I've been at Cloudflare working as a Software Engineer in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) team for around 1 and half years now.
At Cloudflare we always strive to deliver security and performance without compromising either, so I spent some time the last few weeks working on potential WAF performance optimizations.
Following the rollout of this piece of work, we observed a decrease of 40% in the average time the WAF takes to process an HTTP request and a 4.3% drop in CPU consumption at the edge.
Figure 1 - Decrease in average time to process an HTTP request by the WAF.
I've written about these optimizations, the regex engine migration we did back in July of 2019 and our ongoing engine migration here: blog.cloudflare.com - Making the Cloudflare WAF 40% faster.