Birthday Week 2019 Wrap-up

This week we celebrated Cloudflare’s 9th birthday by launching a variety of new offerings that support our mission: to help build a better Internet.  Below is a summary recap of how we celebrated Birthday Week 2019.

Cleaning up bad bots

Every day Cloudflare protects over 20 million Internet properties from malicious bots, and this week you were invited to join in the fight!  Now you can enable “bot fight mode” in the Firewall settings of the Cloudflare Dashboard and we’ll start deploying CPU intensive code to traffic originating from malicious bots.  This wastes the bots’ CPU resources and makes it more difficult and costly for perpetrators to deploy malicious bots at scale. We’ll also share the IP addresses of malicious bot traffic with our Bandwidth Alliance partners, who can help kick malicious bots offline. Join us in the battle against bad bots – and, as you can read here – you can help the climate too!

Browser Insights

Speed matters, and if you manage a website or app, you want to make sure that you’re delivering a high performing website to all of your global end users. Now you can enable Browser Insights in the Speed section of the Continue reading

Tutorial: Explore Project Calico Network Policies with Google Kubernetes Engine

Virtual networking softwareKubernetes open source container orchestration software. While Kubernetes has extensive support for Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), the default networking stack based on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Unlike other managed Kubernetes services, GKE comes with an integrated Calico stack that can be enabled during the cluster creation. It is also possible to configure Calico on an existing, running GKE cluster. Start by launching a standard GKE cluster with network policies enabled. This can be done by clicking the Enable network policy checkbox available under Availability, networking, security, and additional features section. After the cluster is up and running, we can check for Calico Pods deployed as a part of Daemonset in the kube-system namespace. Let’s download the calicoctl, Calico’s CLI to explore the environment further. We need to point calicoctl to etcd endpoints of GKE cluster. This can be done with the below settings: Now, let’s go ahead and deploy one of the samples provided by Project Calico. Run the below commands to deploy the application. You can download the YAML files from Project Calico’s http://mi2.live. The post Tutorial: Explore Project Calico Network Policies with Google Kubernetes Engine appeared first on The New Stack.

AT&T Lobs White Box Router Design at OCP

5G: Easy Please for Enterprises Say Verizon, IBM, Qualcomm

The Role of South Asia’s NOGs in Community Building

At the recently concluded 34th South Asia Network Operators Group (SANOG 34), it was interesting not only to hear about the evolution of digital infrastructure, technology, and the economy in South Asia, including the opportunities it presents to network operators, but also to hear how community-led national Network Operating Groups (NOGs) in South Asia are working to build technical community knowledge, capacity, and engagement in their respective economies.

SANOG, which was set up as a sub-regional, community-led initiative in 2003, has played a significant role in bringing operators from the region together for knowledge sharing and cooperation. It is a biannual event, rotated among economies for maximum reach and participation.

While the NOGs of developed economies in the Asia Pacific began forming in the late 1990s, the NOGs in South Asia are quite recent: Bangladesh (bdNOG) and Bhutan (btNOG) were set up in 2014; Nepal (npNOG) in 2016; Sri Lanka (LKNOG) in 2017; and India (INNOG) in 2017.

The objectives of these NOGs are to encourage knowledge sharing within their respective economies and discuss global and regional technical developments, while addressing local requirements and issues. This, in turn, helps members Continue reading

Weekly Wrap: Ericsson Bribery Scandal Cuts Deep, Surpassing $1B Penalty

The Certification Ladder

Are you climbing the certification ladder? If you’re in IT the odds are good that you are. Some people are just starting out and see certifications as a way to get the knowledge they need to do their job. Others see certs as a way to get out of a job they don’t like. Still others have plenty of certifications but want to get the ones at the top of their field. This last group are the ones that I want to spend some time talking about.

Pushing The Limit

Expert-level certifications aren’t easy on purpose. They’re supposed to represent the gap between being good at something and going above and beyond. For some that involves some kind of practical test of skills like the CCIE. For others it involves a board interview process like the VCDX. Or it could even involve a combination of things like the CWNE does with board review and documentation submissions.

Expert certifications aren’t designed to be powered through in a short amount of time. That’s because it’s difficult to become an expert at something without putting in the practice time. For some tests, that means meeting some minimum requirements. You can only attempt your Continue reading

Workers Sites: Extending the Workers platform with our own serverless building blocks

As of today, with the Wrangler CLI, you can now deploy entire websites directly to Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV. If you can statically generate the assets for your site, think create-react-app, Jekyll, or even the WP2Static plugin, you can deploy it to our entire global network, which spans 194 cities in more than 90 countries.

While you could deploy an entire site directly to Workers before, it wasn’t the easiest process. So, the Workers Developer Experience Team came up with a solution to make deploying static assets a significantly better experience.

