Automatically generating Cloudflare’s Terraform provider

In November 2022, we announced the transition to OpenAPI Schemas for the Cloudflare API. Back then, we had an audacious goal to make the OpenAPI schemas the source of truth for our SDK ecosystem and reference documentation. During 2024’s Developer Week, we backed this up by announcing that our SDK libraries are now automatically generated from these OpenAPI schemas. Today, we’re excited to announce the latest pieces of the ecosystem to now be automatically generated — the Terraform provider and API reference documentation.

This means that the moment a new feature or attribute is added to our products and the team documents it, you’ll be able to see how it’s meant to be used across our SDK ecosystem and make use of it immediately. No more delays. No more lacking coverage of API endpoints.

You can find the new documentation site at https://developers.cloudflare.com/api-next/, and you can try the preview release candidate of the Terraform provider by installing 5.0.0-alpha1.

Why Terraform? 

For anyone who is unfamiliar with Terraform, it is a tool for managing your infrastructure as code, much like you would with your application code. Many of our customers (big and small) rely Continue reading

Cloudflare helps verify the security of end-to-end encrypted messages by auditing key transparency for WhatsApp

Chances are good that today you’ve sent a message through an end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging app such as WhatsApp, Signal, or iMessage. While we often take the privacy of these conversations for granted, they in fact rely on decades of research, testing, and standardization efforts, the foundation of which is a public-private key exchange. There is, however, an oft-overlooked implicit trust inherent in this model: that the messaging app infrastructure is distributing the public keys of all of its users correctly.

Here’s an example: if Joe and Alice are messaging each other on WhatsApp, Joe uses Alice’s phone number to retrieve Alice’s public key from the WhatsApp database, and Alice receives Joe’s public key. Their messages are then encrypted using this key exchange, so that no one — even WhatsApp — can see the contents of their messages besides Alice and Joe themselves. However, in the unlikely situation where an attacker, Bob, manages to register a different public key in WhatsApp’s database, Joe would try to message Alice but unknowingly be messaging Bob instead. And while this threat is most salient for journalists, activists, and those most vulnerable to cyber attacks, we believe that protecting the privacy and integrity of Continue reading

One-Arm Hub-and-Spoke VPN with MPLS/VPN

All our previous designs of the hub-and-spoke VPN (single PE, EVPN) used two VRFs for the hub device (ingress VRF and egress VRF). Is it possible to build a one-arm hub-and-spoke VPN where the hub device exchanges traffic with the PE router over a single link?

TL&DR: Yes, but only on some devices (for example, Cisco IOS or FRRouting) when using MPLS transport.

Here’s a high-level diagram of what we’d like to achieve:

Read more …

Start auditing and controlling the AI models accessing your content

Site owners have lacked the ability to determine how AI services use their content for training or other purposes. Today, Cloudflare is releasing a set of tools to make it easy for site owners, creators, and publishers to take back control over how their content is made available to AI-related bots and crawlers. All Cloudflare customers can now audit and control how AI models access the content on their site.

This launch starts with a detailed analytics view of the AI services that crawl your site and the specific content they access. Customers can review activity by AI provider, by type of bot, and which sections of their site are most popular. This data is available to every site on Cloudflare and does not require any configuration.

We expect that this new level of visibility will prompt teams to make a decision about their exposure to AI crawlers. To help give them time to make that decision, Cloudflare now provides a one-click option in our dashboard to immediately block any AI crawlers from accessing any site. Teams can then use this “pause” to decide if they want to allow specific AI providers or types of bots to proceed. Once that Continue reading

Introducing Ephemeral IDs: a new tool for fraud detection

In the early days of the Internet, a single IP address was a reliable indicator of a single user. However, today’s Internet is more complex. Shared IP addresses are now common, with users connecting via mobile IP address pools, VPNs, or behind CGNAT (Carrier Grade Network Address Translation). This makes relying on IP addresses alone a weak method to combat modern threats like automated attacks and fraudulent activity. Additionally, many Internet users have no option but to use an IP address which they don’t have sole control over, and as such, should not be penalized for that.

At Cloudflare, we are solving this complexity with Turnstile, our CAPTCHA alternative. And now, we’re taking the next step in advancing security with Ephemeral IDs, a new feature that generates a unique short-lived ID, without relying on any network-level information.

When a website visitor interacts with Turnstile, we now calculate an Ephemeral ID that can link behavior to a specific client instead of an IP address. This means that even when attackers rotate through large pools of IP addresses, we can still identify and block malicious actions. For example, in attacks like credential stuffing or account signups, where fraudsters attempt to disguise Continue reading

Network performance update: Birthday Week 2024

When it comes to the Internet, everyone wants to be the fastest. At Cloudflare, we’re no different. We want to be the fastest network in the world, and are constantly working towards that goal. Since June 2021, we’ve been measuring and ranking our network performance against the top global networks. We use this data to improve our performance, and to share the results of those initiatives. 

In this post, we’re going to share with you how our network performance has changed since our last post in March 2024, and discuss the tools and processes we are using to assess network performance. 

