Case Study: Upwork configures 150,000 URL redirects in one-fifth the time and boosts engineering efficiency with Cloudflare Workers (Cloudflare)

Upwork improves engineering efficiency using Cloudflare Workers

Upwork, the leading online marketplace for freelance talent, faced a major technical and UX problem after rebranding from Elance and oDesk: roughly 150,000 legacy URLs needed to be redirected quickly and accurately. Many links were returning errors, creating SEO risk and a poor experience for users, and a manual fix would have taken hundreds of labor hours.

Upwork solved the problem with Cloudflare Workers, using serverless JavaScript at the network edge to test and deploy bulk redirects quickly and safely. The project was completed in about one-fifth the time of a manual approach, saving hundreds of hours, and Upwork also benefitted from Cloudflare’s Load Balancing, WAF, Rate Limiting and API/Terraform automation to improve reliability and block or challenge up to 1 million anomalous requests per day.

Upwork

Wilson Chong

Sr. Director, Reliability Engineering