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Ultra Ethernet: Resource Initialization

Introduction to libfabric and Ultra Ethernet

[Updated: September-26, 2025]

Deprectaed: new version: Ultra Etherent: Discovery

Libfabric is a communication library that belongs to the OpenFabrics Interfaces (OFI) framework. Its main goal is to provide applications with high-performance and scalable communication services, especially in areas like high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI). Instead of forcing applications to work directly with low-level networking details, libfabric offers a clean user-space API that hides complexity while still giving applications fast and efficient access to the network.

One of the strengths of libfabric is that it has been designed together with both application developers and hardware vendors. This makes it possible to map application needs closely to the capabilities of modern network hardware. The result is lower software overhead and better efficiency when applications send or receive data.

Ultra Ethernet builds on this foundation by adopting libfabric as its communication abstraction layer. Ultra Ethernet uses the libfabric framework to let endpoints interact with AI frameworks and, ultimately, with each other across GPUs. Libfabric provides a high-performance, low-latency API that hides the details of the underlying transport, so AI frameworks do not need to manage the low-level details of endpoints, buffers, or the underlying Continue reading

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Start a Lab From a GitHub netlab Topology File

Someone approached me after my NOG.HR netlab presentation and said: “wouldn’t it be great if we could just start the lab from an example topology published on GitHub?”

It took me almost a year to get it done, but the functionality finally made it into the 25.09 release:

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With Enlightened Self-Interest, Nvidia Reshapes The Tech World In Its Own Image

UPDATED: Watching Nvidia grow over the past two decades, from a gaming and visualization GPU supplier to the behemoth of the modern AI datacenter, has been nothing short of amazing. …

With Enlightened Self-Interest, Nvidia Reshapes The Tech World In Its Own Image was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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HW061: Cisco’s Ultra-Reliable Wireless Backhaul

As automation of machinery in industrial environments grows, there is a need for reliable wireless technologies to connect and control mobile assets. Mobile assets cannot tolerate dropped connections or network latency, which could jeopardize safety among other problems. Cisco’s Ultra-Reliable Wireless Backhaul is one such product that promises to deliver reliable wireless in industrial environments. ... Read more »

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BGP Route Reflectors, Originator ID and Cluster ID

In iBGP, all routers in the same AS must be fully meshed, meaning every router forms an iBGP session with every other router. This is required because iBGP by default does not advertise routes learned from one iBGP peer to another. The full mesh ensures that every router can learn all the routes.

The problem is that in a large network with many iBGP routers, a full mesh quickly becomes unmanageable. The number of sessions grows rapidly, and you could end up with hundreds of iBGP sessions. If you have 10 iBGP routers and try to build a full mesh, you would need 45 sessions. For n routers, the number of sessions is n × (n – 1) / 2. So with 10 routers, that’s 10 × 9 / 2 = 45.

This is where route reflectors come in. A route reflector reduces the need for full mesh by allowing certain routers to reflect routes to others. With this design, you only need a few sessions instead of a full mesh, making the iBGP setup much more scalable. If you have the same 10 routers, with RR, you only need 9 sessions.

BGP Training Course for Beginners

BGP solves this Continue reading

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PP079: Rethinking the Architecture of Microsegmentation

Microsegmentation is a complex topic. We did an overview episode earlier this year, and we invited listeners to reach out to keep the microsegmentation conversation going. Today’s guest did just that. Philip Griffiths is Head of Strategic Sales at Netfoundry. However, this isn’t a sponsored show about NetFoundry. Philip is also involved in a working... Read more »

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Building unique, per-customer defenses against advanced bot threats in the AI era

Today, we are announcing a new approach to catching bots: using models to provide behavioral anomaly detection unique to each bot management customer and stop sophisticated bot attacks. 

With this per-customer approach, we’re giving every bot management customer hyper-personalized security capabilities to stop even the sneakiest bots. We’re doing this by not only making a first-request judgement call, but also by tracking behavior of bots who play the long-game and continuously execute unwanted behavior on our customers’ websites. We want to share how this service works, and where we’re focused. Our new platform has the power to fuel hundreds of thousands of unique detection suites, and we’ve heard our first target loud and clear from site owners: protect websites from the explosion of sophisticated, AI-driven web scraping.

