Cloudflare Images was announced one year ago on this very blog to help you solve the problem of delivering images in the right size, right quality and fast. Very fast.
It doesn’t really matter if you only run a personal blog, or a portal with thousands of vendors and millions of end-users. Doesn’t matter if you need one hundred images to be served one thousand times each at most, or if you deal with tens of millions of new, unoptimized, images that you deliver billions of times per month.
We want to remove the complexity of dealing with the need to store, to process, resize, re-encode and serve the images using multiple platforms and vendors.
At the time we wrote:
Images is a single product that stores, resizes, optimizes and serves images. We built Cloudflare Images, so customers of all sizes can build a scalable and affordable image pipeline in minutes.
We supported the most common formats, such as JPG, WebP, PNG and GIF.
We did not feel the need to support SVG files. SVG files are inherently scalable, so there is nothing to resize on the server side before serving them to your audience. One can even argue that Continue reading
A few months ago we launched Custom Domains into an open beta. Custom Domains allow you to hook up your Workers to the Internet, without having to deal with DNS records or certificates – just enter a valid hostname and Cloudflare will do the rest! The beta’s over, and Custom Domains are now GA.
Custom Domains aren’t just about a seamless developer experience; they also allow you to build a globally distributed instantly scalable application on Cloudflare’s Developer Platform. That’s because Workers leveraging Custom Domains have no concept of an ‘Origin Server’. There’s no ‘home’ to phone to - and that also means your application can use the power of Cloudflare’s global network to run your application, well, everywhere. It’s truly serverless.
Today we’ll start a series of posts outlining a simple todo list application. We’ll start with an API and hook it up to the Internet using Custom Domains.
With Custom Domains, you’re treating the whole network as the application server. Any time a request comes into a Cloudflare data center, Workers are triggered in that data center and connect to resources across the network as needed. Our developers don’t need to Continue reading
The Software as a Service (SaaS) model has changed the way we work – 80% of businesses use at least one SaaS application. Instead of investing in building proprietary software or installing and maintaining on-prem licensed software, SaaS vendors provide businesses with out-of-the-box solutions.
SaaS has many benefits over the traditional software model: cost savings, continuous updates and scalability, to name a few. However, any managed solution comes with trade-offs. As a business, one of the biggest challenges in adopting SaaS tooling is loss of customization. Not every business uses software in the same way and as you grow as a SaaS company it’s not long until you get customers saying “if only I could do X”.
Enter Workers for Platforms – Cloudflare's serverless functions offering for SaaS businesses. With Workers for Platforms, your customers can build custom logic to meet their requirements right into your application.
We’re excited to announce that Workers for Platforms is now in GA for all Enterprise customers! If you’re an existing customer, reach out to your Customer Success Manager (CSM) to get access. For new customers, fill out our contact form to get started.
As a SaaS business invested in Continue reading
Today, we’re excited to announce that Stream Live is out of beta, available to everyone, and ready for production traffic at scale. Stream Live is a feature of Cloudflare Stream that allows developers to build live video features in websites and native apps.
Since its beta launch, developers have used Stream to broadcast live concerts from some of the world’s most popular artists directly to fans, build brand-new video creator platforms, operate a global 24/7 live OTT service, and more. While in beta, Stream has ingested millions of minutes of live video and delivered to viewers all over the world.
Bring your big live events, ambitious new video subscription service, or the next mobile video app with millions of users — we’re ready for it.
Live video uses a massive amount of bandwidth. For example, a one-hour live stream at 1080p at 8Mbps is 3.6GB. At typical cloud provider egress prices, even a little egress can break the bank.
Live video must be encoded on-the-fly, in real-time. People expect to be able to watch live video on their phone, while connected to mobile networks with less bandwidth, higher latency and Continue reading
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R2 gives developers object storage, without the egress fees. Before R2, cloud providers taught us to expect a data transfer tax every time we actually used the data we stored with them. Who stores data with the goal of never reading it? No one. Yet, every time you read data, the egress tax is applied. R2 gives developers the ability to access data freely, breaking the ecosystem lock-in that has long tied the hands of application builders.
In May 2022, we launched R2 into open beta. In just four short months we’ve been overwhelmed with over 12k developers (and rapidly growing) getting started with R2. Those developers came to us with a wide range of use cases from podcast applications to video platforms to ecommerce websites, and users like Vecteezy who was spending six figures in egress fees. We’ve learned quickly, gotten great feedback, and today we’re excited to announce R2 is now generally available.
We wouldn’t ask you to bet on tech we weren’t willing to bet on ourselves. While in open beta, we spent time moving our own products to R2. One such example, Cloudflare Images, proudly serving thousands Continue reading
On today's Full Stack Journey podcast we welcome guest Eric Chou, an author, educator, and network engineer. From traditional network engineering to the birth of "cloud" at Amazon and now working to share his knowledge via blog posts, videos, books, and classes, Eric shares lessons learned on his career journey.
The post Full Stack Journey 070: A Network Automation Career Journey With Eric Chou appeared first on Packet Pushers.
I spent a rainy day implementing VLANs, VRFs, and VXLAN on Cumulus Linux VX and came to “appreciate” the beauties of Linux networking configuration.
TL&DR: It sucks
There are two major ways of configuring data plane constructs (interfaces, port channels, VLANs, VRFs) on Linux:
I spent a rainy day implementing VLANs, VRFs, and VXLAN on Cumulus Linux VX and came to “appreciate” the beauties of Linux networking configuration.
TL&DR: It sucks
There are two major ways of configuring data plane constructs (interfaces, port channels, VLANs, VRFs) on Linux:
A startup called Veego is pitching an end user experience service to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to help providers offer better tech support to customers. The question is, are ISPs interested in customer service?
The post Startup Veego Targets ISP Customer Service With An End User Experience Package appeared first on Packet Pushers.
As enterprises adopt containers, microservices, and Kubernetes for cloud-native applications, vulnerability management is crucial to improve the security posture of containerized workloads throughout build, deploy, and runtime. Securing your build artifacts and deployment pipeline, especially when it comes to images, is extremely important. By following best practices for image building and scanning throughout the application development and deployment process, you can help ensure the security of the containers and workloads in your environment.
Let’s look at some of the nuances of choosing a base image, hardening your container image, and container image scanning, including tips on choosing an appropriate scanning solution and tackling privacy concerns.
It’s important to choose a base image that reduces the attack surface of your container. I recommend using a distroless or scratch image because they contain only the application and its runtime dependencies. Both types of images improve your security posture by reducing the attack surface and exposure to vulnerabilities.
If for some reason you can’t use a distroless or scratch image, choose a minimal distro. Modern immutable Linux distributions, such as Bottlerocket and Flatcar Container Linux, can be used as base images for containers, as can minimal versions Continue reading