Inter-Domain Traffic-Engineering Based MPLS-LSPs
Recently I was exploring solution to have inter-domain traffic-engineerig based MPLS LSPs and came up with following writeup (after going through relevant rfc and vendor Implementation document (my favourite Junos). Please glance through it on my github home page. thanks
https://github.com/kashif-nawaz/Inter-Domain-Traffic-Engineering-and-MPLS-LSPs
HN745: Using Abstractions in Automation
Today’s episode of Heavy Networking comes to you from AutoCon1 in Amsterdam, recorded live on premises. In today’s network automation discussion, we cover abstraction layers with guest Jaakko Rautanen. Practically speaking, what are abstractions, and how do they help make your network automation project successful? We’ll also discuss some of our guest’s automation projects, how... Read more »A wild week in phishing, and what it means for you
Being a bad guy on the Internet is a really good business. In more than 90% of cybersecurity incidents, phishing is the root cause of the attack, and during this third week of August phishing attacks were reported against the U.S. elections, in the geopolitical conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, and to cause $60M in corporate losses.
You might think that after 30 years of email being the top vector for attack and risk we are helpless to do anything about it, but that would be giving too much credit to bad actors, and a misunderstanding of how defenders focused on detections can take control and win.
Phishing isn’t about email exclusively, or any specific protocol for that matter. Simply put, it is an attempt to get a person, like you or me, to take an action that unwittingly leads to damages. These attacks work because they appear to be authentic, visually or organizationally, such as pretending to be the CEO or CFO of your company, and when you break it down they are three main attack vectors that Cloudflare has seen most impactful from the bad emails we protect our customers Continue reading
A wild week in phishing, and what it means for you
This post is also available in 한국어, 日本語, 简体中文, 繁體中文, Français, Deutsch and Español.
Being a bad guy on the Internet is a really good business. In more than 90% of cybersecurity incidents, phishing is the root cause of the attack, and during this third week of August phishing attacks were reported against the U.S. elections, in the geopolitical conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, and to cause $60M in corporate losses.
You might think that after 30 years of email being the top vector for attack and risk we are helpless to do anything about it, but that would be giving too much credit to bad actors, and a misunderstanding of how defenders focused on detections can take control and win.
Phishing isn’t about email exclusively, or any specific protocol for that matter. Simply put, it is an attempt to get a person, like you or me, to take an action that unwittingly leads to damages. These attacks work because they appear to be authentic, visually or organizationally, such as pretending to be the CEO or CFO of your company, and when you break it down they are three Continue reading
Introducing high-definition portrait video support for Cloudflare Stream
Cloudflare Stream is an end-to-end solution for video encoding, storage, delivery, and playback. Our focus has always been on simplifying all aspects of video for developers. This goal continues to motivate us as we introduce first-class portrait (vertical) video support today. Newly uploaded or ingested portrait videos will now automatically be processed in full HD quality.
Why portrait video
In the past few years, the popularity of portrait video has exploded, motivated by short-form video content applications such as TikTok or YouTube Shorts. However, Cloudflare customers have been confused as to why their portrait videos appear to be lower quality when viewed on portrait-first devices such as smartphones. This is because our video encoding pipeline previously did not support high-quality portrait videos, leading them to be grainy and lower quality. This pain point has now been addressed with the introduction of high-definition portrait video.
The current stream pipeline
When you upload a video to Stream, it is first encoded into several different “renditions” (sizes or resolutions) before delivery. This is done in order to enable playback in a wide variety of network conditions, as well as to standardize the way a video is experienced. By using these adaptive Continue reading
Simplify cloud routing and object storage configurations with Cloud Connector
As part of Cloudflare's mission to help build a better Internet, we’re continuously integrating with other networks and service providers, ensuring ease of use for anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Today, we’re excited to announce Cloud Connector – a brand-new way to put Cloudflare in front of popular public cloud services, protecting your assets, accelerating applications, and routing your traffic between multiple cloud providers seamlessly.
Cloud Connector is a natural extension of Cloudflare's Connectivity Cloud, which aims to simplify and secure the complex web of connections across today’s enterprises. Imagine Origin Rules, but managed by Cloudflare, available for all plans, created with just a few clicks, and working out of the box without the need for additional rules. It allows you to route traffic to different public clouds without complicated workarounds. This means you can now direct specific requests to AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, or our own R2, even if these services are not set as the DNS target for your hostname.
Whether you’re an e-commerce site looking to route image traffic to the best-performing cloud storage for faster load times, a media company distributing video content efficiently across various cloud providers, or Continue reading
Introducing high-definition portrait video support for Cloudflare Stream
Cloudflare Stream is an end-to-end solution for video encoding, storage, delivery, and playback. Our focus has always been on simplifying all aspects of video for developers. This goal continues to motivate us as we introduce first-class portrait (vertical) video support today. Newly uploaded or ingested portrait videos will now automatically be processed in full HD quality.
