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Category Archives for "Networking"

HN756: Alkira Enhances Its Multi-Cloud Networking With ZTNA and Security (Sponsored)

Alkira provides a Multi-Cloud Networking Service (MCNS) that lets you connect public cloud and on-prem locations using a cloud-delivered, as-a-service approach. But Alkira offers more than just multi-cloud connectivity. On today’s sponsored episode of Heavy Networking, we dig into Alkira’s full set of offerings, which include networking, visibility, governance, and security controls such as firewalls... Read more »

TNO007: Good Foundations Are Key To Leveraging AI for Network Operations

In this episode of Total Network Operations the conversation focuses on the impact and implementation of AI on network operations. Host Scott Robohn is joined by guest Michael Wynston to discuss the foundational requirements for AI implementation, such as well-documented processes, version control, and lab testing. Michael also talks about the need for lifelong learning... Read more »

Weekend Reads 110124


Do you want to analyse decrypted TLS traffic in Wireshark or let an Intrusion Detection System (IDS), like Suricata, Snort or Zeek, inspect the application layer data of potentially malicious TLS encrypted traffic?


Thousands of machines running Linux have been infected by a malware strain that’s notable for its stealth, the number of misconfigurations it can exploit, and the breadth of malicious activities it can perform, researchers reported Thursday.


More evidence has emerged that AI-driven demand for energy to power datacenters is prolonging the life of coal-fired plants in the US.


The Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) together ensure the stability of the Internet Numbers Registry System. In order to strengthen their accountability, efforts are under way to revise the criteria for the accreditation of RIRs, and the obligations they must continuously meet.


What happens on the network if you’re joining a Microsoft Active Directory domain? Which protocols are used? As I suspected, it’s a bit more complex than just seeing a single known protocol like HTTPS.


The demand for optical interconnects is so high, given the immense bandwidth bottlenecks for accelerator-to-accelerator and accelerator to memory needs, that raising venture funding is not a problem.


The basic approach to resolving the Continue reading

Workers Builds: integrated CI/CD built on the Workers platform

During 2024’s Birthday Week, we launched Workers Builds in open beta — an integrated Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) workflow you can use to build and deploy everything from full-stack applications built with the most popular frameworks to simple static websites onto the Workers platform. With Workers Builds, you can connect a GitHub or GitLab repository to a Worker, and Cloudflare will automatically build and deploy your changes each time you push a commit.

Workers Builds is intended to bridge the gap between the developer experiences for Workers and Pages, the latter of which launched with an integrated CI/CD system in 2020. As we continue to merge the experiences of Pages and Workers, we wanted to bring one of the best features of Pages to Workers: the ability to tie deployments to existing development workflows in GitHub and GitLab with minimal developer overhead. 

In this post, we’re going to share how we built the Workers Builds system on Cloudflare’s Developer Platform, using Workers, Durable Objects, Hyperdrive, Workers Logs, and Smart Placement.

The design problem

The core problem for Workers Builds is how to pick up a commit from GitHub or GitLab and start a Continue reading

Moving Baselime from AWS to Cloudflare: simpler architecture, improved performance, over 80% lower cloud costs

Introduction

When Baselime joined Cloudflare in April 2024, our architecture had evolved to hundreds of AWS Lambda functions, dozens of databases, and just as many queues. We were drowning in complexity and our cloud costs were growing fast. We are now building Baselime and Workers Observability on Cloudflare and will save over 80% on our cloud compute bill. The estimated potential Cloudflare costs are for Baselime, which remains a stand-alone offering, and the estimate is based on the Workers Paid plan. Not only did we achieve huge cost savings, we also simplified our architecture and improved overall latency, scalability, and reliability.

Cost (daily)

Before (AWS)

After (Cloudflare)

Compute

$650 - AWS Lambda

$25 - Cloudflare Workers

CDN

$140 - Cloudfront

$0 - Free

Data Stream + Analytics database

$1,150 - Kinesis Data Stream + EC2

$300 - Workers Analytics Engine

Total (daily)

$1,940

$325

Total (annual)

$708,100

$118,625 (83% cost reduction)

Table 1: AWS vs. Workers Costs Comparison ($USD)

When we joined Cloudflare, we immediately saw a surge in usage, and within the first week following the announcement, we were processing over a billion events daily and our weekly active users tripled.

As the platform grew, so did the challenges Continue reading

Ethernet at NANOG 92

Ethernet has been the mainstay of much of the networking environment for almost 50 years now, but that doesn't mean that it’s remained unchanged over that period. The evolution of this technology has featured continual increases in the scale of Ethernet networks, increasing in capacity, reach and connections. I’d like to report on a couple of Ether-related presentations that took place at the recent NANOG 92 meeting, held in Toronto in October 2024 that described some recent developments in Ethernet.

Installing Certificate on ISE Lab Server

When ISE is installed, all the certificates used for different services such as EAP, Admin portal, etc., are self signed. Below is a short summary of the certificates that ISE uses:

  • Admin – Authentication of the ISE admin portal (GUI).
  • EAP Authentication – EAP protocols that use SSL/TLS tunneling.
  • RADIUS DTLS – RADsec server (encrypted RADIUS).
  • pxGrid – pxGrid controller.
  • SAML – For SAML signing.
  • Portal – For portals.

