Dogfooding Cloudflare Workers

Dogfooding Cloudflare Workers

On the WWW team, we’re responsible for Cloudflare’s REST APIs, account management services and the dashboard experience. We take security and PCI compliance seriously, which means we move quickly to stay up to date with regulations and relevant laws.

A recent compliance project had a requirement of detecting certain end user request data at the edge, and reacting to it both in API responses as well as visually in the dashboard. We realized that this was an excellent opportunity to dogfood Cloudflare Workers.

Deploying workers to www.cloudflare.com and api.cloudflare.com

In this blog post, we’ll break down the problem we solved using a single worker that we shipped to multiple hosts, share the annotated source code of our worker, and share some best practices and tips and tricks we discovered along the way.

Since being deployed, our worker has served over 400 million requests for both calls to api.cloudflare.com and the www.cloudflare.com dashboard.

The task

First, we needed to detect when a client was connecting to our services using an outdated TLS protocol. Next, we wanted to pass this information deeper into our application stack so that we could act upon it and Continue reading

HPC Container Security: Fact, Myth, Rumor, And Kernels

It is fair to say that containers in HPC are a big deal. Nothing more clearly shows the critical nature of any technology than watching the community reaction when a new security issue is discovered and released.

In a recent announcement from the team over at Sylabs, they stated that multiple container systems on kernels that do not support PR_SET_NO_NEW_PRIVS were now vulnerable. This was big news, and it obviously spread like a proverbial wildfire through the HPC community, with many mostly voicing their upset that the initial announcement came out at the start of a long holiday weekend …

HPC Container Security: Fact, Myth, Rumor, And Kernels was written by James Cuff at The Next Platform.

Don’t Miss Keith Bogart’s May CCNA Kickoff!

It’s that time again! Tune in on May 7 at 10 am PST/ 1 pm EST for our monthly CCNA Kickoff session with expert instructor Keith Bogart.

 

This is a FREE session in which Keith (CCIE #4923) will present everything you need to know to get started on your CCNA journey.


What Keith will cover in this months webinar:

  • How to get started by making a study schedule
  • Strategies to prevent you from becoming overwhelmed throughout the exam process
  • CCNA certification test format
  • Which topics to study, and how in depth
  • What study tools will be the most useful
  • What to expect when you walk into the testing center

You can view this, and all of our other webinars here.

European Agenda on Digital for Development: Can the Multistakeholder Approach Help?

The year 2017 was an important milestone in moving forward the European agenda for Digital for Development (D4D). The European Commission (EC) paper on mainstreaming digital technologies into EU development policy and the European Council conclusions on Digital for Development have activated the European development community to share opinions and ideas on how to help bridge the global digital divide.

In the past month, we have had a couple of open events in Brussels to discuss this important issue. The European Parliament’s EPP group hosted a public hearing on Digitalisation for Development to collect ideas and to push for more progress. Two weeks later, the EC held the first multistakeholder meeting for Digital4Development with a focus on Africa.

Building a Balanced Agenda

There are a number of pillars of activities that most stakeholders agree on. These include Internet access with a focus on last mile; Internet as an enabler across different sectors; skills; and entrepreneurship. During the recent meetings, the EC, the national development agencies and the private sector showcased impressive and innovative digitalisation programmes.

However, several stakeholders pointed out that while it is important to continue to invest in Internet access, this is no longer enough. We need Continue reading

Docker Compose and Kubernetes with Docker for Desktop

With KubeCon EU happening in Copenhagen, we looked back at the most popular posts with our readers on Docker and Kubernetes. For those of you that have yet to try Docker EE 2.0, this blog highlights how in Docker for Desktops you can use Docker compose to directly deploy an application onto a Kubernetes cluster. 

If you’re running an edge version of Docker on your desktop (Docker for Mac or Docker for Windows Desktop), you can now stand up a single-node Kubernetes cluster with the click of a button. While I’m not a developer, I think this is great news for the millions of developers who have already been using Docker on their Macbook or Windows laptop because they now have a fully compliant Kubernetes cluster at their fingertips without installing any other tools.

Developers using Docker to build containerized applications often build Docker Compose files to deploy them. With the integration of Kubernetes into the Docker product line, some developers may want to leverage their existing Compose files but deploy these applications in Kubernetes.

With Docker on the desktop (as well as Docker Enterprise Edition) you can use Docker compose to directly deploy an application Continue reading

Network Automation with Brigade on Software Gone Wild

David Barroso was sick-and-tired of using ZX Spectrum of Network Automation and decided to create an alternative with similar functionality but a proper programming language instead of YAML dictionaries masquerading as one. The result: Brigade, an interesting network automation tool we discussed in Episode 90 of Software Gone Wild.