Digging into the data

Cloudflare has been measuring network performance across these top networks from the top 1,000 ISPs by estimated population (according to the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC)), and optimizing our network for ISPs and countries where we see opportunities to improve. For performance benchmarking, we look at TCP connection time. This is the time it takes an end user to connect to the website or endpoint they are trying to reach. We chose this metric to show how our network helps make your websites faster by serving your traffic where Continue reading

Making zone management more efficient with batch DNS record updates

Customers that use Cloudflare to manage their DNS often need to create a whole batch of records, enable proxying on many records, update many records to point to a new target at the same time, or even delete all of their records. Historically, customers had to resort to bespoke scripts to make these changes, which came with their own set of issues. In response to customer demand, we are excited to announce support for batched API calls to the DNS records API starting today. This lets customers make large changes to their zones much more efficiently than before. Whether sending a POST, PUT, PATCH or DELETE, users can now execute these four different HTTP methods, and multiple HTTP requests all at the same time.

Efficient zone management matters

DNS records are an essential part of most web applications and websites, and they serve many different purposes. The most common use case for a DNS record is to have a hostname point to an IPv4 address, this is called an A record:

example.com 59 IN A 198.51.100.0

blog.example.com 59 IN A 198.51.100.1

ask.example.com 59 IN A 198.51. Continue reading

Egress Peer Engineering: basics

Egress Peer Engineering extends regular BGP policies to provide more flexibility.

Why use Egress Peer Engineering

When a network operator has multiple external connections, such as IP transit, private peerings or Internet Exchange (IXP), there is often a need to …

NAT Overload Towards Specific Host

This is a quick post on how to perform NAT overload (PAT) towards a specific host only. I have an inside network of 10.10.1.0/24. I need a host in this network to reach the host 192.168.0.1. They don’t have direct connectivity so I need to PAT it behind the router which has an IP of 192.168.128.103. I don’t want to PAT all the traffic from 10.10.1.0/24, though, only towards this specific host. There are hosts in 192.168.128.0/24 that the VM should access using its original source. The network is shown in the diagram below:

First, I’ll define my inside and outside interface:

RT01(config)#int gi0/0
RT01(config-if)#ip nat inside
RT01(config-if)#int gi0/1
RT01(config-if)#ip nat outside

Then I’m going to create the ACL that matches on traffic from the 10.10.1.0/24 network to the host 192.168.0.1:

RT01(config)#ip access-list extended NAT-SRC-10.10.2.0/24
RT01(config-ext-nacl)#permit ip 10.10.2.0 0.0.255.255 host 192.168.0.1

Then, I’ll configure the NAT statement to match on the ACL and do an overload to interface Gi0/1:

RT01(config)#ip nat inside source list NAT-SRC-10.10.2. Continue reading

Cloudflare’s 2024 Annual Founders’ Letter

This week Cloudflare will celebrate the fourteenth anniversary of our launch. We think of it as our birthday. As is our tradition ever since our first anniversary, we use our Birthday Week each year to launch new products that we think of as gifts back to the Internet. For the last five years, we also take this time to write our annual Founders’ Letter reflecting on our business and the state of the Internet. This year is no different.

That said, one thing that is different is you may have noticed we've actually had fewer public innovation weeks over the last year than usual. That's been because a couple of incidents nearly a year ago caused us to focus on improving our internal systems over releasing new features. We're incredibly proud of our team's focus to make security, resilience, and reliability the top priorities for the last year. Today, Cloudflare's underlying platform, and the products that run on top of it, are significantly more robust than ever before.

With that work largely complete, and our platform in its strongest shape ever, we plan to pick back up the usual cadence of new product launches that we're known for. This Continue reading

Logging in Python

Logging in Python

How many times have you found yourself staring at your screen, surrounded by a sea of hastily added print statements, thinking "There's got to be a better way"? If you're like me, the answer is probably "more times than I'd care to admit."

Sick of finding myself in this situation more often than I'd like, I decided to take action. Python's default logging module is powerful, but it just didn't cut it for my needs. I was looking for something more.

Why Logging Matters

Before we dive in, let's look at why logging is crucial:

  1. Debugging: Logs provide a trail of breadcrumbs to track down issues.
  2. Monitoring: They help you understand your application's behavior.
  3. Auditing: Logs can serve as a record of important events or actions.
  4. Performance Tracking: You can use logs to identify bottlenecks and optimize your code.

Introducing PyLogger

With these benefits in mind, I set out to build a custom logging class that would meet all my requirements. The result is PyLogger, a Python logging class that aims to make logging both powerful and user-friendly.

GitHub Repository

Key Features

Below are some of the key features that make pylogger appealing:

  1. Flexible Continue reading

IPv6: Instructions for Use

Retirement obviously does not sit well with my friend Tiziano Tofoni; the English version of his IPv6 book just came out.

It is a bit sad, though, that we still need “how to use IPv6” books when the protocol is old enough to enjoy a nice glass of whiskey (in the US) trying to drown its sorrow at its slow adoption.

Creating a Simple GUI Application with Python Tkinter

Creating a Simple GUI Application with Python Tkinter

A few years ago, I used a simple application called 'TypeItIn'. It kept a small GUI window open with some buttons and labels. You could configure each label with your own text. If you wanted to type one of these texts into a window, all you needed to do was click on the label, and it would start typing the text into whatever window you opened. It was such a time-saver, especially if you had multiple texts that you often used.

Fast forward a few years, I really needed such a tool and then realized I knew a bit of Python, so I should be able to create the same functionality using Python. So, in this blog post, let's go through how you can create a simple GUI application with just a few lines of code.

What Is Tkinter?

Tkinter is the standard GUI toolkit for Python, providing a fast and easy way to create simple GUI applications. It is built into Python, so there’s no need to install anything separately if you already have Python.

Tkinter is widely used due to its simplicity and the vast availability of widgets like buttons, menus, and text fields, which help Continue reading

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