Lab: Protect IS-IS Routing Data with MD5 Authentication
Like OSPF and BGP, IS-IS contains a simple mechanism to authenticate routing traffic – IS-IS packets can include a cleartext password or an MD5- or SHA hash. Unlike OSPF, IS-IS can also authenticate:
- The hello packets exchanged between routers
- The contents of Link State PDUs flooded across an area or a domain.
Want to know more? Check out the Protect IS-IS Routing Data with MD5 Authentication lab exercise.
Click here to start the lab in your browser using GitHub Codespaces (or set up your own lab infrastructure). After starting the lab environment, change the directory to feature/3-md5 and execute netlab up.
IPB184: IPv6 Basics: Dual-Stack
We’re diving into another IPv6 Basics today with the topic of dual-stack, which means running the IPv4 and IPv6 protocol stacks simultaneously. We get many questions about the implications of running dual-stack, and in this episode we’ll provide answers. We start by getting a little finicky about the definition of dual-stack, and then talk about... Read more »Announcing Cloudflare Email Service’s private beta
If you are building an application, you rely on email to communicate with your users. You validate their signup, notify them about events, and send them invoices through email. The service continues to find new purpose with agentic workflows and other AI-powered tools that rely on a simple email as an input or output.
And it is a pain for developers to manage. It’s frequently the most annoying burden for most teams. Developers deserve a solution that is simple, reliable, and deeply integrated into their workflow.
Today, we're excited to announce just that: the private beta of Email Sending, a new capability that allows you to send transactional emails directly from Cloudflare Workers. Email Sending joins and expands our popular Email Routing product, and together they form the new Cloudflare Email Service — a single, unified developer experience for all your email needs.
With Cloudflare Email Service, we’re distilling our years of experience securing and routing emails, and combining it with the power of the developer platform. Now, sending an email is as easy as adding a binding to a Worker and calling send:
export default {
async fetch(request, env, ctx) {
await env.SEND_EMAIL.send({
to: [{ Continue readingAnnouncing the Cloudflare Data Platform: ingest, store, and query your data directly on Cloudflare
For Developer Week in April 2025, we announced the public beta of R2 Data Catalog, a fully managed Apache Iceberg catalog on top of Cloudflare R2 object storage. Today, we are building on that foundation with three launches:
Cloudflare Pipelines receives events sent via Workers or HTTP, transforms them with SQL, and ingests them into Iceberg or as files on R2
R2 Data Catalog manages the Iceberg metadata and now performs ongoing maintenance, including compaction, to improve query performance
R2 SQL is our in-house distributed SQL engine, designed to perform petabyte-scale queries over your data in R2
Together, these products make up the Cloudflare Data Platform, a complete solution for ingesting, storing, and querying analytical data tables.
Like all Cloudflare Developer Platform products, they run on our global compute infrastructure. They’re built around open standards and interoperability. That means that you can bring your own Iceberg query engine — whether that's PyIceberg, DuckDB, or Spark — connect with other platforms like Databricks and Snowflake — and pay no egress fees to access your data.
Analytical data is critical for modern companies. It allows you to understand your user’s behavior, your company’s performance, and alerts you to issues. Continue reading
Choice: the path to AI sovereignty
Every government is laser-focused on the potential for national transformation by AI. Many view AI as an unparalleled opportunity to solve complex national challenges, drive economic growth, and improve the lives of their citizens. Others are concerned about the risks AI can bring to its society and economy. Some sit somewhere between these two perspectives. But as plans are drawn up by governments around the world to address the question of AI development and adoption, all are grappling with the critical question of sovereignty — how much of this technology, mostly centered in the United States and China, needs to be in their direct control?
Each nation has their own response to that question — some seek ‘self-sufficiency’ and total authority. Others, particularly those that do not have the capacity to build the full AI technology stack, are approaching it layer-by-layer, seeking to build on the capacities their country does have and then forming strategic partnerships to fill the gaps.
We believe AI sovereignty at its core is about choice. Each nation should have the ability to select the right tools for the task, to control its own data, and to deploy applications at will, all without being Continue reading
Every Cloudflare feature, available to everyone
Over the next year Cloudflare will make nearly every feature we offer available to any customer who wants to buy and use it regardless of whether they are an enterprise account. No need to pick up a phone and talk to a sales team member. No requirement to find time with a solutions engineer in our team to turn on a feature. No contract necessary. We believe that if you want to use something we offer, you should just be able to buy it.
