Comparing Serverless Performance for CPU Bound Tasks

Comparing Serverless Performance for CPU Bound Tasks

This post is a part of an ongoing series comparing the performance of Cloudflare Workers with other Serverless providers. In our past tests we intentionally chose a workload which imposes virtually no CPU load (returning the current time). For these tests, let's look at something which pushes hardware to the limit: cryptography.

tl;dr Cloudflare Workers are seven times faster than a default Lambda function for workloads which push the CPU. Workers are six times faster than Lambda@Edge, tested globally.

Slow Crypto

The PBKDF2 algorithm is designed to be slow to compute. It's used to hash passwords; its slowness makes it harder for a password cracker to do their job. Its extreme CPU usage also makes it a good benchmark for the CPU performance of a service like Lambda or Cloudflare Workers.

We've written a test based on the Node Crypto (Lambda) and the WebCrypto (Workers) APIs. Our Lambda is deployed to with the default 128MB of memory behind an API Gateway in us-east-1, our Worker is, as always, deployed around the world. I also have our function running in a Lambda@Edge deployment to compare that performance as well. Again, we're using Catchpoint to test from hundreds of locations around Continue reading

End of term

It’s time to take my regular summer break from writing The Morning Paper – normal service will resume again on Monday 6th August. I’ll be topping up my paper backlog and scouting out interesting research during the break. If you’ve seen any great papers I haven’t already covered and that you think ‘The Morning Paper’ readers would enjoy, please do send them my way.

In the meantime, here are a few picks from papers we’ve covered this term in case you missed any of them. (In order of publication on the blog)

Many thanks to all of you that follow along and support the blog – the accountability keeps me sticking at it when I’m snowed under, and Continue reading

How To Minikube + Cloudflare

How To Minikube + Cloudflare

The following is a guest blog post by Nathan Franzen, Software Engineer at StackPointCloud. StackPointCloud is the creator of Stackpoint.io, the leading multi-cloud management platform for cloud native workloads. They are the developers of the Cloudflare Ingress Controller for Kubernetes.

Deploying Applications on Minikube with Argo Tunnels

This article assumes basic knowledge of Kubernetes. If you're not familiar with Kubernetes, visit https://kubernetes.io/docs/tutorials/kubernetes-basics/ to learn the basics.

Minikube is a tool which allows you to run a Kubernetes cluster locally. It’s not only a great way to experiment with Kubernetes, but also a great way to try out deploying services using a reverse tunnel.

At Cloudflare, we've created a product called Argo Tunnel which allows you to host services through a tunnel using Cloudflare as your edge. Tunnels provide a way to expose your services to the internet by creating a connection to Cloudflare's edge and routing your traffic over it. Since your service is creating its own outbound connection to the edge, you don’t have to open ports, configure a firewall, or even have a public IP address for your service. All traffic flows through Cloudflare, blocking attacks and intrusion attempts before they ever make it to Continue reading

Redirecting DNS Requests to Umbrella with FTD

A few days ago I shared an article that described redirecting DNS requests with ASA. A good use case for this might be if an organization is using Cisco Umbrella but there is no way to get every host is pointed toward the correct DNS server(s) in a timely manner. In that case, a configuration of destination NAT in the ASA can force those misconfigured clients to use one of the OpenDNS addresses.

This article is very similar, but we will share a method for doing this with Firepower Threat Defence. The concept is the same but all configuration is done in Firepower Management Console. Before starting on the NAT configuration, it is important to configure the following network objects (Objects, Object Management, Network).

  • obj_any – 0.0.0.0/0
  • Umbrella1 – 208.67.220.220
  • Umbrella2 – 208.67.222.222

It is also important to confirm the existence of two port objects (Objects, Object Management, Network).

  • DNS_over_TCP  –  TCP Port 53
  • DNS_over_UDP –  UDP Port 53

Most of the configuration will be done on the NAT policy for the device we are managing (Device, NAT, select edit for the appropriate NAT policy).