The certificates can be seen by going to Administration -> System -> Certificates:

A certificate can be viewed by selecting the checkbox and clicking View:

Self-signed certificates aren’t good. Certificates should be signed by a trusted CA. That could be a public root CA, or more commonly, especially for labs, an internal CA. Before such a certificate can be installed, ISE must be configured to trust that CA. This is done by importing the root CA certificate. I’ll download the certificate from the web service on the ADCS server. The web service is reachable on https:://<IP of ADCS server>/certsrv/. Click Download a CA certificate, certificate chain or CRL:

On the next page, change to Base 64 and then click Download CA certificate:

The file is downloaded Continue reading

Cloudflare’s perspective of the October 30 OVHcloud outage

On October 30, 2024, cloud hosting provider OVHcloud (AS16276) suffered a brief but significant outage. According to their incident report, the problem started at 13:23 UTC, and was described simply as “An incident is in progress on our backbone infrastructure.” OVHcloud noted that the incident ended 17 minutes later, at 13:40 UTC. As a major global cloud hosting provider, some customers use OVHcloud as an origin for sites delivered by Cloudflare — if a given content asset is not in our cache for a customer’s site, we retrieve the asset from OVHcloud.

We observed traffic starting to drop at 13:21 UTC, just ahead of the reported start time. By 13:28 UTC, it was approximately 95% lower than pre-incident levels. Recovery appeared to start at 13:31 UTC, and by 13:40 UTC, the reported end time of the incident, it had reached approximately 50% of pre-incident levels.

Traffic from OVHcloud (AS16276) to Cloudflare

Cloudflare generally exchanges most of our traffic with OVHcloud over peering links. However, as shown below, peered traffic volume during the incident fell significantly. It appears that some small amount of traffic briefly began to flow over transit links from Cloudflare to OVHcloud due to sudden Continue reading

HW039: Demystifying Private Mobile Networks

What is a private mobile network and how does it work? Guest Jeremy Rollinson, an expert in private cellular networks, joins host Keith Parsons to clarify misconceptions about private mobile networks, from terminology to spectrum allocations. They explore the differences between public and private networks, the evolution of private mobile networks, the importance of understanding... Read more »

HS087: Alkira’s Multi-Cloud NaaS Bridges Networking and Security (Sponsored)

Startup Alkira has built a Network as a Service (NaaS) offering that extends from on prem to public cloud and multi-cloud. Today’s sponsored episode of Heavy Strategy digs in to Alkira’s capabilities in multi-cloud networking, security, automation, and cost transparency. Guest Manan Shah, SVP of Product at Alkira,  explains how Alkira simplifies network management, enhances... Read more »

PP037: From Supply Chain Security to Post-Quantum Cryptography – Live from XFD!

This episode was recorded live at Security Field Day (XFD) 12 in October, 2024. As delegates at the event, JJ and Drew heard presentations from DigiCert, Dell Technologies, SonicWall, and Citrix. These presentations covered topics including digital certificate management, post-quantum cryptography, supply chain security, recovering from ransomware, Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), and Secure Service... Read more »

Migrating billions of records: moving our active DNS database while it’s in use

According to a survey done by W3Techs, as of October 2024, Cloudflare is used as an authoritative DNS provider by 14.5% of all websites. As an authoritative DNS provider, we are responsible for managing and serving all the DNS records for our clients’ domains. This means we have an enormous responsibility to provide the best service possible, starting at the data plane. As such, we are constantly investing in our infrastructure to ensure the reliability and performance of our systems.

DNS is often referred to as the phone book of the Internet, and is a key component of the Internet. If you have ever used a phone book, you know that they can become extremely large depending on the size of the physical area it covers. A zone file in DNS is no different from a phone book. It has a list of records that provide details about a domain, usually including critical information like what IP address(es) each hostname is associated with. For example:

example.com      59 IN A 198.51.100.0
blog.example.com 59 IN A 198.51.100.1
ask.example.com  59 IN A 198.51.100.2

It is not unusual Continue reading

Forced offline: the Q3 2024 Internet disruption summary

Cloudflare’s network spans more than 330 cities in over 120 countries, where we interconnect with over 13,000 network providers in order to provide a broad range of services to millions of customers. The breadth of both our network and our customer base provides us with a unique perspective on Internet resilience, enabling us to observe the impact of Internet disruptions. Thanks to Cloudflare Radar functionality released earlier this year, we can explore the impact from a routing perspective, as well as a traffic perspective, at both a network and location level.

As we have noted in the past, this post is intended as a summary overview of observed and confirmed disruptions, and is not an exhaustive or complete list of issues that have occurred during the quarter. 

A larger list of detected traffic anomalies is available in the Cloudflare Radar Outage Center.

Having said that, the third quarter of 2024 was particularly active, with quite a few significant Internet disruptions. Unfortunately, governments continued to impose nationwide Internet shutdowns intended to prevent cheating on exams. Damage to both terrestrial and submarine cables impacted Internet connectivity across Africa and in other parts of the world. Damage caused by an active hurricane Continue reading

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