The battle against malicious bots used to be a simpler affair. Attackers used scripts that were fairly easy to identify through static, predictable signals: a request with a missing User-Agent header, a malformed method name, or traffic from a non-standard port was a clear indicator of malicious intent. However, the Internet is always evolving. As websites became more dynamic to create rich user Continue reading

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Deploy your own AI vibe coding platform — in one click!

It’s an exciting time to build applications. With the recent AI-powered "vibe coding" boom, anyone can build a website or application by simply describing what they want in a few sentences. We’re already seeing organizations expose this functionality to both their users and internal employees, empowering anyone to build out what they need.

Today, we’re excited to open-source an AI vibe coding platform, VibeSDK, to enable anyone to run an entire vibe coding platform themselves, end-to-end, with just one click.

Want to see it for yourself? Check out our demo platform that you can use to create and deploy applications. Or better yet, click the button below to deploy your own AI-powered platform, and dive into the repo to learn about how it’s built.

Deploying VibeSDK sets up everything you need to run your own AI-powered development platform:

• Integration with LLM models to generate code, build applications, debug errors, and iterate in real-time, powered by Agents SDK. 

• Isolated development environments that allow users to safely build and preview their applications in secure sandboxes.

• Infinite scale that allows you to deploy thousands or even millions of applications that end users deploy, all served on Cloudflare’s global network

• Observability and caching Continue reading

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Cloudflare Confidence Scorecards – making AI safer for the Internet

Security and IT teams face an impossible balancing act: Employees are adopting AI tools every day, but each tool carries unique risks tied to compliance, data privacy, and security practices. Employees using these tools without seeking prior approval leads to a new type of Shadow IT which is referred to as Shadow AI. Preventing Shadow AI requires manually vetting each AI application to determine whether it should be approved or disapproved. This isn’t scalable. And blanket bans of AI applications will only drive AI usage deeper underground, making it harder to secure.

That’s why today we are launching Cloudflare Application Confidence Scorecards. This is part of our new suite of AI Security features within the Cloudflare One SASE platform. These scores bring scale and automation to the labor- and time-intensive task of evaluating generative AI and SaaS applications one by one. Instead of spending hours trying to find AI applications’ compliance certifications or data-handling practices, evaluators get a clear score that reflects an application’s safety and trustworthiness. With that signal, decision makers within organizations can confidently set policies or apply guardrails where needed, and block risky tools so their organizations can embrace innovation without compromising security.

Our Cloudflare Application Confidence Continue reading

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Why Cloudflare, Netlify, and Webflow are collaborating to support Open Source tools like Astro and TanStack

Open source is the core fabric of the web, and the open source tools that power the modern web depend on the stability and support of the community. 

To ensure two major open source projects have the resources they need, we are proud to announce our financial sponsorship to two cornerstone frameworks in the modern web ecosystem: Astro and TanStack.

Critically, we think it’s important we don’t do this alone — for the open web to continue to thrive, we must bet on and support technologies and frameworks that are open and accessible to all, and not beholden to any one company. 

Which is why we are also excited to announce that for these sponsorships we are joining forces with our peers at Netlify to sponsor TanStack and Webflow to sponsor Astro.

Our decision to support Astro and TanStack was deliberate. These two projects represent distinct but complementary visions for the future of web development. One is redefining the architecture for high-performance, content-driven websites, while the other provides a full-stack toolkit for building the most ambitious web applications.

When it Continue reading

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Launching the x402 Foundation with Coinbase, and support for x402 transactions

Cloudflare is partnering with Coinbase to create the x402 Foundation. This foundation’s mission will be to encourage the adoption of the x402 protocol, an updated framework that allows clients and services to exchange value on the web using a common language. In addition to today’s partnership, we are shipping a set of features to allow developers to use x402 in the Agents SDK and our MCP integrations, as well as proposing a new deferred payment scheme.

