pingora

Pingora is an open-source framework from Cloudflare for building high-performance network services and proxy servers in Rust. It's the actual technology that powers a significant part of Cloudflare's global network infrastructure, handling over 40 million internet requests per second in production.

A proxy server sits between users and the actual servers delivering content — routing traffic, load balancing (distributing requests across multiple servers), applying security rules, caching content, and handling encryption. Pingora gives developers a programmable foundation for building these kinds of systems with full control over the logic.

The reason Cloudflare built and open-sourced this is largely about safety and performance. Much of the internet's networking infrastructure is written in C or C++, languages where memory management bugs are a common source of security vulnerabilities. Rust (the language Pingora is built with) provides similar performance to C but with memory safety guarantees built into the language, dramatically reducing the risk of common security flaws.

For most vibe coders and founders, Pingora is infrastructure-level tooling — the kind of thing large-scale companies use when building internet infrastructure that needs to handle millions of simultaneous connections reliably. It's not something you'd reach for to build a typical web app. However, it's worth knowing about if you're building a product that involves custom proxy logic, API gateways, or traffic management at significant scale, or if you're evaluating what mature Rust-based infrastructure looks like in practice.