A Node to Workers Story

A Node to Workers Story

Node.js allows developers to build web services with JavaScript. However, you're on your own when it comes to registering a domain, setting up DNS, managing the server processes, and setting up builds.

There's no reason to manage all these layers on separate platforms. For a site on Cloudflare, these layers can be on a single platform. Serverless technology simplifies developers' lives and reframes our current definition of backend.

In this article I will breeze through a simple example of how converting a former Node server into a Worker untangled a part of my teams’ code base. The conversion to Workers for this example can be found at this PR on Github.

Background

Cloudflare Marketplace hosts a variety of apps, most of which are produced by third party developers, but some are produced by Cloudflare employees.

The Spotify app is one of those apps that was written by the Cloudflare apps team. This app requires an OAuth flow with Spotify to retrieve the user’s token and gather the playlist, artists, other Spotify profile specific information. While Cloudflare manages the OAuth authentication portion, the app owner - in this case Cloudflare Apps - manages the small integration service that uses the Continue reading

VMware firewall takes aim at defending apps in data center, cloud

VMware has taken the wraps off a firewall it says protects enterprise applications and data inside data centers or clouds.Unlike perimeter firewalls that filter traffic from an unlimited number of unknown hosts, VMware says its new Service-defined Firewall gains deep visibility into the hosts and services that generate network traffic by tapping into into its NSX network management software, vSphere hypervisors and AppDefense threat-detection system.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware firewall takes aim at defending apps in data center, cloud

VMware has taken the wraps off a firewall it says protects enterprise applications and data inside data centers or clouds.Unlike perimeter firewalls that filter traffic from an unlimited number of unknown hosts, VMware says its new Service-defined Firewall gains deep visibility into the hosts and services that generate network traffic by tapping into into its NSX network management software, vSphere hypervisors and AppDefense threat-detection system.To read this article in full, please click here

Day Two Cloud 004: How To Optimize Cloud For Cost And Performance Without Going Insane

Your monthly cloud bill can be shocking. On today's Day Two Cloud we talk with Iris Classon about how to optimize your cloud deployment for cost without killing performance--i.e., how to keep customers and finance happy without going insane.

The post Day Two Cloud 004: How To Optimize Cloud For Cost And Performance Without Going Insane appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Seven Women Using the Internet to Make a Difference

We’re celebrating International Women’s Day this year with great news: The Internet Society welcomes a new Chapter in Lesotho – and the Chapter’s president, vice president, treasurer, secretary, as well as a board member are all talented tech women.

Lesotho is a small landlocked country within South Africa, where less than a third of its population is connected to the Internet. One of the Lesotho Chapter’s key priorities this year is to start an “Internet for Education” project, which aims to encourage five schools to use the Internet to support teaching and to improve the quality of education.

Please join us in welcoming the Lesotho Chapter, then learn about its President Ithabeleng Moreke and other women around the world who are using the Internet to make a difference in their communities!

Ithabeleng Moreke

Ithabeleng Moreke enjoys the world of the Internet and all things networks, the technology behind it, and Internet security – and how they affect our everyday lives. She’s worked as network engineer for the government of Lesotho and is now with Vodacom Lesotho.

Jazmin Fallas Kerr

In Jazmin Fallas Kerr’s hometown, Desamparados, Costa Rica, nearly half of all families with women as head of household are in Continue reading

Heavy Networking 434: Solving Network Performance And Security Problems With VIAVI Solutions (Sponsored)

On today's sponsored Heavy Networking, VIAVI Solutions joins the Packet Pushers to discuss the intersection of network performance management (NPM) and security. We discuss how network and security teams can leverage VIAVI's packet capture capabilities, how it enriches flow records with additional data to provide valuable context, and how the concept of end user experience informs VIAVI's approach to NPM.

The post Heavy Networking 434: Solving Network Performance And Security Problems With VIAVI Solutions (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 8th, 2019

Wake up! It's HighScalability time:

 

A highly simplified diagram of serverless. (@jbesw)

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? I'd greatly appreciate your support on Patreon. Know anyone who needs cloud? I wrote Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 just for them. It has 40 mostly 5 star reviews. They'll learn a lot and love you even more.

