TNO049: Automated Network Testing and Validation
What does network testing and validation really mean? How do testing and validation fit within an automation workflow? Is it possible to run meaningful tests without coding skills? Dan Wade from BlueAlly answers these questions and offers practical insights into building trust in automation through test environments, using AI for ideation and problem-solving, and personal... Read more »DIY BYOIP: a new way to Bring Your Own IP prefixes to Cloudflare
When a customer wants to bring IP address space to Cloudflare, they’ve always had to reach out to their account team to put in a request. This request would then be sent to various Cloudflare engineering teams such as addressing and network engineering — and then the team responsible for the particular service they wanted to use the prefix with (e.g., CDN, Magic Transit, Spectrum, Egress). In addition, they had to work with their own legal teams and potentially another organization if they did not have primary ownership of an IP prefix in order to get a Letter of Agency (LOA) issued through hoops of approvals. This process is complex, manual, and time-consuming for all parties involved — sometimes taking up to 4–6 weeks depending on various approvals.
Well, no longer! Today, we are pleased to announce the launch of our self-serve BYOIP API, which enables our customers to onboard and set up their BYOIP prefixes themselves.
With self-serve, we handle the bureaucracy for you. We have automated this process using the gold standard for routing security — the Resource Public Key Infrastructure, RPKI. All the while, we continue to ensure the best quality of service by Continue reading
Lab: Adjust IS-IS Timers
Like any other routing protocol, IS-IS has several timers you can tweak to improve the convergence speed of your network, or make your network unstable (eventually breaking it completely) if you reduce them too much (if you care about fast convergence, you REALLY SHOULD use BFD).
You’ll find more details (and the opportunity to tweak the timers in a safe environment) in the Adjust IS-IS Timers lab exercise.
Click here to start the lab in your browser using GitHub Codespaces (or set up your own lab infrastructure). After starting the lab environment, change the directory to feature/6-timers and execute netlab up.
What’s New in Calico – Fall 2025 Release
Simplify, Secure, and Scale Your Infrastructure
As organizations scale Kubernetes and hybrid infrastructures, many are realizing that more tools don’t mean better security. A recent Microsoft report found that organizations with 16+ point solutions see 2.8x more data security incidents than those with fewer tools. Yet platform teams are still expected to deliver resilience and performance across containers, VMs, and bare metal, often while juggling fragmented tools that introduce risk, downtime, and complexity.
The Fall 2025 release of Calico Enterprise and Calico Cloud cuts through that complexity. Its new features are designed to make your infrastructure more resilient, performant, and observable—right out of the box. From disaster recovery automation to modern data plane support and application traffic handling, these updates empower platform engineers to simplify operations while meeting strict reliability requirements.
The new features in this release can be grouped into two main categories:
1. Resilient, High-Performance Networking and Improved Quality of Service:
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- High availability (HA) management planes for VM and bare metal hosts – Increases resiliency and helps reduce downtime.
- The official release (GA) of the nftables dataplane -Delivers faster and more scalable rule-processing than iptables.
- Maglev-Based Session Affinity – Maintain stable network traffic flow during failures Continue reading
IPB187: IPv6 RFC Updates
Today the IPv6 Buzz crew provides updates on the latest in IPv6 standards, RFCs, and best practices. They break down the recent discussions around RFC 6052, explore the options for RFC 8215, and share Nick’s spin on the now defunct testipv6.com site. Episode Links: RFC 6052 RFC 8215 RFC 6598 IPv6.armyN4N042: Meet MACsec
MACsec is a protocol for encrypting Ethernet frames on a local (though not always local) network. Ethan Banks and Holly Metlitzky have an ELI5 (explain like I’m 5) discussion as to what exactly is MACsec and how it differs from IPsec. They talk about when and whether you need to implement MACsec with all the... Read more »Extract audio from your videos with Cloudflare Stream
Cloudflare Stream loves video. But we know not every workflow needs the full picture, and the popularity of podcasts highlights how compelling stand-alone audio can be. For developers, processing a video just to access audio is slow, costly, and complex.