Payments on the web have historically been designed for humans. We browse a merchant’s website, show intent by adding items to a cart, and confirm our intent to purchase by inputting our credit card information and clicking “Pay.” But what if you want to enable direct transactions between digital services? We need protocols to allow machine-to-machine transactions. 

Every day, sites on Cloudflare send out over a billion HTTP 402 response codes to bots and crawlers trying to access their content and e-commerce stores. This response code comes with a simple message: “Payment Required.”

Yet these 402 responses too often go unheard. One reason is a lack of standardization. Without a specification for how to Continue reading

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Helping protect journalists and local news from AI crawlers with Project Galileo

We are excited to announce that Project Galileo will now include access to Cloudflare's Bot Management and AI Crawl Control services. Participants in the program, which include roughly 750 journalists, independent news organizations, and other non-profits supporting news-gathering around the world, will now have the ability to protect their websites from AI crawlers—for free. 

Project Galileo is Cloudflare's free program to help protect important civic voices online. Launched in 2014, it now includes more than 3,000 organizations in 125 countries, and it has served as the foundation for other free Cloudflare programs that help protect democratic elections, public schools, public health clinics, and other critical infrastructure.  

Although we think all Project Galileo participants will benefit from these additional free services, we believe they are essential for news organizations. 

News organizations, particularly local news, are facing significant challenges in transitioning to the AI-driven web. As people increasingly turn to AI models for information, less of their web traffic is making it to the actual website where that information originated. Industries, like news organizations, that rely on user traffic to generate revenue are increasingly at-risk. 

Allowing news organizations to monitor and control how AI Continue reading

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SwiNOG 40: Deploying Precision Time Protocol across WAN

Is it possible to deploy Precision Time Protocol across a country-wide WAN network and reach nanosecond-level synchronization between cities? It’s definitely not trivial and only works over dedicated infrastructure; for more details, watch the PTP in WANs (video) presentation Oliver Ettlin had at SwiNOG 40.

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NB544: NVIDIA Buys $5 Billion of Intel Stock; Netskope Rides SASE IPO to an $8.8 Billion Valuation

It’s big-money deals and ever-more AI on this week’s Network Break. We start with a red alert from NVIDIA, which has rolled out a software upgrade to patch multiple bugs in its Triton Inference Server, one of which is a dangerous remote code execution vulnerability. On the news front, NVIDIA pledges a $5 billion investment... Read more »

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Help build the future: announcing Cloudflare’s goal to hire 1,111 interns in 2026

At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better Internet. That mission is ambitious, long-term, and requires constant innovation. But building for the future isn’t just about the technology we create — it’s also about investing in the people who will create it. That’s why today, we are incredibly excited to announce our most ambitious intern program yet: Cloudflare aims to hire as many as 1,111 interns over the course of 2026. This effort to grow our number of interns next year will happen in hub locations around the world. 

We view internships as a vital pipeline for talent and a source of new energy and ideas. The number of our intern goal, a nod to our 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver, is intentional. It represents our deep technical roots and our focus on building foundational infrastructure for the Internet. Now, we stand at the cusp of a new technological revolution: the age of AI.

To win in this new era, we can’t just rely on established methods. We need new ways of thinking, unconstrained by the "way things have always been done." That’s why this significantly increased class Continue reading

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Introducing free access to Cloudflare developer features for students

I can recall countless late nights as a student spent building out ideas that felt like breakthroughs. My own thesis had significant costs associated with the tools and computational resources I needed. The reality for students is that turning ideas into working applications often requires production-grade tools, and having to pay for them can stop a great project before it even starts. We don’t think that cost should stand in the way of building out your ideas.

Cloudflare’s Developer Platform already makes it easy for anyone to go from idea to launch. It gives you all the tools you need in one place to work on that class project, build out your portfolio, and create full-stack applications. We want students to be able to use these tools without worrying about the cost, so starting today, students at least 18 years old in the United States with a verified .edu email can receive 12 months of free access to Cloudflare’s developer features. This is the first step for Cloudflare for Students, and we plan to continue expanding our support for the next generation of builders.