Today’s launch starts by bringing Single Sign-On (SSO) into our dashboard out of our enterprise plan and making it available to any user. That capability is the first of many. We will be sharing updates over the next few months as more and more features become available for purchase on any plan.
We are also making a commitment to ensuring that all future releases will follow this model. The goal is not to restrict new tools to the enterprise tier for some amount of time before making them widely available. We believe helping build a better Internet means making sure the best tools are available to anyone who needs them.
It’s not Continue reading
Safe in the sandbox: security hardening for Cloudflare Workers
As a serverless cloud provider, we run your code on our globally distributed infrastructure. Being able to run customer code on our network means that anyone can take advantage of our global presence and low latency. Workers isn’t just efficient though, we also make it simple for our users. In short: You write code. We handle the rest.
Part of 'handling the rest' is making Workers as secure as possible. We have previously written about our security architecture. Making Workers secure is an interesting problem because the whole point of Workers is that we are running third party code on our hardware. This is one of the hardest security problems there is: any attacker has the full power available of a programming language running on the victim's system when they are crafting their attacks.
This is why we are constantly updating and improving the Workers Runtime to take advantage of the latest improvements in both hardware and software. This post shares some of the latest work we have been doing to keep Workers secure.
Some background first: Workers is built around the V8 JavaScript runtime, originally developed for Chromium-based browsers like Chrome. This gives us a head start, because V8 Continue reading
R2 SQL: a deep dive into our new distributed query engine
How do you run SQL queries over petabytes of data… without a server?
We have an answer for that: R2 SQL, a serverless query engine that can sift through enormous datasets and return results in seconds.
This post details the architecture and techniques that make this possible. We'll walk through our Query Planner, which uses R2 Data Catalog to prune terabytes of data before reading a single byte, and explain how we distribute the work across Cloudflare’s global network, Workers and R2 for massively parallel execution.
During Developer Week 2025, we launched R2 Data Catalog, a managed Apache Iceberg catalog built directly into your Cloudflare R2 bucket. Iceberg is an open table format that provides critical database features like transactions and schema evolution for petabyte-scale object storage. It gives you a reliable catalog of your data, but it doesn’t provide a way to query it.
Until now, reading your R2 Data Catalog required setting up a separate service like Apache Spark or Trino. Operating these engines at scale is not easy: you need to provision clusters, manage resource usage, and be responsible for their availability, none of which contributes to the primary goal of Continue reading
Partnering to make full-stack fast: deploy PlanetScale databases directly from Workers
We’re not burying the lede on this one: you can now connect Cloudflare Workers to your PlanetScale databases directly and ship full-stack applications backed by Postgres or MySQL.
We’ve teamed up with PlanetScale because we wanted to partner with a database provider that we could confidently recommend to our users: one that shares our obsession with performance, reliability and developer experience. These are all critical factors for any development team building a serious application.
Now, when connecting to PlanetScale databases, your connections are automatically configured for optimal performance with Hyperdrive, ensuring that you have the fastest access from your Workers to your databases, regardless of where your Workers are running.
As Workers has matured into a full-stack platform, we’ve introduced more options to facilitate your connectivity to data. With Workers KV, we made it easy to store configuration and cache unstructured data on the edge. With D1 and Durable Objects, we made it possible to build multi-tenant apps with simple, isolated SQL databases. And with Hyperdrive, we made connecting to external databases fast and scalable from Workers.
Today, we’re introducing a new choice for building on Cloudflare: Postgres and MySQL PlanetScale databases, directly Continue reading
Cloudflare’s developer platform keeps getting better, faster, and more powerful. Here’s everything that’s new.
When you build on Cloudflare, we consider it our job to do the heavy lifting for you. That’s been true since we introduced Cloudflare Workers in 2017, when we first provided a runtime for you where you could just focus on building.
That commitment is still true today, and many of today’s announcements are focused on just that — removing friction where possible to free you up to build something great.
There are only so many blog posts we can write (and that you can read)! We have been busy on a much longer list of new improvements, and many of them we’ve been rolling out consistently over the course of the year. Today’s announcement breaks down all the new capabilities in detail, in one single post. The features being released today include:
Use more APIs from Node.js — including node:fs and node:https
Use models from different providers in AI Search (formerly AutoRAG)
Deploy larger container instances and more concurrent instances to our Containers platform
Run 30 concurrent headless web browsers (previously 10), via the Browser Rendering API
Use the Playwright browser automation library with the Browser Rendering API — now fully supported and GA
N4N039: Configuring an IPsec Tunnel
We dive back into the world of IPsec with an episode dedicated to configuring IPsec tunnels. After discussing a listener comment regarding transport mode in IPsec tunnels, Ethan Banks and Holly Metlitzky work through topics such as multi-vendor IPsec configuration, licensing, and the details of configuration and routing. Bonus material: MTU size and NAT-T. Episode... Read more »A year of improving Node.js compatibility in Cloudflare Workers
We've been busy.
