Google launches A3 supercomputer VMs

Google Cloud announced a new supercomputer virtual-machine series aimed at rapidly training large AI models.Unveiled at the Google I/O conference, the new A3 supercomputer VMs are purpose-built to handle the considerable resource demands of a large language model (LLM). “A3 GPU VMs were purpose-built to deliver the highest-performance training for today’s ML workloads, complete with modern CPU, improved host memory, next-generation Nvidia GPUs and major network upgrades,” the company said in a statement.The instances are powered by eight Nvidia H100 GPUs, Nvidia’s newest GPU that just begin shipping earlier this month, as well as Intel’s 4th Generation Xeon Scalable processors, 2TB of host memory and 3.6 TBs bisectional bandwidth between the eight GPUs via Nvidia’s NVSwitch and NVLink 4.0 interconnects.To read this article in full, please click here

Google launches A3 supercomputer VMs

Google Cloud announced a new supercomputer virtual-machine series aimed at rapidly training large AI models.Unveiled at the Google I/O conference, the new A3 supercomputer VMs are purpose-built to handle the considerable resource demands of a large language model (LLM). “A3 GPU VMs were purpose-built to deliver the highest-performance training for today’s ML workloads, complete with modern CPU, improved host memory, next-generation Nvidia GPUs and major network upgrades,” the company said in a statement.The instances are powered by eight Nvidia H100 GPUs, Nvidia’s newest GPU that just begin shipping earlier this month, as well as Intel’s 4th Generation Xeon Scalable processors, 2TB of host memory and 3.6 TBs bisectional bandwidth between the eight GPUs via Nvidia’s NVSwitch and NVLink 4.0 interconnects.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco aims for full-stack observability with AppDynamics/ThousandEyes tie-in

Cisco is more tightly integrating its network- and application-intelligence tools in an effort to help customers quickly diagnose and remediate performance problems.An upgrade to Cisco's Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) platform melds the vendor’s AppDynamics application observability capabilities and ThousandEyes network intelligence with a bi-directional, OpenTelemetry-based integration package. (Read more about how to shop for network observability tools)The goal with DEM is to get business, infrastructure, networking, security operations, and DevSecOps teams working together more effectively to find the root cause of a problem and quickly address the issue, said Carlos Pereira, Cisco Fellow and chief architect in its Strategy, Incubation & Applications group. To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco aims for full-stack observability with AppDynamics/ThousandEyes tie-in

Cisco is more tightly integrating its network- and application-intelligence tools in an effort to help customers quickly diagnose and remediate performance problems.An upgrade to Cisco's Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) platform melds the vendor’s AppDynamics application observability capabilities and ThousandEyes network intelligence with a bi-directional, OpenTelemetry-based integration package. (Read more about how to shop for network observability tools)The goal with DEM is to get business, infrastructure, networking, security operations, and DevSecOps teams working together more effectively to find the root cause of a problem and quickly address the issue, said Carlos Pereira, Cisco Fellow and chief architect in its Strategy, Incubation & Applications group. To read this article in full, please click here

Network Break 430: Cisco Viptela Customers Have A Certifiably Bad Day; IT Crimes And Punishments

Take a Network Break! This week we cover some follow-up on Lumen. Then we dive into a massive Cisco blunder that let a digital certificate expire on some models of the Viptela SD-WAN appliance, causing device failures. Extreme Networks release a new Wi-Fi 6e AP and core and aggregation switches, a Ubiquiti employee who stole […]

The post Network Break 430: Cisco Viptela Customers Have A Certifiably Bad Day; IT Crimes And Punishments appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Zero Trust Security for AI

Zero Trust Security for AI

A collection of tools from Cloudflare One to help your teams use AI services safely

Zero Trust Security for AI

Cloudflare One gives teams of any size the ability to safely use the best tools on the Internet without management headaches or performance challenges. We’re excited to announce Cloudflare One for AI, a new collection of features that help your team build with the latest AI services while still maintaining a Zero Trust security posture.

Large Language Models, Larger Security Challenges

A Large Language Model (LLM), like OpenAI’s GPT or Google’s Bard, consists of a neural network trained against a set of data to predict and generate text based on a prompt. Users can ask questions, solicit feedback, and lean on the service to create output from poetry to Cloudflare Workers applications.

The tools also bear an uncanny resemblance to a real human. As in some real-life personal conversations, oversharing can become a serious problem with these AI services. This risk multiplies due to the types of use cases where LLM models thrive. These tools can help developers solve difficult coding challenges or information workers create succinct reports from a mess of notes. While helpful, every input fed into a prompt becomes a piece of Continue reading

A raft of free Cloudflare services for AI startups

A raft of free Cloudflare services for AI startups
A raft of free Cloudflare services for AI startups

Over the past couple of years, we have piloted a program for early stage startups with free access to a selection of developer products that are high leverage for them. Last year, we launched version 2 of the startup program, which dramatically expanded the basket of products included.

While upgrading startups to the startup plan, I often get inquiries from startups that are fully bootstrapped and not affiliated with any accelerator program. Many of them, especially AI startups, are very promising and would benefit highly from the startup plan.

Typically, they also apply for the Workers Launchpad program, for whom semi-finalists can get upgraded to the startup plan as a benefit. But many of those startups would benefit from getting upgraded right away rather than wait for the review process for each cohort.

