Tech Bytes: Nokia Deepfield Brings Fresh Analytics, New Gear To The DDoS Fight (Sponsored)
Distributed Denial of Service attacks, or DDoS, have plagued the Internet for decades. And attackers are finding new ways to take advantage of higher levels of bandwidth and the ever-growing number of network-connected devices. Today on Tech Bytes, sponsored by Nokia, we’ll talk about what’s brewing on the DDoS front and how Nokia’s Deepfield is... Read more »Cloudflare named a leader in Forrester Edge Development Platforms Wave, Q4 2023
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Forrester has recognized Cloudflare as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Edge Development Platforms, Q4 2023 with the top score in the current offering category.
According to the report by Principal Analyst, Devin Dickerson, “Cloudflare’s edge development platform provides the building blocks enterprises need to create full stack distributed applications and enables developers to take advantage of a globally distributed network of compute, storage and programmable security without being experts on CAP theorem.“
Over one million developers are building applications using the Developer Platform products including Workers, Pages, R2, KV, Queues, Durable Objects, D1, Stream, Images, and more. Developers can easily deploy highly distributed, full-stack applications using Cloudflare’s full suite of compute, storage, and developer services.
Workers make Cloudflare’s network programmable
“ A key strength of the platform is the interoperability with Cloudflare’s programmable global CDN combined with a deployment model that leverages intelligent workload placement.”
– The Forrester Wave™: Edge Development Platforms, Q4 2023
Workers run across Cloudflare’s global network, provide APIs to read from and write directly to the local cache, Continue reading
Asking The Right Question About The Wireless Future
It wasn’t that long ago that I wrote a piece about how Wi-Fi 6E isn’t going to move the needle very much in terms of connectivity. I stand by my convictions that the technology is just too new and doesn’t provide a great impetus to force users to upgrade or augment systems that are already deployed. Thankfully, someone at the recent Mobility Field Day 10 went and did a great job of summarizing some of my objections in a much simpler way. Thanks to Nick Swiatecki for this amazing presentation:
He captured so many of my hesitations as he discussed the future of wireless connectivity. And he managed to expand on them perfectly!
New Isn’t Automatically Better
Any time I see someone telling me that Wi-Fi 7 is right around the corner and that we need to see what it brings I can’t help but laugh. There may be devices that have support for it right now, but as Nick points out in the above video, that’s only one part of the puzzle. We still have to wait for the clients and the regulatory bodies to catch up to the infrastructure technology. Could you imagine if we did the same Continue reading
Can a Router Use the Default Route to Reach BGP Next Hops?
TL&DR: Yes.
Starting with RFC 4271, Route Resolvability Condition:
- A route without an outgoing interface is resolvable if its next hop is resolvable without recursively using the same route.
- A route with an outgoing interface is always considered resolvable.
- BGP routes can be resolved through routes with just a next hop or an outgoing interface.
Can a Router Use the Default Route to Reach BGP Next Hops?
TL&DR: Yes.
Starting with RFC 4271, Route Resolvability Condition:
- A route without an outgoing interface is resolvable if its next hop is resolvable without recursively using the same route.
- A route with an outgoing interface is always considered resolvable.
- BGP routes can be resolved through routes with just a next hop or an outgoing interface.
Weekly Roundup: NVIDIA Addresses AI Infrastructure Issues
NVIDIA announcements this week, like other industry efforts this year, aim to speed up Ethernet networking in an AI infrastructure.Worth Reading: Network Automation with GitHub Actions
George Davitiani put together a lovely proof-of-concept using GitHub actions to deploy modified configurations to network devices. Even better, he documented the whole setup, and the way to reproduce it. I’m positive you’ll find a few ideas browsing through what he did.
Worth Reading: Network Automation with GitHub Actions
George Davitiani put together a lovely proof-of-concept using GitHub actions to deploy modified configurations to network devices. Even better, he documented the whole setup, and the way to reproduce it. I’m positive you’ll find a few ideas browsing through what he did.
Worth Reading: Going CCNP Emeritus
Daniel Teycheney decided not to renew his CCNP status and used this opportunity to publish his thoughts on IT certifications. Not surprisingly, I agree with most of the things he said, but I never put it in writing so succinctly.
Red Pill Warning: Reading his blog post might damage your rosy view of the networking industry. You’ve been warned ;)
Worth Reading: Going CCNP Emeritus
Daniel Teycheney decided not to renew his CCNP status and used this opportunity to publish his thoughts on IT certifications. Not surprisingly, I agree with most of the things he said, but I never put it in writing so succinctly.
