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Category Archives for "Networking"

Cloudflare Zaraz supports Managed Components and DLP to make third-party tools private

Cloudflare Zaraz supports Managed Components and DLP to make third-party tools private
Cloudflare Zaraz supports Managed Components and DLP to make third-party tools private

When it comes to privacy, much is in your control as a website owner. You decide what information to collect, how to transmit it, how to process it, and where to store it. If you care for the privacy of your users, you’re probably taking action to ensure that these steps are handled sensitively and carefully. If your website includes no third party tools at all - no analytics, no conversion pixels, no widgets, nothing at all - then it’s probably enough! But… If your website is one of the other 94% of the Internet, you have some third-party code running in it. Unfortunately, you probably can’t tell what exactly this code is doing.

Third-party tools are great. Your product team, marketing team, BI team - they’re all right when they say that these tools make a better website. Third-party tools can help you understand your users better, embed information such as maps, chat widgets, or measure and attribute conversions more accurately. The problem doesn’t lay with the tools themselves, but with the way they are implemented - third party scripts.

Third-party scripts are pieces of JavaScript that your website is loading, often from a remote web server. Those Continue reading

API Endpoint Management and Metrics are now GA

API Endpoint Management and Metrics are now GA
API Endpoint Management and Metrics are now GA

The Internet is an endless flow of conversations between computers. These conversations, the  constant exchange of information from one computer to another, are what allow us to interact with the Internet as we know it. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are the vital channels that carry these conversations, and their usage is quickly growing: in fact, more than half of the traffic handled by Cloudflare is for APIs, and this is increasing twice as fast as traditional web traffic.

In March, we announced that we’re expanding our API Shield into a full API Gateway to make it easy for our customers to protect and manage those conversations. We already offer several features that allow you to secure your endpoints, but there’s more to endpoints than their security. It can be difficult to keep track of many endpoints over time and understand how they’re performing. Customers deserve to see what’s going on with their API-driven domains and have the ability to manage their endpoints.

Today, we’re excited to announce that the ability to save, update, and monitor the performance of all your API endpoints is now generally available to API Shield customers. This includes key performance metrics like latency, error rate, and Continue reading

Protests spur Internet disruptions in Iran

Protests spur Internet disruptions in Iran
Protests spur Internet disruptions in Iran

Over the past several days, protests and demonstrations have erupted across Iran in response to the death of Mahsa Amini. Amini was a 22-year-old woman from the Kurdistan Province of Iran, and was arrested on September 13, 2022, in Tehran by Iran’s “morality police”, a unit that enforces strict dress codes for women. She died on September 16 while in police custody.

Published reports indicate that the growing protests have resulted in at least eight deaths. Iran has a history of restricting Internet connectivity in response to protests, taking such steps in May 2022, February 2021, and November 2019. They have taken a similar approach to the current protests, including disrupting Internet connectivity, blocking social media platforms, and blocking DNS. The impact of these actions, as seen through Cloudflare’s data, are reviewed below.

Impact to Internet traffic

In the city of Sanandij in the Kurdistan Province, several days of anti-government protests took place after the death of Mahsa Amini. In response, the government reportedly disrupted Internet connectivity there on September 19. This disruption is clearly visible in the graph below, with traffic on TCI (AS58224), Iran’s fixed-line incumbent operator, in Sanandij dropping to zero between Continue reading

Broadcom’s VMware acquisition sparks concern

Chip powerhouse Broadcom recently announced its intention to acquire virtualization pioneer VMware for $61 billion. In light of Broadcom’s less than stellar track record with prior acquisitions (CA Technologies in 2018, and Symantec in 2019), VMware’s enterprise customers are understandably worried.“Following the purchases of CA and Symantec, Broadcom raised prices, decreased support, and stopped investing in innovation,” says Tracy Woo, senior analyst for Forrester. “VMware customers would be wise to have an exit plan,” she cautioned.IDC analyst Stephen Elliot sees it differently. Rather than advising VMware customers to identify the exits, Elliot believes customers should “double down” on their relationship with the vendor, moving towards a more strategic business partnership.To read this article in full, please click here

Broadcom’s VMware acquisition sparks concern

Chip powerhouse Broadcom recently announced its intention to acquire virtualization pioneer VMware for $61 billion. In light of Broadcom’s less than stellar track record with prior acquisitions (CA Technologies in 2018, and Symantec in 2019), VMware’s enterprise customers are understandably worried.“Following the purchases of CA and Symantec, Broadcom raised prices, decreased support, and stopped investing in innovation,” says Tracy Woo, senior analyst for Forrester. “VMware customers would be wise to have an exit plan,” she cautioned.IDC analyst Stephen Elliot sees it differently. Rather than advising VMware customers to identify the exits, Elliot believes customers should “double down” on their relationship with the vendor, moving towards a more strategic business partnership.To read this article in full, please click here

Day Two Cloud 164: DevSecOps Is A Real Thing

Today on the Day Two Cloud podcast, we talk DevSecOps and how it's more than just a marketing term. We also discuss Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and IT as Code and what that actually means for operations folks. It doesn't mean you have to write code all day, but we make an effort to put some specifics around what an Ops person should know when it comes to code.

The post Day Two Cloud 164: DevSecOps Is A Real Thing appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Day Two Cloud 164: DevSecOps Is A Real Thing

Today on the Day Two Cloud podcast, we talk DevSecOps and how it's more than just a marketing term. We also discuss Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and IT as Code and what that actually means for operations folks. It doesn't mean you have to write code all day, but we make an effort to put some specifics around what an Ops person should know when it comes to code.

