I sat down with Edward and Noah from Cloudflare to unpack the design of Pingora, the Rust based proxy framework that now powers Cloudflare’s origin facing traffic. The discussion covers why Cloudflare moved away from NGINX, how Pingora differs from Oxy, and what it takes to operate a high performance global proxy at massive scale. Listeners will learn about connection reuse strategies, dynamic traffic handling, gRPC and protocol translation, custom HTTP implementations, TLS backend choices, and the practical trade offs of Rust, Tokio, and work stealing in real production systems. It is an episode full of deep technical insights into building and operating modern networking infrastructure.
Note that this episode was recorded prior to the recent cloudflare outage and as such this is not something we discussed in the episode. If you are interested to learn more about that I can recommend their excellent post-mortem blog post which already circulated around here. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45973709
