Cloudflare’s 2023 Annual Founders’ Letter

Cloudflare is officially a teenager. We launched on September 27, 2010. Today we celebrate our thirteenth birthday. As is our tradition, we use the week of our birthday to launch products that we think of as our gift back to the Internet. More on some of the incredible announcements in a second, but we wanted to start by talking about something more fundamental: our identity.

Like many kids, it took us a while to fully understand who we are. We chafed at being put in boxes. People would describe Cloudflare as a security company, and we'd say, "That's not all we do." They'd say we were a network, and we'd object that we were so much more. Worst of all, they'd sometimes call us a "CDN," and we'd remind them that caching is a part of any sensibly designed system, but it shouldn't be a feature unto itself. Thank you very much.

And so, yesterday, the day before our thirteenth birthday, we announced to the world finally what we realized we are: a connectivity cloud.

The connectivity cloud

What does that mean? "Connectivity" means we measure ourselves by connecting people and things together. Our job isn't to be the Continue reading

The best place on Region: Earth for inference

Today, Cloudflare’s Workers platform is the place over a million developers come to build sophisticated full-stack applications that previously wouldn’t have been possible.

Of course, Workers didn’t start out that way. It started, on a day like today, as a Birthday Week announcement. It may not have had all the bells and whistles that exist today, but if you got to try Workers when it launched, it conjured this feeling: “this is different, and it’s going to change things”. All of a sudden, going from nothing to a fully scalable, global application took seconds, not hours, days, weeks or even months. It was the beginning of a different way to build applications.

If you’ve played with generative AI over the past few months, you may have had a similar feeling. Surveying a few friends and colleagues, our “aha” moments were all a bit different, but the overarching sentiment across the industry at this moment is unanimous — this is different, and it’s going to change things.

Today, we’re excited to make a series of announcements that we believe will make a similar impact as Workers did in the future of computing. Without burying the lede any further, here they Continue reading

BGP Labs: Use BFD to Speed Up Convergence

In the next BGP labs exercise, you can practice tweaking BGP timers and using BFD to speed up BGP convergence.

BGP Labs: Use BFD to Speed Up Convergence

In the next BGP labs exercise you can practice tweaking BGP timers and using BFD to speed up BGP convergence.

I would strongly recommend using netlab to run BGP labs, but if you insist you can use any system you like including physical hardware.

NFA v23.09 is here, featuring custom SSL/TLS certificates, MAC Address dictionaries, Mattermost notification channels support, and more.

The post NFA v23.09 is here, featuring custom SSL/TLS certificates, MAC Address dictionaries, Mattermost notification channels support, and more. appeared first on Noction.

Meta Platforms Is Determined To Make Ethernet Work For AI

We said it from the beginning: There is no way that Meta Platforms, the originator of the Open Compute Project, wanted to buy a complete supercomputer system from Nvidia in order to advance its AI research and move newer large language models and recommendation engines into production. …

The post Meta Platforms Is Determined To Make Ethernet Work For AI first appeared on The Next Platform.

Meta Platforms Is Determined To Make Ethernet Work For AI was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Oracle Cloud delivers Nvidia-powered generative AI service

Oracle last week announced limited availability of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Generative AI, which aims to enable business users to integrate AI into their line-of-business applications.OCI Generative AI is a managed service built on Oracle's cloud infrastructure in collaboration with Cohere, an AI platform for enterprise. The managed service and Cohere models will work in conjunction with AI Vector Search, a feature of Oracle Database 23c that provides retrieval augmented generation (RAG), an AI technique that combines pretrained LLMs and proprietary business data to deliver responses with higher accuracy. OCI Generative AI will also form the basis for generative AI capabilities embedded across Oracle’s suite of SaaS applications, including Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite, Oracle NetSuite, and industry applications such as Oracle Cerner.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM brings AI to Z series mainframes, z/OS, Cloud Paks

New AI toolkits, machine learning (ML) frameworks and AI-based private cloud tools are on their way to IBM Z-series mainframe users, as the company looks to preserve its share of the fast-growing AI marketplace.The company announced today that its newest offerings, meant to help organizations get to work on the latest and greatest in AI frameworks, will be available for IBM Z, LinuxOne, z/OS and Cloud Pak architectures. The first new feature, AI Toolkit for IBM Z and LinuxONE, is designed to help enable mission-critical business applications on open-source frameworks like IBM’s Z Accelerated line with TensorFlow, SnapML and more. A Python AI Toolkit for the underlying z/OS also provides an open-source Python library for AI/ML workloads, designed to conform with the company’s Security and Privacy by Design guidelines.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM brings AI to Z series mainframes, z/OS, Cloud Paks

