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Announcing Cloudflare Incident Alerts

A lot of people rely on Cloudflare. We serve over 46 million HTTP requests per second on average; millions of customers use our services, including 31% of the Fortune 1000. And these numbers are only growing.

Given the privileged position we sit in to help the Internet to operate, we’ve always placed a very large emphasis on transparency during incidents. But we’re constantly striving to do better.

That’s why today we are excited to announce Incident Alerts — available via email, webhook, or PagerDuty. These notifications are accessible easily in the Cloudflare dashboard, and they’re customizable to prevent notification overload. And best of all, they’re available to everyone; you simply need a free account to get started.

Lifecycle of an incident

Without proper transparency, incidents cause confusion and waste resources for anyone that relies on the Internet. With so many different entities working together to make the Internet operate, diagnosing and troubleshooting can be complicated and time-consuming. By far the best solution is for providers to have transparent and proactive alerting, so any time something goes wrong, it’s clear exactly where the problem is.

Cloudflare incident response

We understand the importance of proactive and transparent alerting around incidents. We have Continue reading

Cloudflare account permissions, how to use them, and best practices

In the dynamic landscape of modern web applications and organizations, access control is critical. Defining who can do what within your Cloudflare account ensures security and efficient workflow management. In order to help meet your organizational needs, whether you are a single developer, a small team, or a larger enterprise, we’re going to cover two changes that we have developed to make it easier to do user management, and best practices on how to use these features, alongside existing features in order to scope everything appropriately into your account, in order to ensure security while you are working with others.

What are roles?

In the preceding year, Cloudflare has expanded our list of roles available to everyone from 1 to over 60, and we are continuing to build out more, better roles. We have also made domain scoping a capability for all users. This prompts the question, what are roles, and why do they exist?

Roles are a set of permissions that exist in a bundle with a name. Every API call that is made to Cloudflare has a required set of permissions, otherwise an API call will return with a 403. We generally group permissions into a role to Continue reading

Cloudflare Stream Low-Latency HLS support now in Open Beta

Stream Live lets users easily scale their live-streaming apps and websites to millions of creators and concurrent viewers while focusing on the content rather than the infrastructure — Stream manages codecs, protocols, and bit rate automatically.

For Speed Week this year, we introduced a closed beta of Low-Latency HTTP Live Streaming (LL-HLS), which builds upon the high-quality, feature-rich HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol. Lower latency brings creators even closer to their viewers, empowering customers to build more interactive features like chat and enabling the use of live-streaming in more time-sensitive applications like live e-learning, sports, gaming, and events.

Today, in celebration of Birthday Week, we’re opening this beta to all customers with even lower latency. With LL-HLS, you can deliver video to your audience faster, reducing the latency a viewer may experience on their player to as little as three seconds. Low Latency streaming is priced the same way, too: $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered, with zero extra charges for encoding or bandwidth.

Broadcast with latency as low as three seconds.

LL-HLS is an extension of the HLS standard that allows us to reduce glass-to-glass latency — the time between something happening on the broadcast end and a user seeing Continue reading

Cloudflare Fonts: enhancing website font privacy and speed

We are thrilled to introduce Cloudflare Fonts! In the coming weeks sites that use Google Fonts will be able to effortlessly load their fonts from the site’s own domain rather than from Google. All at a click of a button. This enhances both privacy and performance. It enhances users' privacy by eliminating the need to load fonts from Google’s third-party servers. It boosts a site's performance by bringing fonts closer to end users, reducing the time spent on DNS lookups and TLS connections.

Sites that currently use Google Fonts will not need to self-host fonts or make complex code changes to benefit – Cloudflare Fonts streamlines the entire process, making it a breeze.

Fonts and privacy

When you load fonts from Google, your website initiates a data exchange with Google's servers. This means that your visitors' browsers send requests directly to Google. Consequently, Google has the potential to accumulate a range of data, including IP addresses, user agents (formatted descriptions of the browser and operating system), the referer (the page on which the Google font is to be displayed) and how often each IP makes requests to Google. While Google states that they do not use this data for targeted Continue reading

How Cloudflare’s systems dynamically route traffic across the globe

Picture this: you’re at an airport, and you’re going through an airport security checkpoint. There are a bunch of agents who are scanning your boarding pass and your passport and sending you through to your gate. All of a sudden, some of the agents go on break. Maybe there’s a leak in the ceiling above the checkpoint. Or perhaps a bunch of flights are leaving at 6pm, and a number of passengers turn up at once. Either way, this imbalance between localized supply and demand can cause huge lines and unhappy travelers — who just want to get through the line to get on their flight. How do airports handle this?

