Case study: Calico helps Upwork migrate legacy system to Kubernetes on AWS and enforce zero-trust security

Upwork is a freelancing platform that connects a global base of clients to freelancers via job postings. Since going public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2019, the company has become one of the leading freelance platforms worldwide and was named on Time’s list of the 100 Most Influential Companies of 2022.

Upwork’s platform team was running containerized workloads on Consul and Spring Cloud, which required service owners to manually switch to a new code library each time Upwork’s platform team had a new release, and vice versa. This manual switching happened as often as every two months, which was inefficient for a company with over 800 microservices. Also, service owners were not adopting new libraries immediately and could not add upstream and downstream dependencies as needed without going through a review process. Combined, these problems meant that service owners and the cloud engineering and InfoSec teams lacked visibility, were highly susceptible to zero-day attacks and had a slow incident mitigation response.

To solve these problems, Upwork needed to adopt a distributed architecture from the application layer to the network layer. To do this, they required Kubernetes. The switch to Kubernetes meant Upwork’s containers needed to adhere to cloud-native Continue reading

HPE announces a cloud service for large language models

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is offering support for demanding AI applications with a new cloud-based service underpinned by the company’s supercomputers.The initial service is designed specifically to facilitate large language models (LLM), but the company says it plans to roll out similar AI services for domain- and industry-specific applications in climate modeling, healthcare and life sciences, financial services, manufacturing, and transportation.All of these will fall under HPE’s GreenLake portfolio, but unlike the rest of GreenLake services, these will be hosted entirely in the cloud. The other services run either entirely on customer premises or in a hybrid on-prem/cloud environment.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco is buying network monitoring, analysis firm Accedian Networks

Looking to improve network visibility, Cisco plans to buy Accedian Networks, makers of software for monitoring and analyzing network performance.Founded 2004, Accecian sells Skylight, a platform that diagnoses problems and recommends remediation to fix them. The package is aimed at mobile backhaul, data-center services, service providers, and cloud-connectivity customers.The company, which competes with players including IBM, SolarWinds, Progress, NetScout, and Kentik, is already a Cisco business partner. Cisco offers Skylight for near-real-time network performance monitoring, analytics, and assurance within its Cisco Crosswork Network Automation platform for service providers.To read this article in full, please click here

Cloudflare Snippets is now available in alpha

Cloudflare Snippets is now available in alpha

Today we are excited to announce that Cloudflare Snippets is available in alpha. In the coming weeks we will be opening access to our waiting list.

Cloudflare Snippets is now available in alpha

What are Snippets?

Over the past two years we have released a number of new rules products such as Transform Rules, Cache Rules, Origin Rules, Config Rules and Redirect Rules. These new products give more control to customers on how we process their traffic as it flows through our global network. The feedback on these products so far has been overwhelmingly positive. However, our customers still occasionally need the ability to do more than the out-of-the-box functionality allows. Not just adding an HTTP header - but performing some advanced calculation to create the output.

For these cases, Cloudflare Snippets comes to the rescue. Snippets are small pieces of user created JavaScript that are run by Cloudflare before your website, API or application is served to the user. If you're familiar with Cloudflare Workers, our robust developer platform, then you'll find Snippets to be a familiar addition. For those who are not, Snippets are designed to be easily created, tested, and deployed. Providing you with the ability to deploy your custom JavaScript Snippet to Continue reading

Part 2: Rethinking cache purge with a new architecture

Part 2: Rethinking cache purge with a new architecture
Part 2: Rethinking cache purge with a new architecture

In Part 1: Rethinking Cache Purge, Fast and Scalable Global Cache Invalidation, we outlined the importance of cache invalidation and the difficulties of purging caches, how our existing purge system was designed and performed, and we gave a high level overview of what we wanted our new Cache Purge system to look like.

It’s been a while since we published the first blog post and it’s time for an update on what we’ve been working on. In this post we’ll be talking about some of the architecture improvements we’ve made so far and what we’re working on now.

Cache Purge end to end

We touched on the high level design of what we called the “coreless” purge system in part 1, but let’s dive deeper into what that design encompasses by following a purge request from end to end:

Part 2: Rethinking cache purge with a new architecture

Step 1: Request received locally

An API request to Cloudflare is routed to the nearest Cloudflare data center and passed to an API Gateway worker. This worker looks at the request URL to see which service it should be sent to and forwards the request to the appropriate upstream backend. Most endpoints of the Cloudflare API are currently handled by Continue reading

Spotlight on Zero Trust: We’re fastest and here’s the proof

Spotlight on Zero Trust: We're fastest and here's the proof
Spotlight on Zero Trust: We're fastest and here's the proof

In January and in March we posted blogs outlining how Cloudflare performed against others in Zero Trust. The conclusion in both cases was that Cloudflare was faster than Zscaler and Netskope in a variety of Zero Trust scenarios. For Speed Week, we’re bringing back these tests and upping the ante: we’re testing more providers against more public Internet endpoints in more regions than we have in the past.

For these tests, we tested three Zero Trust scenarios: Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), and Remote Browser Isolation (RBI). We tested against three competitors: Zscaler, Netskope, and Palo Alto Networks. We tested these scenarios from 12 regions around the world, up from the four we’d previously tested with. The results are that Cloudflare is the fastest Secure Web Gateway in 42% of testing scenarios, the most of any provider. Cloudflare is 46% faster than Zscaler, 56% faster than Netskope, and 10% faster than Palo Alto for ZTNA, and 64% faster than Zscaler for RBI scenarios.

In this blog, we’ll provide a refresher on why performance matters, do a deep dive on how we’re faster for each scenario, and we’ll talk about how we measured performance for each product.

Continue reading

It’s never been easier to migrate thanks to Cloudflare’s new Migration Hub

It's never been easier to migrate thanks to Cloudflare's new Migration Hub
It's never been easier to migrate thanks to Cloudflare's new Migration Hub

We understand the pain points associated with CDN migrations. That's why in late 2021 we introduced Turpentine, a project to  the process of translating the old Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) into Cloudflare Workers with just a push of a button. After nearly two years of testing and user feedback, we’ve tailored the migration processes for different user groups.

Today, we are thrilled to relaunch Turpentine, and introduce Cloudflare's new Migration Hub. The Migration Hub serves as a one-stop-shop for all migration needs, featuring brand-new migration guides that bring transparency and simplicity to the process.

We also know that a large number of customers aren't comfortable doing migrations themselves. Years of built up business logic makes unpacking and translating CDN configurations between different vendors difficult and locks businesses into subpar products and services. To help these customers we have established a Professional Services group to ensure smooth migrations for customers transitioning to Cloudflare’s first-class products. Going forward, we plan to continue to invest resources in Turpentine to ensure that moving to any part of Cloudflare is easy and you have the help you need.

Why choose Cloudflare?

Cloudflare has gained immense popularity among businesses seeking to improve website performance, security, Continue reading

Workers KV is faster than ever with a new architecture

Workers KV is faster than ever with a new architecture
Workers KV is faster than ever with a new architecture

We’re excited to announce a significant performance improvement coming to Workers KV, focused on dramatically improving cold read performance and reducing latency, even for long tail access patterns.

Developers using KV have seen great performance on hot reads, but ask why their 95th percentile latency — often on a key (or set of keys) that hadn’t been accessed recently or in that region — was higher than expected. We took this feedback to heart: we’ve been working feverishly on a new caching layer for KV behind the scenes, which enables customers to achieve much more frequent hot reads, reduced worst case latency times, better flexibility and control over cache TTLs, and much faster consistency over our previous iterations, and it’s now live for all KV users.

The best part? Developers using KV don’t need to change anything to benefit from this increased performance.

What is Workers KV?

Workers KV is a key value store designed for read heavy use-cases and applications powered by Cloudflare’s network. KV’s focus on read-heavy use-cases allows it to serve hot (cached) reads in milliseconds, which makes it ideal for storing per-application or customer configuration data, routing configuration, multivariate (A/B testing) configurations, and even small asset Continue reading

How Kinsta used Workers and Workers KV to improve cache hit rates by 56%

How Kinsta used Workers and Workers KV to improve cache hit rates by 56%

This is a guest post by Kinsta about their use of our platform.

How Kinsta used Workers and Workers KV to improve cache hit rates by 56%

At Kinsta, we’re obsessed with speed: Our Application Hosting, Database Hosting and Managed WordPress Hosting services all run on the Google Cloud Platform’s fastest Premium Tier Network and C2 Machines, and we rely on Cloudflare to keep the pedal to the metal for tens of thousands of customers who want to deliver their content around the world with speed and security.

While making that happen, we’ve learned a thing or two about using Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV to provide optimized caching rules for static and dynamic content.

In early 2023, we doubled down on Cloudflare cache wrangling, making caches more responsive to client-side configuration changes while also shifting the heavy lifting behind broadcasting feature updates away from our admins on the backend and into Cloudflare Workers. A key result was a dramatic increase in the share of customer data successfully cached, increasing 56.3% between October 2022 and March 2023.

How Kinsta used Workers and Workers KV to improve cache hit rates by 56%

Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV allow us to programmatically customize every request and response with minimal effort and lower latency. We no longer need to deploy changes to hundreds of thousands of containers when we Continue reading

Intel’s German chip fab plans expand

Intel will spend more than $32 billion to open two high-end microchip fabrication facilities in Magdeburg, Germany, in an expansion of the chipmaking giant’s plans for European growth.In an announcement on Monday, Intel also said that the facilities would use its more advanced Angstrom manufacturing process, which is used to manufacture sub-nanometer chips. The use of this technology has always been in the plans for the Magdeburg site, for which Intel acquired the land in November 2022. That initial plan, announced in March 2022, earmarked $18.55 billion for the site.The company said that the facility will enter production in four to five years, “following the European Commission’s approval of the incentive package.” About 30% of the costs for the Magdeburg facility (roughly $5.5 billion) will be covered by government subsidies, according to a report from Bloomberg at the time of the deal’s initial announcement. That figure is set to increase to nearly $11 billion as of yesterday’s announcement.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco sets a foundation for AI network infrastructure

