A Tale of Two (APT) Transports

Securing access to your APT repositories is critical. At Cloudflare, like in most organizations, we used a legacy VPN to lock down who could reach our internal software repositories. However, a network perimeter model lacks a number of features that we consider critical to a team’s security.

As a company, we’ve been moving our internal infrastructure to our own zero-trust platform, Cloudflare Access. Access added SaaS-like convenience to the on-premise tools we managed. We started with web applications and then moved resources we need to reach over SSH behind the Access gateway, for example Git or user-SSH access. However, we still needed to handle how services communicate with our internal APT repository.

We recently open sourced a new APT transport which allows customers to protect their private APT repositories using Cloudflare Access. In this post, we’ll outline the history of APT tooling, APT transports and introduce our new APT transport for Cloudflare Access.

A brief history of APT

Advanced Package Tool, or APT, simplifies the installation and removal of software on Debian and related Linux distributions. Originally released in 1998, APT was to Debian what the App Store was to modern smartphones - a decade ahead of its time!

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Go Hack Nights at Cloudflare

At Cloudflare we're extensively using the Go programming language to build a better Internet. Go is a free and open source programming language created by Google in 2007 and open sourced in 2009. Earlier this year, Go made news when it entered the list of top 10 programming languages on the TIOBE Index.

Recently we launched an internal monthly Go Hack Night at our San Francisco office, open to anyone who works at Cloudflare regardless of their department or position. Anyone from newbie programmers to our most experienced Go engineers are encouraged to attend, and experienced engineers are asked to throw on a mentor badge and help guide colleagues with installing and learning Go.

We had over 30 attendees at our inaugural Go Hack Night, and our survey reveals some great stats:

• 26% of attendees were completely new to programming
• 61% of attendees were experienced in other languages but new to Go
• Every attendee said they learned something!

We actively encourage an inclusive learning culture and we're super excited to make the Go programming language more accessible to our entire company.

If you're interested in working with Go and helping to build a better Internet, we're hiring!

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