[msmith]

We’re using it to customize Cloudflare’s default caching policies so that we can cache more content at the edge. For example, we can segment the cache based on the geolocation or device type of the client. We can also normalize the URLs before doing the cache lookup, by stripping query params which we know aren’t going to affect the content in the response.

This can save hundreds of ms from the response time of the initial HTTP request, which means all of the other page resources will load more quickly too.

It does add some additional complexity, but for large sites and hosting platforms, this can have very significant cost savings. It’s usually way cheaper to serve bytes from Cloudflare’s cache than to serve them from your origin.