Eligible Continue reading

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A Lookback at Workers Launchpad and a Warm Welcome to Cohort #6

Imagine you have an idea for an AI application that you’re really excited about — but the cost of GPU time and complex infrastructure stops you in your tracks before you even write a line of code. This is the problem founders everywhere face: balancing high infrastructure costs with the need to innovate and scale quickly.

Our startup programs remove those barriers, so founders can focus on what matters the most: building products, finding customers, and growing a business. Cloudflare for Startups launched in 2018 to provide enterprise-level application security and performance services to growing startups. As we built out our Developer Platform, we pivoted last year to offer founders up to $250,000 in cloud credits to build on our Developer Platform for up to one year.

During Birthday Week 2022, we announced our Cloudflare Workers Launchpad Program with an initial $1.25 billion in potential funding for startups building on Cloudflare Workers, made possible through partnerships with 26 leading venture capital (VC) firms. Within months, we expanded VC-backed funding to $2 billion.

Since 2022, we’ve welcomed 145 startups from 23 countries. These startups are solving problems across verticals such as AI and machine learning, developer tools, 3D design, cloud Continue reading

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Supporting the future of the open web: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy

At Cloudflare, we believe that helping build a better Internet means encouraging a healthy ecosystem of options for how people can connect safely and quickly to the resources they need. Sometimes that means we tackle immense, Internet-scale problems with established partners. And sometimes that means we support and partner with fantastic open teams taking big bets on the next generation of tools.

To that end, today we are excited to announce our support of two independent, open source projects: Ladybird, an ambitious project to build a completely independent browser from the ground up, and Omarchy, an opinionated Arch Linux setup for developers. 

Cloudflare has a long history of supporting open-source software – both through our own projects shared with the community and external projects that we support. We see our sponsorship of Ladybird and Omarchy as a natural extension of these efforts in a moment where energy for a diverse ecosystem is needed more than ever.  

Most of us spend a significant amount of time using a web browser –  in fact, you’re probably using one to read this blog! The beauty Continue reading

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Come build with us: Cloudflare’s new hubs for startups

Cloudflare’s offices bring together builders in some of the world’s most popular technology hubs. We have a long history of using those spaces for one-off events and meet ups over the last fifteen years, but we want to do more. Starting in 2026, we plan to open the doors of our offices routinely to startups and builders from outside of our team who need the space to collaborate, meet new people, or just type away at a keyboard in a new (and beautiful) location.

Prior to 2020, we expected essentially every team member of Cloudflare to be present in one of our offices five days a week. That worked well for us and helped facilitate the launch of dozens of technologies as well as a community and culture that defined who we are.

Like every other team on the planet, the COVID pandemic forced us to revisit that approach. We used the time to think about what our offices could be, in a world where not every team member showed up every day of the week. While we decided we would be open to remote and hybrid work, we still felt like some Continue reading

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Free access to Cloudflare developer services for non-profit and civil society organizations

We are excited to announce that non-profit, civil society, and public interest organizations are now eligible to join Cloudflare for Startups. Under this new program, participating organizations will be eligible to receive up to $250,000 in Cloudflare credits — these can be used for a variety of our developer and core products, including databases & storage, compute services, AI, media, and performance and security.

Non-profit organizations and startups have a lot in common. In addition to being powered by small groups of dedicated, resilient, and creative people, they are constantly navigating funding shortages, staffing challenges, and insufficient tools. Most importantly, both are unrelenting in their efforts to do more with less; maximizing the impact of every dollar spent and hour invested.

Cloudflare's developer services and our startup programs were designed for exactly these challenges. Our goal is to make it easier for anyone to write code, build applications, and launch new ideas anywhere in the world. Put another way, we want to help small teams have a global impact.

All are welcome to apply. The application period for this new program will open today and runs until December 1. After the closing of the application period, Cloudflare will review the Continue reading