Merry Christmas And Happy New 2026 Year

Dear friends,

Thank you so much for reading our blog, for all your questions and interesting discussions. You are amazing audience, thanks for being with us.

It is absolute pleasure to wish each and every of you Merry Christmas! Let the coming year be successful, healthy and prosperous for you and your beloved ones. And for now, have a wonderful Christmas time.

Yours sincerely,

Team Karneliuk

How Workers powers our internal maintenance scheduling pipeline

Cloudflare has data centers in over 330 cities globally, so you might think we could easily disrupt a few at any time without users noticing when we plan data center operations. However, the reality is that disruptive maintenance requires careful planning, and as Cloudflare grew, managing these complexities through manual coordination between our infrastructure and network operations specialists became nearly impossible.

It is no longer feasible for a human to track every overlapping maintenance request or account for every customer-specific routing rule in real time. We reached a point where manual oversight alone couldn't guarantee that a routine hardware update in one part of the world wouldn't inadvertently conflict with a critical path in another.

We realized we needed a centralized, automated "brain" to act as a safeguard — a system that could see the entire state of our network at once. By building this scheduler on Cloudflare Workers, we created a way to programmatically enforce safety constraints, ensuring that no matter how fast we move, we never sacrifice the reliability of the services on which our customers depend.

In this blog post, we’ll explain how we built it, and share the results we’re seeing now.

Building a Continue reading

Worth Reading 121925


In my earlier article on Technitium and Wazuh, I described DNS as both a behavioral signal and an enforcement point. DNS queries appear early in the attack chain, often long before C2 traffic stabilizes.


Cloudflare’s network suffered a brief but widespread outage Friday, after an update to its Web Application Firewall to mitigate a vulnerability in React Server Components went wrong.


You’d think that by now, networks were well enough understood that people would stop making assumptions that we have known, almost since the dawn of networking, to be untrue. Yet as users, developers, and network administrators, we still seem curiously unable to let go of long-held beliefs.


As well as the Mac clones, there were PC-style PowerPC machines – and a version of classic MacOS for them has just been rediscovered, enabling previously unimagined combinations.


Have you ever experienced that moment of panic when you can’t recall a familiar phone number or navigate without a map app? This growing reliance on external memory—known as the “Google Effect”—is a real-world example of how we’ve outsourced core cognitive functions to our devices.

Code Orange: Fail Small — our resilience plan following recent incidents

On November 18, 2025, Cloudflare’s network experienced significant failures to deliver network traffic for approximately two hours and ten minutes. Nearly three weeks later, on December 5, 2025, our network again failed to serve traffic for 28% of applications behind our network for about 25 minutes.

We published detailed post-mortem blog posts following both incidents, but we know that we have more to do to earn back your trust. Today we are sharing details about the work underway at Cloudflare to prevent outages like these from happening again.

We are calling the plan “Code Orange: Fail Small”, which reflects our goal of making our network more resilient to errors or mistakes that could lead to a major outage. A “Code Orange” means the work on this project is prioritized above all else. For context, we declared a “Code Orange” at Cloudflare once before, following another major incident that required top priority from everyone across the company. We feel the recent events require the same focus.  Code Orange is our way to enable that to happen, allowing teams to work cross-functionally as necessary to get the job done while pausing any other work.

The Code Continue reading

Innovating to address streaming abuse — and our latest transparency report

Cloudflare's latest transparency report — covering the first half of 2025 — is now live. As part of our commitment to transparency, Cloudflare publishes such reports twice a year, describing how we handle legal requests for customer information and reports of abuse of our services. Although we’ve been publishing these reports for over 10 years, we’ve continued to adapt our transparency reporting and our commitments to reflect Cloudflare’s growth and changes as a company. Most recently, we made changes to the format of our reports to make them even more comprehensive and understandable.

In general, we try to provide updates on our approach or the requests that we receive in the transparency report itself. To that end, we have some notable updates for the first half of 2025. But our transparency report can only go so far in explaining the numbers. 

