SPONSORED FEATURE: Back before there were AI factories, there were two generations of the AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure supercomputer, built by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan. …
ABCI Evolves To Meet Japan’s Changing AI Needs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
As I started describing the iBGP Local-AS Details, I discovered that anything I ever wrote about the BGP local-as feature was hosted on a now-extinct website. Fortunately, I found a copy of that article in the Internet Archive and migrated it to the ipSpace.net blog. Hope you’ll like it ;)
As explained in the preceding chapter, “Egress Interface Congestions,” both the Rail switch links to GPU servers and the inter-switch links can become congested during gradient synchronization. It is essential to implement congestion control mechanisms specifically designed for RDMA workloads in AI fabric back-end networks because congestion slows down the learning process and even a single packet loss may restart the whole training process.
This section begins by introducing Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) and Priority-based Flow Control (PFC), two foundational technologies used in modern lossless Ethernet networks. ECN allows switches to mark packets, rather than dropping them, when congestion is detected, enabling endpoints to react proactively. PFC, on the other hand, offers per-priority flow control, which can pause selected traffic classes while allowing others to continue flowing.
Finally, we describe how Datacenter Quantized Congestion Notification (DCQCN) combines ECN and PFC to deliver a scalable and lossless transport mechanism for RoCEv2 traffic in AI clusters.
I am pleased to introduce the work of one of my students, who developed a […]
The post Professional Corporate Network Simulation in Packet Tracer first appeared on Brezular's Blog.
It is almost the end of Developer Week and we haven’t talked about containers: until now. As some of you may know, we’ve been working on a container platform behind the scenes for some time.
In late June, we plan to release Containers in open beta, and today we’ll give you a sneak peek at what makes it unique.
Workers are the simplest way to ship software around the world with little overhead. But sometimes you need to do more. You might want to:
Run user-generated code in any language
Execute a CLI tool that needs a full Linux environment
Use several gigabytes of memory or multiple CPU cores
Port an existing application from AWS, GCP, or Azure without a major rewrite
Cloudflare Containers let you do all of that while being simple, scalable, and global.
Through a deep integration with Workers and an architecture built on Durable Objects, Workers can be your:
API Gateway: Letting you control routing, authentication, caching, and rate-limiting before requests reach a container
Service Mesh: Creating private connections between containers with a programmable routing layer
Orchestrator: Allowing you to write custom scheduling, scaling, and health checking logic for your containers
Instead Continue reading
With quick access to flexible infrastructure and innovative AI tools, startups are able to deploy production-ready applications with speed and efficiency. Cloudflare plays a pivotal role for countless applications, empowering founders and engineering teams to build, scale, and accelerate their innovations with ease — and without the burden of technical overhead. And when applicable, initiatives like our Startup Program and Workers Launchpad offer the tooling and resources that further fuel these ambitious projects.
Cloudflare recently announced AI agents, allowing developers to leverage Cloudflare to deploy agents to complete autonomous tasks. We’re already seeing some great examples of startups leveraging Cloudflare as their platform of choice to invest in building their agent infrastructure. Read on to see how a few up-and-coming startups are building their AI agent platforms, powered by Cloudflare.
Founded in 2023, Lamatic.ai empowers SaaS startups to seamlessly integrate intelligent AI agents into their products. Lamatic.ai simplifies the deployment of AI agents by offering a fully managed lifecycle with scalability and security in mind. SaaS providers have been leveraging Lamatic to replatform their AI workflows via a no-code visual builder to reduce technical debt Continue reading
Today, we’re sharing a preview of a new feature that makes it easier to build cross-cloud apps: Workers VPC.
Workers VPC is our take on the traditional virtual private cloud (VPC), modernized for a network and compute that isn’t tied to a single cloud region. And we’re complementing it with Workers VPC Private Links to make building across clouds easier. Together, they introduce two new capabilities to Workers:
A way to group your apps’ resources on Cloudflare into isolated environments, where only resources within a Workers VPC can access one another, allowing you to secure and segment app-to-app traffic (a “Workers VPC”).
A way to connect a Workers VPC to a legacy VPC in a public or private cloud, enabling your Cloudflare resources to access your resources in private networks and vice versa, as if they were in a single VPC (the “Workers VPC Private Link”).
Workers VPC and Workers VPC Private Link enable bidirectional connectivity between Cloudflare and external clouds
When linked to an external VPC, Workers VPC makes the underlying resources directly addressable, so that application developers can think at the application layer, without dropping down to the network layer. Think of this like a Continue reading
During Cloudflare’s Birthday Week in September 2024, we introduced a revamped Startup Program designed to make it easier for startups to adopt Cloudflare through a new credits system. This update focused on better aligning the program with how startups and developers actually consume Cloudflare, by providing them with clearer insight into their projected usage, especially as they approach graduation from the program.