Some airports may not do anything and just let you suffer in a longer line. Some airports may offer fast-lanes through the checkpoints for a fee. But most airports will tell you to go to another security checkpoint a little farther away to ensure that you can get through to your gate as fast as possible. They may even have signs up telling you how long each line is, so you can make an easier decision when trying to get through.

At Cloudflare, we have the same problem. We Continue reading

Traffic transparency: unleashing the power of Cloudflare Trace

Today, we are excited to announce Cloudflare Trace! Cloudflare Trace is available to all our customers. Cloudflare Trace enables you to understand how HTTP requests traverse your zone's configuration and what Cloudflare Rules are being applied to the request.

For many Cloudflare customers, the journey their customers' traffic embarks on through the Cloudflare ecosystem was a mysterious black box. It's a complex voyage, routed through various products, each capable of introducing modification to the request.

Consider this scenario: your web traffic could get blocked by WAF Custom Rules or Managed Rules (WAF); it might face rate limiting, or undergo modifications via Transform Rules, Where a Cloudflare account has many admins, modifying different things it can be akin to a game of "hit and hope," where the outcome of your web traffic's journey is uncertain as you are unsure how another admins rule will impact the request before or after yours. While Cloudflare's individual products are designed to be intuitive, their interoperation, or how they work together, hasn't always been as transparent as our customers need it to be. Cloudflare Trace changes this.

Running a trace

Cloudflare Trace allows users to set a number of request variables, allowing Continue reading

Intel updates FPGA product line

Intel refreshed its FPGA line-up with cost-optimized offerings, released its FPGA software stack as open source, and added a new processor design based on the RISC-V architecture.The first of the new products is the Agilex 3 family of power- and cost-optimized FPGAs available in compact form factors. Agilex follows the same product-naming convention as the desktop Core series; 3 is the lowest end of the performance spectrum, followed by 5, 7, and 9 series in ascending order.The Agilex 3 family will come with two branches: the B-Series and C-Series. The B-Series FPGAs have higher I/O density in smaller form factors at lower power than other Intel FPGAs. B-Series FPGAs are targeted for board and system management, including server platform management (PFM) applications.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel updates FPGA product line

Taking control of your fortunes on Linux

The fortune command is generally considered one of the just-for-fun commands that you’ll find on linux systems, but it can prove useful in some interesting ways.How it works Probably most Linux users run the fortune command only when they’re bored, though I’ve known a few who added the fortune command to the end of their .bashrc files so that every login would provide a little quote or a saying that they’d ponder for as much as 30 seconds before proceeding to more serious work.The fortune command is, however, more versatile than many Linux users realize. In fact, most of the responses to typing “fortune” are not really fortunes at all. Rather than predicting your future or even just the outcome of your day, they provide quotes or lighthearted comments.To read this article in full, please click here

Taking control of your fortunes on Linux

Does EVPN/VXLAN over SD-WAN Make Sense?

It looks like we might be seeing VXLAN-over-SDWAN deployments in the wild. Here’s the “why that makes sense” argument I received from a participant of the ipSpace.net Design Clinic in which I wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about the idea.

Also, the EVPN-over-WAN idea is not hypothetical since EVPN+VXLAN is now the easiest way to build L3VPN with data center switches that don’t support MPLS LDP. Folks with no interest in EVPN’s L2 features are still using it for L3VPN.

Let’s unravel this scenario a bit:

Does EVPN/VXLAN over SD-WAN Make Sense?

Also, the EVPN-over-WAN idea is not hypothetical since EVPN+VXLAN is now the easiest way to build L3VPN with data center switches that don’t support MPLS LDP. Folks with no interest in EVPN’s L2 features are still using it for L3VPN.

Let’s unravel this scenario a bit:

Why Single-Port LAGs?

I recommend always using LACP for external connections. It will make your life easier, even when you only have a single connection. Here’s why we do it.

If you set up a PNI with AS32590, we will strongly recommend the use of LACP, even for a single link. If you have two PNIs with us, they will each be separate single-member LAGs, because they will be on different routers on our side.

It’s only once you have more than 2 links that we start using LACP in the way most people think of it.

It’s not just us. In Google’s Peering Policy, under “Private peering physical connection requirements”, it states

Link aggregation via LACP is required for all links, including single links

Ever wondered why that is? What’s the point in setting up a LAG if I only have one link? What does it give me? More lines of config for no operational enhancement? And I thought we should use L3 everywhere anyway?

