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Category Archives for "Networking"

Making Cloudflare the best platform for building AI Agents

As engineers, we’re obsessed with efficiency and automating anything we find ourselves doing more than twice. If you’ve ever done this, you know that the happy path is always easy, but the second the inputs get complex, automation becomes really hard. This is because computers have traditionally required extremely specific instructions in order to execute.

The state of AI models available to us today has changed that. We now have access to computers that can reason, and make judgement calls in lieu of specifying every edge case under the sun.

That’s what AI agents are all about.

Today we’re excited to share a few announcements on how we’re making it even easier to build AI agents on Cloudflare, including:

  • agents-sdk — a new JavaScript framework for building AI agents

  • Updates to Workers AI: structured outputs, tool calling, and longer context windows for Workers AI, Cloudflare’s serverless inference engine

  • An update to the workers-ai-provider for the AI SDK

We truly believe that Cloudflare is the ideal platform for building Agents and AI applications (more on why below), and we’re constantly working to make it better — you can expect to see more announcements from us in this space in the future.

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Stub Networks in Virtual Labs

The previous blog posts described how virtualization products create LAN segments and point-to-point links.

However, sometimes we need stub segments – segments connected to a single router or switch – because we don’t want to waste resources creating hosts attached to a network device, but would still prefer a more realistic mechanism than static routes to inject IP subnets into routing protocols.

Read more …

NB515: Quantum Computing’s Future Looking More Certain; Arista Posts Record 2024 Revenues

Lots of good stuff in this week’s Network Break. Microsoft announces an 8-qubit quantum chip and declares that practical quantum computing is years, not decades, away. D-Wave says its quantum computers are now commercially available for research facilities, academic institutions, and governments. Apple rolls its own 5G modem into its iPhone 16e. Meta announces its... Read more »

How To Find and Fix What’s Trashing Your App Performance

Troubleshooting slow app or website performance is one of the more frustrating tasks developers face. Reliability is a key performance indicator and user experience metric, so when something goes wrong, it rises immediately to the top of your priority list. Unless you can find and fix the problem fast, everything else you’d planned to do today is getting pushed into the future. The Scenario Picture this: You’re busy at your keyboard, trying to hit a milestone on an important yet incremental upgrade to your company’s key user-facing app. Suddenly, your ticketing system goes berserk — dozens of users are reporting that they can’t access an essential feature in your app. More patient users report they can access it … eventually. It’s taking minutes to load, not seconds, as they’re used to. You check your app’s performance in your monitoring tool, and everything looks fine — all the indicators are showing green. But your users are saying the app is slow — which, as far as they’re concerned, means it’s down. So, what exactly is going on here? Uncover What’s Degrading Digital Performance The evolution to internet-centric application delivery has made it increasingly challenging for IT orgs to identify the root Continue reading

Worth Reading: Network Traffic Telemetry Protocols

Pavel Odintsov published a series of introductory blog posts describing protocols we can use to collect network traffic telemetry:

  • Part 1 covers the ancient Netflow v5, Netflow v9, and IPFIX. It also mentions sampling and flow aggregation.
  • Part 2 describes sFlow, port mirroring and sampled mirroring, and the use of IPFIX/Netflow v9 to transport mirrored traffic.

These blog posts will not make you an expert but will give you an excellent overview of the telemetry landscape1.

  1. Hint: more than enough to turn you into an instant AI-assisted LinkedIn garbage generator Thought Leader™ 😜 ↩︎

Introduction of an Artificial Neuron

 Introduction 


Before diving into the somewhat complex world of Artificial Intelligence (AI), let’s first consider what intelligence means from a human perspective. Judo, as a martial art, serves as a good—though not an obvious—example. I trained in judo for over 20 years. During that time, I learned which throwing techniques to use to take down an opponent efficiently by leveraging their movement energy and reactions. But how did I learn that? Through a supervised training process, where our coach first taught us the throwing techniques and the situations in which they work best. Then, we practiced them ourselves. Mastering these techniques requires thousands of repetitions before achieving perfection. Ultimately, timing and reaction to the opponent’s movements play a significant role in determining whether a throw is successful or not. After mastering several throwing technics, I was capable of apply them in the situation not necessarily to seen before.

How does this relate to Artificial Intelligence (AI)? AI is a broad term encompassing solutions that aim to mimic human brain functions. A subset of AI is Machine Learning (ML), which enables systems to make decisions based on input data without being explicitly programmed for each scenario. The driving force behind this Continue reading

Palo Alto Clientless VPN Configuration

Palo Alto Clientless VPN Configuration

As the title suggests, Palo Alto's clientless VPN allows users to access internal resources (HTTPS-based) without installing the GlobalProtect client. This is useful when you have an internal application that external contractors need to use, but they may not want to install a VPN client. All they need to do is open a browser, log in to your GlobalProtect portal, and access the applications directly. In this blog post, we'll go through the steps to configure Palo Alto Clientless VPN.

As always, if you find this post helpful, press the ‘clap’ button. It means a lot to me and helps me know you enjoy this type of content.