We will need four rules that Continue reading

Redirecting DNS Requests to Umbrella with FTD

A few days ago I shared an article that described redirecting DNS requests with ASA. A good use case for this might be if an organization is using Cisco Umbrella but there is no way to get every host is pointed toward the correct DNS server(s) in a timely manner. In that case, a configuration of destination NAT in the ASA can force those misconfigured clients to use one of the OpenDNS addresses.

This article is very similar, but we will share a method for doing this with Firepower Threat Defence. The concept is the same but all configuration is done in Firepower Management Console. Before starting on the NAT configuration, it is important to configure the following network objects (Objects, Object Management, Network).

  • obj_any – 0.0.0.0/0
  • Umbrella1 – 208.67.220.220
  • Umbrella2 – 208.67.222.222

It is also important to confirm the existence of two port objects (Objects, Object Management, Network).

  • DNS_over_TCP  –  TCP Port 53
  • DNS_over_UDP –  UDP Port 53

Most of the configuration will be done on the NAT policy for the device we are managing (Device, NAT, select edit for the appropriate NAT policy).

We will need four rules that Continue reading

We’ve Added New Dates To Our Bootcamp Calendar!



CCIE Routing & Switching:


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January 7-11


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January 21-27
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January 7-13
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7 Day Bootcamp

January 28 – February 3
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5 Day Bootcamp

February 25 – March 1
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CCNA Security:


5 Day Bootcamp

April 1-5
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Visit our Bootcamps Site to purchase your course today!

Weekend Reads 070618

Our security analysis of the mobile communication standard LTE ( Long-Term Evolution, also know as 4G) on the data link layer (so called layer two) has uncovered three novel attack vectors that enable different attacks against the protocol. —David Rupprecht, Katharina Kohls, Thorsten Holz, and Christina Pöpper

To be fair, the tech sector has been the United States’ economic pride and joy in recent decades, a seemingly endless wellspring of innovation. The speed and power of Google’s search engine is breathtaking, putting extraordinary knowledge at our fingertips. Internet telephony allows friends, relatives, and co-workers to interact face to face from halfway around the world, at very modest cost. Yet, despite all this innovation, the pace of productivity growth in the broader economy remains lackluster. —Kenneth Rogoth @MarketWatch

The world of scholarly communication is broken. Giant, corporate publishers with racketeering business practices and profit margins that exceed Apple’s treat life-saving research as a private commodity to be sold at exorbitant profits. Only around 25 per cent of the global corpus of research knowledge is ‘open access’, or accessible to the public for free and without subscription, which is a real impediment to resolving major problems, such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Continue reading

Kernel of Truth episode 03 — Linux: the kernel, the community & beyond

Listen, you can’t name an open networking podcast “Kernel of Truth,” and NOT have an episode dedicated to the Linux kernel! So we got two of the brightest, most enthusiastic Linux experts we know into the recording booth and let them wax poetic about the language of the data center. As I soon found out, it’s harder to get Linux fans to STOP talking about Linux that it is to get them going — but hey, that just makes my job as host a lot easier! There’s nothing like listening to knowledgeable people discuss something they’re passionate about, and that’s what we’ve got in store for you.

In this episode, I’m joined by Roopa Prabhu, leader of the kernel team at Cumulus Networks, and Shrijeet Mukherjee, Cumulus’ former VP of Engineering. Specifically, our discussion revolves around the Linux kernel and Linux community. We get into some pretty interesting questions: why Linux in the data center? What has Cumulus contributed to the kernel? How has the prolific Linux community evolved? What the heck is a “boffin”?? I’m not a fan of spoilers, (thanks for ruining Avengers: Infinity War for me, Twitter!) so I’ll let you guys tune in and find Continue reading

NetQ is now a 2018 “New Product” Award Winner!

IT World Awards recognizes Cumulus NetQ

Cumulus NetQ is on FIRE!!

