Build your next startup on Cloudflare with our comprehensive Startup Plan, v2.0

Build your next startup on Cloudflare with our comprehensive Startup Plan, v2.0
Build your next startup on Cloudflare with our comprehensive Startup Plan, v2.0

Starting a business is hard. And we know that the first few years of your business are crucial to your success.

Cloudflare’s Startup Plan is here to help.

Last year, we piloted a program to a select group of startups for free, with a selection of products that are very high leverage for young startups, early in their product development, like Workers, Stream, and Zero Trust.

Over the past year, startup founders repeatedly wrote into [email protected], and most of these emails followed one of 2 patterns:

  1. A startup would like to request additional products that are not a part of the startup plan, often Workers KV, Pages, Cloudflare for SaaS, R2, Argo, etc.
  2. A startup that is not a part of any accelerator program but would like to get on the startup plan.

Based on this feedback, we are thrilled to announce that today we will be increasing the scope of the program to also include popularly requested products! Beyond that, we’re also super excited to be broadening the eligibility criteria, so more startups can qualify for the plan.

What does the Cloudflare Startup Plan include?

There’s a lot of additional value that’s in the latest version of Continue reading

D1: our quest to simplify databases

D1: our quest to simplify databases
D1: our quest to simplify databases

When we announced D1 in May of this year, we knew it would be the start of something new – our first SQL database with Cloudflare Workers. Prior to D1 we’ve announced storage options like KV (key-value store), Durable Objects (single location, strongly consistent data storage) and R2 (blob storage). But the question always remained “How can I store and query relational data without latency concerns and an easy API?”

The long awaited “Cloudflare Database'' was the true missing piece to build your application entirely on Cloudflare’s global network, going from a blank canvas in VSCode to a full stack application in seconds. Compatible with the popular SQLite API, D1 empowers developers to build out their databases without getting bogged down by complexity and having to manage every underlying layer.

Since our launch announcement in May and private beta in June, we’ve made great strides in building out our vision of a serverless database. With D1 still in private beta but an open beta on the horizon, we’re excited to show and tell our journey of building D1 and what’s to come.

The D1 Experience

We knew from Cloudflare Workers feedback that using Wrangler as the mechanism to create Continue reading

HS034 Introducing Graphiant Stateless Cloud WAN – Sponsored

Graphiant Stateless Cloud WAN addresses the limitations of SDWAN - better scalability, more flexibility and service guarantees. Their stateless network core is multi-tenant, predictable and scalable. Customers get the benefit of SDWAN with less of the problems. We unpack the details in this episiode with Khalid Raza, Founder and CEO of Graphiant and ask questions to understand how it would fit your strategy.

HS034 Introducing Graphiant Stateless Cloud WAN – Sponsored

Graphiant Stateless Cloud WAN addresses the limitations of SDWAN - better scalability, more flexibility and service guarantees. Their stateless network core is multi-tenant, predictable and scalable. Customers get the benefit of SDWAN with less of the problems. We unpack the details in this episiode with Khalid Raza, Founder and CEO of Graphiant and ask questions to understand how it would fit your strategy.

The post HS034 Introducing Graphiant Stateless Cloud WAN – Sponsored appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Repost: On the Viability of EVPN

Jordi left an interesting comment to my EVPN/VXLAN or Bridged Data Center Fabrics blog post discussing the viability of using VXLAN and EVPN in times when the equipment lead times can exceed 12 months. Here it is:


Interesting article Ivan. Another major problem I see for EPVN, is the incompatibility between vendors, even though it is an open standard. With today’s crazy switch delivery times, we want a multi-vendor solution like BGP or LACP, but EVPN (due to vendors) isn’t ready for a multi-vendor production network fabric.

