Is the CLI the best way to configure, manage, and troubleshoot routers and other networking gear? Or should we move past the CLI towards automation and (possibly even) GUI-based tools? Mark Posser joins Russ and Tom to discuss on this episode of the Hedge.
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For more reading on this topic, please check out this post by Chris Grundemann.
Developing a new video conferencing application often begins with a peer-to-peer setup using WebRTC, facilitating direct data exchange between clients. While effective for small demonstrations, this method encounters scalability hurdles with increased participants. The data transmission load for each client escalates significantly in proportion to the number of users, as each client is required to send data to every other client except themselves (n-1).
In the scaling of video conferencing applications, Selective Forwarding Units (SFUs) are essential. Essentially a media stream routing hub, an SFU receives media and data flows from participants and intelligently determines which streams to forward. By strategically distributing media based on network conditions and participant needs, this mechanism minimizes bandwidth usage and greatly enhances scalability. Nearly every video conferencing application today uses SFUs.
In 2024, we announced Cloudflare Realtime (then called Cloudflare Calls), our suite of WebRTC products, and we also released Orange Meets, an open source video chat application built on top of our SFU.
We also realized that use of an SFU often comes with a privacy cost, as there is now a centralized hub that could see and listen to all the media contents, even though its sole job is Continue reading
A few days ago, I attended a SwiNOG meeting for the first time and realized what a mistake I was making — I should have been there years ago.
Not only was the event impeccably organized (what else would you expect in Switzerland) and at the best event location I have ever experienced (it’s hard to beat this view), it was also full of short, interesting, up-to-the-point presentations (you can already view the slide decks, YouTube videos should be available shortly). Plus, I met so many old friends I haven’t seen in years, and people I communicated with for years but never met before.
It’s not like the organizers would need any more publicity (the event was sold out), but if you happen to be near Switzerland in time for the next meeting, make sure to be there.
Thanks again to the wonderful SwiNOG core team for a fantastic experience! I hope we’ll meet again at the next SwiNOG meeting!
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has kept a steady drumbeat for much of the year as it looks to position itself as the go-to IT hardware and software vendor for the rapidly expanding AI market, which has grown from chatbots to AI agents in under three years. …
HPE Throws Everything At AI – And AI At Everything was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Calico Enterprise lets users write network policies using domain names instead of IP addresses. This is done by dynamically mapping domain names to IP addresses and matching the egress traffic against these IPs. We have discussed this feature in detail when we introduced the Inline mode for the eBPF data plane in Calico Enterprise 3.20 release! It addresses the latency and performance issues of the various modes used by Calico in iptables/nftables data planes. It is a shame that Calico users who are not yet ready to switch completely to eBPF would miss out on this big DNS policy improvement. Don’t worry! We found a way to port it to iptables to enhance our users’ experience without forcing users to make a huge leap.
In Calico Enterprise v3.21, we have extended the Inline DNS policy mode to iptables. In this mode, DNS policies are updated in real time as DNS responses are parsed by eBPF within the data plane, thus improving the performance.
In all the existing modes in the iptables data plane, the DNS response packets are sent to Felix – Calico’s userspace agent. It parses the packets and updates the Continue reading
The AI landscape is evolving at an incredible pace, and with it, the tools and platforms available to developers are becoming more powerful and interconnected than ever. Here at Cloudflare, we're genuinely passionate about empowering you to build the next generation of applications, and that absolutely includes intelligent agents that can reason, act, and interact with the world.
When we talk about "Agents SDKs", it can sometimes feel a bit… fuzzy. Some SDKs (software development kits) described as 'agent' SDKs are really about providing frameworks for tool calling and interacting with models. They're fantastic for defining an agent's "brain" – its intelligence, its ability to reason, and how it uses external tools. Here’s the thing: all these agents need a place to actually run. Then there's what we offer at Cloudflare: an SDK purpose-built to provide a seamless execution layer for agents. While orchestration frameworks define how agents think, our SDK focuses on where they run, abstracting away infrastructure to enable persistent, scalable execution across our global network.
Think of it as the ultimate shell, the place where any agent, defined by any agent SDK (like the powerful new OpenAI Agents SDK), Continue reading
A year ago, I described how we use the netlab validate command to test device configuration templates for most platforms supported by netlab. That blog post included a simple “this is how you test interface address configuration” example; now, let’s move to something a bit more complex: baseline OSPF configuration.
Testing the correctness of OSPF configurations seems easy:
There’s just a tiny little fly in this ointment…
Right or wrong, we still believe that we live in a world where traditional HPC simulation and modeling at high precision matters more than mashing up the sum total of human knowledge and mixing with the digital exhaust of our lives to create a globe-spanning automation that will leave us all with very little to do and a commensurate amount of wealth and power to show for it. …
Some Thoughts On The Future “Doudna” NERSC-10 Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
We’re excited to announce that Cloudflare Containers are now available in beta for all users on paid plans.
You can now run new kinds of applications alongside your Workers. From media and data processing at the edge, to backend services in any language, to CLI tools in batch workloads — Containers open up a world of possibilities.
Containers are tightly integrated with Workers and the rest of the developer platform, which means that:
Your workflow stays simple: just define a Container in a few lines of code, and run wrangler deploy, just like you would with a Worker.
Containers are global: as with Workers, you just deploy to Region:Earth. No need to manage configs across 5 different regions for a global app.
You can use the right tool for the job: routing requests between Workers and Containers is easy. Use a Worker when you need to be ultra light-weight and scalable. Use a Container when you need more power and flexibility.
Containers are programmable: container instances are spun up on-demand and controlled by Workers code. If you need custom logic, just write some JavaScript instead of spending time chaining together API calls or writing Kubernetes operators.
A few weeks ago, we added OSPF areas functionality to netlab. In the next release1, you’ll be able to configure stub areas, NSSA areas, inter-area route summarization and filtering (OSPF ranges), and summarization of NSSA type-7 prefixes for OSPFv2 and OSPFv3.
OSPFv2 (defined in RFC 2328) is 27 years old, and NSSA functionality (RFC 3101) was last touched 22 years ago. One would hope the implementations in network devices are mature and feature-complete. Yeah, keep dreaming 🤦♂️.