In this blog post, we’ll do a deeper dive on one topic: Cloudflare’s approach to streaming and claims of copyright violations. Given increased access to AI tools and other systems for abuse, bad actors have become increasingly sophisticated in the way they attempt to abuse systems to stream copyrighted content, often incorporating steps to hide their behavior. We’ve Continue reading

Happy Holidays and All the Best in 2026!

They say time goes faster as you get older, and it seems to be true. Another year has (almost) gone by.

Try to disconnect from the crazy pace of the networking world, forget the “vibe coding with AI will make engineers obsolete” stupidities (hint: Fifth Generation Languages and Natural Language Programming were all the rage in the 1980s and 1990s), and focus on your loved ones. I would also like to wish you all the best in 2026!

In the meantime, I’m working on weaning netlab off of a particular automation tool (you can always track the progress on GitHub). Expect the first results in the January netlab release.

How Istio Ambient Mode Delivers Real World Solutions

For years, platform teams have known what a service mesh can provide: strong workload identity, authorization, mutual TLS authentication and encryption, fine-grained traffic control, and deep observability across distributed systems. In theory, Istio checked all the boxes. In practice though, many teams hit a wall.

Across industries like financial services, media, retail, and SaaS, organizations told a similar story. They wanted mTLS between services to meet regulatory or security requirements. They needed safer deployment capabilities like canary rollouts and traffic splitting. They wanted visibility that went beyond IP addresses.

However, traditional sidecar based meshes came with real costs:

  • High operational complexity
  • Thousands of sidecars to manage
  • Fragile upgrade paths
  • Hard to debug failure modes

In several cases, teams started down the Istio service mesh path, only to pause or roll back entirely because the ongoing operational complexity was too high. The value of a service mesh was clear, but the service mesh architecture based on sidecars was not sustainable for many production environments.

The Reality Platform Teams Have Been Living With

In many cases, organizations evaluated service meshes with clear goals in mind. They wanted mTLS between services, better control over traffic during deployments, and observability that could keep up. Continue reading

Announcing support for GROUP BY, SUM, and other aggregation queries in R2 SQL

When you’re dealing with large amounts of data, it’s helpful to get a quick overview — which is exactly what aggregations provide in SQL. Aggregations, known as “GROUP BY queries”, provide a bird’s eye view, so you can quickly gain insights from vast volumes of data.

That’s why we are excited to announce support for aggregations in R2 SQL, Cloudflare's serverless, distributed, analytics query engine, which is capable of running SQL queries over data stored in R2 Data Catalog. Aggregations will allow users of R2 SQL to spot important trends and changes in the data, generate reports and find anomalies in logs.

This release builds on the already supported filter queries, which are foundational for analytical workloads, and allow users to find needles in haystacks of Apache Parquet files.

In this post, we’ll unpack the utility and quirks of aggregations, and then dive into how we extended R2 SQL to support running such queries over vast amounts of data stored in R2 Data Catalog.

The importance of aggregations in analytics

Aggregations, or “GROUP BY queries”, generate a short summary of the underlying data.

A common use case for aggregations is generating reports. Consider a table called “sales”, which contains Continue reading

Nvidia Is The Only AI Model Maker That Can Afford To Give It Away

An alien flying in from space aboard a comet would look down on Earth and see that there is this highly influential and famous software company called Nvidia that just so happens to have a massively complex and ridiculously profitable hardware business running a collection of proprietary and open source software that about three quarters of its approximately 40,000 employees create. …

Nvidia Is The Only AI Model Maker That Can Afford To Give It Away was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Worth Reading 121725


Tensor processing units (TPUs) are specially designed AI accelerators. They are a type of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), or chips designed for specific tasks. For TPUs, that task is running and optimizing AI and machine learning (ML) workflows, including training and inference.


