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Announcing the Cloudflare Images Sourcing Kit

Announcing the Cloudflare Images Sourcing Kit
Announcing the Cloudflare Images Sourcing Kit

When we announced Cloudflare Images to the world, we introduced a way to store images within the product and help customers move away from the egress fees met when using remote sources for their deliveries via Cloudflare.

To store the images in Cloudflare, customers can upload them via UI with a simple drag and drop, or via API for scenarios with a high number of objects for which scripting their way through the upload process makes more sense.

To create flexibility on how to import the images, we’ve recently also included the ability to upload via URL or define custom names and paths for your images to allow a simple mapping between customer repositories and the objects in Cloudflare. It's also possible to serve from a custom hostname to create flexibility on how your end-users see the path, to improve the delivery performance by removing the need to do TLS negotiations or to improve your brand recognition through URL consistency.

Still, there was no simple way to tell our product: “Tens of millions of images are in this repository URL. Go and grab them all from me”.  

In some scenarios, our customers have buckets with millions of images Continue reading

Send email using Workers with MailChannels

Send email using Workers with MailChannels
Send email using Workers with MailChannels

Here at Cloudflare we often talk about HTTP and related protocols as we work to help build a better Internet. However, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) — used to send emails — is still a massive part of the Internet too.

Even though SMTP is turning 40 years old this year, most businesses still rely on email to validate user accounts, send notifications, announce new features, and more.

Sending an email is simple from a technical standpoint, but getting an email actually delivered to an inbox can be extremely tricky. Because of the enormous amount of spam that is sent every single day, all major email providers are very wary of things like new domains and IP addresses that start sending emails.

That is why we are delighted to announce a partnership with MailChannels. MailChannels has created an email sending service specifically for Cloudflare Workers that removes all the friction associated with sending emails. To use their service, you do not need to validate a domain or create a separate account. MailChannels filters spam before sending out an email, so you can feel safe putting user-submitted content in an email and be confident that it won’t ruin your domain Continue reading

Route to Workers, automate your email processing

Route to Workers, automate your email processing
Route to Workers, automate your email processing

Cloudflare Email Routing has quickly grown to a few hundred thousand users, and we’re incredibly excited with the number of feature requests that reach our product team every week. We hear you, we love the feedback, and we want to give you all that you’ve been asking for. What we don’t like is making you wait, or making you feel like your needs are too unique to be addressed.

That’s why we’re taking a different approach - we’re giving you the power tools that you need to implement any logic you can dream of to process your emails in the fastest, most scalable way possible.

Today we’re announcing Route to Workers, for which we’ll start a closed beta soon. You can join the waitlist today.

How this works

When using Route to Workers your Email Routing rules can have a Worker process the messages reaching any of your custom Email addresses.

Route to Workers, automate your email processing

Even if you haven’t used Cloudflare Workers before, we are making onboarding as easy as can be. You can start creating Workers straight from the Email Routing dashboard, with just one click.

Route to Workers, automate your email processing

After clicking Create, you will be able to choose a starter that allows you to get Continue reading

Closed Caption support coming to Stream Live

Closed Caption support coming to Stream Live
Closed Caption support coming to Stream Live

Building inclusive technology is core to the Cloudflare mission. Cloudflare Stream has supported captions for on-demand videos for several years. Soon, Stream will auto-detect embedded captions and include it in the live stream delivered to your viewers.

Thousands of Cloudflare customers use the Stream product to build video functionality into their apps. With live caption support, Stream customers can better serve their users with a more comprehensive viewing experience.

Enabling Closed Captions in Stream Live

Stream Live scans for CEA-608 and CEA-708 captions in incoming live streams ingested via SRT and RTMPS.  Assuming the live streams you are pushing to Cloudflare Stream contain captions, you don’t have to do anything further: the captions will simply get included in the manifest file.

Closed Caption support coming to Stream Live

If you are using the Stream Player, these captions will be rendered by the Stream Player. If you are using your own player, you simply have to configure your player to display captions.  

Closed Caption support coming to Stream Live

Currently, Stream Live supports captions for a single language during the live event. While the support for captions is limited to one language during the live stream, you can upload captions for multiple languages once the event completes and the live event becomes an on-demand Continue reading

Stream with sub-second latency is like a magical HDMI cable to the cloud

Stream with sub-second latency is like a magical HDMI cable to the cloud
Stream with sub-second latency is like a magical HDMI cable to the cloud

Starting today, in open beta, Cloudflare Stream supports video playback with sub-second latency over SRT or RTMPS at scale. Just like HLS and DASH formats, playback over RTMPS and SRT costs $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered regardless of video encoding settings used.

