You’ve Been Running a Kubernetes Security Model in NSX and Didn’t Even Know It
One of the blockers to moving VMs off vSphere and onto Kubernetes is losing NSX and the protection it provides. Security teams that have spent years building out distributed firewall policy look at Kubernetes and are, quite understandably, alarmed by the flat network and the fact that any workload can reach any other by default.
How will they enforce east-west traffic controls? Will they be able to replicate NSX distributed firewall rules with the same granularity? What about security groups, tiered policy, and rules that travel with the workload when it moves? These are important questions that must be answered before migration can begin.
Migrate vSphere to Kubernetes with microsegmentation intact
Calico addresses vSphere to Kubernetes security concerns with a network policy model that maps directly to key features of the NSX distributed firewall (NSX DFW). Every property NSX DFW users rely on has a direct Calico equivalent: tiered governance, workload-identity enforcement, distributed kernel-level inspection, and dynamic workload grouping. Teams coming from vSphere will recognise the pattern quickly.
Let’s walk through each one in detail.
Distributed Enforcement
Traditional firewalls sit at the edge of the network. Traffic between workloads inside Continue reading
Everything we launched during Agents Week
At the beginning of Agents Week, Rita shared that agents represent the next evolution of computing: not only as a new application of AI but also as a new class of software that’s shaping how people interact with technology, and how software interacts with the Internet. Over the last year or so, we set out to explore what this shift means for developers and customers building AI-native apps and the infrastructure needed to support them. As agents become more capable and autonomous, the challenges extend beyond the models themselves — to identity, communication, orchestration, memory, observability, and security.
Over the past week we’ve shared how we’re bringing those pieces together across the Cloudflare platform to serve an Agentic Internet. Each day we presented new tools, products, and ideas toward building for an Internet where humans and agents cooperate instead of collide.
Monday, August 3
Monday focused on the foundations for building and running intelligent, autonomous apps — the runtime and infrastructure agents rely on.
Tuesday, August 4
Tuesday introduced the Agent Development Lifecycle (ADLC) and the primitives that take agentic software from prototype to production.
Wednesday, August 5
Wednesday extended Zero Trust from users and devices to agents themselves — Continue reading
Serving the most critical missions: Cloudflare for Government achieves FedRAMP Class D (High) Certified status
We believe the Internet must be a force for good, and that it requires a foundation of trust. Nowhere is that trust more critical than in public service. Government agencies are the stewards of a nation’s most sensitive data. They protect national security, critical infrastructure, and the personal information of every citizen.
Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. A key part of that mission is giving public sector agencies the best technology to stay secure, fast, and reliable. That means meeting the highest possible standards.
Today, we are proud to announce a major milestone: Cloudflare for Government has achieved FedRAMP Class D (High) certification status. We are honored to take this step with our sponsoring agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, whose global mission demands the highest level of security.
We are also very excited to announce that we are using the new systems we developed for FedRAMP High as the foundation of our commitment to pursuing U.S. Department of Defense Impact Level 4 (DoD IL4) authorization. IL4 is the department’s cybersecurity standard for systems handling controlled, unclassified data. We are confident that bringing our global network to this space will change Continue reading
netlab 26.08: ArcOS, VPP (FD.io), ACLs, and DNS
netlab release 26.08 brings a few humongous additions:
- ArcOS support by @roc-ops
- VPP (FD.io) with FRR or BIRD control plane by @jbemmel
- SONiC containers (also by @roc-ops)
- IPv4/IPv6 access control lists in the routing module by @DanPartelly
But wait, there’s more:
New Financial Tools Section (Retirement Planner Is the Big One)
I mentioned in the WordPress-to-Hugo migration post that this site was going to start drifting a bit toward retirement and financial planning content alongside the usual networking stuff. Here’s the first real piece of that: a new Financial Tools section, same browser-only, nothing-sent-to-a-server philosophy as the Network Tools I’ve been building for years.
