Response: NAT Traversal Mess
Let’s look at another part of the lengthy comment Bob left after listening to the Rise of NAT podcast. This one is focused on the NAT traversal mess:
You mentioned that only video-conferencing and BitTorrent use client-to-client connectivity (and they are indeed the main use cases), but hell, do they need to engineer complex systems to circumvent these NATs and firewalls: STUN, TURN, ICE, DHT…
Cleaning up the acronym list first: DHT is unlike the others and has nothing to do with NAT.
With “Ironwood” TPU, Google Pushes The AI Accelerator To The Floor
If you want to be a leading in supplying AI models and AI applications, as well as AI infrastructure to run it, to the world, it is also helpful to have a business that needs a lot of AI that can underwrite the development of homegrown infrastructure that can be sold side-by-side with the standard in the industry. …
With “Ironwood” TPU, Google Pushes The AI Accelerator To The Floor was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Calico Open Source 3.30: Exploring the Goldmane API for custom Kubernetes Network Observability
Kubernetes is built on the foundation of APIs and abstraction, and Calico leverages its extensibility to deliver network security and observability in both its commercial and open source versions. APIs are the special sauce that help automate and operationalize your Kubernetes platforms as part of a CI/CD pipeline and other GitOps workflows.
Calico OSS 3.30, introduces numerous battle-tested observability and security tools from our commercial editions. This includes the following key features:
- Goldmane – A gRPC-based API for accessing and capturing flow logs and policy evaluation metrics
- Whisker – A web-based tool for viewing and filtering flow logs to troubleshoot connectivity issues and author and maintain Calico network security policies
- GlobalStagedNetworkPolicy and StagedNetworkPolicy – New custom resources that allow you to audit the behavior of a new policy before you actively enforce it
- Calico Ingress Gateway – Our 100% upstream, enterprise-ready implementation of the Gateway API that is based on Envoy Gateway
- Calico Cloud ready – Every OSS cluster includes the required components to connect to a stateless, read-only, and free version of Calico Cloud
You may know about the Calico REST API, which allows you to manage Calico resources, such as Calico network policy, Calico IPAM configurations Continue reading
NAN089: A Career Journey of Exponential Learning
“If you don’t feel nervous in front of a challenge, you are not exponentially learning” is how today’s guest Christian Adell describes his own approach to career growth. Christian chats with us first about how he got started in IT, his various experiences in both networking and DevOps and then network automation. He leads a... Read more »Make your apps truly interactive with Cloudflare Realtime and RealtimeKit
Over the past few years, we’ve seen developers push the boundaries of what’s possible with real-time communication — tools for collaborative work, massive online watch parties, and interactive live classrooms are all exploding in popularity.
We use AI more and more in our daily lives. Text-based interactions are evolving into something more natural: voice and video. When users interact with the applications and tools that AI developers create, we have high expectations for response time and connection quality. Complex applications of AI are built on not just one tool, but a combination of tools, often from different providers which requires a well connected cloud to sit in the middle for the coordination of different AI tools.
Developers already use Workers, Workers AI, and our WebRTC SFU and TURN services to build powerful apps without needing to think about coordinating compute or media services to be closest to their user. It’s only natural for there to be a singular "Region: Earth" for real-time applications.
We're excited to introduce Cloudflare Realtime — a suite of products to help you make your apps truly interactive with real-time audio and video experiences. Cloudflare Realtime now brings together our SFU, STUN, and TURN Continue reading
Introducing Cloudflare Secrets Store (Beta): secure your secrets, simplify your workflow
Every cloud platform needs a secure way to store API tokens, keys, and credentials — welcome, Cloudflare Secrets Store! Today, we are very excited to announce and launch Secrets Store in beta. We built Cloudflare Secrets Store to help our customers centralize management, improve security, and restrict access to sensitive values on the Cloudflare platform.
Wherever secrets exist at Cloudflare – from our developer platform, to AI products, to Cloudflare One – we’ve built a centralized platform that allows you to manage them in one place.
We are excited to integrate Cloudflare Secrets Store with the whole portfolio of Cloudflare products, starting today with Cloudflare Workers.
