Linux Foundation to blaze a path forward for mainframes

Open-source software development will be a key component to keeping the mainframe a vibrant part of current and future enterprise architectures.With that in mind the Open Mainframe Project, part of the Linux Foundation, this week said at its Open Mainframe Summit that it was forming a working group to promote mainframe-modernization efforts and that it had acqured its own Big Iron to spur future development. [ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] The working group will create a common definition and framework defining what mainframe modernization should look like and promote open-source development on the Big Iron.To read this article in full, please click here

Former Broadcom engineer gets eight months in prison for trade secrets theft

A former employee of chip designer Broadcom was sentenced to eight months in prison this week by a federal district court judge after pleading guilty to charges for theft of trade secrets in May, according to an announcement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California.Peter Kisang Kim, who worked for Broadcom as a principal design engineer for more than 20 years, quit his job in July 2020 and, after less than two weeks, took a job at a startup based in the People’s Republic of China. In pleading guilty, Kim admitted to accessing trade secret information from Broadcom related to the testing and design of the company’s Trident family of chipsets, which are designed for use in network switches and cloud-based networking equipment.To read this article in full, please click here

Referencing Configuration Values in Pulumi YAML

Lately I’ve been doing a fair amount of work with Pulumi’s YAML support (see this blog post announcing it), and I recently ran into a situation where I wanted to read in and use a configuration value (set via pulumi config). When using one of Pulumi’s supported programming languages, like TypeScript or Python or Go, this is pretty easy. It’s also easy in YAML, but not as intuitive as I originally expected. In this post, I’ll share how to read in and use a configuration value when using Pulumi YAML.

Configuration values are how you parameterize a Pulumi program in order to make it more flexible and reusable (see this page on configuration from Pulumi’s architecture and concepts documentation). That same page also has examples of using config.Get or config.Require to pull configuration values into a program (the difference between these two, by the way, is that the latter will prevent a program from running if the configuration value isn’t supplied).

In YAML, it’s (currently) handled a bit differently. As outlined in the Pulumi YAML reference, a Pulumi YAML document has four main sections: configuration, resources, variables, and outputs. At first, I thought Continue reading

Store and retrieve your logs on R2

Store and retrieve your logs on R2
Store and retrieve your logs on R2

Following today’s announcement of General Availability of Cloudflare R2 object storage, we’re excited to announce that customers can also store and retrieve their logs on R2.

Cloudflare’s Logging and Analytics products provide vital insights into customers’ applications. Though we have a breadth of capabilities, logs in particular play a pivotal role in understanding what occurs at a granular level; we produce detailed logs containing metadata generated by Cloudflare products via events flowing through our network, and they are depended upon to illustrate or investigate anything (and everything) from the general performance or health of applications to closely examining security incidents.

Until today, we have only provided customers with the ability to export logs to 3rd-party destinations - to both store and perform analysis. However, with Log Storage on R2 we are able to offer customers a cost-effective solution to store event logs for any of our products.

The cost conundrum

We’ve unpacked the commercial impact in a previous blog post, but to recap, the cost of storage can vary broadly depending on the volume of requests Internet properties receive. On top of that - and specifically pertaining to logs - there’s usually more expensive fees to access that data whenever Continue reading

BrandPost: HPE (Aruba) Named an SD-WAN Magic Quadrant Leader 5 Years in a Row

By Jeff Olson, Director of SD-WAN Product and Technical Marketing, at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.We are honored to share that Gartner® has recognized HPE (Aruba) as a Leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SD-WAN for the fifth year in a row. HPE (Aruba) is one of only two companies to be named a Leader in the Gartner SD-WAN Magic Quadrant all five years.In the Magic Quadrant for SD-WAN report, formerly named Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge, Gartner evaluated vendors based on two primary criteria: Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute. The report includes a summary of each vendor, as well as an assessment of each vendor’s strengths and cautions.To read this article in full, please click here

SVG support in Cloudflare Images

SVG support in Cloudflare Images
SVG support in Cloudflare Images

Cloudflare Images was announced one year ago on this very blog to help you solve the problem of delivering images in the right size, right quality and fast. Very fast.