What makes video so expensive? A video file is a dense stack of high-resolution images, stitched together over time. As such, it is not just “one file” — it’s a container of high-dimensional data such as frames per second, resolution, codecs. Analyzing video means traversing time resolution frame rate.
By comparison, an audio file is far simpler. If an audio file consists of only one channel, it is defined as a single waveform. The technical characteristics of this waveform are defined by the sample rate (the number of audio samples taken per second), and the bit depth (the precision of each sample).
With the rise of computationally intensive AI inference pipelines, many of our customers want to perform downstream workflows that require only analyzing the audio. For example:
Power AI and Machine Learning: In addition to translation and transcription, you can feed the audio into Voice-to-Text models for speech recognition or analysis, or AI-powered summaries.
Improve Continue reading
Async QUIC and HTTP/3 made easy: tokio-quiche is now open-source
A little over 6 years ago, we presented quiche, our open source QUIC implementation written in Rust. Today we’re announcing the open sourcing of tokio-quiche, our battle-tested, asynchronous QUIC library combining both quiche and the Rust Tokio async runtime. Powering Cloudflare’s Proxy B in Apple iCloud Private Relay and our next-generation Oxy-based proxies, tokio-quiche handles millions of HTTP/3 requests per second with low latency and high throughput. tokio-quiche also powers Cloudflare Warp’s MASQUE client, replacing our WireGuard tunnels with QUIC-based tunnels, and the async version of h3i.
quiche was developed as a sans-io library, meaning that it implements the state machine required to handle the QUIC transport protocol while not making any assumptions about how its user intends to perform IO. This means that, with enough elbow grease, anyone can write an IO integration with quiche! This entails connecting or listening on a UDP socket, managing sending and receiving UDP datagrams on that socket while feeding all network information to quiche. Given we need this integration to be async, we’d have to do all this while integrating with an async Rust runtime. tokio-quiche does all of that for you, no grease required.
Lowering the barrier to Continue reading
Presentation: Testing Disaster Recovery Designs
Someone asked for my DEEP 2025 presentation (Testing Disaster Recovery Designs). You can download it here (no strings attached). I hope you’ll find it interesting.
The organizers plan to make the recorded videos public after a few months. Of course, I’ll post a link when they do that.
D2DO286: Scaling Kubernetes Across Clouds – Identity, DNS, and Security
If you think managing Kubernetes clusters is hard, what about managing Kubernetes clusters across three different public clouds? We dive into the challenges that arises from running multi-cloud Kubernetes workloads. These challenges include workload identity, DNS query resolutions, and security. Here to help us navigate this complexity and offer possible solutions is Goutam Tadi, Staff... Read more »PP085: News Roundup – Naked Satellite Signals, Account Recovery Buddies, Busting Ghost Networks
Did you know college students are snooping on satellite transmissions? On today’s news roundup we discuss new research in which university investigators use off-the-shelf equipment to intercept traffic from geostationary satellites and discover that a lot of it is unencrypted. We also dig into the credential hygiene lessons we can learn from a corpus of... Read more »
NAN105: Campus Network Automation, Powered by Cisco Agentic Workflows (Sponsored)
Cisco Workflows is a new platform that makes network automation easier, smarter, and safer. On today’s episode, sponsored by Cisco, we get introduced to Cisco Workflows by Stephen Orr, Distinguished Solutions Engineer; and Reid Butler, Director of Product Management. They break down how Workflows helps you ditch repetitive tasks, roll out changes faster, and plug... Read more »How Workers VPC Services connects to your regional private networks from anywhere in the world
In April, we shared our vision for a global virtual private cloud on Cloudflare, a way to unlock your applications from regionally constrained clouds and on-premise networks, enabling you to build truly cross-cloud applications.
Today, we’re announcing the first milestone of our Workers VPC initiative: VPC Services. VPC Services allow you to connect to your APIs, containers, virtual machines, serverless functions, databases and other services in regional private networks via Cloudflare Tunnels from your Workers running anywhere in the world.
