Announcing Cloudflare Images beta to simplify your image pipeline
Today, we are announcing the beta of Cloudflare Images: a simple service to store, resize, optimize, and deliver images at scale.
In 2018, we launched Stream to provide a single product that could be used to store, encode, and deliver videos. With Cloudflare Images, we are doing for images what Stream did for videos. Just like Stream, Cloudflare Images eliminates the need to think about storage buckets, egress costs, and many other common problems that are solved for you out of the box. Whether you are building an ecommerce platform with millions of high-res product pictures and videos or a new app for creators, you can build your entire media pipeline by combining Cloudflare Images and Stream.
Fundamental questions for storing and serving images
Any time you are building infrastructure for image storage and processing, there are four fundamental questions you must answer:
- “Where do we store images?”
- “How do we secure, resize, and optimize the images for different use cases?”
- “How do we serve the images to our users reliably?”
- “How do we do all of these things at scale while having predictable and affordable pricing, especially during spikes?”
Cloudflare Images has a straightforward set Continue reading
Feedback Requested: Chartering the MANRS Community
While MANRS has gone from strength to strength since its beginning in 2014, gaining attention, interest, and credibility from network operators worldwide, for the initiative to be sustainable and impactful in the long run there should be a stronger sense of ownership by the community. MANRS is an industry-led initiative whose participants set and develop […]
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Start building your own private network on Cloudflare today
Starting today, your team can create a private network on Cloudflare’s network. Team members click a single button to connect to private IPs in environments that you control. Cloudflare’s network routes their connection through a data center in one of over 200 cities around the world. On the other side, administrators deploy a lightweight software connector that replaces traditional VPN appliances.
Cloudflare’s private network combines IP level connectivity and Zero Trust controls. Thick clients like RDP software, SMB file viewers, or other programs can connect to the private IPs already in use in your deployment without any additional configuration. Coming soon, you’ll be able to layer additional identity-based network-level rules to control which users, from which devices, can reach specific IPs.
We are launching this feature as a follow-up to Cloudflare’s Developer Week because we are excited to give your development team, and your entire organization, a seamless platform for building and connecting your internal resources. We built this solution based on feedback from customers who want to move to a Zero Trust model without sacrificing some of the convenience of a private network.
We’re excited to give any team the ability to run their internal network on Cloudflare’s global Continue reading
Using Unequal-Cost Multipath to Cope with Leaf-and-Spine Fabric Failures
Scott submitted an interesting the comment to my Does Unequal-Cost Multipath (UCMP) Make Sense blog post:
How about even Large CLOS networks with the same interface capacity, but accounting for things to fail; fabric cards, links or nodes in disaggregated units. You can either UCMP or drain large parts of your network to get the most out of ECMP.
Before I managed to write a reply (sometimes it takes months while an idea is simmering somewhere in my subconscious) Jeff Tantsura pointed me to an excellent article by Erico Vanini that describes the types of asymmetries you might encounter in a leaf-and-spine fabric: an ideal starting point for this discussion.
Using Unequal-Cost Multipath to Cope with Leaf-and-Spine Fabric Failures
Scott submitted an interesting the comment to my Does Unequal-Cost Multipath (UCMP) Make Sense blog post:
How about even Large CLOS networks with the same interface capacity, but accounting for things to fail; fabric cards, links or nodes in disaggregated units. You can either UCMP or drain large parts of your network to get the most out of ECMP.
Before I managed to write a reply (sometimes it takes months while an idea is simmering somewhere in my subconscious) Jeff Tantsura pointed me to an excellent article by Erico Vanini that describes the types of asymmetries you might encounter in a leaf-and-spine fabric: an ideal starting point for this discussion.
Get Smart About Cloud Networking – A Packet Pushers Livestream Event, April 22
There are lots of reasons to get educated about cloud networking. You might: Be responsible for connecting end users to numerous cloud services Have to link an application in Cloud A to services and data in Cloud B Support a hybrid application that has one foot in your DC and another in AWS, Azure, or […]
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How to Publish AVS Workloads on the Internet
Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is a VMware–validated private cloud solution, managed and maintained by Azure. It runs on dedicated, bare-metal Azure infrastructure. AVS allows customers to manage and secure applications across both VMware environments and Microsoft Azure resources with a consistent operating framework. It supports workload migration, VM deployment, and Azure service consumption.
