Leave your VPN and cURL secure APIs with Cloudflare Access

Leave your VPN and cURL secure APIs with Cloudflare Access
Leave your VPN and cURL secure APIs with Cloudflare Access

We built Access to solve a problem here at Cloudflare: our VPN. Our team members hated the slowness and inconvenience of VPN but, that wasn’t the issue we needed to solve. The security risks posed by a VPN required a better solution.

VPNs punch holes in the network perimeter. Once inside, individuals can access everything. This can include  critically sensitive content like private keys, cryptographic salts, and log files. Cloudflare is a security company; this situation was unacceptable. We need a better method that gives every application control over precisely who is allowed to  reach it.

Access meets that need. We started by moving our browser-based applications behind Access. Team members could connect to applications faster, from anywhere, while we improved the security of the entire organization. However, we weren’t yet ready to turn off our VPN as some tasks are better done through a command line. We cannot #EndTheVPN without replacing all of its use cases. Reaching a server from the command line required us to fall back to our VPN.

Today, we’re releasing a beta command line tool to help your team, and ours. Before we started using this feature at Cloudflare, curling a server required me to Continue reading

Hadoop Needs To Be A Business, Not Just A Platform

It is safe to say that a little more than a decade ago, when the clone of Google’s MapReduce and Google File System distributed storage and computing platform was cloned at Yahoo and offered up to the world as a way to transform the nature of data analytics at scale, that we all had much higher hopes for the emergence of platforms centered around Hadoop that would change enterprise, not just webscale, computing.

Hadoop Needs To Be A Business, Not Just A Platform was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For October 5th, 2018

Hey, wake up! It's HighScalability time:

 

Halloween is early. Do you know what's hiding inside your computer? Probably not. (bloomberg)

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please support me on Patreon. I'd really appreciate it. Know anyone looking for a simple book explaining the cloud? Then please recommend my well reviewed book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love it and you'll be their hero forever.

  • 127k: lines of code in first version of Photoshop; $15: Amazon's new minimum wage; 100,000: botnet hijacks Brazilian bank traffic; 3,000: miles per gallon efficiency of a bike; 1 billion: Reddit video views per month; 3: imposters found using face rekognition software; 24%: run their cloud database using RDS, DynamoDB, etc; 250+: decentralized exchanges in the world today; $9 billion: Apple charge to make Google default iOS search; $1.63B: EU fine for Facebook breach; 9 million: broken Wikipedia links rescued by Internet Archive; 1 million: people who rely on gig work; 6,531,230,326: Duck Duck Go queries;  

  • Quotable Quotes:

Intel, AMD both claim server speed records

It is so nice to see a return of competition in the CPU space. For too long it had been a one-horse race, with Intel on its own and AMD willing to settle for good enough. Revitalized with the Zen architecture, AMD is taking it to Intel once again, and you are the winner.Both sides are proclaiming massive performance records, although in both cases they come with an asterisk next to them.Intel's announcement In Intel’s case, it announced 95 new performance world records for its Intel Xeon Scalable processors using the most up-to-date benchmarks on hardware for major OEMs, including Dell, HPE, ASUS, and Super Micro, running SPECInt and SPECFP benchmarks as well as SAP HANA, ranging from single-socket systems up to eight-socket systems.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel, AMD both claim server speed records

It is so nice to see a return of competition in the CPU space. For too long it had been a one-horse race, with Intel on its own and AMD willing to settle for good enough. Revitalized with the Zen architecture, AMD is taking it to Intel once again, and you are the winner.Both sides are proclaiming massive performance records, although in both cases they come with an asterisk next to them.Intel's announcement In Intel’s case, it announced 95 new performance world records for its Intel Xeon Scalable processors using the most up-to-date benchmarks on hardware for major OEMs, including Dell, HPE, ASUS, and Super Micro, running SPECInt and SPECFP benchmarks as well as SAP HANA, ranging from single-socket systems up to eight-socket systems.To read this article in full, please click here

Reboot Plugin for Linux in Ansible 2.7

Ansible-2-7-Feature-Spotlight

Rebooting Linux systems with Ansible has always been possible, but was often tricky and error-prone. In Ansible 2.7, I am happy to say that rebooting Linux hosts with Ansible is now easier and can be done with a single task using the newly minted reboot plugin.

Some History

The win_reboot module was written by Matt Davis and included with Ansible 2.1. Rebooting Windows hosts is a much more common occurrence than rebooting Linux hosts. Necessity is the mother of invention, so it made sense that win_reboot appeared before the equivalent for Linux. And while less than elegant, it is possible to reboot Linux hosts using shell and wait_for or wait_for_connection[1].

Rebooting Linux systems with Ansible never felt right to me — much too error prone and finicky. It finally bugged me enough that I refactored win_reboot into reboot so Linux hosts could join the reboot party with their Windows counterparts.

Development Story

When I set out to make the reboot plugin[2], the goal was to create a common class that win_reboot (and potentially others) could easily subclass to override specific parts of the reboot process. I was also working in reverse, deconstructing win_reboot into a new Continue reading

Juniper CEO Rahim talks network, security and multicloud trends

Juniper CEO Rami Rahim is shepherding a number of key transitions for the company. Juniper made a big bet on 400G Ethernet this summer, detailing how it plans to transition its wide-area network, data center and enterprise portfolio to 400G Ethernet. And earlier this year, Juniper released its Contrail Enterprise Multicloud software, an SDN controller that is the central component of its multicloud, intent-based networking strategy. Ahead of its NXTWORK annual customer and partner summit next week, Rahim talked with Network World’s Michael Cooney about trends and directions for the networking vendor, as Rahim aims to position Juniper more strongly against chief competitors such as Cisco, Arista, HPE, and Huawei.To read this article in full, please click here

Juniper CEO Rahim talks network, security and multicloud trends

Juniper CEO Rami Rahim is shepherding a number of key transitions for the company. Juniper made a big bet on 400G Ethernet this summer, detailing how it plans to transition its wide-area network, data center and enterprise portfolio to 400G Ethernet. And earlier this year, Juniper released its Contrail Enterprise Multicloud software, an SDN controller that is the central component of its multicloud, intent-based networking strategy. Ahead of its NXTWORK annual customer and partner summit next week, Rahim talked with Network World’s Michael Cooney about trends and directions for the networking vendor, as Rahim aims to position Juniper more strongly against chief competitors such as Cisco, Arista, HPE, and Huawei.To read this article in full, please click here

The Why of Security

Security is a field of questions. We find ourselves asking
all kinds of them all the time. Who is trying to get into my network? What are
they using? How can I stop them? But I feel that the most important question is
the one we ask the least. And the answer to that question provides the
motivation to really fix problems as well as conserving the effort necessary to
do so.

The Why’s Old Sage

If you’re someone with kids, imagine a conversation like
this one for a moment:

Your child runs into the kitchen with a lit torch in their hands and asks “Hey, where do we keep the gasoline?”

Now, some of you are probably laughing. And some of you are
probably imagining all kinds of crazy going on here. But I’m sure that most of
you probably started asking a lot of questions like:

  • – Why does my child have a lit torch in the house?
  • – Why do they want to know where the gasoline is?
  • – Why do they want to put these two things together?
  • – Why am I not stopping this right now?

Usually, the rest of the Five Ws follow Continue reading