Descale your network with Cloudflare’s enhanced Descaler Program

Descale your network with Cloudflare’s enhanced Descaler Program
Descale your network with Cloudflare’s enhanced Descaler Program

Speed matters, especially when it comes to exiting a slower service and transitioning to a new one. Back in March, 2023, we announced the Descaler Program, a frictionless path to migrate existing Zscaler customers to Cloudflare One. This program makes it easy for customers to make the switch to a faster, simpler, and more agile foundation for security and network transformation with Cloudflare.

Through repeated engagements with customers of all sizes, we've improved the Descaler tooling to allow Zscaler to Cloudflare configuration migrations to be completed in hours, not days. This accelerated transition has helped organizations meet migration deadlines and eliminate countless hours of manual migration effort without skipping a beat. Today we’re excited to share more stories from customers and the amount of time it took them to ‘descale’.

Cloudflare One and the Descaler Program

As a quick recap, Cloudflare One is our Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform that combines network connectivity services with Zero Trust security services on one of the fastest, most resilient and most composable global networks. The platform dynamically connects users to enterprise resources, with identity-based security controls delivered close to users, wherever they are.

At its core, the Descaler Program helps Continue reading

Understanding end user-connectivity and performance with Digital Experience Monitoring, now available in beta

Understanding end user-connectivity and performance with Digital Experience Monitoring, now available in beta

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Understanding end user-connectivity and performance with Digital Experience Monitoring, now available in beta

Organizations that replace their corporate network and security appliances with a cloud-based solution trust that provider with how their employees work each and every day. Cloudflare One, our comprehensive Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) offering, helps more than 10,000 organizations deploy a remote access and Internet security solution that is faster than industry competitors. Starting today, administrators can measure that experience on their own and hold us accountable to that standard.

Cloudflare’s Digital Experience Monitoring (DEX) product gives teams of any size the same toolkit that we use to measure our own global network that powers nearly one-fourth of the Internet each day. Customers of Cloudflare One can now measure the experience that their team members have connecting to the Internet - whether they need that data for troubleshooting, evaluating carrier and ISP performance, or just understanding how their employees work.

We are excited to share today that DEX is now in open beta for all Cloudflare One customers. Administrators can begin running tests and evaluating network performance with any device enrolled using the Cloudflare One agent. Today’s announcement opens up these tools to every customer, but we are just getting started - Continue reading

Benchmarking dashboard performance

Benchmarking dashboard performance
Benchmarking dashboard performance

In preparation of Cloudflare Speed Week 2023, we spent the last few weeks benchmarking the performance of a Cloudflare product that has gone through many transformations throughout the years: the Cloudflare dashboard itself!

Limitations and scope

Optimizing for user-experience is vital to the long-term success of both Cloudflare and our customers. Reliability and availability of the dashboard are also important, since millions of customers depend on our services every day. To avoid any potential service interruptions while we made changes to the application’s architecture, we decided to gradually roll out the improvements, starting with the login page.

As a global company, we strive to deliver the best experience to all of our customers around the world. While we were aware that performance was regional, with regions furthest from our core data centers experiencing up to 10 times longer loading speeds, we wanted to focus on improvements that would benefit all of our users, no matter where they geographically connect to the Dashboard.

Finally, throughout this exercise, it was important to keep in mind that our overall goal was to improve the user experience of the dashboard, with regards to loading performance. We chose to use a Lighthouse Performance score as Continue reading

Network performance update: Speed Week 2023

Network performance update: Speed Week 2023
Network performance update: Speed Week 2023

We constantly measure our own and other networks' performance, and look for ways to improve our performance; and share our results.

In this post we are going to share the most recent updates, and tell you about our tools and processes that we use to monitor and improve our network performance.

First, the results

In July, 2022, we started taking a more granular look down to every single network and taking actions for the specific networks where we have some room for improvement. Cloudflare was already the fastest provider for most of the networks around the world (we define a network as country and AS number pair). Taking a closer look at the numbers, Cloudflare was ranked #1 in 33% of the networks and was within 2 ms or 5% of the #1 provider for 8% of the networks that we measured in terms of the 95th percentile TCP Connection Time. For reference, our closest competitor on that front was the fastest for 20% of networks.