Just one year ago, Cumulus launched a new product that fundamentally changes the way organizations validate and troubleshoot not just their network, but the entire Linux ecosystem as a whole. The product was named NetQ (think Network Query). It provides deep insight on the connectivity of all network devices either now or in the past — including all switches, Linux hosts, inside Linux hosts (Containers, direct interaction with container orchestration tools like Kubernetes, VMs, Openstack environment) and any other devices running a Linux-based operating system connected to the network. No more manual box-by-box troubleshooting, no more wondering what happened last night, no more pulling cables to find where the issue was stemming from, no more finger pointing, no more human-led misconfigurations and no more frustration of not having sight past the edge of the network.

Instead, Cumulus NetQ, the agent-based technology that runs on anything Linux, changes all that. NetQ brings the efficiencies of web-scale to network operations with an algorithmic, preventive, centralized telemetry system built for the modern automated cloud network. NetQ aggregates and maintains data from across all Linux nodes in the data center in a time-series database, making the fabric-wide events, Continue reading

The Privacy Pickle

I recorded a fantastic episode of The Network Collective last night with some great friends from the industry. The topic was privacy. Originally I thought we were just going to discuss how NAT both was and wasn’t a form of privacy and how EUI-64 addressing wasn’t the end of days for people worried about being tracked. But as the show wore on, I realized a few things about privacy.

Booming In Peace

My mom is a Baby Boomer. We learn about them as a generation based on some of their characteristics, most notably their rejection of the values of their parents. One of things they hold most dear is their privacy. They grew up in a world where they could be private people. They weren’t living in a 1 or 2 room house with multiple siblings. They had the right of privacy. They could have a room all to themselves if they so chose.

Baby Boomers, like my mom, are intensely private adults. They marvel at the idea that targeted advertisements can work for them. When Amazon shows them an ad for something they just searched for they feel like it’s a form of dark magic. They also aren’t trusting Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For July 6th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

Could RAINB (Redundant Array of Independent Neanderthal ‘minibrains’) replace TPUs as the future AI core? 

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please lend me your support on Patreon. It would mean a great deal to me. And if you know anyone looking for a simple book that uses lots of pictures and lots of examples to explain the cloud, then please recommend my new book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love you even more.

 

  • $100m: Fortnite iOS revenue in 90 days; $2.5 Billion: SUSE Linux acquisition; 500,000: different orgs on Slack; 6.1%: chance of breaking change in each library; 10: years of the Apple app store; 2021: Japan goes exascale;

  • Quoteable Quotes:
    • jedberg: > Yes, that's how Amazon creates lock-in.
      That is the cynical way to look at it. It also creates value because it lets you do more with what you already have.
    • Paul Ingles: We didn’t change our organisation because we wanted to use Kubernetes, we used Kubernetes because we wanted to change our organisation.
    • ThousandEyes: The Internet is made up of thousands of autonomous networks that Continue reading

A Deeper Dive Into Public DNS Resolver Quad9

There are plenty of public DNS resolvers. The best known was Google Public DNS i.e. 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 for IPv4 and 2001:4860:4860::8888 and 2001:4860:4860::8844 for IPv6. But there are a few other options available now, each with different policies and technical features.

Two new Public DNS resolvers were recently launched. Quad9 (launched Nov 2017) and 1dot1dot1dot1 (launched Apr 2018). We have already covered 1.1.1.1 in detail in a recent blog. So let’s talk about Quad9 (9.9.9.9).

The Global Cyber Alliance (GCA), an organization founded by a partnership of law enforcement (New York County District Attorney and City of London Police) and research (Center for Internet Security – CIS) organizations focused on combating systemic cyber risk in real, measurable ways, partnered with IBM and Packet Clearing House (PCH) to launch a Global Public Recursive DNS Resolver Service. Quad9 protects users from accessing known malicious websites, leveraging threat intelligence from multiple industry leaders; it currently blocks up to two million threats per day.

A handy little infographic on the Quad9 website helps show how it works. Essentially, you set up Quad 9 as your Continue reading

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