I can’t speak for Google, only for the way we operate our network. But I’m pretty sure their reasons are similar to ours. The obvious reason is for future growth, but there are operational benefits too.

Continue reading

Welcome to Birthday Week 2023

Having been at Cloudflare since it was tiny it’s hard to believe that we’re hitting our teens! But here we are 13 years on from launch. Looking back to 2010 it was the year of iPhone 4, the first iPad, the first Kinect, Inception was in cinemas, and TiK ToK was hot (well, the Kesha song was). Given how long ago all that feels, I'd have a hard time predicting the next 13 years, so I’ll stick to predicting the future by creating it (with a ton of help from the Cloudflare team).

Building the future is, in part, what Birthday Week is about. Over the past 13 years we’ve announced things like Universal SSL (doubling the size of the encrypted web overnight and helping to usher in the largely encrypted web we all use; Cloudflare Radar shows that worldwide 99% of HTTP requests are encrypted), or Cloudflare Workers (helping change the way people build and scale applications), or unmetered DDoS protection (to help with the scourge of DDoS).

This year will be no different.

Winding back to the year I joined Cloudflare we made our first Birthday Week announcement: our automatic IPv6 gateway. Fast-forward to today and Continue reading

Cisco Aims to Bolster Cloud Security and Resilience With Splunk

Cisco’s acquisition of Splunk will bring together powerful infrastructure security and observability offerings with advanced data management capabilities.

Intel Gets Its Chiplets In Order With 6th Gen Xeon SPs

Based on what Intel has been saying for the past several weeks in various events, but especially the Hot Chips 2023 a few weeks ago and the more recent Intel Innovation 2023 extravaganza, the company’s foundry process roadmap and its server processor roadmaps are going to align harmoniously to make the Xeon SP family of CPUs more competitive next year. …

The post Intel Gets Its Chiplets In Order With 6th Gen Xeon SPs first appeared on The Next Platform.

Intel Gets Its Chiplets In Order With 6th Gen Xeon SPs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Heavy Networking 702: Supporting Network Automation With The Pandas Python Library

Today's Heavy Networking covers Pandas. Not the cuddly bears that eat bamboo, but the Python library that makes it easy for you to work with a set of data. Import Pandas at the top of your Python script, follow one of many Pandas tutorials online, and in short order you’ll be able to perform data operations in a spreadsheet-like way. We talk network automation use cases for Pandas with Rick Donato.

Heavy Networking 702: Supporting Network Automation With The Pandas Python Library

The post Heavy Networking 702: Supporting Network Automation With The Pandas Python Library appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Ansible Contributor Summit, Durham 2023

The Ansible Contributor Summit is a full day working session for community contributors to interact with one another and meet with the Ansible development teams behind the projects like AWX, Galaxy NG, Molecule, Ansible Lint and Event-Driven Ansible. We will discuss important issues affecting the Ansible Community and help shape the future of collaboration.

We are happy to have the opportunity to do a second Contributor Summit this year, and this time it will be part of DjangoCon US 2023 in Durham, NC. Our previous experience co-locating the Contributor Summit with another related event was in February in Ghent, Belgium as part of CfgMgmtCamp 2023. It was so successful, we wanted to do it again with another great match.

Hello, Durham!

We will be meeting in the "Bull City", the home of Ansible itself and the inspiration for our beloved mascot, Ansibull. In case you didn't know, the Ansible office overlooks the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, and this mixed with Ansible word play is why you might see mentions of bulls and Ansibulls in Ansible land.

If you can't attend the event in person in Durham, worry not! Ansible Contributor Summit is a hybrid event, so you will Continue reading

Typo traps: analyzing traffic to exmaple.com (or is it example.com?)

A typo is one of those common mistakes with unpredictable results when it comes to the Internet’s domain names (DNS). In this blog post we’re going to analyze traffic for exmaple.com, and see how a very simple human error ends up creating unintentional traffic on the Internet.

Cloudflare has owned exmaple.com for a few years now, but don’t confuse it with example.com! example.com is a reserved domain name set by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), under the direction of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It has been used since 1999 as a placeholder, or example, in documentation, tutorials, sample network configurations, or to prevent accidental references to real websites. We use it extensively on this blog.

As I’m writing it, the autocorrect system transforms exmaple.com into example.com, every time, assuming I must have misspelled it. But in situations where there’s no automatic spelling correction (for example, while editing a configuration file) it’s easy for example to become exmaple.

And so, lots of traffic goes to exmaple.com by mistake — whether it was a typoed attempt to reach example.com or due to other random reasons. Fake email accounts in Continue reading

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