If you have a secret you want to use across multiple Workers, you can now use the Cloudflare Secrets Store to do so. You can spin up your store from the dashboard or by using Wrangler CLI:
wrangler secrets-store store create <name>
Then, create a secret:
wrangler secrets-store secret create <store-id>
Once the secret is created, you can specify the binding to deploy in a Worker immediately.
secrets_store_secrets = [
{ binding = "'open_AI_KEY'", store_id= "abc123", secret_name = "open_AI_key"},
]
Last step – Continue reading
Cloudflare Snippets are now Generally Available
Cloudflare Snippets are now generally available (GA) for all paid plans, giving you a fast, flexible way to control HTTP traffic using lightweight JavaScript “code rules” — at no extra cost.
Need to transform headers dynamically, fine-tune caching, rewrite URLs, retry failed requests, replace expired links, throttle suspicious traffic, or validate authentication tokens? Snippets provide a production-ready solution built for performance, security, and control.
With GA, we’re introducing a new code editor to streamline writing and testing logic. This summer, we’re also rolling out an integration with Secrets Store — enabling you to bind and manage sensitive values like API keys directly in Snippets, securely and at scale.
Snippets bring the power of JavaScript to Cloudflare Rules, letting you write logic that runs before a request reaches your origin or after a response returns from upstream. They’re ideal when built-in rule actions aren’t quite enough. While Cloudflare Rules let you define traffic logic without code, Snippets extend that model with greater flexibility for advanced scenarios.
Think of Snippets as the ultra-fast “code layer” of Cloudflare Rules: the Ruleset Engine evaluates your rules and invokes Continue reading
Network performance update: Developer Week 2025
As the Internet has become enmeshed in our everyday lives, so has our need for speed. No one wants to wait when adding shoes to our shopping carts, or accessing corporate assets from across the globe. And as the Internet supports more and more of our critical infrastructure, speed becomes more than just a measure of how quickly we can place a takeout order. It becomes the connective tissue between the systems that keep us safe, healthy, and organized. Governments, financial institutions, healthcare ecosystems, transit — they increasingly rely on the Internet. This is why at Cloudflare, building the fastest network is our north star.
We’re happy to announce that we are the fastest network in 48% of the top 1000 networks by 95th percentile TCP connection time between November 2024, and March 2025, up from 44% in September 2024.
In this post, we’re going to share with you how our network performance has changed since our last post in September 2024, and talk about what makes us faster than other networks. But first, let’s talk a little bit about how we get this data.
It’s happened to all of us Continue reading
Introducing Workers Observability: logs, metrics, and queries – all in one place
We’re excited to announce Workers Observability – a new section in the Cloudflare Dashboard that allows you to query detailed log events across all Workers in your account to extract deeper insights.
In 2024, we set out to build the best first-party observability for any cloud platform. Since then, we’ve improved metrics reporting for all resources, launched Workers Logs to automatically ingest and store logs for Workers, and rebuilt real-time logs with improved filtering. However, observability insights have been limited to a single Worker.
Starting today, you can use Workers Observability to understand what is happening across all of your Workers:
Workers Metrics Dashboard (Beta): A single dashboard to view metrics and logs from all of your Workers
Query Builder (Beta): Construct structured queries to explore your logs, extract metrics from logs, create graphical and tabular visualizations, and save queries for faster future investigations.
Workers Logs: Now Generally Available, with a public API and improved invocation-based grouping.
The Query Builder allows you to interact with your logs, and answer the “why” to any question you have. You can find it by navigating to Workers & Pages > Observability in the dashboard.
Using the Query Builder, you Continue reading
Cisco Champion 8th year in a row
Just got the news—I’ve been selected as a Cisco Champion for the 8th year in a row! Truly honored and thankful to be part of such an inspiring community. This year is full of milestones. While Cisco celebrates its 40th birthday, I’m marking 10 years as a CCIE and 15 years from my CCNA—a journey that’s brought endless learning, challenges, and growth throughout my career. Being a Cisco Champion year after year has been a great way to stay connected with amazing people, share knowledge, and keep up with the ever-evolving tech world. Here’s to Cisco’s 40 years of networking—and
The post Cisco Champion 8th year in a row appeared first on How Does Internet Work.
