How Cloudflare Protects the Internet — I Built My Own Edge CDN + DDoS Protection

If someone sent 1 million requests per second to your backend right now… your server would crash instantly.

Yet companies like Stripe, Discord, Shopify, and thousands of others survive massive traffic spikes and DDoS attacks every day.

Why?

Because their backend servers are never exposed directly to the internet.

Instead, everything passes through an edge protection layer like Cloudflare.

In this video, we reverse engineer how Cloudflare protects websites and then build a mini version from scratch using Node.js and Redis.

We’ll implement:

• Edge server architecture
• DDoS protection with rate limiting
• Redis-powered IP blacklisting
• Bot detection
• CAPTCHA challenge system
• Edge caching (mini CDN)

By the end of this project, you’ll understand one of the core ideas behind modern internet infrastructure: stopping attacks before they reach your backend.

If you’re a backend developer, this is the kind of system thinking that separates API developers from real infrastructure engineers.

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📂 **Project Features**

* Node.js edge protection server
* Redis-based rate limiting
* IP blacklist system
* Fake CAPTCHA challenge flow
* Reverse proxy to backend
* Edge caching layer

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🧠 **What you'll learn**

• How Cloudflare protects websites
• Why backend servers should never be directly exposed
• How edge networks work
• Real-world DDoS mitigation strategies
• CDN-style caching architecture

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👨‍💻 **Connect with me**

Instagram:
https://instagram.com/aakash.a.dev

Follow for more content about:

• backend engineering
• system design
• distributed systems
• real-world infrastructure projects

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🚀 **Future videos will cover**

* Building a mini CDN
* Distributed rate limiting systems
* Kafka-style event systems
* Real-time infrastructure engineering

Видео How Cloudflare Protects the Internet — I Built My Own Edge CDN + DDoS Protection канала Developer & Me