Listen to the podcast

Notes:

Performance analysis of cloud applications

Performance analysis of cloud applications Ardelean et al., NSDI’18

Today’s choice gives us an insight into how Google measure and analyse the performance of large user-facing services such as Gmail (from which most of the data in the paper is taken). It’s a paper in two halves. The first part of the paper demonstrates through an analysis of traffic and load patterns why the only real way to analyse production performance is using live production systems. The second part of the paper shares two techniques that Google use for doing so: coordinated bursty tracing and vertical context injection.

(Un)predictable load

Let’s start out just by consider Gmail requests explicitly generated by users (called ‘user visible requests,’ or UVRs, in the paper). These are requests generated by mail clients due to clicking on messages, sending messages, and background syncing (e.g., IMAP).

You can see a clear diurnal cycle here, with the highest QPS when both North America and Europe are active in the early morning, and lower QPS at weekends. (All charts are rescaled using some unknown factor, to protect Google information).

Request response sizes vary by about 20% over time. Two contributing factors are bulk mail senders, Continue reading

Cisco embraces Kubernetes, pushing container software into mainstream

Cisco this week took big steps toward helping customers deploy, monitor and manage on-premises and public-cloud production-ready Kubernetes-based container applications.Kubernetes, originally designed by Google, is an open-source-based system for developing and orchestrating containerized applications. Containers can be deployed across multiple server hosts and Kubernetes orchestration lets customers build application services that span multiple containers, schedule those containers across a cluster, scale those containers and manage the container health. [ Check out What is hybrid cloud computing and learn what you need to know about multi-cloud. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Because the technology is still relatively new, Cisco says organizations are still challenged to efficiently and confidently utilize Kubernetes as they modernize legacy applications and develop new cloud applications.To read this article in full, please click here

NetQ + Kubernetes: bringing container visibility with the leading container orchestrator

Businesses today have to get applications to market faster than ever, but with the same or less budget. Because of this requirement, modern data centers are evolving to support a change in application delivery. In order to get applications to market faster and increase revenue, applications that were once built as one monolithic entity are becoming segmented and deployed separately, communicating amongst themselves. The pieces of applications, sometimes referred to as microservices, are often deployed as containers. This results in much faster deployment and a quicker update cycle. However, the network teams operating the infrastructure supporting the applications often have no visibility into how their networks are being utilized, and thus are making design, operations and troubleshooting decisions blindly. Now, Cumulus NetQ provides this visibility from container deployments all the way to the spine switches and beyond — accelerating operations and providing the crucial information to efficiently design and operate the networks running containers.

Understanding the challenges of container management

Traditionally, the new application design and deployment method using containers makes operating and managing the infrastructure to support them very challenging. The containers often have to talk with each other within or across data centers or to the outside world. An Continue reading

What are Docker Captains looking forward to at DockerCon

With less than 6 weeks until DockerCon 2018, we can barely contain our excitement! From their favorite tips and tricks for using Docker in production or levering Docker for Machine Learning, Docker Captains come together at DockerCon to share their knowledge and collaborate with the broader community. We’ve asked Docker Captains to share what they are most looking forward to at DockerCon. Here are some of their responses.  

DockerCon

 

“I’m looking forward to meeting the many other Docker enthusiasts and champions and listening to other cool things that Docker makes possible” – Kinnary Jangla, Pinterest

“ In 2015, I attended DockerCon for the first time. I was sitting in a chair and listening to the amazing stories and ideas presented by speakers at the conference, which set off a chain of events that led to today. I feel privileged, and am really looking forward to being on stage and sharing our transformational journey to inspire the people who would sit in that chair. I am also looking forward to hearing the keynotes and the exciting new announcements that I am sure are being lined up for the big event.” – Alexandre Iankoulski, Baker Hughes

“Learning about the Continue reading

Encryption Is Key to Safety of Journalists

At a time when we notice increasing and alarming threats to media freedom around the world, World Press Freedom Day (WPFD) is more pertinent today than ever before. We therefore can’t afford to celebrate this important day without both considering the damage done to the free press over the past year and intensifying our efforts to protect journalists and the future of journalism around the world.

To ensure that we can continue to celebrate the media’s vital role in democracies in the future, we must tackle the increasing number of Internet shutdowns around the world and find better ways to secure the safety of journalists.

Let’s start with the latter. The surveillance of journalists, in particular, has profound implications for democratic institutions, including freedom of the press. It threatens journalists’ ability to confidently and confidentially work with sources and to unlock information about controversial issues. It therefore hinders their ability to play their roles as watchdogs in democratic or undemocratic, developed or developing societies alike. But reports indicate that more and more journalists are at risk of facing state or societal surveillance.

Encryption offers a vital and relatively simple defense for such intrusions. Building on last year’s Continue reading

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