As of May 31, 2023 those numbers have improved significantly. Today, Cloudflare is the fastest provider for 46% of networks—and was within 2 ms (95th percentile TCP Connection Time) or 5% of the fastest Continue reading

How we think about Zero Trust Performance

How we think about Zero Trust Performance
How we think about Zero Trust Performance

Cloudflare has done several deep dives into Zero Trust performance in 2023 alone: one in January, one in March, and one for Speed Week. In each of them, we outline a series of tests we perform and then show that we’re the fastest. While some may think that this is a marketing stunt, it’s not: the tests we devised aren’t necessarily built to make us look the best, our network makes us look the best when we run the tests.

We’ve discussed why performance matters in our blogs before, but the short version is that poor performance is a threat vector: the last thing we want is for your users to turn off Zero Trust to get an experience that is usable for them. Our goal is to improve performance because it helps improve the security of your users, the security of the things that matter most to you, and enables your users to be more productive.

When we run Zero Trust performance tests, we start by measuring end-to-end latency from when a user sends a packet to when the Zero Trust proxy receives, forwards, and inspects the packet, to when the destination website processes the packet and Continue reading

Globally distributed AI and a Constellation update

Globally distributed AI and a Constellation update
Globally distributed AI and a Constellation update

During Cloudflare's 2023 Developer Week, we announced Constellation, a set of APIs that allow everyone to run fast, low-latency inference tasks using pre-trained machine learning/AI models, directly on Cloudflare’s network.

Constellation update

We now have a few thousand accounts onboarded in the Constellation private beta and have been listening to our customer's feedback to evolve and improve the platform. Today, one month after the announcement, we are upgrading Constellation with three new features:

Bigger models
We are increasing the size limit of your models from 10 MB to 50 MB. While still somewhat conservative during the private beta, this new limit opens doors to more pre-trained and optimized models you can use with Constellation.

Tensor caching
When you run a Constellation inference task, you pass multiple tensor objects as inputs, sometimes creating big data payloads. These inputs travel through the wire protocol back and forth when you repeat the same task, even when the input changes from multiple runs are minimal, creating unnecessary network and data parsing overhead.

The client API now supports caching input tensors resulting in even better network latency and faster inference times.

XGBoost runtime
Constellation started with the ONNX runtime, but our vision is to Continue reading

Donning a MASQUE: building a new protocol into Cloudflare WARP

Donning a MASQUE: building a new protocol into Cloudflare WARP
Donning a MASQUE: building a new protocol into Cloudflare WARP

When we originally announced WARP, we knew we were launching a product that was different from other VPNs. Cloudflare has not only hundreds more data centers than your typical VPN provider, but also a unique purview into the adoption of open Internet standards. The confluence of these two factors have led us to today’s announcement: support for MASQUE, a cutting-edge new protocol for the beta version of our consumer WARP iOS app.

MASQUE is a set of mechanisms that extend HTTP/3 and leverage the unique properties of the QUIC transport protocol to efficiently proxy IP and UDP traffic. Most importantly, it will make your Internet browsing experience faster and more stable without sacrificing privacy.

Like many products at Cloudflare, we’re offering this first as a free, consumer offering. Once we’ve had an opportunity to learn from what it’s like to operate MASQUE on mobile devices, at scale, we plan to integrate it into our Zero Trust enterprise product suite.

We’re not saying goodbye to Wireguard

When we first built WARP we chose to go with Wireguard for many reasons – among them, simplicity. This is where Wireguard shines: ~4,000 lines of code that use public-key cryptography to create an encrypted Continue reading

What’s New: Cloud Automation with amazon.aws 6.0.0

When it comes to Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure automation, the latest release of the certified amazon.aws Collection for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform brings a number of enhancements to improve the overall user experience and speed up the process from development to production.