Civil unrest can often cloud measurement data. Some measurement systems, including ours, make relatively sweeping assumptions about the stability of both end user and network service behaviours, and assume that the changes that occur from day-to-day are minor.


Identifying active IPv6 addresses is challenging. Various methods emerged to master the measurement challenge in this huge address space, including hitlists, new probing techniques, and AI-generated target lists. In this paper, we apply active Subnet-Router anycast (SRA) probing, a commonly unused method to explore the IPv6 address space.


Several months ago, I arrived at the office at 8:45 a.m., sat at my desk, and was about to start my day. The only problem was that I, for the life of me, could not remember my password. This is a bit laughable because for the past year, I had typed that exact password almost daily, sometimes from muscle memory.


Vaibhav Kakkar once tested a therapy chatbot to help with Continue reading

Negara dengan Bandara Terbanyak di Dunia: Rahasia di Balik Angka Amerika Serikat

Siapa yang menjadi raja di langit? Bicara soal transportasi udara, satu nama langsung muncul. Ya, Amerika Serikat adalah negara dengan airport terbanyak di dunia. Jumlahnya sangat fantastis dan jauh meninggalkan negara lain. Fenomena ini bukan sekadar angka. Ia mencerminkan geografi, ekonomi, dan budaya yang unik. Mari kita bedah lebih dalam.

Amerika Serikat: Raja Langit dengan Jumlah Bandara Menakjubkan

Amerika Serikat memimpin daftar global dengan jumlah total bandara yang mencengangkan. Menurut data dari FAA atau Federal Aviation Administration, ada lebih dari 19.000 bandara. Angka ini termasuk berbagai jenis fasilitas. Tentu saja, tidak semua bandara sebesar JFK atau LAX. Sebagian besar adalah fasilitas kecil. Namun, semuanya berkontribusi pada infrastruktur penerbangan yang masif.

FAA membagi bandara menjadi dua kategori utama. Pertama adalah bandara umum. Kedua adalah bandara swasta. Bandara umum tersedia untuk penggunaan publik. Sementara itu, bandara swasta hanya untuk pemiliknya. Kombinasi kedualah yang menciptakan angka yang sangat besar. Selain itu, budaya penerbangan umum di AS sangat kuat. Banyak individu dan perusahaan memiliki pesawat pribadi. Akibatnya, kebutuhan akan landai pacu pribadi pun melonjak.

Mengapa Jumlah Bandara di Continue reading

Ingress NGINX Controller Is Dead — Should You Move to Gateway API?

Now What? Understanding the Impact of the Ingress NGINX Deprecation

Ingress NGINX Controller, the trusty staple of countless platform engineering toolkits, is about to be put out to pasture. This news was announced by the Kubernetes community recently, and very quickly circulated throughout the cloud-native space. It’s big news for any platform team that currently uses the NGINX Controller because, as of March 26, 2026, there will be no more bug fixes, no more critical vulnerability patches and no more enhancements when Kubernetes continues to release new versions.

If you’re feeling ambushed, you’re not alone. For many teams, this isn’t just an inconvenient roadmap update, its unexpected news that now puts long-term traffic management decisions front and center. You know you need to migrate yesterday but the best path forward can be a confusing labyrinth of platforms and unfamiliar tools. Questions you might ask yourself:

❓Do you find a quick drop-in Ingress replacement?

❓Does moving to Gateway API make sense and can you commit enough resources to do a full migration?

❓If you decide on Gateway API then what is the best option for a smooth transition?

With Ingress NGINX on the way out, platform teams are standing at a Continue reading

How Sustainable Is This Crazy Server Spending?

We can all talk until we are blue in the face about how weird it is for so much money to be spent on servers during the GenAI boom, but after reviewing the latest market report from IDC – which is one again but sporadically giving out some stats to the public – we thought that to feel the full impact of this change, we should draw you a picture of the past 26 years of server revenues by quarter so you can take it all in. …

How Sustainable Is This Crazy Server Spending? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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