Once you set up a Tunnel in your desired network, you can register each service that you want to expose to Workers by configuring its host or IP address. Then, you can access the VPC Service as you would any other Workers service binding — Cloudflare’s network will automatically route to the VPC Service over Cloudflare’s network, regardless of where your Worker is executing:
export default {
async fetch(request, env, ctx) {
// Perform application logic in Workers here
// Call an external API running in a ECS in AWS when needed using the binding
const response = await env.AWS_VPC_ECS_API.fetch("http://internal-host.com");
// Additional application logic in Workers
return new Response();
},
};Workers VPC is now Continue reading
Worth Reading: AI Won’t Replace Network Engineers
Jason Gintert published an excellent explanation why AI won’t replace (all) network engineers, and reading it, I felt like reading one of my “automation won’t replace network engineers” blog posts.
Here’s a quote to get you in the mood:
AI will make good engineers better and will expose mediocre ones. If your value proposition is memorizing CLI commands or being a human grep for log files, then yes, you might need to be worried.
Zero-Trust with Zero-Friction eBPF in Calico v3.31
Calico eBPF by default*
*some conditions may apply
Calico has used eBPF as one of its dataplanes since version 3.13, released more than five years ago. At the time, this was an exciting step forward, introducing a new, innovative data plane that quickly gained traction within the Calico community. Since then, there have been many changes and continued evolution, all thanks to the many adopters of the then-new data plane.
However, there has been one persistent challenge in the installation process since day one: bootstrapping the eBPF data plane required a manual setup step. This extra friction point often frustrated operators and slowed adoption.
With the launch of Calico v3.31, that hurdle to using the eBPF data plane has finally been removed. For many environments (see Limitations section below), you can now install Calico with eBPF enabled right out of the box with no manual setup required.
Simply use the provided installation manifest (custom-resources-bpf.yaml), which comes preconfigured with the data plane option set to eBPF.
To get started, follow the instructions in Install Calico networking and network policy for on-premises deployments to enjoy a much smoother installation experience.
See Calico eBPF in action with Continue reading
HW064: An Introduction to nOversight
nOversight is a Wi-Fi analysis app from Numerous Networks for iOS and Mac iOS that helps both end users and professionals do a better job of understanding how their Wi-Fi is running and how it’s working on their individual devices. Today we talk to Ben Toner, the creator of nOversight to give us the details... Read more »Building a better testing experience for Workflows, our durable execution engine for multi-step applications
Cloudflare Workflows is our take on "Durable Execution." They provide a serverless engine, powered by the Cloudflare Developer Platform, for building long-running, multi-step applications that persist through failures. When Workflows became generally available earlier this year, they allowed developers to orchestrate complex processes that would be difficult or impossible to manage with traditional stateless functions. Workflows handle state, retries, and long waits, allowing you to focus on your business logic.
However, complex orchestrations require robust testing to be reliable. To date, testing Workflows was a black-box process. Although you could test if a Workflow instance reached completion through an await to its status, there was no visibility into the intermediate steps. This made debugging really difficult. Did the payment processing step succeed? Did the confirmation email step receive the correct data? You couldn't be sure without inspecting external systems or logs.
As developers ourselves, we understand the need to ensure reliable code, and we heard your feedback loud and clear: the developer experience for testing Workflows needed to be better.
The black box nature of testing was one part of the problem. Beyond that, though, the limited testing offered came at a high Continue reading
The Curious Case of Default OSPF Interface Timers
We run two types of integration tests before shipping a netlab release: device integration tests that check whether we correctly implemented netlab features on all supported devices, and platform integration tests that check whether rarely-used core functionality works as expected.
I want to have some validation included in the platform integration tests to ensure the lab devices are started, and that the links and the management network work as expected. The simplest way to get that done is to start OSPF with short hello intervals (to get adjacency up in no time), for example: