How we built AI face cropping for Images

During Developer Week 2024, we introduced AI face cropping in private beta. This feature automatically crops images around detected faces, and marks the first release in our upcoming suite of AI image manipulation capabilities.

AI face cropping is now available in Images for everyone. To bring this feature to general availability, we moved our CPU-based prototype to a GPU-based implementation in Workers AI, enabling us to address a number of technical challenges, including memory leaks that could hamper large-scale use.

Photograph by Suad Kamardeen (@suadkamardeen) on Unsplash

Turning raw images into production-ready assets

We developed face cropping with two particular use cases in mind:

Social media platforms and AI chatbots. We observed a lot of traffic from customers who use Images to turn unedited images of people into smaller profile pictures in neat, fixed shapes.

E-commerce platforms. The same product photo might appear in a grid of thumbnails on a gallery page, then again on an individual product page with a larger view. The following example illustrates how cropping can change the emphasis from the model’s shirt to their sunglasses.

Photograph by Media Modifier (@mediamodifier) on Unsplash

When handling high volumes of media content, preparing images for production can be Continue reading

TCG056: Network Automation Reality Check with Ivan Pepelnjak

In this unplanned and unfiltered conversation, we dive deep into network automation realities with Ivan Pepelnjak, networking’s long standing and independent voice from ipSpace.net. We explore why automation projects fail, dissect the tooling landscape (Ansible vs. Terraform vs. Python), and discuss the cultural barriers preventing enterprises from modernizing their networks. Ivan delivers hard truths about... Read more »

SwiNOG 40: Trustworthy Network Automation

The SwiNOG 40 event started with an interesting presentation on Building Trustworthy Network Automation (video) by Damien Garros (now CEO @ OpsMill) who discussed the principles one can use to build a trustworthy network automation solution, including idempotency, dry runs, and transactional changes. He also covered the crucial roles of the declarative approach, version control, and testing.

If you have ever watched any of my network automation materials, you won’t be surprised by anything he said, but if you’re just starting your network automation journey, you MUST watch this presentation to get your bearings straight.

PP075: Kernel Vs. User Mode In Endpoint Security Software

Microsoft is rethinking allowing endpoint security software to run in the Windows kernel (including third-party and Microsoft’s own endpoint security software). While there are benefits to running security software in the kernel, there are also serious downsides (see the CrowdStrike outage). Dan Massameno joins JJ and Drew on Packet Protector to talk about the role... Read more »

NB539: Boom Times for Arista; SonicWall Offers $200K Firewall Warranty

Take a Network Break! We start with critical vulnerabilities in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center and Fortinet’s FortiSIEM. On the news front, SonicWall announces Gen8 firewalls plus a $200,000 warranty for customers that sign on to SonicWall’s Managed Protection Security Suite. IBM Cloud suffers its fourth major outage since May of this year, SASE vendor... Read more »

Announcing the Cloudflare Browser Developer Program

Today, we are announcing Cloudflare’s Browser Developer Program, a collaborative initiative to strengthen partnership between Cloudflare and browser development teams.

Browser developers can apply to join here. 

At Cloudflare, we aim to help build a better Internet. One way we achieve this is by providing website owners with the tools to detect and block unwanted traffic from bots through Cloudflare Challenges or Turnstile. As both bots and our detection systems become more sophisticated, the security checks required to validate human traffic become more complicated. While we aim to strike the right balance, we recognize these security measures can sometimes cause issues for legitimate browsers and their users.

Building a better web together

A core objective of the program is to provide a space for intentional collaboration where we can work directly with browser developers to ensure that both accessibility and security can co-exist. We aim to support the evolving browser landscape, while upholding our responsibility to our customers to deliver the best security products. This program provides a dedicated channel for browser teams to share feedback, report issues, and help ensure that Cloudflare’s Challenges and Turnstile work seamlessly with all browsers.

What the program includes

Browser developers in Continue reading

Parallelization Strategies in Neural Networks

From a network engineer’s perspective, it is not mandatory to understand the full functionality of every application running in a datacenter. However, understanding the communication patterns of the most critical applications—such as their packet and flow sizes, entropy, transport frequency, and link utilization—is essential. Additionally, knowing the required transport services, including reliability, in-order packet delivery, and lossless transmission, is important.

