Cloudflare has one of the largest networks on the planet and provides a rich suite of free and paid services and tools to help any company or Internet presence - large or small - combat against bots, denial of service attacks, and all kinds of malicious elements.

I'd heard of Cloudflare's Wall of Entropy - literally, a wall of lava lamps that float up and bubble down as lava heats and cools, making it lighter or heavier. On a recent visit to San Francisco for unrelated purposes (Snowflake Summit 2024) it struck me this was my chance to see it in person. I reached out to Cloudflare who kindly allowed me to visit and tell me all about it.

Chances are I even made it into one of the camera shots capturing the scene, forming part of the overall entropy, becoming part of a cryptographic key that may have protected your company or web site.

For its immense importance to the Internet, Cloudflare's office is a very subtle, understated building at 101 Townsend St, San Francisco. You could easily pass by and were it not for the Cloudflare logo you wouldn't realise how much tech, how much significance, is hidden within.

Cloudflare states its mission is to help build a better Internet. It launched in 2009 and is used by over 19% of companies, organisations, institutions, governments, bloggers, individuals, and others with an online presence today. That is, nearly one in five websites use Cloudflare for online protection and security. However, the company has only 162,086 paying customers. It may surprise you to know Cloudflare provides a wide range of free services, but this reflects how seriously Cloudflare takes that mission of building a better Internet. It's prepared to put its money where its mouth is, and today any person, any organisation, can sign up for free Cloudflare protection and only need to pay when the business requirements grow and require a higher degree of protection or reliability.

Cloudflare also runs the free public DNS service at IP address 1.1.1.1 - you might know of Google's 8.8.8.8 DNS service; well, Cloudflare offers its own at an even cooler address and states it is the world's fastest DNS resolver, and that the company will never sell your data or target you with ads.

Additionally, Cloudflare can give you free SSL certificates, content delivery networks, zero trust products, and more. Really, there is no reason for your website to suffer bot attacks. If you host a website, blog, anything, you owe it to yourself and your users to check out the free Cloudflare offerings. Paid add-ons include load balancing, advanced certificates, video streaming, separate DNS hosting outside of Cloudflare, and other items.

Organisations that work on behalf of the arts, human rights, civil society, or democracy get even more, with the highest Cloudflare protections at no cost through Project Galileo.

Millions of Internet properties are sitting on top of Cloudflare, and its network grows by tens of thousands daily. Cloudflare serves more than 60 million HTTP/S requests per second.

It's a big company with a big footprint on the Internet. It's undoubtedly one of the most significant Internet companies on the planet.

And all of this security - the encryption of data used by SSL certificates, by TLS traffic, by all the Internet protocols that protect your data - requires numbers. Random numbers.

Cloudflare needs lots of random numbers - as in lots ! Yet, computers are historically bad at generating random numbers. After all, computers were designed to give the same output for the same inputs each and every time. In the past, mathematicians and programmers have created formulas and algorithms to generate sequences of numbers, but yet given the same algorithm and the same 'seed' number (or starting point), they'll generate the same sequence every time. "One thing that traditional computers aren't good at is is coin flipping," said MIT professor of computer science and engineering Steve Ward.

In many cases this is ok. A video game that generates a maze or a map based on an algortihm and seed gives you a veneer of randomness by making whole new worlds, but with the pleasing attribute if a world is particularly compelling you can share your seed value so others can create the exact same map. A famous example is Minecraft.

But in other cases this is far from ok. And that's the case at Cloudflare. With over 60 million requests served every second, with 19% of the Internet under its watchful gaze, security and encryption is paramount. It's not acceptable to have an algorithm and seed that can be reverse-engineered, or that repeats itself after its sequence is exhausted, with the exact same results.

Hence, the Wall of Entropy. A camera takes a photograph of the wall and its mixed colours, the patterns made by the floating materials inside the lamps, the change of sunlight from night to day and night again, the shadows of passers by, and even the faces of visitors like me all combine to make a truly random, unique set of numbers every single time. These are numbers that cannot be predicted, and cannot be replicated.

Cloudflare doesn't rely solely on this wall; it has other methods - which actually includes another wall in London albeit with pendiula. However, this wall is a significant factor in the generation of these random numbers that Cloudflare constantly needs every second.

It is an amazing sight to behold; it's something so simple but yet has so much meaning. If you saw it you outside of Cloudalre you might think it's neat, but that's all. However, every second of every day tens and tens of millions and millions of pieces of Internet traffic rely on the numbers being generated from photographs of this wall to protect you and I from hackers and crackers, bots, and all kinds of malicious Internet abusers.

If there were a seven wonders of the Internet, akin to the seven wonders of the ancient world, surely the Cloudflare Wall of Entropy would make the list. It's peaceful and even meditative to observe, but is central to Internet security.

Check out the Cloudflare free and paid offerings, if you haven't already, and who knows - perhaps the ebb and flow and rise and fall of these lamps may well keep the bad guys out of your website too.