As AVS private cloud runs on an isolated Azure environment, by default it is not accessible from Azure or the Internet. Users can use either ExpressRoute Global Reach (i.e., from on-prem) or a jump box (i.e., on an Azure VNet) to access AVS private cloud. This means AVS workload VMs are confined within AVS private cloud and not accessible from the Internet. If customers want to make AVS Private Cloud resources, such as web servers, accessible from the Internet, Public IP needs to be deployed. There are a couple of ways to do this: (1) Destination NAT or DNAT via Azure Virtual WAN/Azure Firewall; and (2) Azure Application Gateway. This article focuses on DNAT with Azure Virtual WAN/Azure Firewall.
Sports Industry Execs Share Challenges and Approaches to Creating Analytics
Tracing their roots to “moneyball “20 years ago, sports businesses believe their data-driven decision efforts can help enterprise IT.A Networking Perspective On Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA)
Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) is a security point of view that has gathered enough momentum in 2020 and 2021 to frequently appear in marketing literature. The big idea of zero trust in network computing is roughly, “I confidently know who you are and have applied an appropriate security policy, but I still don’t trust you.”
My understanding of ZTA continues to evolve. This post represents my understanding today, with an emphasis on what ZTA means for network engineers.
How Is ZTA Different From Firewall Rules?
At first glance, zero trust sounds mostly like a firewall policy. Of course I don’t trust you. That’s why we apply all these filtering rules to the VPN tunnel, network interface, etc. Yes, but simple filtering implies a level of trust. The trust comes in the assumption that if you get through the filter, what you’re saying is trustworthy.
Zero trust does away with that assumption. For example…
- ZTA could mean that just because a VPN user passed a complex authentication scheme, their transactions are not assumed to be wholesome. Well done–your username and password check out, and we’ve applied a filtering policy to your tunnel. With that completed, we’re now going to monitor Continue reading
Tech Bytes: Optimizing Performance And IT Support For Your Distributed Workforce (Sponsored)
On today’s Tech Bytes episode, sponsored by AppNeta, we explore how IT can optimize performance and support for a highly distributed workforce and develop a sustainable strategy for a Work From Anywhere reality. Our AppNeta guests are Adam Edwards, Chief Customer Officer; and Mike Hustler, CTO.
The post Tech Bytes: Optimizing Performance And IT Support For Your Distributed Workforce (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Tech Bytes: Optimizing Performance And IT Support For Your Distributed Workforce (Sponsored)
On today’s Tech Bytes episode, sponsored by AppNeta, we explore how IT can optimize performance and support for a highly distributed workforce and develop a sustainable strategy for a Work From Anywhere reality. Our AppNeta guests are Adam Edwards, Chief Customer Officer; and Mike Hustler, CTO.Complexity Reduction?
Back in January, I ran into an interesting article called The many lies about reducing complexity:
Reducing complexity sells. Especially managers in IT are sensitive to it as complexity generally is their biggest headache. Hence, in IT, people are in a perennial fight to make the complexity bearable.
Gerben then discusses two ways we often try to reduce complexity. First, we try to simply reduce the number of applications we’re using. We see this all the time in the networking world—if we could only get to a single pane of glass, or reduce the number of management packages we use, or reduce the number of control planes (generally to one), or reduce the number of transport protocols … but reducing the number of protocols doesn’t necessarily reduce complexity. Instead, we can just end up with one very complex protocol. Would it really be simpler to push DNS and HTTP functionality into BGP so we can use a single protocol to do everything?
Second, we try to reduce complexity by hiding it. While this is sometimes effective, it can also lead to unacceptable tradeoffs in performance (we run into the state, optimization, surfaces triad here). It can also make the system Continue reading