Using our Workers command-line tool Wrangler, we've made it possible to deploy any static site to Workers in three easy steps: run wrangler init --site, configure the newly created wrangler.toml file with your account and project details, and then publish it to Cloudflare's edge with wrangler publish. If you want to explore how this works, check out our new Workers Sites tutorial for create-react-app, where we cover how this new functionality allows you to deploy without needing to write any additional code!

While in hindsight the path we took to get to this point might not seem the most straightforward, it really highlights the flexibility Continue reading

Workers Sites: Deploy Your Website Directly on our Network

Performance on the web has always been a battle against the speed of light — accessing a site from London that is served from Seattle, WA means every single asset request has to travel over seven thousand miles. The first breakthrough in the web performance battle was HTTP/1.1 connection keep-alive and browsers opening multiple connections. The next breakthrough was the CDN, bringing your static assets closer to your end users by caching them in data centers closer to them. Today, with Workers Sites, we’re excited to announce the next big breakthrough — entire sites distributed directly onto the edge of the Internet.

Deploying to the edge of the network

Why isn’t just caching assets sufficient? Yes, caching improves performance, but significant performance improvement comes with a series of headaches. The CDN can make a guess at which assets it should cache, but that is just a guess. Configuring your site for maximum performance has always been an error-prone process, requiring a wide collection of esoteric rules and headers. Even when perfectly configured, almost nothing is cached forever, precious requests still often need to travel all the way to your origin (wherever it may be). Cache invalidation is, after all, Continue reading

Net2Text: Natural-Language Interface to Network Operations

Sick-and-tired of intent-based GUIs that are barely better than CiscoWorks on steroids? How about asking Siri-like assistant queries about network state in somewhat-limited English and getting replies back in full-blown sentences?

Warning: you might be reentering the land of unicorns driving flying DeLoreans... but then keep in mind what Arthur Clarke had to say on this topic ;).

Welcome to Net2Text, another proof-of-concept tool created by the group led by Laurent Vanbever… who joined us for a short chat to discuss it, resulting in Episode 105 of Software Gone Wild.

Storage trends: What’s the best uses for Optane (aka 3D XPoint memory)?

While 3D XPoint memory has been shipping as Optane from Intel for two years, it hasn't found a great deal of traction, but a new server DIMM and an upcoming Micron product release may change that.

Storage trends: What’s the best uses for Optane?

While 3D XPoint memory has been shipping as Optane from Intel for two years, it hasn't found a great deal of traction, but a new server DIMM and an upcoming Micron product release may change that.

Storage trends: What’s the best uses for Optane (aka 3D XPoint memory)?

While 3D XPoint memory has been shipping as Optane from Intel for two years, it hasn't found a great deal of traction, but a new server DIMM and an upcoming Micron product release may change that.

Storage trends: What’s the best uses for Optane?

While 3D XPoint memory has been shipping as Optane from Intel for two years, it hasn't found a great deal of traction, but a new server DIMM and an upcoming Micron product release may change that.

Take part in the 2020 IT Salary Survey

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IBM brings blockchain to Red Hat OpenShift; adds Apache CouchDB for hybrid cloud customers

IBM continued its Red Hat and open-source integration work this week by adding Red Hat OpenShift support to its blockchain platform and bringing a Kubernetes Operator for Apache CouchDB along side its hybrid-cloud services offering. The ability to deploy IBM Blockchain on Red Hat OpenShift, the company’s flagship enterprise Kubernetes platform, means IBM Blockchain developers will have the ability  to deploy secure software, either on-premises, in public clouds or in hybrid cloud architectures.To read this article in full, please click here

Gremlin’s Scenarios Simulate Common Outages for Chaos Engineering

There are two things that seem to motivate developers — a speedy, self-explanatory onboarding experience and a bit of friendly competition. Certainly, Gremlin chaos as a service’s new Scenarios features seems to check both boxes. The Scenarios feature, which launched Thursday at the company’s Lorne Kligerman. The idea for Scenarios pulled from their former chaotic lives as well as from customer success and developer advocates. “We know things will fail today. We Continue reading

CMC Networks Bolsters SD-WAN with Enea NFV Access

Ericsson Bribery Scandal Cuts Deep, Surpassing $1B Penalty

Data center gear will increasingly move off-premises

I've said that colocation and downsizing in favor of the cloud is happening, and the latest research from 451 Research confirms the trend. More than half of global utilized racks will be located at off-premises facilities, such as cloud and colocation sites, by the end of 2024, the company found.As companies get out of data center ownership, hardware will move to colocation sites like Equinix and DRT or cloud providers. The result is the total worldwide data center installed-base growth will see a dip of 0.1% CAGR between 2019-2024, according to the report, but overall total capacity in terms of space, power, and racks will continue to shift toward larger data centers.To read this article in full, please click here