Why portrait video
In the past few years, the popularity of portrait video has exploded, motivated by short-form video content applications such as TikTok or YouTube Shorts. However, Cloudflare customers have been confused as to why their portrait videos appear to be lower quality when viewed on portrait-first devices such as smartphones. This is because our video encoding pipeline previously did not support high-quality portrait videos, leading them to be grainy and lower quality. This pain point has now been addressed with the introduction of high-definition portrait video.
The current stream pipeline
When you upload a video to Stream, it is first encoded into several different “renditions” (sizes or resolutions) before delivery. This is done in order to enable playback in a wide variety of network conditions, as well as to standardize the way a video is experienced. By using these adaptive bitrate Continue reading
Simplify cloud routing and object storage configurations with Cloud Connector
Introduction
As part of Cloudflare's mission to help build a better Internet, we’re continuously integrating with other networks and service providers, ensuring ease of use for anyone, anywhere, anytime.
Today, we’re excited to announce Cloud Connector – a brand-new way to put Cloudflare in front of popular public cloud services, protecting your assets, accelerating applications, and routing your traffic between multiple cloud providers seamlessly.
Cloud Connector is a natural extension of Cloudflare's Connectivity Cloud, which aims to simplify and secure the complex web of connections across today’s enterprises. Imagine Origin Rules, but managed by Cloudflare, available for all plans, created with just a few clicks, and working out of the box without the need for additional rules. It allows you to route traffic to different public clouds without complicated workarounds. This means you can now direct specific requests to AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, or our own R2, even if these services are not set as the DNS target for your hostname.
Whether you’re an e-commerce site looking to route image traffic to the best-performing cloud storage for faster load times, a media company distributing video content efficiently across various cloud providers, or Continue reading
Hedge 239: AI for Network Operations
There are (at least) three different aspects of AI in network engineering: network design to support AI, AI for development, and AI for operations. J.P. Vassuer joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss AI for understanding and operating networks. What are the possibilities? What are the pitfalls? What can we expect to see?
NAN070: FakeNOS – An Open Source NOS for Network Testing
Today we spotlight an open-source project called FakeNOS. Whether you’re a network engineer looking to experiment in a controlled environment, or a DevOps engineer wanting to run a network testbed for your processes, you can use FakeNOS for your projects. My guests are FakeNOS creator Denis Mulyalin and the maintainer of this project, Enric Pitarch.... Read more »Paris 2024 Olympics recap: Internet trends, cyber threats, and popular moments
The Paris 2024 Summer Olympics wrapped up on August 11, 2024, with the Olympic flag being lowered in the Stade de France after 16 days of competitions. With 329 events across 32 sports, over 10,000 athletes from 204 nations participated in the pursuit of medals and glory, creating some viral online moments along the way. In this post, we turn our attention to the closing ceremony, the impact of various Olympic moments on Internet traffic, and the cyber attacks faced by sponsors. We also examine email trends related to the Olympics, including mentions of Simone Biles, Snoop Dogg, and Imane Khelif.
Cloudflare has a global presence with data centers in over 330 cities, supporting millions of customers with different tools and products, which provides a global view of what’s happening on the Internet. This is helpful for improving security, privacy, efficiency, and speed, but also for observing Internet disruptions and traffic trends.
In our previous blog post about the opening ceremony and the early days of the event, we showed how France was impacted by the Olympics, with clear drops in traffic during the main events. The opening ceremony caused the most significant drop—traffic decreased by as much as 20% Continue reading
Paris 2024 Olympics recap: Internet trends, cyber threats, and popular moments
The Paris 2024 Summer Olympics wrapped up on August 11, 2024, with the Olympic flag being lowered in the Stade de France after 16 days of competitions. With 329 events across 32 sports, over 10,000 athletes from 204 nations participated in the pursuit of medals and glory, creating some viral online moments along the way. In this post, we turn our attention to the closing ceremony, the impact of various Olympic moments on Internet traffic, and the cyber attacks faced by sponsors. We also examine email trends related to the Olympics, including mentions of Simone Biles, Snoop Dogg, and Imane Khelif.
Cloudflare has a global presence with data centers in over 330 cities, supporting millions of customers with different tools and products, which provides a global view of what’s happening on the Internet. This is helpful for improving security, privacy, efficiency, and speed, but also for observing Internet disruptions and traffic trends.
In our previous blog post about the opening ceremony and the early days of the event, we showed how France was impacted by the Olympics, with clear drops in traffic during the main events. The opening ceremony caused the most significant drop—traffic decreased by as much as 20% Continue reading
Arista cEOS Got Working MPLS Data Plane
Urs Baumann brought me a nice surprise last weekend. He opened a GitHub issue saying, “MPLS works on Arista cEOS containers in release 4.31.2F” and asking whether we could enable netlab to configure MPLS on cEOS containers.
netlab already had MPLS configuration templates for Arista EOS but reported an error message if you tried to use MPLS with the cEOS containers because the containers did not have a working MPLS data plane.