This blog post goes through changes and highlights what’s new in the 6.0.0 release of this Ansible Content Collection. We have included numerous bug fixes, features, and code quality improvements that further enhance the amazon.aws Collection. Let's go through some of them!

 

Forward-looking Changes

New boto3/botocore Versioning

The amazon.aws Collection has dropped support for botocore<1.25.0 and boto3<1.22.0. Most modules will continue to work with older versions of the AWS Software Development Kit (SDK), however, compatibility with older versions of the AWS SDK is not guaranteed and will not be tested. When using older versions of the AWS SDK, a warning will be displayed by Ansible. Check out the module documentation for the minimum required version for each module. 

New Python Support Policy

On July 30, 2022, AWS announced that the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) v1 and AWS SDK for Python (boto3 and Continue reading

Tips for building a home lab to prep for network certifications

Hands-on experience with network hardware and software can solidify certification-test concepts or let you practice skills that may be part of a cert exam, and the process can be helped along by use of a home lab. But how do you go about building one?Start by identifying your learning goals and figuring out the hardware and software they’ll require. If you’re focused on applications, server environments, automation, or identity management, a server for hosting virtual environments may suffice. But if you’re interested in networking at Layers 1, 2 and 3, you’ll need some physical networking hardware such as routers, switches, or hardware firewalls. This is especially true if you’re seeking vendor certification on specific devices.To read this article in full, please click here

Tips for building a home lab to prep for network certifications

Hands-on experience with network hardware and software can solidify certification-test concepts or let you practice skills that may be part of a cert exam, and the process can be helped along by use of a home lab. But how do you go about building one?Start by identifying your learning goals and figuring out the hardware and software they’ll require. If you’re focused on applications, server environments, automation, or identity management, a server for hosting virtual environments may suffice. But if you’re interested in networking at Layers 1, 2 and 3, you’ll need some physical networking hardware such as routers, switches, or hardware firewalls. This is especially true if you’re seeking vendor certification on specific devices.To read this article in full, please click here

Summer Break 2023

Long story short: it’s time for another summer break, as people reporting my bloopers – THANK YOU!!! – know only too well. I plan to be back in early autumn rolling out tons of new content.

I’ll do my best to reply to support requests (it will take longer than usual), and probably won’t be able to resist publishing a few lightweight netlab-related blog posts. If you get bored there’s still over 400 hours of existing content, over 100 podcast episodes, and thousands of blog posts.

In the meantime, get away from work, turn off the Internet, and enjoy a few days in your favorite spot with your loved ones!

Summer Break 2023

Long story short: it’s time for another summer break, as people reporting my bloopers – THANK YOU!!! – know only too well. I plan to be back in early autumn rolling out tons of new content.

I’ll do my best to reply to support requests (it will take longer than usual), and probably won’t be able to resist publishing a few lightweight netlab-related blog posts. If you get bored there’s still over 400 hours of existing content, over 100 podcast episodes, and thousands of blog posts.

In the meantime, get away from work, turn off the Internet, and enjoy a few days in your favorite spot with your loved ones!

What’s New with Cloud Automation with amazon.aws 6.0.0

What's New with Cloud Automation with amazon.aws 6.0.0

When it comes to Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure automation, the latest release of the certified amazon.aws Collection for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform brings a number of enhancements to improve the overall user experience and speed up the process from development to production.

This blog post goes through changes and highlights what's new in the 6.0.0 release of this Ansible Content Collection. We have included numerous bug fixes, features, and code quality improvements that further enhance the amazon.aws Collection. Let's go through some of them!

Forward-looking Changes

New boto3/botocore Versioning

The amazon.aws Collection has dropped support for botocore<1.25.0 and boto3<1.22.0. Most modules will continue to work with older versions of the AWS Software Development Kit (SDK), however, compatibility with older versions of the AWS SDK is not guaranteed and will not be tested. When using older versions of the AWS SDK, a warning will be displayed by Ansible. Check out the module documentation for the minimum required version for each module. 

New Python Support Policy

On July 30, 2022, AWS announced that the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS Continue reading

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

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