New AI toolkits, machine learning (ML) frameworks and AI-based private cloud tools are on their way to IBM Z-series mainframe users, as the company looks to preserve its share of the fast-growing AI marketplace.The company announced today that its newest offerings, meant to help organizations get to work on the latest and greatest in AI frameworks, will be available for IBM Z, LinuxOne, z/OS and Cloud Pak architectures. The first new feature, AI Toolkit for IBM Z and LinuxONE, is designed to help enable mission-critical business applications on open-source frameworks like IBM’s Z Accelerated line with TensorFlow, SnapML and more. A Python AI Toolkit for the underlying z/OS also provides an open-source Python library for AI/ML workloads, designed to conform with the company’s Security and Privacy by Design guidelines.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: What do music and SSE have in common?

By: Nav Chander, Head of Service Provider SD-WAN/SASE Product Marketing.This is part 3 of a 3-part blog series on SD-WAN, Secure Service Edge (SSE), and multi-cloud networking (MCN), where we will highlight how these 3 technology areas are analogous to 3 different musical instruments that can be played separately but combined, are better together. The first two blogs focused on MCN and SD-WAN, and this blog focuses on SSE technology. Feel free to check out Part 1 and Part 2.To read this article in full, please click here

Julia Still Not Grown Up Enough to Ride Exascale Train

We’ve been watching Julia, an HPC-oriented programming language designed for technical and scientific computing for a number of years to see it can make inroads into supercomputing. …

The post Julia Still Not Grown Up Enough to Ride Exascale Train first appeared on The Next Platform.

Julia Still Not Grown Up Enough to Ride Exascale Train was written by Nicole Hemsoth Prickett at The Next Platform.

Tailscale, Mullvad partner to deliver secure, private web browsing

Security networking startup Tailscale has partnered with Mullvad to make Mullvad’s global network of VPN services available to Tailscale customers looking to maintain user privacy while browsing the internet.Tailscale provides software that creates a peer-to-peer mesh VPN, which allows for customers to create direct connections between devices. Tailscale enables encrypted point-to-point connections using the opensource WireGuard protocol, which means only devices on a private network can communicate with each other. WireGuard is an open-source project that is designed for quick reconnections, which improves reliability. WireGuard is also supported by consumer-grade VPN provider Mullvad.To read this article in full, please click here

Tailscale, Mullvad partner to deliver secure, private web browsing

Security networking startup Tailscale has partnered with Mullvad to make Mullvad’s global network of VPN services available to Tailscale customers looking to maintain user privacy while browsing the internet.Tailscale provides software that creates a peer-to-peer mesh VPN, which allows for customers to create direct connections between devices. Tailscale enables encrypted point-to-point connections using the opensource WireGuard protocol, which means only devices on a private network can communicate with each other. WireGuard is an open-source project that is designed for quick reconnections, which improves reliability. WireGuard is also supported by consumer-grade VPN provider Mullvad.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM service uses DNS to deliver multicloud connectivity

IBM is rolling out a new DNS-based service that will let customers securely control connectivity between distributed multicloud environments.NS1 Connect is one of the first fruits from IBM’s acquisition of DNS specialist NS1 earlier this year. The service is aimed at helping organizations set up the best connection between clouds and end users to deliver applications optimized for performance, cost, security and availability.Core to the NS1 Connect package, which will be available Oct. 17, is traffic-steering technology that intelligently distributes DNS traffic across the network. DNS is often described as the Internet’s phone book, working in the background to match the names of web sites that users type into a search box with the corresponding IP address.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM service uses DNS to deliver multicloud connectivity

IBM is rolling out a new DNS-based service that will let customers securely control connectivity between distributed multicloud environments.NS1 Connect is one of the first fruits from IBM’s acquisition of DNS specialist NS1 earlier this year. The service is aimed at helping organizations set up the best connection between clouds and end users to deliver applications optimized for performance, cost, security and availability.Core to the NS1 Connect package, which will be available Oct. 17, is traffic-steering technology that intelligently distributes DNS traffic across the network. DNS is often described as the Internet’s phone book, working in the background to match the names of web sites that users type into a search box with the corresponding IP address.To read this article in full, please click here

Can anybody stop Nvidia?