After a few configuration tweaks and a batch of integration tests later, I had the results: everything worked. You can use MPLS on Arista cEOS with netlab release 1.9.0 (right now @ 1.9.0-dev2), and I’ll be able to create MPLS labs running in GitHub Codespaces in the not-too-distant future.
HS080: Top Mistakes In Developing and Executing Technology Strategies
To borrow a phrase first used in a military context, no tech strategy survives its first contact with real users. Today’s Heavy Strategy explores common mistakes executives make when developing and executing a technology plan. They include poor communication, making assumptions, not understanding a system’s architecture or dependencies, and more. Co-hosts Johna and Jerry draw... Read more »
PP026: Security Considerations for Working from Anywhere
Remote work is now a norm. And whether it’s a day or two at home every week, or relocating overseas so you can log in to the office from an Italian piazza or a beach in Thailand, there are lots of opportunities to do our jobs outside traditional workplaces. On today’s Packet Protector, we look... Read more »Introducing HTTP request traffic insights on Cloudflare Radar
Historically, traffic graphs on Cloudflare Radar have displayed two metrics: total traffic and HTTP traffic. These graphs show normalized traffic volumes measured in bytes, derived from aggregated NetFlow data. (NetFlow is a protocol used to collect metadata about IP traffic flows traversing network devices.) Today, we’re adding an additional metric that reflects the number of HTTP requests, normalized over the same time period. By comparing bytes with requests, readers can gain additional insights into traffic patterns and user behavior. Below, we review how this new data has been incorporated into Radar, and explore HTTP request traffic in more detail.
Note that while we refer to “HTTP request traffic” in this post and on Radar, the term encompasses requests made in the clear over HTTP and over encrypted connections using HTTPS – the latter accounts for ~95% of all requests to Cloudflare during July 2024.
New and updated graphs
Graphs including HTTP request-based traffic data have been added to the Overview and Traffic sections on Cloudflare Radar. On the Overview page, the “Traffic trends” graph now includes a drop-down selector at the upper right, where you can choose between “Total & HTTP bytes” and “HTTP requests & bytes”. We explore Continue reading
Introducing HTTP request traffic insights on Cloudflare Radar
Historically, traffic graphs on Cloudflare Radar have displayed two metrics: total traffic and HTTP traffic. These graphs show normalized traffic volumes measured in bytes, derived from aggregated NetFlow data. (NetFlow is a protocol used to collect metadata about IP traffic flows traversing network devices.) Today, we’re adding another metric that reflects the number of HTTP requests, normalized over the same time period. By comparing bytes with requests, readers can gain additional insights into traffic patterns and user behavior. Below, we review how this new data has been incorporated into Radar, and explore HTTP request traffic in more detail.
Note that while we refer to “HTTP request traffic” in this post and on Radar, the term encompasses requests made in the clear over HTTP and over encrypted connections using HTTPS – the latter accounts for ~95% of all requests to Cloudflare during July 2024.
New and updated graphs
Graphs including HTTP request-based traffic data have been added to the Overview and Traffic sections on Cloudflare Radar. On the Overview page, the “Traffic trends” graph now includes a drop-down selector at the upper right, where you can choose between “Total & HTTP bytes” and “HTTP requests & bytes”. We explore Continue reading
Layer-3-Only EVPN: Behind the Scenes
In the previous blog post, I described how to build a lab to explore the layer-3-only EVPN design and asked you to do that and figure out what’s going on behind the scenes. If you didn’t find time for that, let’s do it together in this blog post. To keep it reasonably short, we’ll focus on the EVPN control plane and leave the exploration of the data-plane data structures for another blog post.
The most important thing to understand when analyzing a layer-3-only EVPN/VXLAN network is that the data plane looks like a VRF-lite design: each VRF uses a hidden VLAN (implemented with VXLAN) as the transport VLAN between the PE devices.
Rising together: honoring Cloudflare’s outstanding partners
We’re thrilled to announce Cloudflare’s worldwide 2023 Channel Partner Award winners! Partners are crucial to Cloudflare’s success, extending the solutions and support that customers need to control application complexity, reduce cyber risk, and cut costs, all with a high level of customer satisfaction.
PowerUP Partners First
This year, we again received CRN’s highest accolade of a 5-star ranking for our Partner Program. Through our expanded Cloudflare PowerUP Partner Program, we’re ensuring Cloudflare’s partnerships and alliances continue delivering strong results to joint customers across sectors worldwide. We’re focused on making it easier for our partners to work with us and grow their business with us. The Cloudflare team is all about helping partners:
Be innovative by transforming how customers connect, protect, and build with Cloudflare security, speed, programmability, and resilience.
Increase profitability by growing revenue and delivering more value at scale to rapidly grow business and expand reach.
Accelerate GTM by benefiting from sales and marketing support, streamlined processes, and transparent pricing to close deals quickly.
From comprehensive training through Cloudflare University to expert support across departments, partners are equipped to drive digital transformation and modernize IT infrastructures for their customers in a competitive market.