Retirement & Social Security Planner
This is the one that actually matters. It’s a full retirement dashboard — portfolio projections, Social Security claiming strategy (including spousal/survivor benefits), RMDs, a Roth conversion planner, Medicare/IRMAA cost estimates, and a Monte Carlo simulation that runs a thousand random market paths against your numbers instead of just assuming a flat return every year. I’ve been building and using a private version of this for a while now; this is that tool, cleaned up for public use. Find it at fryguy.net/financial-tools/retirement-planner.
Retiring WordPress – How I Migrated fryguy.net to Hugo (With an AI Pair Programmer)
This site has run on WordPress since basically forever. As of this week, it doesn’t anymore. Everything you’re reading is now a static Hugo site, built from Markdown, served by nginx, with no PHP and no database anywhere in the stack. Here’s why I did it, what actually moved, and how I used Claude Code as a pair programmer for most of the heavy lifting.
Why bother
Let’s be honest about how it got this bad: I didn’t keep up with it. I know. Servers don’t rot on their own — you stop patching them, stop upgrading them, and a few years later you’re staring at a stack that’s aged out from under you. The old droplet had quietly rotted underneath a site that still worked fine. Ubuntu 18.04 — EOL since 2023. PHP 7.4 — EOL since 2022, with no apt-upgrade path to anything newer (the PPA I’d have needed was frozen). MySQL 5.7 — also EOL. WordPress itself was current; everything under it wasn’t, and there was no clean patching path left, just a slow accumulation of risk on a box facing the public internet.
7 Common Misconceptions When Choosing an AI Model
Token price, benchmark scores, model size, and context windows can all be misleading. Here are seven common model-selection misconceptions—and the real-world examples that challenge them.Hedge 315: Engineering Psychology
We often talk about “human infrastructure” in network engineering–but what does this mean, and how do we help engineers “produce” while helping them to flourish as individuals? Catherine Hicks joins Tom and Russ to discuss the psychology of software engineering, and how the lessons learned apply to network engineering.
You can find Catherine’s new book on the psychology of software engineering here.
If you would like to follow Catherine’s writing in this area, including the impact of AI on work, you can find her blog here.
You can connect with Catherine on LinkedIn.
Unveiling good and bad behaviors on the Agentic Internet
The Internet isn’t a single lane of traffic. For a long time, the rule of thumb in web security was that bots are bad, while humans are good. Of course, we’re far past this generalization. Humans can be fraudulent, and bots can be helpful at different levels. Site owners actively want some automated traffic to interact with our sites to make the Internet functional and discoverable.
To complicate things further, the line between "human" and "bot" is blurring more and more. Now, we have a type of “hybrid” traffic where a single session shifts from human to agentic and back again. (Think of a user browsing a store, and then handing off the checkout process to an automated shopping assistant.)
So, how do website owners manage this kind of complexity? What matters here is assessing behaviors. Is this behavior abusive? Malicious? What’s the risk presented here, and can I trust this visitor based on their actions? Solving this requires moving beyond static, point-in-time checks. It requires analyzing continuous behaviors to evaluate Trust.
In this post, we’ll share an inside look into the strategy of the Web Integrity & Trust team (covering the bots and fraud problem spaces) around detecting Continue reading
Introducing Radar Researcher: An AI tool for exploring Internet data in plain language
Since launching in 2020, Cloudflare Radar has provided one-of-a-kind insight into Internet traffic on a global scale. The open data that Radar publishes from our global network is used by a variety of experts in different domains: human rights advocates, journalists, academic researchers, network operators, and more.
Today, as part of Agents Week, Radar is beta-launching a new tool: Radar Researcher.
Now, if you want to answer a question with Radar’s data, you can just ask in plain language and get an answer back with real, interactive charts, all built on Cloudflare's developer platform. You no longer need to find the right page, choose the right filters, or read the API documentation to write a query.
Why we built Radar Researcher
Over the past six years, the Radar team has worked to provide clear, accessible, reliable data visualizations of complex datasets. This is not without its challenges: our user base is vast and ranges from curious novices to technical network experts. Even so, we publish as much insight into the Internet as seen from our network as we can: DNS queries from our public resolver 1.1.1.1, HTTP traffic from across our global network, Continue reading
Announcing Cloudflare Ambassadors, Community Engineers, and another $1M in open-source funding
As a platform for helping build a better Internet, Cloudflare helps turn ideas into real products and experiences around the world. Across communities and backgrounds, developers build with Cloudflare using the tools they love, shaping what comes next for the Internet while inspiring, collaborating with, and teaching others.