When gaming chip maker Nvidia announced a decade ago that it planned a strategic shift to data center AI, there were many questions: Could they build a full-stack, enterprise-grade offering? Was there even a market for AI?After the company’s latest earnings report, the question is whether anybody can challenge Nvidia as the preeminent AI platform provider for both enterprise and hyperscale data centers.Through clever acquisitions, internal hardware/software development, and strategic alliances, Nvidia positioned itself perfectly to take advantage of the generative AI frenzy created by the release of ChatGPT late last year. Neither industry-wide chip shortages, nor the collapse of its proposed $40 billion purchase of chip rival Arm Ltd. had any noticeable effect on Nvidia’s phenomenal growth.To read this article in full, please click here

Can anybody stop Nvidia?

When gaming chip maker Nvidia announced a decade ago that it planned a strategic shift to data center AI, there were many questions: Could they build a full-stack, enterprise-grade offering? Was there even a market for AI?After the company’s latest earnings report, the question is whether anybody can challenge Nvidia as the preeminent AI platform provider for both enterprise and hyperscale data centers.Through clever acquisitions, internal hardware/software development, and strategic alliances, Nvidia positioned itself perfectly to take advantage of the generative AI frenzy created by the release of ChatGPT late last year. Neither industry-wide chip shortages, nor the collapse of its proposed $40 billion purchase of chip rival Arm Ltd. had any noticeable effect on Nvidia’s phenomenal growth.To read this article in full, please click here

The Essence of Cisco and Splunk

You no doubt noticed that Cisco bought Splunk last week for $28 billion. It was a deal that had been rumored for at least a year if not longer. The purchase makes a lot of sense from a number of angles. I’m going to focus on a couple of them here with some alliteration to help you understand why this may be one of the biggest signals of a shift in the way that Cisco does business.

The S Stands for Security

Cisco is now a premier security company now. The addition of the most power SIEM on the market means that Cisco’s security strategy now has a completeness of vision. SecureX has been a very big part of the sales cycle for Cisco as of late and having all the parts to make it work top to bottom is a big win. XDR is a great thing for organizations but it doesn’t work without massive amounts of data to analyze. Guess where Splunk comes in?

Aside from some very specialized plays, Cisco now has an answer for just about everything a modern enterprise could want in a security vendor. They may not be number one in every market but Continue reading

Welcome to connectivity cloud: the modern way to connect and protect your clouds, networks, applications and users

The best part of our job is the time we spend talking to Cloudflare customers. We always learn something new and interesting about their IT and security challenges.

In recent years, something about those conversations has changed. More and more, the biggest challenge customers tell us about isn’t something that’s easy to define. And it’s definitely not something you can address with an individual product or feature.

Rather, what we’re hearing from IT and security teams is that they are losing control of their digital environment.

This loss of control comes in a few flavors. They might express hesitance about adopting a new capability they know they need, because of compatibility concerns. Or maybe they’ll talk about how much time and effort it takes to make relatively simple changes, and how those changes take time away from more impactful work. If we had to sum the feeling up, it would be something like, “No matter how large my team or budget, it’s never enough to fully connect and protect the business.”

Does any of this feel familiar? If so, let us tell you that you are far from alone.

Reasons for loss of control

The rate of change in Continue reading

Sippy helps you avoid egress fees while incrementally migrating data from S3 to R2

Earlier in 2023, we announced Super Slurper, a data migration tool that makes it easy to copy large amounts of data to R2 from other cloud object storage providers. Since the announcement, developers have used Super Slurper to run thousands of successful migrations to R2!

While Super Slurper is perfect for cases where you want to move all of your data to R2 at once, there are scenarios where you may want to migrate your data incrementally over time. Maybe you want to avoid the one time upfront AWS data transfer bill? Or perhaps you have legacy data that may never be accessed, and you only want to migrate what’s required?

Today, we’re announcing the open beta of Sippy, an incremental migration service that copies data from S3 (other cloud providers coming soon!) to R2 as it’s requested, without paying unnecessary cloud egress fees typically associated with moving large amounts of data. On top of addressing vendor lock-in, Sippy makes stressful, time-consuming migrations a thing of the past. All you need to do is replace the S3 endpoint in your application or attach your domain to your new R2 bucket and data will start getting copied Continue reading