If you’ve ever been curious about what an advanced degree in network engineering looks like, you’ll want to join us for this episode of the Hedge. Levi Perigo from the University of Colorado at Boulder joins Tom and Russ to talk through what earning a Master’s in Networking involves and what kinds of things you would learn.
Welcome to Technology Short Take #195! It wasn’t planned this way, but it seems like this Tech Short Take is heavily slanted toward AI/LLM-related articles and posts. Topics like security concerns around improper storage of API keys, how developers are using AI tools, spyware getting installed with AI assistants, and how AI/LLMs might be creating barriers to entry for new IT profesionals are all on tap this time around. I hope this unintentional focus doesn’t prevent you from finding something useful!
It’s an older blog post, but it checks out—have a look at this walkthrough of Containerlab and Netlab. (Hat tip to Ivan for the link. Also, bonus points if you understood the reference at the start of this paragraph.)
If you’re in the early stages of your Segment Routing journey, you might appreciate the videos from Jeff’s webinar; you can now watch them without an ipSpace.net account.
This afternoon, we sent the following email to our global team. One of our core values at Cloudflare is transparency, and we believe it's important that you hear this directly from us because it’s a major moment at Cloudflare.
Team:
We are writing to let you know directly that we’ve made the decision to reduce Cloudflare’s workforce by more than 1,100 employees globally.
The way we work at Cloudflare has fundamentally changed. We don’t just build and sell AI tools and platforms. We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere.
Today is a hard day. This decision unfortunately means saying goodbye to teammates who have contributed meaningfully to our mission and to building Cloudflare Continue reading
Alexis and Kevin sit down with Linda Haviv, an AI/ML Engineer and founder of Coding Crystals. Linda is known for making AI infrastructure accessible, and for a career path that went from philosophy student to professional singer to self-taught developer to AI engineer. Together they discuss the difference between AI infrastructure and AI engineering, the... Read more »
If you run a self-hosted Ubiquiti UniFi network — whether it’s a home lab, small business, or multi-site setup — you know the UniFi dashboard is great for real-time monitoring but falls short when you want a clean summary you can save, share, or review later. I built UniFi Network Health Report to fill that...
On April 29, 2026, a Linux kernel local privilege escalation vulnerability was publicly disclosed under the name "Copy Fail" (CVE-2026-31431). Cloudflare’s Security and Engineering teams began assessing the vulnerability as soon as it was disclosed. We reviewed the exploit technique, evaluated exposure across our infrastructure, and validated that our existing behavioral detections could identify the exploit pattern within minutes.
There was no impact to the Cloudflare environment, no customer data was at risk, and no services were disrupted at any point. Read on to learn how our preparedness paid off.
Background
Our Linux kernel release process
Cloudflare operates a global Linux server infrastructure at an immense scale, with datacenters located across 330 cities. We maintain a custom Linux kernel build based on the community's Long-Term Support (LTS) versions to manage updates effectively at this volume. At any given time, we may utilize multiple LTS versions from various series, such as 6.12 or 6.18, which benefit from extended update periods.
The community regularly merges and releases security and stability updates which trigger an automated job to generate a new internal kernel build approximately every week. These builds undergo testing in our staging data centers to Continue reading
For years, multi-homing in VXLAN BGP/EVPN fabrics with Cisco Nexus switches meant one thing: vPC. It works very well; two-switch redundancy, familiar operational model, no need to deeply understand EVPN’s…
For years, multi-homing in VXLAN BGP/EVPN fabrics with Cisco Nexus switches meant one thing: vPC. It works very well; two-switch redundancy, familiar operational model, no need to deeply understand EVPN’s…
Eric Chou talks with Adrian Iliesiu aka NetGru, a seasoned CCIE veteran and community leader known for his work to simplify network automation and make it accessible to network engineers. He focuses on helping network teams navigate the transition into AI and vibe coding while maintaining their core technical skills. Adrian shares insights and practical... Read more »
Eyvonne and William sit down with Joseph Nicholson, a Network Operations Engineer with NTT DATA, to share how public speaking transformed his career and technical experience. Joseph went from a terrifying ten minute lightning talk at AutoCon 2 to presenting 45-minute sessions at conferences like NANOG. Together they discuss how conversations in conference halls influenced... Read more »
On May 5, 2026, at roughly 19:30 UTC, DENIC, the registry operator for the .de country-code top-level domain (TLD), started publishing incorrect DNSSEC signatures for the .de zone. Any validating DNS resolver receiving these signatures was required by the DNSSEC specification to reject them and return SERVFAIL to clients, including 1.1.1.1, the public DNS resolver operated by Cloudflare.
The country-code top-level domain for Germany, .de, is one of the largest on the Internet. On Cloudflare Radar, it consistently ranks among the most broadly queried TLDs globally. An outage at this level of the DNS hierarchy has the potential to make millions of domains unreachable.
In this post, we’ll walk through what we saw, the impact of these events, and how we applied temporary mitigations while DENIC resolved the issue.
How DNSSEC works
DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) adds cryptographic authentication to DNS. When a zone is signed with DNSSEC, each set of records is accompanied by a digital signature known as an RRSIG record that lets a resolver verify the records haven’t been tampered with. Unlike encrypted DNS protocols, such as DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPs (DoH), DNSSEC is about Continue reading
Why You Should Attend Cisco Live — and Actually Talk to People Back in 2022, I wrote a post covering everything Cisco Live has to offer: the technical sessions, the…
Why You Should Attend Cisco Live — and Actually Talk to People Back in 2022, I wrote a post covering everything Cisco Live has to offer: the technical sessions, the…
A while ago, I found the How Automatic Return Routing solves IP overlap article on Cloudflare’s blog. They evidently have a technology that addresses a pain point well worth solving (access to shared resources from clients using overlapping address ranges). I just hate how they’re selling it. Go read the article first; I’ll wait.
OK, here’s what bothers me: the “VRFs and NAT are bad” claims, while they use the same technology in disguise.