Repost: On the Viability of EVPN

Jordi left an interesting comment to my EVPN/VXLAN or Bridged Data Center Fabrics blog post discussing the viability of using VXLAN and EVPN in times when the equipment lead times can exceed 12 months. Here it is:


Interesting article Ivan. Another major problem I see for EPVN, is the incompatibility between vendors, even though it is an open standard. With today’s crazy switch delivery times, we want a multi-vendor solution like BGP or LACP, but EVPN (due to vendors) isn’t ready for a multi-vendor production network fabric.

SD-WAN transport-side BGP

The majority of Cisco SD-WAN guides and posts I have found use static routing rather than routing protocols on the transport-side. Static routes are all very well for SD-WAN tunnel traffic but I was wanting to understand how you equate for DIA traffic in a more real-life situation where address ranges are advertised via BGP.

Lenovo Plays The Long Game, Not The Wrong Game, In Systems

It has been nearly four decades since the Chinese Academy of Sciences handed Liu Chuanzhi and Danny Lui $25,000 to help found Legend, originally a maker of TV sets that, in the wake of the success of the IBM PC and the Apple II computer, decided maybe becoming a maker of PCs was a better idea.

Lenovo Plays The Long Game, Not The Wrong Game, In Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

AWS IPSEC Site-to-Site VPN

Notes

https://meteor-honeycup-16b.notion.site/Site-to-Site-VPN-144441a6ac0b4e39a514adc67a8348d5 — This will be updated frequently and has the entire notes on the topics

Intro

  • VPN — Virtual Private Network, often used to communicate securely over untrusted networks like the internet.
  • IPSEC is the protocol which is used for securing the data. Some other tunnelling protocols and frameworks are GRE, DMVPN, Wireguard etc
  • Two types of VPNs — Site-to-Site other is Client-to-site /Remote Access VPN, this lab will be a site-to-site VPN.
  • Site-to-Site, as the name suggests usually connects two sites and a Site is typically referred to as a group of devices in a Data-Center. Site-to-Site will enable two sites separated from the internet to communicate privately and securely over the internet.

Site-to-Site

  • Think along the lines of two boundary devices which encrypt and decrypt LAN traffic
  • Design Redundancy and Scalability along these lines for these two end-points
  • It is important to note that you can have VPN to access any services within your VPC as VPC can be visualised as a virtual Data-Center and thus you can not have a VPN for a service like S3 which is a public offering and can be reached via the Internet

Let’s imagine you have built your Continue reading

Intelligence and Wisdom

I spent the last week at the Philmont Leadership Challenge in beautiful Cimarron, NM. I had the chance to learn a bit more about servant leadership and work on my outdoor skills a little. I also had some time to reflect on an interesting question posed to me by one of the members of my crew.

He asked me, “You seem wise. How did you get so wise?” This caught me flat-flooted for a moment because I’d never really considered myself to be a very wise person. Experienced perhaps but not wise like Yoda or Gandalf. So I answered him as I thought more about it.

Intelligence is knowing what to do. Wisdom is knowing what not to do.

The more I thought about that quote the more I realized the importance of the distinction.

Basic Botany

There’s another saying that people tweeted back at me when I shared the above quote. It’s used in the context of describing Intelligence and Wisdom for Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying:

Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting tomatoes in a fruit salad.

It’s silly and funny but it gets right to the point and is a Continue reading

Shortages force network vendors into creative product redesigns

Supply chain problems have triggered most major networking players such as Cisco, Juniper, Arista, and others to redesign or re-engineer some products in an attempt to overcome component shortages and deliver products to customers.Lead times for some routers, switches and other gear is already delayed well beyond six months. Retooling to get hardware out the door can add is own delay and put additional pressure on engineers looking to reshape things like power supplies and board-level features without causing major problems themselves.To read this article in full, please click here

The first Zero Trust SIM

The first Zero Trust SIM

This post is also available in Deutsch, Français and Español.

The first Zero Trust SIM

The humble cell phone is now a critical tool in the modern workplace; even more so as the modern workplace has shifted out of the office. Given the billions of mobile devices on the planet — they now outnumber PCs by an order of magnitude — it should come as no surprise that they have become the threat vector of choice for those attempting to break through corporate defenses.