The community is where some of Cloudflare’s best moments happen. Students show their friends how to deploy Workers for the first time. Discord users answer questions from other developers via working code samples, instead of links to documentation. Open-source contributors build novel solutions to solve their own problems, then share them with the world. Organizers host events that give builders from all backgrounds the space to start building their dream project.
All of these represent a community at its best: people helping other people build.
This spirit of community is an exciting and vital part of helping to build the Internet. Those who step up to educate and support others, or to invent, build, or maintain tools shared across the ecosystem, make lasting contributions to the health and potential of the Internet.
We want to have their backs.
That's why today we’re announcing an improved community program, designed to better support, recognize, Continue reading
Unifying Workers AI and AI Gateway into a single AI control plane
AI Gateway and Workers AI first started as distinct products, but over time, we noticed our users were converging. With AI Gateway, you can proxy requests to any model provider and get built-in observability, logging, access, and security. On Workers AI, we host models on the GPU infrastructure that we manage, exposing an API endpoint you can leverage to access inference-as-a-service.
The architecture of these products looks different, but to an end user, it achieves the same goal: connecting you to models with a sophisticated control plane. Today, we're excited to share our plans on how these products converge into one unified path, so you can connect to any model provider (including Workers AI), while managing things like observability, billing, security, and logging from a single control plane.
It’s the next step toward some big plans we have — read on to learn what a unified control plane means for the future of model routing.
Merging the binding and API
We've been hinting at the fact that these products are becoming more unified through our entrypoints: the Workers binding and the REST API. We have an AI binding that you can use to call AI Gateway and Workers AI. Continue reading
SONiC Deep Dive: Configuring VLAN 10 from CLI to ASIC
Introduction
In this chapter, we
examine what happens under the hood when we configure a Layer-2 VLAN on a SONiC
switch, enable two host-facing interfaces, and associate them with the
previously created VLAN as untagged access ports. Figure 5-1 illustrates the
conceptual configuration in which Host-1 and Host-2 are connected to interfaces
Eth1/1 and Eth1/2, respectively. Both interfaces are members of VLAN 10, which
at this stage functions as a Layer-2 broadcast domain. The host-facing
interfaces are single-lane 25-Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.
We begin by creating VLAN 10 and examining the complete SONiC processing sequence, from the user's VLAN configuration to ASIC programming. Next, we study what happens when the interfaces are enabled and associated with VLAN 10. Finally, we verify that Host-1 and Host-2 have IP connectivity through Leaf-1. Although this is a very basic configuration example, many SONiC components participate in the process. The database examples presented in this chapter are taken from the lab environment. The communication between processes is explained at a conceptual level because the focus is on SONiC operation rather than the underlying Linux communication mechanisms.
Figure
5-1: Host Connectivity.
Step 1: Configure Vlan 10
Figure 5-2 depicts the conceptual sequence of Continue reading
The New MCP Headers Are a Gift to Gateways
In short, buried in the transport section of the MCP 2026-07-28 release candidate are three changes that matter more to infrastructure teams than to anyone else: mandatory Mcp-Method and Mcp-Name headers, cache-control-style ttlMs and cacheScope fields, and standardized W3C Trace Context propagation. Together with the stateless core, they turn MCP from a protocol that gateways had to fight into one that meets them halfway. What the headers still don’t carry: who the caller is, whether the call should be allowed, and any record that it happened.
Everyone is writing about MCP going stateless, and the coverage is deserved. No handshake, no session ID, any request can hit any server replica, round-robin load balancing just works. If you want the deep dive on what that does to protocol state, my colleague Peter is writing one.
I want to talk about the part of the release candidate that made me sit up, because I spend my days around a gateway that authorizes agent traffic. It’s three transport changes, a few paragraphs in the announcement, and it fixes a problem every MCP-aware proxy has been engineering around since Streamable HTTP shipped in the 2025-03-26 revision.