 

  • 5%: France's new digital tax revolution; $15 trillion: AI contribution to global GDP by 2030; 70%: better response time using HTTP keep-alive in lambda; 115 million: Akamai found bots (per day) compromising user accounts by credential stuffing; 83%: of all internet traffic is API calls, not HTML; $1 million: first millionaire bug-bounty hacker is 19 years old; 15%: mooch their Netflix account; 5%: Microsoft's app store take; $15: Tensorflow at the edge; 30%: first quarter drop in DRAM prices; $2 billion: IBM's microkernel folly; ~1TWh: lithium-ion batteries production per year by 2030; 25%: Tesla supercharger time improvement by a software update; 

  • Quoteable Quotes:
    • Jeff Bezos: I've witnessed this incredible thing happen on the internet over the last two decades. I started Amazon in my Continue reading

ExaBGP and etcd – processing routes

In my last post – we took a look at how we could leverage etcd from Python. In this post, I want to propose a use for leveraging etcd as a sort of message bus for ExaBGP. We saw some pretty compelling features with etcd that I think can work nicely in our ExaBGP model. So without further blabbering – let’s start coding.

Note: I assume you have a local instance of etcd installed and it is currently empty. If it’s not empty – you’ll want to clear it all out using a command like this ETCDCTL_API=3 etcdctl del "" --from-key=true

If you recall – in our last post on ExaBGP we were at a point where the ExaBGP process was using two Python programs we wrote. One for processing received routes (exa_bgp_receive.py) and one for sending route updates (exa_bgp_send.py). My goal here it to remove a lot of the logic for static route processing from these two scripts and make them more about route processing. More specifically – I want to turn the two Python scripts that ExaBGP is running on our behalf into simple programs that read/write to to/from etcd. Once we Continue reading

How to determine if Wi-Fi 6 is right for you

There's a lot of hype around the next Wi-Fi standard, 802.11ax, more commonly known as Wi-Fi 6. Often new technologies are built up by vendors as the "next big thing" and then flop because they don’t live up to expectations. In the case of Wi-Fi 6, however, the fervor is warranted because it's the first Wi-Fi standard designed with the premise that Wi-Fi is the primary connection for devices rather than a network of convenience. Wi-Fi resources Test and review of 4 Wi-Fi 6 routers: Who’s the fastest? Five questions to answer before deploying Wi-Fi 6 Wi-Fi 6E: When it’s coming and what it’s good for Wi-Fi 6 is a different kind of Wi-Fi Wi-Fi 6 is loaded with features, such as Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), 1024-QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) encoding, and target wake time (TWT), that make Wi-Fi faster and less congested. Many of these enhancements came from the world of LTE and 4G, which addressed these challenges long ago. These new features will lead to a better mobile experience and longer client battery life, and they will open the door to a wide range of applications that could not have been done on Continue reading

Sample Solution: Automated Auditing Toolbox

Wherever you look you find three kinds of people: those that build tools they need, those that find the tools they need, and those that yammer about the lack of tools without ever doing anything to solve the problem.

Daniel Teycheney is clearly in the first category. When faced with “collect some data and create a simple report” hands-on assignment during the Building Network Automation Solutions course he started creating a toolbox of playbooks that can be used in initial network auditing. I’m positive you’ll find tons of useful tidbits in his code ;)

Want to be able to do something similar? You missed the Spring 2019 online course, but you can get the mentored self-paced version with Expert Subscription.

A generalised solution to distributed consensus

A generalised solution to distributed consensus Howard & Mortier, arXiv’19

This is a draft paper that Heidi Howard recently shared with the world via Twitter, and here’s the accompanying blog post. It caught my eye for promising a generalised solution to the consensus problem, and also for using reasoning over immutable state to get there. The state maintained at each server is monotonic.

Consensus is a notoriously hard problem, and Howard has been deep in the space for several years now. See for example the 2016 paper on Flexible Paxos. The quest for the holy grail here is to find a unifying and easily understandable protocol that can be instantiated in different configurations allowing different trade-offs to be made according to the situation.

This paper re-examines the problem of distributed consensus with the aim of improving performance and understanding. We proceed as follows. Once we have defined the problem of consensus, we propose a generalised solution to consensus that uses only immutable state to enable more intuitive reasoning about correctness. We subsequently prove that both Paxos and Fast Paxos are instances of our generalised consensus algorithm and thus show that both algorithms are conservative in their approach.

The Continue reading

Python Decorators – From a Network Engineers Perspective

As going through learning some basic programming, I encountered Decorators. I should be very honest if any of you are trying to figure out or learn what decorators in python do from my blog post you are dangerously in trouble.

So what this post about if not learning, well its mostly on what the functionality is so that you can learn the concept from better programming resources.

 

Let’s examine the below code

 

The output will be something like below

 

What’s in this code:

The first thing you have to realize is that some representation with ‘@’ symbol. If you have noticed get_reinfo and get_modelinfo functions, they have one thing in common which is to connect to the device and get output before they parse the required fields, that what a Decorator is helping us to do here, we extend that wrapping functionality around new functions without having to write everything or globalize everything.

At least that is what I understood.  So, next time when you are writing some code try to think if you can incorporate decorators into them.

-Rakesh