Cloudflare with Edward Wang & Kevin Guthrie

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Oct 30, 2025

Kevin Guthrie and Edward Wang from Cloudflare discuss their groundbreaking Rust-based proxy, Pingora, which processes an astonishing 90 million requests per second. They explain why Rust was chosen for its memory safety and performance advantages over NGINX. The duo shares insights into the technical challenges of migrating from established systems and the importance of community contributions. Additionally, they highlight Pingora's evolution, efficiency gains, and the innovative tools that assisted in its development, showcasing how Rust is shaping the future of high-performance network services.

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INSIGHT

Cloudflare's Massive Global Footprint

Cloudflare routes roughly 20% of global internet traffic and Pingora handles ~90M requests/sec worldwide.
The network uses 300+ edge locations and Anycast to distribute load and capacity.

INSIGHT

Memory Safety Drove Rust Adoption

Rust adoption aimed to eliminate classes of memory-safety bugs and costly core dumps in NGINX.
Reducing crashes was a priority because each core dump impacted thousands of requests and attracted executive attention.

ADVICE

Migrate Incrementally Behind Existing Proxies

Migrate features gradually by extracting responsibilities into separate services placed behind existing proxies.
Route traffic selectively to the new service so you can switch over incrementally and safely.

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How do you build a system that handles 90 million requests per second? That’s the scale that Cloudflare operates at, processing roughly 25% of all internet traffic through their global network of 330+ edge locations.

In this episode, we talk to Kevin Guthrie and Edward Wang from Cloudflare about Pingora, their open-source Rust-based proxy that replaced nginx across their entire infrastructure. We’ll find out why they chose Rust for mission-critical systems handling such massive scale, the technical challenges of replacing battle-tested infrastructure, and the lessons learned from “oxidizing” one of the internet’s largest networks.

About Cloudflare

Cloudflare is a global network designed to make everything you connect to the Internet secure, private, fast, and reliable. Their network spans 330+ cities worldwide and handles approximately 25% of all internet traffic. Cloudflare provides a range of services including DDoS protection, CDN, DNS, and serverless computing—all built on infrastructure that processes billions of requests every day.

About Kevin Guthrie

Kevin Guthrie is a Software Architect and Principal Distributed Systems Engineer at Cloudflare working on Pingora and the production services built upon it. He specializes in performance optimization at scale. Kevin has deep expertise in building high-performance systems and has contributed to open-source projects that power critical internet infrastructure.

About Edward Wang

Edward Wang is a Systems Engineer at Cloudflare who has been instrumental in developing Pingora, Cloudflare’s Rust-based HTTP proxy framework. He co-authored the announcement of Pingora’s open source release. Edward’s work focuses on performance optimization, security, and building developer-friendly APIs for network programming.

Links From The Episode

Pingora - Serving 90+ million requests per second (7e12 per day) at Cloudflare
How we built Pingora - Cloudflare blog post on Pingora’s architecture
Open sourcing Pingora - Announcement of Pingora’s open source release
Rust in Production: Oxide - Interview with Steve Klabnik
Anycast - Routing traffic to the closest point of presence
Lua - A small, embeddable scripting language
nginx - The HTTP server and reverse proxy that Pingora replaced
coredump - File capturing the memory of a running process for debugging
OpenResty - Extending nginx with Lua
Oxy - Another proxy developed at Cloudflare in Rust
Ashley Williams - Famous Rust developer who worked at Cloudflare at one point
Yuchen Wu - One of the first drivers of Pingora development
Andrew Hauck - Early driver of Pingora development
Pingora Peak - The actual mountain in Wyoming where a Cloudflare product manager almost fell off
shellflip - Graceful process restarter in Rust, used by Pingora
tableflip - Go library that inspired shellflip
bytes - Reference-counted byte buffers for Rust
The Cargo Book: Specifying dependencies from git repositories - Who needs a registry anyway?
cargo audit - Security vulnerability scanner for Rust dependencies
epoll - Async I/O API in Linux
Tokio - The async runtime powering Pingora
mio - Tokio’s abstraction over epoll and other async I/O OS interfaces
Noah Kennedy - An actual Tokio expert on the Pingora team
Rain: Cancelling Async Rust - RustConf 2025 talk with many examples of pitfalls
foundations - Cloudflare’s foundational crate for Rust project that exposes Tokio internal metrics
io_uring - Shiny new kernel toy for async I/O
ThePrimeTime: Cloudflare - Trie Hard - Big Savings On Cloud - “It’s not a millie, it’s not a billie, it’s a trillie”
valuable - Invaluable crate for introspection of objects for logging and tracing
bytes - Very foundational crate for reference counted byte buffers
DashMap - Concurrent HashMap with as little lock contention as possible
Prossimo - Initiative for memory safety in critical internet infrastructure
River - Prossimo-funded reverse proxy based on Pingora
Rustls - Memory-safe TLS implementation in Rust, also funded by Prossimo
http crate - HTTP types for Rust
h2 - HTTP/2 implementation in Rust
hyper - Fast HTTP implementation for Rust
ClickHouse Rust client - Official Rust client by Paul Loyd
Pingap - Reverse proxy built on Pingora
PR: Add Rustls to Pingora - by Harald Gutmann
PR: Add s2n-tls to Pingora - by Bryan Gilbert

Official Links