Stream is like a magic HDMI cable to the cloud. You can easily connect a video stream and display it from as many screens as you want wherever you want around the world.

What do we mean by sub-second?

Video latency is the time it takes from when a camera sees something happen live to when viewers of a broadcast see the same thing happen via their screen. Although we like to think what’s on TV is happening simultaneously in the studio and your living room at the same time, this is not the case. Often, cable TV takes five seconds to reach your home.

On the Internet, the range of latencies across different services varies widely from multiple minutes down to a few seconds or less. Live streaming technologies like HLS and DASH, used on by the most common video streaming websites typically offer 10 to 30 seconds of latency, and this is what you can achieve Continue reading

Bring your own ingest domain to Stream Live

Bring your own ingest domain to Stream Live
Bring your own ingest domain to Stream Live

The last two years have given rise to hundreds of live streaming platforms. Most live streaming platforms enable their creators to go live by providing them with a server and an RTMP/SRT key that they can configure in their broadcasting app.

Until today, even if your live streaming platform was called live-yoga-classes.com, your users would need to push the RTMPS feed to live.cloudflare.com. Starting today, every Stream account can configure its own domain in the Stream dashboard. And your creators can broadcast to a domain such as push.live-yoga-classes.com.

This feature is available to all Stream accounts, including self-serve customers at no additional cost. Every Cloudflare account with a Stream subscription can add up to five ingest domains.

Secure CNAMEing for live video ingestion

Cloudflare Stream only supports encrypted video ingestion using RTMPS and SRT protocols. These are secure protocols and, similar to HTTPS, ensure encryption between the broadcaster and Cloudflare servers. Unlike non-secure protocols like RTMP, secure RTMP (or RTMPS) protects your users from monster-in-the-middle attacks.

In an unsecure world, you could simply CNAME a domain to another domain regardless of whether you own the domain you are sending traffic to. Because Stream Live Continue reading

Cloudflare Stream simplifies creator management for creator platforms

Cloudflare Stream simplifies creator management for creator platforms
Cloudflare Stream simplifies creator management for creator platforms

Creator platforms across the world use Cloudflare Stream to rapidly build video experiences into their apps. These platforms serve a diverse range of creators, enabling them to share their passion with their beloved audience. While working with creator platforms, we learned that many Stream customers track video usage on a per-creator basis in order to answer critical questions such as:

  • “Who are our fastest growing creators?”
  • “How much do we charge or pay creators each month?”
  • “What can we do more of in order to serve our creators?”

Introducing the Creator Property

Creator platforms enable artists, teachers and hobbyists to express themselves through various media, including video. We built Cloudflare Stream for these platforms, enabling them to rapidly build video use cases without needing to build and maintain a video pipeline at scale.

At its heart, every creator platform must manage ownership of user-generated content. When a video is uploaded to Stream, Stream returns a video ID. Platforms using Stream have traditionally had to maintain their own index to track content ownership. For example, when a user with internal user ID 83721759 uploads a video to Stream with video ID 06aadc28eb1897702d41b4841b85f322, the platform must maintain a Continue reading

Cisco Live 2022

Cisco Live US 2022 will be June 12-16 in Las Vegas. After two years of virtual conferences and being vaccinated three times against Covid-19, I’m more than motivated to go in person! However, for those who are still hesitating, there is also an online version, over two days, probably in a similar format to 2021. I am really looking forward to it and being able to talk and interact with my former colleagues, friends, and peers again. This is probably the best part about attending a conference in person: meeting…

The post Cisco Live 2022 appeared first on AboutNetworks.net.

What is a private cloud?

Private clouds make efficient use of storage, compute, and memory resources, can provide faster response times for enterprise applications, and help comply with regulations about where data is stored.What is a private cloud? The concept of a private cloud is relatively simple and straightforward. NIST defined it in its NIST Cloud Computing Standards Roadmap back in 2013 with this description: “The private cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization comprising multiple consumers (e.g., business units).”To read this article in full, please click here

What is a private cloud?

