Archive

Category Archives for "Networking"

NSX Portfolio Realizing the Virtual Cloud Network for Customers

If you’re already in Las Vegas or heading there, we are excited to welcome you into the Virtual Cloud Network Experience at VMworld US 2018!

First, why is the networking and security business unit at VMware calling this a “Virtual Cloud Network Experience”? Announced May 1, the Virtual Cloud Network is the network model for the digital era. It is also the vision of VMware for the future of networking to empower customers to connect and protect applications and data, regardless of where they sit – from edge to edge.

At VMworld this year we’re making some announcements that are helping turn the Virtual Cloud Network vision into reality and showcasing customer that have embraced virtual cloud networking.

With that, here’s what’s new:

Public Cloud, Bare Metal, and Containers

NSX is only for VMs, right? Wrong! We’ve added support for native AWS and Azure workloads with NSX Cloud, support for applications running on bare metal servers (no hypervisor!), and increased support for containers (including containers running on bare metal). There’s much to get up to speed on so check out the can’t-miss 100-level sessions below, plus there are a bunch of 200 and 300 level sessions covering the Continue reading

Using Workers To Make Static Sites Dynamic

Using Workers To Make Static Sites Dynamic

The following is a guest post by Paddy Sherry, Lead Developer at Gambling.com Group. They build performance marketing websites and tools, using Cloudflare to serve to their global audience. Paddy is a Web Performance enthusiast with an interest in Serverless Computing.

Choosing technology that is used on a large network of sites is a key architectural decision that must be correct. We build static websites but needed to find a way to make them dynamic to do things like geo targeting, restrict access and A/B testing. This post shares our experiences on what we learned when using Workers to tackle these challenges.

Our Background

At Gambling.com Group, we use Cloudflare on all of our sites so our curiosity level in Workers was higher than most. We are big fans of static websites because nothing is faster than flat HTML. We had been searching for a technology like this for some time and applied to be part of the beta program, so were one of the first to gain access to the functionality.

The reason we were so keen to experiment with Workers is that for anyone running static sites, 99% of the time, the product requirements Continue reading

Deploying TLS 1.3

Last week saw the formal publication of the TLS 1.3 specification as RFC 8446. It’s been a long time coming – in fact it’s exactly 10 years since TLS 1.2 was published back in 2008 – but represents a substantial step forward in making the Internet a more secure and trusted place.

What is TLS and why is it needed?

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is widely used to encrypt data transmitted between Internet hosts, with the most popular use being for secure web browser connections (adding the ‘S’ to HTTP). It is also commonly (although less visibly) used to encrypt data sent to and from mail servers (using STARTTLS with SMTP and IMAP/POP etc..), but can be used in conjunction with many other Internet protocols (e.g. DNS-over-TLS, FTPS) where secure connections are required. For more information about how TLS works and why you should use it, please see our TLS Basics guide.

TLS is often used interchangeably with SSL (Secure Socket Layers) which was developed by Netscape and predates it as an IETF Standard, but many Certification Authorities (CAs) still market the X.509 certificates used by TLS as ‘SSL certificates’ due to their familiarity with Continue reading

Dell XPS 15 (9560) Ubuntu 1804 Setup

I recently upgraded my Dell XPS (9560) to Ubuntu 1804 LTS from 1604 and I ran into a few issues along the way. This post may help others so I am documenting it here. Pre-Flight Prior to installing Ubuntu 1604 I upgraded the BIOS from Windows 10. Also in the BIOS settings I disabled secure...

White Box Open Networking: A Cure for Your Regulatory Compliance Ills

Just about every major US regulatory requirement says companies must use software that’s fully supported by the vendor that sells it. Simply put, if you’re using software that is beyond its end of life, you’re not only posing a security risk to your company – you’re also out of regulatory compliance.

It’s an issue for any public company, given that they must all comply with the Sarbanes Oxley Act, as well as any company that must meet the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).  Those three acts alone cover an awful lot of, if not most, US companies.

All software has a lifecycle, including the network operating system (NOS) software controlling all the network switches and routers in enterprise networks. When that NOS is nearing its end of life, meaning you have no choice but to upgrade in order to stay in compliance, it’s a good time to assess your available options. In fact, given the pace of technology change, it’s a safe bet that you’ve got alternatives that quite literally didn’t exist when you installed your current NOS five, six — or more — years ago.

White Continue reading

Introducing ebpf_exporter

Introducing ebpf_exporter

This is an adapted transcript of a talk I gave at Promcon 2018. You can find slides with additional information on our Prometheus deployment and presenter notes here. There's also a video.

Tip: you can click on the image to see the original large version.

Introducing ebpf_exporter

Here at Cloudflare we use Prometheus to collect operational metrics. We run it on hundreds of servers and ingest millions of metrics per second to get insight into our network and provide the best possible service to our customers.

Prometheus metric format is popular enough, it's now being standardized as OpenMetrics under Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It's exciting to see convergence in long fragmented metrics landscape.

In this blog post we'll talk about how we measure low level metrics and share a tool that can help you to get similar understanding of your systems.

Introducing ebpf_exporter

There are two main exporters one can use to get some insight into a Linux system performance.

The first one is node_exporter that gives you information about basics like CPU usage breakdown by type, memory usage, disk IO stats, filesystem and network usage.

The second one is cAdvisor, that gives similar metrics, but drills down to a container level. Instead Continue reading

Fog Computing and Networking

To meet the needs of the emerging applications and networks, the clouds are descending toward the ground and even dispersed among the client devices – forming fog computing and networking or fog. Learn more about fog computing at Fog World Congress 2018.