Starting today, AI startups no longer need an accelerator affiliation or an employee referral in order to qualify for the Startup Program.

How to get on the startup plan as an AI startup

Here’s what I need you to do if you are a founder of a bootstrapped AI startup. Create a Cloudflare account if you don’t have one, add a domain, and update Continue reading

Introducing Cursor: the Cloudflare AI Assistant

Introducing Cursor: the Cloudflare AI Assistant
Introducing Cursor: the Cloudflare AI Assistant

Today we’re excited to be launching Cursor – our experimental AI assistant trained to answer questions about Cloudflare’s Developer Platform. This is just the first step in our journey to help developers build in the fastest way possible using AI, so we wanted to take the opportunity to share our vision for a generative developer experience.

Whenever a new, disruptive technology comes along, it’s not instantly clear what the native way to interact with that technology will be.

However, if you’ve played around with Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, it’s easy to get the feeling that this is something that’s going to change the way we work. The question is: how? While this technology already feels super powerful, today, we’re still in the relatively early days of it.

While Developer Week is all about meeting developers where they are, this is one of the things that’s going to change just that — where developers are, and how they build code. We’re already seeing the beginnings of how the way developers write code is changing, and adapting to them. We wanted to share with you how we’re thinking about it, what’s on the horizon, and some of the large Continue reading

Introducing Constellation, bringing AI to the Cloudflare stack

Introducing Constellation, bringing AI to the Cloudflare stack

This post is also available in 简体中文, 日本語, Deutsch and Español.

Introducing Constellation, bringing AI to the Cloudflare stack

The Cloudflare Workers' ecosystem now features products and features ranging from compute, hosting, storage, databases, streaming, networking, security, and much more. Over time, we've been trying to inspire others to switch from traditional software architectures, proving and documenting how it's possible to build complex applications that scale globally on top of our stack.

Today, we're excited to welcome Constellation to the Cloudflare stack, enabling developers to run pre-trained machine learning models and inference tasks on Cloudflare's network.

One more building block in our Supercloud

Machine learning and AI have been hot topics lately, but the reality is that we have been using these technologies in our daily lives for years now, even if we do not realize it. Our mobile phones, computers, cars, and home assistants, to name a few examples, all have AI. It's everywhere.

But it isn't a commodity to developers yet, though. They often need to understand the mathematics behind it, the software and tools are dispersed and complex, and the hardware or cloud services to run the frameworks and data are expensive.

Today we're introducing another feature to our stack, allowing everyone to Continue reading

Query Cloudflare Radar and our docs using ChatGPT plugins

Query Cloudflare Radar and our docs using ChatGPT plugins
Query Cloudflare Radar and our docs using ChatGPT plugins

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT plugins in alpha we knew that it opened the door for new possibilities for both Cloudflare users and developers building on Cloudflare. After the launch, our team quickly went to work seeing what we could build, and today we’re very excited to share with you two new Cloudflare ChatGPT plugins – the Cloudflare Radar plugin and the Cloudflare Docs plugin.

The Cloudflare Radar plugin allows you to talk to ChatGPT about real-time Internet patterns powered by Cloudflare Radar.

The Cloudflare Docs plugin allows developers to use ChatGPT to help them write and build Cloudflare applications with the most up-to-date information from our documentation. It also serves as an open source example of how to build a ChatGPT plugin with Cloudflare Workers.

Let’s do a deeper dive into how each of these plugins work and how we built them.

Cloudflare Radar ChatGPT plugin

When ChatGPT introduced plugins, one of their use cases was retrieving real-time data from third-party applications and their APIs and letting users ask relevant questions using natural language.

Cloudflare Radar has lots of data about how people use the Internet, a well-documented public API, an OpenAPI specification, and it’s entirely built on Continue reading

Learn about Network Automation at Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2023

network automation summitfest

As you may have heard, AnsibleFest will be taking place at Red Hat Summit in Boston May 23-25. This change will allow you to harness everything that Red Hat technology has to offer in a single place and will give you even more tools to address your automation needs. Join Ansible and automation-focused audiences to hear from Red Hat and Ansible leaders, customers, and partners while getting the latest on the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform product roadmap, community projects, and what’s coming in IT automation. 

 

Networks are integral parts of IT enterprises. Ansible Automation Platform’s simple framework means that p network administrators can finally speak the same language of automation as the rest of the IT organization, extending the capabilities of Ansible to include native support networks all the way to the edge. . Because we understand how important network automation is to teams working in hybrid cloud environments,  we have lined up some great sessions at AnsibleFest and Red Hat Summit:

netlab Release 1.5.3: libvirt Public Networks

containerlab release 0.41.0 that came out a few days ago changed a few topology attributes with no backward compatibility, breaking netlab for anyone doing a new installation. The only way out of that conundrum was to push out a new netlab release that uses the new attributes and requires containerlab release 0.41.0 (more about that in a minute).

On a more positive note, netlab release 1.5.3 brings a few interesting features, including:

netlab Release 1.5.3: libvirt Public Networks

containerlab release 0.41.0 that came out a few days ago changed a few topology attributes with no backward compatibility, breaking netlab for anyone doing a new installation. The only way out of that conundrum was to push out a new netlab release that uses the new attributes and requires containerlab release 0.41.0 (more about that in a minute).

On a more positive note, netlab release 1.5.3 brings a few interesting features, including: