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Technical Details of Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

From the very beginning Cloudflare used Intel CPU-based servers (and, also, Intel components for things like NICs and SSDs). But we're always interested in optimizing the cost of running our service so that we can provide products at a low cost and high gross margin.

We're also mindful of events like the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities and have been working with outside parties on research into mitigation and exploitation which we hope to publish later this year.

We looked very seriously at ARM-based CPUs and continue to keep our software up to date for the ARM architecture so that we can use ARM-based CPUs when the requests per watt is interesting to us.

In the meantime, we've deployed AMD's EPYC processors as part of Gen X server platform and for the first time are not using any Intel components at all. This week, we announced details of this tenth generation of servers. Below is a recap of why we're excited about the design, specifications, and performance of our newest hardware.

Servers for an Accelerated Future

Every server can run every service. This architectural decision has helped us achieve higher efficiency across the Cloudflare network. It has also given us more Continue reading

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Denial of Services as a Service

Hacking isn’t new. If you follow the 2600 Magazine culture of know the name Mitnick or Draper you know that hacking has been a part of systems as long as their have been systems. What has changed in recent years is the malicious aspect of what’s going on in the acts themselves. The pioneers of hacking culture were focused on short term gains or personal exploitation. It was more about proving you could break into a system and getting the side benefit of free phone calls or an untraceable mobile device. Today’s hacking cultures are driven by massive amounts of theft and exploitation of resources to a degree that would make any traditional hacker blush.

It’s much like the difference between petty street crime and “organized” crime. With a patron and a purpose, the organizers of the individual members can coordinate to accomplish a bigger goal than was ever thought possible by the person on the street. Just like a wolf pack or jackals, you can take down a much bigger target with come coordination. I talked a little bit about how the targets were going to start changing almost seven years ago and how we needed to start figuring Continue reading

Securing Memory at EPYC Scale

Security is a serious business, one that we do not take lightly at Cloudflare. We have invested a lot of effort into ensuring that our services, both external and internal, are protected by meeting or exceeding industry best practices. Encryption is a huge part of our strategy as it is embedded in nearly every process we have. At Cloudflare, we encrypt data both in transit (on the network) and at rest (on the disk). Both practices address some of the most common vectors used to exfiltrate information and these measures serve to protect sensitive data from attackers but,  what about data currently in use?

Can encryption or any technology eliminate all threats? No, but as Infrastructure Security, it’s our job to consider worst-case scenarios. For example, what if someone were to steal a server from one of our data centers? How can we leverage the most reliable, cutting edge, innovative technology to secure all data on that host if it were in the wrong hands? Would it be protected? And, in particular, what about the server’s RAM?

Data in random access memory (RAM) is usually stored in the clear. This can leave data vulnerable to software or hardware probing by Continue reading

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Akamai: The Financial Sector Is Seeing More APIs-Based Attacks

Cyberattackers are now increasingly targeting APIs, especially in the financial sector, according to content delivery network Akamai’s between 15% and 30% of all web traffic. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company hAndy Ellis neatly summarized the resultsemail to VentureBeat, Akamai explained some of the advantages of automation: criminals “use bots and tools that allow threading, or multiple simultaneous connections, to attempt multiple logins at once.” And by targeting APIs, “they hope to avoid some front-end defenses and speed up their validation times.” A recent Franck V. on 

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