Today, we’re excited to announce an expansion to that program: new credit tiers that better match startups at every stage of their journey. But before we dive into what’s new, let’s take a quick look at what the Startup Program is and why it exists.
Cloudflare for Startups provides credits to help early-stage companies build the next big idea on our platform. Startups accepted into the program receive credits valid for one year or until they’re fully used, whichever comes first.
Beyond credits, the program includes access to up to three domains with enterprise-level services, giving startups the same advanced tools we provide to large companies to protect and accelerate their most critical applications.
We know that building a startup is expensive, and Cloudflare is uniquely positioned to support the full-stack Continue reading
Cloudflare plays a significant role in supporting the Internet’s infrastructure. As a reverse proxy by approximately 20% of all websites, we sit directly in the request path between users and the origin, helping to improve performance, security, and reliability at scale. Beyond that, our global network powers services like delivery, Workers, and R2 — making Cloudflare not just a passive intermediary, but an active platform for delivering and hosting content across the Internet.
Since Cloudflare’s launch in 2010, we have collaborated with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a US-based clearinghouse for reporting child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and are committed to doing what we can to support identification and removal of CSAM content.
Members of the public, customers, and trusted organizations can submit reports of abuse observed on Cloudflare’s network. A minority of these reports relate to CSAM, which are triaged with the highest priority by Cloudflare’s Trust & Safety team. We will also forward details of the report, along with relevant files (where applicable) and supplemental information to NCMEC.
The process to generate and submit reports to NCMEC involves multiple steps, dependencies, and error handling, which quickly became complex under Continue reading
When most people think of segment routing (SR), they think of SRv6–using IPv6 addresses as segment IDs, and breaking the least significant /64 to create microsids for service differentiation. This is not, however, the only way to implement and deploy SR. The alternative is SR using MPLS labels, or SR/MPLS. Hemant Sharma joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss SR/MPLS, why operators might choose MPLS over IPv6 SIDs, and other topics related to SR/MPLS.
When it comes to artificial intelligence, context is everything. The same thing holds true for human intelligence, so it stands to reason that it translates to AI since we created it in our own image. …
The AI Factory: 12,000 Years In The Making, And Absolutely Inevitable was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Any public certification authority (CA) can issue a certificate for any website on the Internet to allow a webserver to authenticate itself to connecting clients. Take a moment to scroll through the list of trusted CAs for your web browser (e.g., Chrome). You may recognize (and even trust) some of the names on that list, but it should make you uncomfortable that any CA on that list could issue a certificate for any website, and your browser would trust it. It’s a castle with 150 doors.
Certificate Transparency (CT) plays a vital role in the Web Public Key Infrastructure (WebPKI), the set of systems, policies, and procedures that help to establish trust on the Internet. CT ensures that all website certificates are publicly visible and auditable, helping to protect website operators from certificate mis-issuance by dishonest CAs, and helping honest CAs to detect key compromise and other failures.
In this post, we’ll discuss the history, evolution, and future of the CT ecosystem. We’ll cover some of the challenges we and others have faced in operating CT logs, and how the new static CT API log design lowers the bar for operators, helping to ensure that Continue reading
Since the launch of Workers AI in September 2023, our mission has been to make inference accessible to everyone.
Over the last few quarters, our Workers AI team has been heads down on improving the quality of our platform, working on various routing improvements, GPU optimizations, and capacity management improvements. Managing a distributed inference platform is not a simple task, but distributed systems are also what we do best. You’ll notice a recurring theme from all these announcements that has always been part of the core Cloudflare ethos — we try to solve problems through clever engineering so that we are able to do more with less.
Today, we’re excited to introduce speculative decoding to bring you faster inference, an asynchronous batch API for large workloads, and expanded LoRA support for more customized responses. Lastly, we’ll be recapping some of our newly added models, updated pricing, and unveiling a new dashboard to round out the usability of the platform.
We’re excited to roll out speed improvements to models in our catalog, starting with the Llama 3.3 70b model. These improvements include speculative decoding, prefix caching, an updated inference backend, Continue reading
The HPC centers of the world like fast networks and compute, but they are also always working under budget constraints unlike their AI peers out there in the enterprise, where money seems to be unlimited to what sometimes looks like an irrationally exuberant extent. …
Google Woos HPC Centers With Fast CPUs And Networks was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.