Regional Services comes to India, Japan and Australia

Regional Services comes to India, Japan and Australia

This post is also available in 简体中文, 日本語, Español, Deutsch, Français.

Regional Services comes to India, Japan and Australia

We announced the Data Localization Suite in 2020, when requirements for data localization were already important in the European Union. Since then, we’ve witnessed a growing trend toward localization globally. We are thrilled to expand our coverage to these countries in Asia Pacific, allowing more customers to use Cloudflare by giving them precise control over which parts of the Cloudflare network are able to perform advanced functions like WAF or Bot Management that require inspecting traffic.

Regional Services, a recap

In 2020, we introduced (Regional Services), a new way for customers to use Cloudflare. With Regional Services, customers can limit which data centers actually decrypt and inspect traffic. This helps because certain customers are affected by regulations on where they are allowed to service traffic. Others have agreements with their customers as part of contracts specifying exactly where traffic is allowed to be decrypted and inspected.

As one German bank told us: "We can look at the rules and regulations and debate them all we want. As long as you promise me that no machine outside the European Union will see a decrypted Continue reading

Digital-twin tech at crux of Schneider Electric’s $10.7B deal for Aveva

Digital-twin technology is playing an important role in the plan by French industrial automation company Schneider Electric to fully take over UK industrial and engineering software vendor Aveva, in a $10.7 billion deal announced Wednesday.Schneider has been a majority shareholder of Aveva since 2018, when it bought roughly 60% of the company’s shares through a reverse merger that made Schneider’s industrial software business a part of the UK firm. The new acquisition deal, when it closes, would see all shares of the British company transferred to Schneider.To read this article in full, please click here

Linux Foundation to blaze a path forward for mainframes

Open-source software development will be a key component to keeping the mainframe a vibrant part of current and future enterprise architectures.With that in mind the Open Mainframe Project, part of the Linux Foundation, this week said at its Open Mainframe Summit that it was forming a working group to promote mainframe-modernization efforts and that it had acqured its own Big Iron to spur future development. [ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] The working group will create a common definition and framework defining what mainframe modernization should look like and promote open-source development on the Big Iron.To read this article in full, please click here

Linux Foundation to blaze a path forward for mainframes

Open-source software development will be a key component to keeping the mainframe a vibrant part of current and future enterprise architectures.With that in mind the Open Mainframe Project, part of the Linux Foundation, this week said at its Open Mainframe Summit that it was forming a working group to promote mainframe-modernization efforts and that it had acqured its own Big Iron to spur future development. [ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] The working group will create a common definition and framework defining what mainframe modernization should look like and promote open-source development on the Big Iron.To read this article in full, please click here

Former Broadcom engineer gets eight months in prison for trade secrets theft

A former employee of chip designer Broadcom was sentenced to eight months in prison this week by a federal district court judge after pleading guilty to charges for theft of trade secrets in May, according to an announcement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California.Peter Kisang Kim, who worked for Broadcom as a principal design engineer for more than 20 years, quit his job in July 2020 and, after less than two weeks, took a job at a startup based in the People’s Republic of China. In pleading guilty, Kim admitted to accessing trade secret information from Broadcom related to the testing and design of the company’s Trident family of chipsets, which are designed for use in network switches and cloud-based networking equipment.To read this article in full, please click here

Store and retrieve your logs on R2

Store and retrieve your logs on R2
Store and retrieve your logs on R2

Following today’s announcement of General Availability of Cloudflare R2 object storage, we’re excited to announce that customers can also store and retrieve their logs on R2.

Cloudflare’s Logging and Analytics products provide vital insights into customers’ applications. Though we have a breadth of capabilities, logs in particular play a pivotal role in understanding what occurs at a granular level; we produce detailed logs containing metadata generated by Cloudflare products via events flowing through our network, and they are depended upon to illustrate or investigate anything (and everything) from the general performance or health of applications to closely examining security incidents.

Until today, we have only provided customers with the ability to export logs to 3rd-party destinations - to both store and perform analysis. However, with Log Storage on R2 we are able to offer customers a cost-effective solution to store event logs for any of our products.

The cost conundrum

We’ve unpacked the commercial impact in a previous blog post, but to recap, the cost of storage can vary broadly depending on the volume of requests Internet properties receive. On top of that - and specifically pertaining to logs - there’s usually more expensive fees to access that data whenever Continue reading

BrandPost: HPE (Aruba) Named an SD-WAN Magic Quadrant Leader 5 Years in a Row

By Jeff Olson, Director of SD-WAN Product and Technical Marketing, at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.We are honored to share that Gartner® has recognized HPE (Aruba) as a Leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SD-WAN for the fifth year in a row. HPE (Aruba) is one of only two companies to be named a Leader in the Gartner SD-WAN Magic Quadrant all five years.In the Magic Quadrant for SD-WAN report, formerly named Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge, Gartner evaluated vendors based on two primary criteria: Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute. The report includes a summary of each vendor, as well as an assessment of each vendor’s strengths and cautions.To read this article in full, please click here

SVG support in Cloudflare Images

SVG support in Cloudflare Images
SVG support in Cloudflare Images

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

Going originless with Cloudflare Workers – Building a Todo app – Part 1: The API

Going originless with Cloudflare Workers – Building a Todo app – Part 1: The API
Going originless with Cloudflare Workers – Building a Todo app – Part 1: The API

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.

Let’s build “Todo”, but without the servers

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 easiest way to build a modern SaaS application

The easiest way to build a modern SaaS application
The easiest way to build a modern SaaS application

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.

The conundrum of customization

As a SaaS business invested in Continue reading