Cisco is taking the wraps off new high-end programmable Silicon One processors aimed at underpinning large-scale Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) infrastructure for enterprises and hyperscalers.The company has added the 5nm 51.2Tbps Silicon One G200 and 25.6Tbps G202 to its now 13-member Silicon One family that can be customized for routing or switching  from a single chipset, eliminating the need for different silicon architectures for each network function. This is accomplished with a common operating system, P4 programmable forwarding code, and an SDK.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Closing IT security gaps with Network Access Control

By: Eve-Marie Lanza, Senior Security Solutions Marketing Manager, HPE Aruba Networking.IT security gaps caused by lack of visibility and control into user and device activities persist for many organizations, according to a report recently released by security research firm Ponemon Institute.In the report sponsored by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, The 2023 Global Study on Closing the IT Security Gap: Addressing Cybersecurity Gaps from Edge to Cloud, 67% of respondents indicated that identifying and authenticating IoT devices accessing their network is critical to their organizations’ security strategy. Yet nearly the same number of respondents (63%) said their security teams lack visibility and control into all the activity of every device connected to their IT infrastructure.To read this article in full, please click here

How to secure Kubernetes workloads using Calico DNS Security Policy

In my previous blog on Kubernetes security foundations, we discussed the growing adoption of cloud-native applications and the security challenges they present. We highlighted the limitations of traditional network firewalls in securing these applications and emphasized the importance of implementing cloud-native security policies to protect network traffic effectively.

In this blog, we will focus on one specific aspect of network security: securing egress traffic from microservices based on fully qualified domain names (FQDNs). Protecting egress traffic is crucial for ensuring the integrity and privacy of data leaving the microservices.

We will explore the challenges associated with safeguarding microservices egress traffic to destinations outside the cluster and discuss how Calico DNS logging and DNS policy can address these challenges. DNS logging allows for the collection and analysis of DNS queries made by microservices, providing valuable insights into their communication patterns and potential security risks. DNS policy enables the enforcement of granular access controls on domain names located outside the cluster, allowing only authorized requests and preventing malicious activities.

By implementing Calico DNS logging and DNS policy, organizations can gain better visibility into their microservices’ egress traffic, detect anomalies or security breaches, and establish stricter controls to protect their valuable data. This Continue reading

Supply-chain constraints spike data-center outages

Shortages due to supply-chain problems has faded from the headlines, but they persist and are actually getting worse in some sectors.A report from AFCOM, an organization of data-center professionals, found that 44% of data-center operators surveyed had suffered downtime or an outage because they couldn’t get needed parts.In the report “State of the Data Center 2023,” 94% of respondents said that they have had supply-chain issues of one kind or another. The most commonly cited items in short supply (59%) are basic IT equipment such as servers and switches, followed by power systems (51%) including generators and UPSes.But even acquiring security systems (34%) such as secure doors and cameras and building materials like concrete (35%) were an issue for many respondents.To read this article in full, please click here

Supply-chain constraints spike data-center outages

Shortages due to supply-chain problems has faded from the headlines, but they persist and are actually getting worse in some sectors.A report from AFCOM, an organization of data-center professionals, found that 44% of data-center operators surveyed had suffered downtime or an outage because they couldn’t get needed parts.In the report “State of the Data Center 202,” 94% of respondents said that they have had supply-chain issues of one kind or another. The most commonly cited items in short supply (59%) are basic IT equipment such as servers and switches, followed by power systems (51%) including generators and UPSes.But even acquiring security systems (34%) such as secure doors and cameras and building materials like concrete (35%) were an issue for many respondents.To read this article in full, please click here

Are you measuring what matters? A fresh look at Time To First Byte

Are you measuring what matters? A fresh look at Time To First Byte
Are you measuring what matters? A fresh look at Time To First Byte

Today, we’re making the case for why Time To First Byte (TTFB) is not a good metric for evaluating how fast web pages load. There are better metrics out there that give a more accurate representation of how well a server or content delivery network performs for end users. In this blog, we’ll go over the ambiguity of measuring TTFB, touch on more meaningful metrics such as Core Web Vitals that should be used instead, and finish on scenarios where TTFB still makes sense to measure.

Many of our customers ask what the best way would be to evaluate how well a network like ours works. This is a good question! Measuring performance is difficult. It’s easy to simplify the question to “How close is Cloudflare to end users?” The predominant metric that’s been used to measure that is round trip time (RTT). This is the time it takes for one network packet to travel from an end user to Cloudflare and back. We measure this metric and mention it from time to time: Cloudflare has an average RTT of 50 milliseconds for 95% of the Internet-connected population.

Whilst RTT is a relatively good indicator of the quality of Continue reading

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