Archive

Category Archives for "Networking"

Birthday Week Wrap-Up: Every day is launch day at Cloudflare

Birthday Week Wrap-Up: Every day is launch day at Cloudflare

Our customers are accustomed to us launching new services, features, and functionality at a feverish pace, but recently, we’ve been especially active. This week we celebrated our 8th Birthday Week by announcing new offerings that benefit our customers and the global Internet community. Our mission is to help build a better Internet, and we’re convinced that launching new capabilities that benefit not only our customers, but also the broader Internet overall, is the best way to fulfill our mission.


Birthday Week Wrap-Up: Every day is launch day at Cloudflare

Helping build a better Internet, one launch at a time

As an organization, we could choose to celebrate Cloudflare’s birthday in lots of different ways (a press release, a company party, or fun gifts for all our employees). But at Cloudflare, we have a unique birthday tradition: we roll up our sleeves and give our customers and the Internet community a new capability (i.e. a gift) every day of our birthday week.

Some of this past week’s launches have been entirely new offerings, like providing key-value storage across Cloudflare’s global cloud network with Cloudflare Workers KV.  Other birthday week launches help improve the overall Internet ecosystem: the Bandwidth Alliance reduces data transfer charges from major cloud hosts and Cloudflare Registrar Continue reading

Outing Your Outages

How are you supposed to handle outages? What happens when everything around you goes upside down in an instant? How much communication is “too much”? Or “not enough”? And is all of this written down now instead of being figured out when the world is on fire?

Team Players

You might have noticed this week that Webex Teams spent most of the week down. Hard. Well, you might have noticed if you used Microsoft Teams, Slack, or any other messaging service that wasn’t offline. Webex Teams went offline about 8:00pm EDT Monday night. At first, most people just thought it was a momentary outage and things would be back up. However, as the hours wore on and Cisco started updating the incident page with more info it soon became apparent that Teams was not coming back soon. In fact, it took until Thursday for most of the functions to be restored from whatever knocked them offline.

What happened? Well, most companies don’t like to admit what exactly went wrong. For every CloudFlare or provider that has full disclosures on their site of outages, there are many more companies that will eventually release a statement with the least amount of technical Continue reading

Push for Greater Control Over the Internet Coming Back Around

A group of countries will likely try to resurrect old battles on international control of Internet in the coming months, during upcoming meetings related to Internet Governance, some experts say.

The effort to relitigate unresolved debates on government control over the Internet will likely come up during the International Telecommunication Union’s Plenipotentiary Conference starting Oct. 29 in Dubai, said Robert Morgus, senior policy director focused on cybersecurity at U.S. think tank New America.

Morgus expects Russia, China, and other countries to renew their push for new internationally sanctioned controls over the Internet during the ITU meeting, he said Thursday at an Internet governance discussion hosted by New America and co-sponsored by the Internet Society’s Washington Chapter.

While the ITU has traditionally stayed away from Internet policy decisions, the group of authoritarian countries will likely push for a new World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) meeting, Morgus said, where Internet control and governance issues have been hot topics.

The last WCIT meeting, in December 2012, ended with the United States, the U.K., Japan, and a handful of other countries declining to sign an agreement supported by 89 nations that called for international cooperation in fighting security problems Continue reading

Building With Workers KV, a Fast Distributed Key-Value Store

Building With Workers KV, a Fast Distributed Key-Value Store
Building With Workers KV, a Fast Distributed Key-Value Store

Your Workers now have access to a low-latency key-value data store which lives inside our network all around the world!

For those who don’t know, Cloudflare Workers is a new type of compute platform, built on top of our global network of 152+ data centers around the world. It allows you to write serverless code which runs in the fabric of the Internet itself, allowing you to engage with your users faster than other platforms can even get a packet to where your code is running. It’s built on a new architecture which eliminates cold starts and dramatically reduces the memory overhead of keeping your code running when compared to a platform like Amazon Lambda.

As powerful as this is, compute is just one component of what you need to build an application, you also need the ability to store data. We evaluated many of the available open source data stores on the market, but ultimately nothing was designed for a world with quite as many distributed nodes as our network. Instead, we have begun releasing our own vision for distributed storage, beginning today.

The Workers KV is a highly distributed, eventually-consistent, key value store. It will allow you to Continue reading

Introducing Workers KV

Introducing Workers KV

In 1864 British computer pioneer Charles Babbage described the first key-value store. It was meant to be part of his Analytical Engine. Sadly, the Analytical Engine, which would have been the first programmable computer, was never built. But Babbage lays out clearly the design for his key-value store in his autobiography. He imagined a read-only store implemented as punched cards. He referred to these as Tables:

I explained that the Tables to be used must, of course, be computed and punched on cards by the machine, in which case they would undoubtedly be correct. I then added that when the machine wanted a tabular number, say the logarithm of a given number, that it would ring a bell and then stop itself. On this, the attendant would look at a certain part of the machine, and find that it wanted the logarithm of a given number, say of 2303. The attendant would then go to the drawer containing the pasteboard cards representing its table of logarithms. From amongst these he would take the required logarithmic card, and place it in the machine.

Introducing Workers KV

Punched card illustration from Babbage’s autobiography showing an integer key (2303) and value representing the decimal part of Continue reading

Back By Popular Demand – Docker Pals Is Coming To Barcelona!

At DockerCon Copenhagen we launched the Docker Pals program in order to connect attendees and help them make the most out of their trip to DockerCon. Attending a conference by yourself can be intimidating and we don’t want anyone to feel that way at DockerCon! Pals get matched with a few others who are new (the “Pals”), and someone who knows their way around (the “Guide”) so that you will know someone before you arrive at the conference. So, DockerCon veterans, please consider signing up to be a Guide and help welcome those newer to DockerCon to the amazing Docker community. Participating gives you the opportunity to learn even more, grow an even bigger network, and have even more fun!

Here’s what Pals had to say:

“Docker Pals was an excellent opportunity to meet new Docker Captains and Community Leaders who are open to engaging with container enthusiasts of all skill levels, specialities and backgrounds. I would certainly take advantage of the program again, and volunteer to be a Guide next year.” – Jackie Liu

“I was able to learn and understand how Docker is used in real time and in production with my fellow Docker Pal.” – Continue reading

BrandPost: It’s Time to Think Outside the Router

“Turn Me Loose” I finally delivered four large boxes of CDs to my local library – my collection of nearly 1,000 titles, some as old as 33 years, like my Loverboy CD, when I acquired them in back in 1985. And back in 1985, or maybe 1986, I did a similar uncluttering with my cassettes and vinyl (except for a few select albums like an original release of Dark Side of the Moon).Music has gone from 12” vinyl to more compact cassette tapes to even more compact CDs and now streaming services that connect listeners to music anywhere, anytime. Just as music technology has changed through the years to provide more flexibility on how music is consumed, the application consumption model has changed, too. The “job of the WAN” has always been to connect users to applications, but wide area networking (WAN) technology based on conventional branch routers has not kept up to provide the optimal means of connecting to them.To read this article in full, please click here