Pingora with Edward and Noah from Cloudflare

episode 15 — Pingora with Edward and Noah from Cloudflare. In Episode 15 of netstack.fm, Glen sits 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.

Learn more:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-we-built-pingora-the-proxy-that-connects-cloudflare-to-the-internet/ — Pingora's introduction blog https://blog.cloudflare.com/pingora-open-source/ — Pingora launch blog post (Cloudflare) https://github.com/vicanso/pingap — pingap, built on top of pingora https://blog.cloudflare.com/road-to-grpc/ — Cloudflare gRPC and gRPC Web article https://github.com/hyperium/h2 — Hyperium h2 crate https://github.com/cloudflare/quiche — Quiche (QUIC and HTTP3 implementation) https://blog.cloudflare.com/technical-breakdown-http2-rapid-reset-ddos-attack/ — Cloudflare Rapid Reset HTTP2 attack analysis https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/fips/140-3/final — NIST FIPS 140-3 publication https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-oxy/ — Introducing Oxy (Cloudflare) https://blog.cloudflare.com/oxy-extensibility/ — Oxy's extensions via generics https://blog.cloudflare.com/20-percent-internet-upgrade/ — Oxidizing other CDN components for performance https://github.com/cloudflare/foundations — Cloudflare's foundations crate

Rama If you like this podcast you might also like our modular network framework in Rust: https://ramaproxy.org Chapters

00:00 Intro 00:37 A bit of background on the episode and our guests 03:18 The Evolution of Proxy Frameworks: Oxy vs. Pingora 14:59 The Philosophy Behind Pingora's Design 20:53 Understanding Pingora's Bare Bones Structure 27:50 Metrics and Observability in Pingora 39:19 Caching Strategies and Backend Structures 42:56 Usage of OnceCell 45:39 TLS Implementations and Their Importance 50:51 Dynamic Traffic Management and gRPC Support 01:02:10 Optimizing Connection Reuse with Pingora 01:07:10 The Importance of Layer 7 Processing 01:11:16 The Shift from Static to Dynamic Web Traffic 01:18:48 Performance Improvements with Rust and Tokio 01:26:00 Memory Management and Allocation Strategies 01:37:59 Outro

Netstack.FM

More information: https://netstack.fm/#episode-15 Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/29EetaSYCD Reach out to us: [email protected]

Music for this episode was composed by Dj Mailbox. Listen to his music at https://on.soundcloud.com/4MRyPSNj8FZoVGpytj