Red Pill Warning: Reading his blog post might damage your rosy view of the networking industry. You’ve been warned ;)
Do hackers eat turkey? And other Thanksgiving Internet trends
Thanksgiving is a tradition celebrated by millions of Americans across six time zones and 50 states, usually involving travel and bringing families together. This year, it was celebrated yesterday, on November 23, 2023. With the Internet so deeply enmeshed into our daily lives, anything that changes how so many people behave is going to also have an impact on online traffic. But how big an impact, exactly?
At a high level: a 10% daily decrease in Internet traffic in the US (compared to the previous week). That happens to be the exact same percentage decrease we observed in 2022. So, Thanksgiving in the US, at least in the realm of Internet traffic, seems consistent with last year.
Let’s dig into more details about how people deal with cooking (or online ordering!) and whether family gatherings are less online, according to our Cloudflare Radar data. We’ll also touch on whether hackers stop for turkey, too.
The Thanksgiving hour: around 15:00 (local time)
While we can see a 10% overall daily drop in US traffic due to Thanksgiving, the drop is even more noticeable when examining traffic on an hour-by-hour basis. Internet activity began to decrease significantly after 12:00 EST, persisting Continue reading
Video: Language Models in AI/ML Landscape
In September 2023, Javier Antich extended the AI/ML in Networking webinar with a new section describing large language models (LLMs), starting with how do the LLMs fit into the AI/ML landscape?
You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to access this webinar.
Video: Language Models in AI/ML Landscape
In September 2023, Javier Antich extended the AI/ML in Networking webinar with a new section describing large language models (LLMs), starting with how do the LLMs fit into the AI/ML landscape?
You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to access this webinar.
Candy Alexander Explains Why Bandwidth and Security are Both in High Demand
Learn why today’s changes in the way businesses operate require the use of new, secure, high-bandwidth connectivity options.RustRadio improved API 0.4
Since last time, I’ve improved the API a bit. That last post was about API version 0.3. Now it’s on 0.4, and I think it’s getting pretty decent.
0.3 could never have worked very well. The API was VecDeque-based,
which means it could not provide a linear view (a slice) of all the
data in the buffer.
The 0.4 API is simpler. You get a typed slice, and you read or write to, it as appropriate. Because all streams are currently single writer, single reader, the code is simple, and requires minimal amount of locking.
It’s simpler, but I switched to using memory mapped circular buffers, with a slice as the stream interface. This means that the buffer is allocated only once, yet both reader and writer can use all space available to them, linearly, without having to worry about wrapping around.
The code is still at https://github.com/ThomasHabets/rustradio. I
registered the github org rustyradio, too. rustradio was taken. I
sent a message to the owner, since it seems to not have any real
content, but have not heard back.
Unsafe code
To make this multiuser stream I did have to write some Continue reading
Network Courses and Certifications to Consider for 2024
There are many network courses that can address your present job's priorities and help you gain the needed skills to keep pace with industry changes and new technologies.Workers AI Update: Stable Diffusion, Code Llama + Workers AI in 100 cities
Thanksgiving might be a US holiday (and one of our favorites — we have many things to be thankful for!). Many people get excited about the food or deals, but for me as a developer, it’s also always been a nice quiet holiday to hack around and play with new tech. So in that spirit, we're thrilled to announce that Stable Diffusion and Code Llama are now available as part of Workers AI, running in over 100 cities across Cloudflare’s global network.
As many AI fans are aware, Stable Diffusion is the groundbreaking image-generation model that can conjure images based on text input. Code Llama is a powerful language model optimized for generating programming code.
For more of the fun details, read on, or head over to the developer docs to get started!
Generating images with Stable Diffusion
Stability AI launched Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 (SDXL) this past summer. You can read more about it here, but we’ll briefly mention some really cool aspects.
First off, “Distinct images can be prompted without having any particular ‘feel’ imparted by the model, ensuring absolute freedom of Continue reading
BGP Labs: AS-Path Prepending
In the previous lab, you learned how to use BGP Multi-Exit Discriminator (MED) to influence incoming traffic flow. Unfortunately, MED works only with parallel links to the same network. In a typical Redundant Internet Connectivity scenario, you want to have links to two ISPs, so you need a bigger hammer: AS Path Prepending.
BGP Labs: AS-Path Prepending
In the previous lab, you learned how to use BGP Multi-Exit Discriminator (MED) to influence incoming traffic flow. Unfortunately, MED works only with parallel links to the same network. In a typical Redundant Internet Connectivity scenario, you want to have links to two ISPs, so you need a bigger hammer: AS Path Prepending.