It doesn’t really matter if you only run a personal blog, or a portal with thousands of vendors and millions of end-users. Doesn’t matter if you need one hundred images to be served one thousand times each at most, or if you deal with tens of millions of new, unoptimized, images that you deliver billions of times per month.

We want to remove the complexity of dealing with the need to store, to process, resize, re-encode and serve the images using multiple platforms and vendors.

At the time we wrote:

Images is a single product that stores, resizes, optimizes and serves images. We built Cloudflare Images, so customers of all sizes can build a scalable and affordable image pipeline in minutes.

We supported the most common formats, such as JPG, WebP, PNG and GIF.

We did not feel the need to support SVG files. SVG files are inherently scalable, so there is nothing to resize on the server side before serving them to your audience. One can even argue that Continue reading

Going originless with Cloudflare Workers – Building a Todo app – Part 1: The API

Going originless with Cloudflare Workers – Building a Todo app – Part 1: The API
Going originless with Cloudflare Workers – Building a Todo app – Part 1: The API

A few months ago we launched Custom Domains into an open beta. Custom Domains allow you to hook up your Workers to the Internet, without having to deal with DNS records or certificates – just enter a valid hostname and Cloudflare will do the rest! The beta’s over, and Custom Domains are now GA.

Custom Domains aren’t just about a seamless developer experience; they also allow you to build a globally distributed instantly scalable application on Cloudflare’s Developer Platform. That’s because Workers leveraging Custom Domains have no concept of an ‘Origin Server’. There’s no ‘home’ to phone to - and that also means your application can use the power of Cloudflare’s global network to run your application, well, everywhere. It’s truly serverless.

Let’s build “Todo”, but without the servers

Today we’ll start a series of posts outlining a simple todo list application. We’ll start with an API and hook it up to the Internet using Custom Domains.

With Custom Domains, you’re treating the whole network as the application server. Any time a request comes into a Cloudflare data center, Workers are triggered in that data center and connect to resources across the network as needed. Our developers don’t need to Continue reading

The easiest way to build a modern SaaS application

The easiest way to build a modern SaaS application
The easiest way to build a modern SaaS application

The Software as a Service (SaaS) model has changed the way we work – 80% of businesses use at least one SaaS application. Instead of investing in building proprietary software or installing and maintaining on-prem licensed software, SaaS vendors provide businesses with out-of-the-box solutions.

SaaS has many benefits over the traditional software model: cost savings, continuous updates and scalability, to name a few. However, any managed solution comes with trade-offs. As a business, one of the biggest challenges in adopting SaaS tooling is loss of customization. Not every business uses software in the same way and as you grow as a SaaS company it’s not long until you get customers saying “if only I could do X”.

Enter Workers for Platforms – Cloudflare's serverless functions offering for SaaS businesses. With Workers for Platforms, your customers can build custom logic to meet their requirements right into your application.

We’re excited to announce that Workers for Platforms is now in GA for all Enterprise customers! If you’re an existing customer, reach out to your Customer Success Manager (CSM) to get access. For new customers, fill out our contact form to get started.

The conundrum of customization

As a SaaS business invested in Continue reading

Stream Live is now Generally Available

Stream Live is now Generally Available
Stream Live is now Generally Available

Today, we’re excited to announce that Stream Live is out of beta, available to everyone, and ready for production traffic at scale. Stream Live is a feature of Cloudflare Stream that allows developers to build live video features in websites and native apps.

Since its beta launch, developers have used Stream to broadcast live concerts from some of the world’s most popular artists directly to fans, build brand-new video creator platforms, operate a global 24/7 live OTT service, and more. While in beta, Stream has ingested millions of minutes of live video and delivered to viewers all over the world.

Bring your big live events, ambitious new video subscription service, or the next mobile video app with millions of users — we’re ready for it.