Overview

GlobalProtect Clientless VPN lets users securely access internal web applications from a browser without installing the GlobalProtect client. This is helpful for providing partners or contractors with access to specific internal applications. You can set up the GlobalProtect portal landing page to give users direct access to these applications.

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Clientless VPN acts as a reverse proxy, intercepting and modifying web pages from internal applications before presenting them to remote users. When users access these URLs, their requests pass through the GlobalProtect portal.

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Before proceeding, Continue reading

From Python to Go 014. Basic SSH Interaction With Network Devices.

Hello my friend,

As mentioned in the previous blogpost, we started talking about practical usage of Python and Go (Golang) for network and IT infrastructure automation. Today we’ll take a look how we can interact with any SSH-speaking device, whether it is a network device, server, or anything else.

You Put So Much Content For Free Online, Why To Join Trainings Then?

Our ultimate goal is to make you successful with software developing for IT infrastructure management. Out blogs are the first step so that you can get up to speed if you already well equipped with fundamentals as protocols, data formats, etc. We believe that sharing is caring, hence we share back our knowledge with you, so that your path could be a little bit easier and quicker, so that you have more time to focus on what matters. If that’s enough for you to move forward, that’s great.

At the same time, if you feel you need more, you want to have finely-curated labs, slack support and deep dive not just in coding, but really in fundamentals, our training programs are here for you:

We offer the following training programs in network automation for you:

Choosing the Right Transport Protocol: TCP vs. UDP vs. QUIC

We often think of protocol choice as a purely technical decision, but it’s a critical factor in the user experience and how your application is consumed. This is a high-impact business decision, making it crucial for the technical team first to understand the business situation and priorities. Choosing the right transport protocol — TCP, UDP or QUIC — profoundly impacts scalability, reliability and performance. These protocols function like different postal services, each offering a unique approach to delivering messages across networks. Should your platform prioritize the reliability of a certified letter, the speed of a doorstep drop-off or the innovation of a couriered package with signature confirmation? This decision-making framework breaks down the strengths, weaknesses, and ideal use cases of TCP, UDP and QUIC. It gives platform engineers and architects the insights to choose the proper protocol for their systems. Overview of Protocols Most engineers are familiar with TCP and have heard of UDP. Some may even have hands-on experience with QUIC. However, to make the right choice, it’s helpful to align on how these protocols compare before diving into the decision-making framework. TCP: The Certified Letter

Weekend Reads 022125


It’s no wonder that techno-futurists trumpet a coming machine intelligence with such ease — they’ve lowered the standards so much to begin with.


While companies are going to extraordinary lengths to obtain valuable compute power to satisfy artificial intelligence’s (AI) growing appetite, a group of vendors have found a way to dip into the existing infrastructure for the extra shot of compute.


To ensure stability and security, every IXP enforces a set of rules — a code of conduct for its participants. These rules go beyond technical niceties; they are essential safeguards for the entire ecosystem.


The terms Digital Sovereignty or Souveraineté numérique have recently risen in prominence to describe the international rule of law as it applies to information and communication technologies.


In this second installment of Beyond Their Intended Scope, we analyze a recent BGP leak out of Brazil that briefly affected networks around the world.

Run BGP Across a Firewall

When I asked my readers what they would consider a good use case for EBGP multihop (thanks again to everyone who answered!), many suggested running BGP across a layer-3 firewall (Running BGP across a “transparent” (bump-in-the-wire) firewall is trivial). I turned that suggestion into a lab exercise in which you have to establish an EBGP multihop session across a “firewall” simulated by a Linux host.

If you haven’t set up your own lab infrastructure, click here to start the lab in your browser using GitHub Codespaces. After starting your codespace, change the directory to basic/e-ebgp-multihop and execute netlab up.

High-Performance Kubernetes Networking with Calico eBPF

Kubernetes has revolutionized cloud-native applications, but networking remains a crucial aspect of ensuring scalability, security, and performance. Default networking approaches, such as iptables-based packet filtering, often introduce performance bottlenecks due to inefficient packet processing and complex rule evaluations. This is where Calico eBPF comes into play, offering a powerful alternative that enhances networking efficiency and security at scale.

Understanding Kubernetes Networking

Kubernetes networking consists of two primary components:

  1. Physical Network Infrastructure – Connects cloud resources to external networks, ensuring communication between nodes and the broader internet.
  2. Cluster Network Infrastructure – Manages internal workload communication within the Kubernetes cluster, including service-to-service traffic and pod-to-pod interactions.

Choosing the right data plane is critical for optimal performance. Factors such as cluster size, throughput, and security requirements should guide this choice. Poor networking choices can lead to congestion, excessive latency, and resource starvation.

Data Plane Options in Kubernetes Networking

Networking in Kubernetes is an abstract idea. While Kubernetes lays the foundation, your Container Networking Interface (CNI) is in charge of the actual networking. To better understand networking, we usually divide it into two sections: a control plane and a data plane.

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