Private clouds make efficient use of storage, compute, and memory resources, can provide faster response times for enterprise applications, and help comply with regulations about where data is stored.What is a private cloud? The concept of a private cloud is relatively simple and straightforward. NIST defined it in its NIST Cloud Computing Standards Roadmap back in 2013 with this description: “The private cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization comprising multiple consumers (e.g., business units).”To read this article in full, please click here

5G uploads aren’t fast enough for enterprise needs

Wireless operators around the world have been heavily focused on providing the best possible consumer 5G download speeds, but a new survey from the research division of French managed services provider SmartCIC says that upload connections—which enterprises need to enable important applications—are lagging behind.In fact, according to the survey, 4G/LTE networks, on average, have 1ms of latency, compared to 8ms for 5G networks. The researchers said that there’s a possibility that a large proportion of tests being run on low-band 5G networks skewed the results somewhat, but also noted that even tests on very high frequency mmWave (millimeter wave) networks showed up to 10ms of latency on 5G networks.To read this article in full, please click here

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff! Why You Should Change to a Natural Deodorant

Many of us have been using the same deodorant for years, but have you ever stopped to think about what’s actually in it? Antiperspirants contain aluminum, which has been linked to breast cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. They also often contain parabens, which are known endocrine disruptors. So what’s a person to do? Switch to a natural deodorant!

The dangers of traditional deodorants

There are a lot of chemicals in traditional deodorants and antiperspirants that can be harmful to your health. Aluminum is the main active ingredient in most antiperspirants. It works by plugging up your sweat glands so that you don’t sweat as much. aluminum has been linked to breast cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

Parabens are another ingredient to watch out for. They’re used as a preservative in many cosmetics and personal care products. But they’re also known endocrine disruptors, which means they can interfere with your hormones.

The benefits of natural deodorants

So, if traditional deodorants are so dangerous, what’s the alternative? Weleda Body Care has a great natural deodorant called Wild Rose Deodorant. It’s made with ingredients like rose oil and alcohol that help to kill bacteria and keep you smelling fresh all day long.

Not only is Continue reading

Announcing Pub/Sub: Programmable MQTT-based Messaging

Announcing Pub/Sub: Programmable MQTT-based Messaging
Announcing Pub/Sub: Programmable MQTT-based Messaging

One of the underlying questions that drives Platform Week is “how do we enable developers to build full stack applications on Cloudflare?”. With Workers as a serverless environment for easily deploying distributed-by-default applications, KV and Durable Objects for caching and coordination, and R2 as our zero-egress cost object store, we’ve continued to discuss what else we need to build to help developers both build new apps and/or bring existing ones over to Cloudflare’s Developer Platform.

With that in mind, we’re excited to announce the private beta of Cloudflare Pub/Sub, a programmable message bus built on the ubiquitous and industry-standard MQTT protocol supported by tens of millions of existing devices today.

In a nutshell, Pub/Sub allows you to:

  • Publish event, telemetry or sensor data from any MQTT capable client (and in the future, other client-facing protocols)
  • Write code that can filter, aggregate and/or modify messages as they’re published to the broker using Cloudflare Workers, and before they’re distributed to subscribers, without the need to ferry messages to a single “cloud region”
  • Push events from applications in other clouds, or from on-prem, with Pub/Sub acting as a programmable event router or a hook into persistent data storage (such as R2 or Continue reading

How we built config staging and versioning with HTTP applications

How we built config staging and versioning with HTTP applications
How we built config staging and versioning with HTTP applications

Last December, we announced a closed beta of a new product, HTTP Applications, giving customers the ability to better control their L7 Cloudflare configuration with versioning and staging capabilities. Today, we are expanding this beta to all enterprise customers who want to participate. In this post, I will talk about some of the improvements that have landed and go into more detail about how this product works.

HTTP Applications

A quick recap of what HTTP Applications are and what they can do. For a deeper dive on how to use them see the previous blog post.

As previously mentioned: HTTP Applications are a way to manage configuration by use case, rather than by hostname. Each HTTP Application has a purpose, whether that is handling the configuration of your marketing website or an internal application. Each HTTP Application consists of a set of versions where each represents a snapshot of settings for managing traffic — Page Rules, Firewall Rules, cache settings, etc.  Each version of configuration inside the HTTP Application is independent of the others, and when a new version is created, it is initialized as a copy of the version that preceded it.

An HTTP Application can be represented with Continue reading