The problem you face in defending against such attacks is that for most Zero Trust solutions, mobile is often a second-class citizen. Those solutions are typically hard to install and manage. And they only work at the software layer, such as with WARP, the mobile (and desktop) apps that connect devices directly into our Zero Trust network. And all this is before you add in the further complication of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) that more employees are using — you’re trying to deploy Zero Trust on a device that doesn’t belong to the company.

It’s a tricky — and increasingly critical — problem to solve. But it’s also a problem which we think we can help with.

What Continue reading

Bringing Zero Trust to mobile network operators

Bringing Zero Trust to mobile network operators
Bringing Zero Trust to mobile network operators

At Cloudflare, we’re excited about the quickly-approaching 5G future. Increasingly, we’ll have access to high throughput and low-latency wireless networks wherever we are. It will make the Internet feel instantaneous, and we’ll find new uses for this connectivity such as sensors that will help us be more productive and energy-efficient. However, this type of connectivity doesn’t have to come at the expense of security, a concern raised in this recent Wired article. Today we’re announcing the creation of a new partnership program for mobile networks—Zero Trust for Mobile Operators—to jointly solve the biggest security and performance challenges.

SASE for Mobile Networks

Every network is different, and the key to managing the complicated security environment of an enterprise network is having lots of tools in the toolbox. Most of these functions fall under the industry buzzword SASE, which stands for Secure Access Service Edge. Cloudflare’s SASE product is Cloudflare One, and it’s a comprehensive platform for network operators.  It includes:

  • Magic WAN, which offers secure Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) connectivity for your data centers, branch offices and cloud VPCs and integrates with your legacy MPLS networks
  • Cloudflare Access, which is a Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) service requiring strict verification for every Continue reading

Securing the Internet of Things

Securing the Internet of Things
Securing the Internet of Things

It’s hard to imagine life without our smartphones. Whereas computers were mostly fixed and often shared, smartphones meant that every individual on the planet became a permanent, mobile node on the Internet — with some 6.5B smartphones on the planet today.

While that represents an explosion of devices on the Internet, it will be dwarfed by the next stage of the Internet’s evolution: connecting devices to give them intelligence. Already, Internet of Things (IoT) devices represent somewhere in the order of double the number of smartphones connected to the Internet today — and unlike smartphones, this number is expected to continue to grow tremendously, since they aren’t bound to the number of humans that can carry them.

But the exponential growth in devices has brought with it an explosion in risk. We’ve been defending against DDoS attacks from Internet of Things (IoT) driven botnets like Mirai and Meris for years now. They keep growing, because securing IoT devices still remains challenging, and manufacturers are often not incentivized to secure them. This has driven NIST (the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology) to actively define requirements to address the (lack of) IoT device security, and the EU Continue reading

Migrate to Azure Monitor Agent on Azure Arc using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

azure arc blog

Azure Arc is becoming the default Microsoft Azure service for connecting non-Azure infrastructure into Azure monitoring and administration.  Azure has also issued a deprecation notice for the Azure Log Analytics Agents; Microsoft Monitoring Agent and Log Analytics (OMS).  Azure Monitor Agent replaces these agents, introducing a simplified, flexible method of configuring collection configuration called Data Collection Rules. To leverage Azure Monitor Agent with their non-Azure servers, customers will need to onboard their machines to Azure Arc-enabled servers. 

This article covers how to use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to migrate servers that are currently using Azure Log Analytics Agent to Azure Monitor Agent on Azure Arc using Ansible Automation Platform.  When you have completed the configuration in this blog, you will be able to run a workflow against an automation controller inventory that performs the following tasks:

  1. Ensures that the Azure Arc agent is installed on each machine.  In cases where the agent is not installed, then it will be installed.
  2. Enable the Azure Monitor Agent on Arc enabled machines.
  3. Disable the Log Analytics Agent.
  4. Uninstall the Log Analytics Agent.

Since the example workflow in this blog post is modular, you may also implement the Continue reading