AO.com, When it's Time for a Change

AO considered many other offerings before deciding on Cloudflare. Cloudflare offered a technically innovative platform that included security features like DDoS protection by default, and was less expensive, with no overage charges for seasonal spikes in bandwidth. AO primarily uses Cloudflare to improve the performance of their web and mobile properties. Faster websites translate to happier customers, and this is core to their mission. Cloudflare exceeded their performance expectations compared to their previous provider. Once they enabled Cloudflare with features such as Rocket Loader, they immediately saw a 1.7 second decrease in page load times across all of their sites. AO uses New Relic to track their apdex scoring, and immediately saw a 10% increase in the number of satisfied requests. Argo Smart Routing with Tiered Caching was also deployed, which allows Cloudflare to route traffic and requests across the fastest, and least congested network paths to their users. Tiered caching reduces the number of requests that hit their origins by leveraging Cloudflare’s Tier-1 data centers to serve requested content. AO also discovered that Cloudflare Workers could help ease the pain of migrating from their previous solution. Workers runs simple business logic that automatically converts these files so they can be stored in S3. If Workers weren’t employed, it would have meant significant code changes to their websites to handle these files in the required S3 format. Lastly, to ensure a highly resilient architecture across their sites they use Cloudflare load balancing in addition to AWS ALB. ALB supports their EC2 instances, while Cloudflare load balancing provides instant failover from AWS to their co-located provider in the event of an AWS outage.