Compatibility with the broad JavaScript developer ecosystem has always been a key strategic investment for us. We believe in open standards and an open web. We want you to see Workers as a powerful extension of your development platform with the ability to just drop code in that Just Works. To deliver on this goal, the Cloudflare Workers team has spent the past year significantly expanding compatibility with the Node.js ecosystem, enabling hundreds (if not thousands) of popular npm modules to now work seamlessly, including the ever popular express framework.
We have implemented a substantial subset of the Node.js standard library, focusing on the most commonly used, and asked for, APIs. These include:
| Module | API documentation |
|---|---|
| node:console | https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/console.html |
| node:crypto | https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/crypto.html |
| node:dns | https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/dns.html |
| node:fs | https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/fs.html |
| node:http | https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/http.html |
| node:https | https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/https.html |
| node:net | https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/net.html |
| node:process | https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/process.html |
| node:timers | https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/timers.html |
| node:tls | https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/tls.html |
| node:zlib | https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/zlib.html |
Each of these has been carefully implemented to approximate Node.js' behavior as closely as possible where feasible. Where matching Node.js' behavior is not possible, our implementations will throw a clear error Continue reading
Some interesting stuff I found on IX LANs
Some interesting stuff I found on IX LANs
These days the internet as a whole is mostly constructed out of point to point ethernet circuits, meaning an ethernet interface (mostly optical) attached
Public Videos: Ansible for Networking Engineers
I made most of the Ansible for Networking Engineers webinar public; you can watch those videos without an ipSpace.net account.
Want to spend more time watching free ipSpace.net videos? The complete list is here.
D2DO283: Lessons Learned When a Startup Doesn’t Take Wing
Today we talk to Elad Ben-Israel about his former startup Wing Cloud, and the language that was built along with it, Winglang. We discuss why Eland started Wing Cloud, lessons learned about founding a start up, and what the future holds for the Winglang language. Ad Spot: Faddom Faddom helps you discover and map your... Read more »NAN101: Scaling Intel’s Data Centers with Network Automation (Sponsored)
Transforming over 5,000 network devices across 56 data centers is no small feat. Doing that with a very small team is even more impressive. On today’s episode, sponsored by Network To Code, we talk to Greg Botts from Intel, who with his team accomplished just that. They started with YAML files and DNS records and... Read more »A simpler path to a safer Internet: an update to our CSAM scanning tool
Launching a website or an online community brings people together to create and share. The operators of these platforms, sadly, also have to navigate what happens when bad actors attempt to misuse those destinations to spread the most heinous content like child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
We are committed to helping anyone on the Internet protect their platform from this kind of misuse. We first launched a CSAM Scanning Tool several years ago to give any website on the Internet the ability to programmatically scan content uploaded to their platform for instances of CSAM in partnership with National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), Interpol, and dozens of other organizations committed to protecting children. That release took technology that was only available to the largest social media platforms and provided it to any website.
However, the tool we offered still required setup work that added friction to its adoption. To help our customers file reports to NCMEC, they needed to create their own credentials. That step of creating credentials and sharing them was too confusing or too much work for small site owners. We did our best helping them with secondary reports, but we needed a method that made Continue reading
Automatically Secure: how we upgraded 6,000,000 domains by default to get ready for the Quantum Future
The Internet is in constant motion. Sites scale, traffic shifts, and attackers adapt. Security that worked yesterday may not be enough tomorrow. That’s why the technologies that protect the web — such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) and emerging post-quantum cryptography (PQC) — must also continue to evolve. We want to make sure that everyone benefits from this evolution automatically, so we enabled the strongest protections by default.
During Birthday Week 2024, we announced Automatic SSL/TLS: a service that scans origin server configurations of domains behind Cloudflare, and automatically upgrades them to the most secure encryption mode they support. In the past year, this system has quietly strengthened security for more than 6 million domains — ensuring Cloudflare can always connect to origin servers over the safest possible channel, without customers lifting a finger.
Now, a year after we started enabling Automatic SSL/TLS, we want to talk about these results, why they matter, and how we’re preparing for the next leap in Internet security.
Before diving in, let’s review the basics of Transport Layer Security (TLS). The protocol allows two strangers (like a client and server) to communicate securely.
Every secure web session Continue reading