In AI fabrics, a neural network, including both its training and inference phases, can be considered an application. For this reason, this section first briefly explains the basic operation of the simplest neural network: the Feed Forward Neural Network (FNN). It then discusses the operation of a single neuron. Although a deep understanding of the application itself is not required, this section equips the reader with knowledge of what pieces of information are exchanged between GPUs during each phase and why these data exchanges are important.


Feedforward Neural Network: Forward Pass


Figure 1-7 illustrates a simple four-layer Feed Forward Neural Network (FNN) distributed across four GPUs. The two leftmost GPUs reside in Node-1, and the other two GPUs reside in Node-2. The training data is fed into the first layer. In real neural networks, this first layer is the input Continue reading

AI Cluster Networking

Introduction

The Ultra Ethernet Specification v1.0 (UES), created by the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC), defines end-to-end communication practices for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) services in AI and HPC workloads over Ethernet network infrastructure. UES not only specifies a new RDMA-optimized transport layer protocol, Ultra Ethernet Transport (UET), but also defines how the full application stack—from Software through Transport, Network, Link, and Physical—can be adjusted to provide improved RDMA services while continuing to leverage well-established standards. UES includes, but is not limited to, a software API, mechanisms for low-latency and lossless packet delivery, and an end-to-end secure software communication path. 

Before diving into the details of Ultra Ethernet, let’s briefly look at what we are dealing with when we talk about an AI cluster. From this point onward, we focus on Ultra Ethernet from the AI cluster perspective. This chapter first introduces the AI cluster networking. Then, it briefly explains how a neural network operates during the training process, including an short introduction to the backpropagation algorithm and its forward and backward pass functionality.

Note: This book doesn’t include any complex mathematical algorithms related backpropagation algorithm, or detailed explanation of different neural networks. I have written a book Continue reading

The Rise of CLI-Based AI Coding Agents: Claude code vs Gemini CLI

Introduction I have been a Cursor user for vibe coding for 3 months. I was very skeptical about using Claude Code and Gemini CLI at first, since I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of using a terminal as an AI agent. But in the last 1–2 months, I’ve been trying them both — and it … Continue reading The Rise of CLI-Based AI Coding Agents: Claude code vs Gemini CLI →

How Agentic AI Is Redefining Campus and Branch Network Needs

The workplace is being redefined. AI workloads, an explosion of connected devices, and changing working patterns are forcing organizations to rethink their campus and branch network designs to support business goals and deliver great digital experiences to customers and employees. Over the last decade, IT teams have had to manage significant change with the adoption of cloud computing, widespread use of mobile devices, and SaaS applications becoming critical to core business operations. Now, the transformation that is AI presents an opportunity to gain a core competitive advantage and a productivity multiplier for those organizations that successfully embrace it. When it comes to the rise of Small Language Models (SLMs) and agentic AI, sophisticated AI capabilities are moving closer to where business happens — at the branch office and on campus. This shift to “edge AI” promises exciting possibilities but also brings significant implications for network infrastructure that network architects and decision-makers must address now. Understanding Local Small Language Models (SLMs) at the Edge Local SLMs are designed to be compact and efficient enough to run on local servers or even dedicated edge devices. For tasks like answering simple queries or summarizing documents using local data, these models perform inference right Continue reading

Congestion Control at IETF 123

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meets three times a year to develop Internet Standards and related best practices. At its July 2025 meeting in Madrid, several sessions explored the evolving role of congestion control in transport protocols and sparked the observations in this post.

Calico at CalicoCon, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025!

The Calico team was thrilled to participate in KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025, where we’ll be showcasing the latest advancements in Kubernetes networking, network security, and observability. We’re excited to connect with the vibrant cloud-native community, share insights, and demonstrate how Calico Open Source continues to empower organizations worldwide.

Quick Links

Nov 10: CalicoCon North America 2025

CalicoCon North America 2025, your go-to event for the latest in Kubernetes networking, network security, and observability.

Hosted by the Calico team, this hybrid event is your chance to hear directly from Calico engineers and leadership, get hands-on with new features, and take an in-depth look at the state of Project Calico.

We’ll dive into Calico 3.30, Calico eBPF, and Calico Whisker: open source observability for Kubernetes.

To view the full agenda & register, see below or click here:

CalicoCon 2025 Logo

Event Details

Date: November 10, 2025
Time: 1:00pm to 5:00pm EST
Location: Virtual | The Westin Peachtree Plaza Atlanta

Nov 10: Happy Hour with Calico

After a day of deep dives and technical Continue reading

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