Streaming live video at scale is hard

Live video uses a massive amount of bandwidth. For example, a one-hour live stream at 1080p at 8Mbps is 3.6GB. At typical cloud provider egress prices, even a little egress can break the bank.

Live video must be encoded on-the-fly, in real-time. People expect to be able to watch live video on their phone, while connected to mobile networks with less bandwidth, higher latency and Continue reading

Why Event-Driven Matters

why event driven matters blog

Life comes down to moments. These events are often how we define our achievements, successes, and failures throughout life. Just like our daily lives, IT organizations and teams can also have these defining moments, where you will often hear phrases like the "great database crash of '98." Many of these memorable IT  moments occur from limiting ourselves to a reactive approach when it comes to managing our IT assets. This is where event-driven automation can help us move from reactive to proactive IT management – well before we have the next great issue or moment in our IT teams. 

In an IT context, events come from monitoring or other tools to tell us when something needs attention.  With this event data, we are able respond faster with automated tasks, resolving issues or enhancing observation where needed, often so we can identify and address festering issues before they are full blown problems. A byproduct of this means teams are now able to spend more time innovating, and are able to realize greater work-life balance because  troubleshooting patterns and remediation approaches are automatically initiated based on an initial event in your environments. 

 

Events on the Infrastructure

Consider Continue reading

R2 is now Generally Available

R2 is now Generally Available

This post is also available in Français and Español.

R2 is now Generally Available

R2 gives developers object storage, without the egress fees. Before R2, cloud providers taught us to expect a data transfer tax every time we actually used the data we stored with them. Who stores data with the goal of never reading it? No one. Yet, every time you read data, the egress tax is applied. R2 gives developers the ability to access data freely, breaking the ecosystem lock-in that has long tied the hands of application builders.

In May 2022, we launched R2 into open beta. In just four short months we’ve been overwhelmed with over 12k developers (and rapidly growing) getting started with R2. Those developers came to us with a wide range of use cases from podcast applications to video platforms to ecommerce websites, and users like Vecteezy who was spending six figures in egress fees. We’ve learned quickly, gotten great feedback, and today we’re excited to announce R2 is now generally available.

We wouldn’t ask you to bet on tech we weren’t willing to bet on ourselves. While in open beta, we spent time moving our own products to R2. One such example, Cloudflare Images, proudly serving thousands Continue reading

Full Stack Journey 070: A Network Automation Career Journey With Eric Chou

On today's Full Stack Journey podcast we welcome guest Eric Chou, an author, educator, and network engineer. From traditional network engineering to the birth of "cloud" at Amazon and now working to share his knowledge via blog posts, videos, books, and classes, Eric shares lessons learned on his career journey.

The post Full Stack Journey 070: A Network Automation Career Journey With Eric Chou appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Nvidia GTC: Hopper processor in full production

Nvidia kicked off its second GTC conference of the year with news that its H100 “Hopper” generation of GPUs is in full production, with global partners planning to roll out products and services in October and wide availability in the first quarter of 2023.Hopper features a number of innovations over Ampere, its predecessor architecture introduced in 2020. Most significant is the new Transformer engine. Transformers are widely-used deep learning models and the standard model of choice for natural language processing. Nvidia claims the H100 Transformer Engine can speed up neural networks by as much as six-fold over Ampere without losing accuracy.To read this article in full, please click here

Nvidia GTC: Hopper processor in full production

Nvidia kicked off its second GTC conference of the year with news that its H100 “Hopper” generation of GPUs is in full production, with global partners planning to roll out products and services in October and wide availability in the first quarter of 2023.Hopper features a number of innovations over Ampere, its predecessor architecture introduced in 2020. Most significant is the new Transformer engine. Transformers are widely-used deep learning models and the standard model of choice for natural language processing. Nvidia claims the H100 Transformer Engine can speed up neural networks by as much as six-fold over Ampere without losing accuracy.To read this article in full, please click here