All things being equal, you probably would not build a 5 gigawatt datacenter on Earth in the desert near the equator. …
OpenAI Datacenters Follow The Money To Abu Dhabi was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Here is how you know you are in a tough business: No matter what you do, no matter how hard your people work and how smart they are, no matter that you are riding the wild tiger of AI growth and revenues have grown marvelously, you can’t make any money. …
Lenovo Breaks Even On Datacenter Hardware, Makes It Up In Services was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
For the third consecutive year, Gartner has named Cloudflare in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge (SSE) report. This analyst evaluation helps security and network leaders make informed choices about their long-term partners in digital transformation. We are excited to share that Cloudflare is one of only nine vendors recognized in this year’s report. You can read more about our position in the report here.
What’s more exciting is that we’re just getting started. Since 2018, starting with our Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) service Cloudflare Access, we’ve continued to push the boundaries of how quickly we can build and deliver a mature SSE platform. In that time, we’ve released multiple products each year, delivering hundreds of features across our platform. That’s not possible without our customers. Today, tens of thousands of customers have chosen to connect and protect their people, devices, applications, networks, and data with Cloudflare. They tell us our platform is faster and easier to deploy and provides a more consistent and reliable user experience, all on a more agile architecture for longer term modernization. We’ve made a commitment to those customers to continue to deliver innovative solutions with the velocity and resilience Continue reading
Ethan Banks created an excellent introductory Netlab - Automate Your Network Labs With YAML! video showing how easy it is to start and configure a container- or VM-based lab, and explaining the basic netlab commands you need to get started.
Thanks a million!
P.S.: If you’ve done something similar and I haven’t noticed it, please send me the link.
On April 11, 2025 09:20 UTC, Cloudflare was notified via its Bug Bounty Program of a request smuggling vulnerability in the Pingora OSS framework discovered by a security researcher experimenting to find exploits using Cloudflare’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) free tier which serves some cached assets via Pingora.
Customers using the free tier of Cloudflare’s CDN or users of the caching functionality provided in the open source pingora-proxy and pingora-cache crates could have been exposed. Cloudflare’s investigation revealed no evidence that the vulnerability was being exploited, and was able to mitigate the vulnerability by April 12, 2025 06:44 UTC within 22 hours after being notified.
The bug bounty report detailed that an attacker could potentially exploit an HTTP/1.1 request smuggling vulnerability on Cloudflare’s CDN service. The reporter noted that via this exploit, they were able to cause visitors to Cloudflare sites to make subsequent requests to their own server and observe which URLs the visitor was originally attempting to access.
We treat any potential request smuggling or caching issue with extreme urgency. After our security team escalated the vulnerability, we began investigating immediately, took steps to disable traffic to vulnerable components, and deployed Continue reading
Hendrik left an interesting comment on my Running IS-IS over Unnumbered Ethernet Interfaces blog post:
FRRouting (Linux) with pure IS-IS, the only way it currently (10.3) works is to copy the loopback IPv4 address to the interfaces that you need to do IPv4 routing on. The OpenFabric (IS-IS “extension” draft) does support true unnumbered interfaces and routes IPv6.
Let’s unpack this. There are (at least) four reasons a router needs an address associated with an interface1:
Calico provides a unified platform for all your Kubernetes networking, network security, and observability requirements. From ingress/egress management and east-west policy enforcement to multi-cluster connectivity, Calico delivers comprehensive capabilities. It is distribution-agnostic, preventing vendor lock-in and offering a consistent experience across popular Kubernetes distributions and managed services. Calico eliminates silos, providing seamless networking and observability for containers, VMs, and bare metal servers, and extends effortlessly to multi-cluster environments, in the cloud, on-premises, and at the edge.
With the recent release of Calico Open Source 3.30, we added:
Everybody has been waiting to see the AI spike at Cisco Systems, and it just happened in its most current quarter. …
Silicon One G200 Finally Drives Cisco’s AI Networking Business was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The Internet relies on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to exchange IP address reachability information. This information outlines the path a sender or router can use to reach a specific destination. These paths, conveyed in BGP messages, are sequences of Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs), with each ASN representing an organization that operates its own segment of Internet infrastructure.
Throughout this blog post, we'll use the terms "BGP routes" or simply "routes" to refer to these paths. In essence, BGP functions by enabling autonomous systems to exchange routes to IP address blocks (“IP prefixes”), allowing different entities across the Internet to construct their routing tables.
When network operators debug reachability issues or assess a resource's global reach, BGP routes are often the first thing they examine. Therefore, it’s critical to have an up-to-date view of the routes toward the IP prefixes of interest. Some networks provide tools called "looking glasses" — public routing information services offering data directly from their own BGP routers. These allow external operators to examine routes from that specific network's perspective. Furthermore, services like bgp.tools, bgp.he.net, RouteViews, or the NLNOG RING looking glass offer aggregated, looking glass-like lookup capabilities, drawing Continue reading
A few weeks ago, I was criticising Nokia’s unnecessary changes to the SR Linux configuration data model, so it’s only fair that I also publish a counterexample:
I thought that was the end of the story and closed the issue, but then something truly amazing happened:
For much of the two-plus years since ChatGPT hit the market and kicked off the generative AI frenzy, the market tilted toward well-resourced hyperscalers like Google, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft as well as Tier 2 cloud service providers, with powerful – and expensive – accelerators and massive large language models like Meta’s Llama with 405 billion parameters. …
Dell Is Determined To Gets Its Piece Of The AI Enterprise Pie was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
⚠️ WARNING ⚠️ This blog post contains graphic depictions of probability. Reader discretion is advised.
Measuring performance is tricky. You have to think about accuracy and precision. Are your sampling rates high enough? Could they be too high?? How much metadata does each recording need??? Even after all that, all you have is raw data. Eventually for all this raw performance information to be useful, it has to be aggregated and communicated. Whether it's in the form of a dashboard, customer report, or a paged alert, performance measurements are only useful if someone can see and understand them.
This post is a collection of things I've learned working on customer performance escalations within Cloudflare and analyzing existing tools (both internal and commercial) that we use when evaluating our own performance. A lot of this information also comes from Gil Tene's talk, How NOT to Measure Latency. You should definitely watch that too (but maybe after reading this, so you don't spoil the ending). I was surprised by my own blind spots and which assumptions turned out to be wrong, even though they seemed "obviously true" at the start. I expect I am not alone in these regards. For that Continue reading
netlab uses point-to-point links provided by the underlying virtualization software to implement links with two nodes and Linux bridges to implement links with more than two nodes connected to them. That’s usually OK if you don’t care about the bridge implementation details, but what if you’d like to use a bridge (or a layer-2 switch if you happen to be of marketing persuasion) you’re familiar with?
You could always implement a bridged segment with a set of links connecting edge nodes to a VLAN-capable device. For example, you could use the following topology to connect two Linux hosts through a bridge running Arista EOS:
There are many reasons why Nvidia is the hardware juggernaut of the AI revolution, and one of them, without question, is the NVLink memory sharing port that started out on its “Pascal” P100 GOU accelerators way back in 2016. …
Nvidia Licenses NVLink Memory Ports To CPU And Accelerator Makers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.