UALink Fires First GPU Interconnect Salvo At Nvidia NVSwitch
Compute engine makers can do all they want to bring the performance of their devices on par or even reasonably close to that of Nvidia’s various GPU accelerators, but until they have something akin to the NVLink and NVSwitch memory fabric that Nvidia uses to leverage the performance of many GPUs at bandwidths that dwarf PCI-Express switches and latencies that dwarf Ethernet interconnects, they can never catch up. …
UALink Fires First GPU Interconnect Salvo At Nvidia NVSwitch was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
PP057: Behind the Scenes At Cisco: PSIRT, AI, CVEs, and VEX
Cisco Systems has a sprawling portfolio of home-grown and acquired products. What’s it like trying to find and address bugs and vulnerabilities across this portfolio? Omar Santos, a Distinguished Engineer at Cisco, gives us an inside look. We dig into how Cisco identifies security bugs using internal and external sources, the growing role of AI... Read more »Dell Tackles AI Infrastructure With Disaggregated Servers And Storage
It is funny how companies can find money – lots of money – when they think IT infrastructure spending can save them money, make them money, or do both at the same time. …
Dell Tackles AI Infrastructure With Disaggregated Servers And Storage was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Your frontend, backend, and database — now in one Cloudflare Worker
In September 2024, we introduced beta support for hosting, storing, and serving static assets for free on Cloudflare Workers — something that was previously only possible on Cloudflare Pages. Being able to host these assets — your client-side JavaScript, HTML, CSS, fonts, and images — was a critical missing piece for developers looking to build a full-stack application within a single Worker.
Today we’re announcing ten big improvements to building apps on Cloudflare. All together, these new additions allow you to build and host projects ranging from simple static sites to full-stack applications, all on Cloudflare Workers:
Cloudflare Workers now provides production ready, generally available (GA) support for React Router v7 (Remix), Astro, Hono, Vue.js, Nuxt, Svelte (SvelteKit), and more, with GA support for more frameworks including Next.js, Angular, and SolidJS (SolidStart) to follow in Q2 2025.
You can build complete full-stack apps on Workers without a framework: you can “just use Vite" and React together, and build a backend API in the same Worker. See our Vite + React template for an example.
The adapter for Next.js — @opennextjs/cloudflare, introduced in September Continue reading
Deploy your Next.js app to Cloudflare Workers with the Cloudflare adapter for OpenNext
We first announced the Cloudflare adapter for OpenNext at Builder Day 2024. It transforms Next.js applications to enable them to run on Cloudflare’s infrastructure.
Over the seven months since that September announcement, we have been working hard to improve the adapter. It is now more tightly integrated with OpenNext to enable supporting many more Next.js features. We kept improving the Node.js compatibility of Workers and unenv was also improved to polyfill the Node.js features not yet implemented by the runtime.
With all of this work, we are proud to announce the 1.0.0-beta release of @opennextjs/cloudflare. Using the Cloudflare adapter is now the preferred way to deploy Next applications to the Cloudflare platform, instead of Next on Pages.
Read on to learn what is possible today, and about our plans for the coming months.
OpenNext is a build tool designed to transform Next.js applications into packages optimized for deployment across various platforms. Initially created for serverless environments on AWS Lambda, OpenNext has expanded its capabilities to support a wider range of environments, including Cloudflare Workers and traditional Node.js servers.
By integrating with the OpenNext codebase, the Cloudflare adapter is now able to Continue reading
Pools across the sea: how Hyperdrive speeds up access to databases and why we’re making it free
In acknowledgement of its pivotal role in building distributed applications that rely on regional databases, we’re making Hyperdrive available on the free plan of Cloudflare Workers!
Hyperdrive enables you to build performant, global apps on Workers with your existing SQL databases. Tell it your database connection string, bring your existing drivers, and Hyperdrive will make connecting to your database faster. No major refactors or convoluted configuration required.
Over the past year, Hyperdrive has become a key service for teams that want to build their applications on Workers and connect to SQL databases. This includes our own engineering teams, with Hyperdrive serving as the tool of choice to connect from Workers to our own Postgres clusters for many of the control-plane actions of our billing, D1, R2, and Workers KV teams (just to name a few).
This has highlighted for us that Hyperdrive is a fundamental building block, and it solves a common class of problems for which there isn’t a great alternative. We want to make it possible for everyone building on Workers to connect to their database of choice with the best performance possible, using the drivers and frameworks they already know Continue reading
Build global MySQL apps using Cloudflare Workers and Hyperdrive
Today, we’re announcing support for MySQL in Cloudflare Workers and Hyperdrive. You can now build applications on Workers that connect to your MySQL databases directly, no matter where they’re hosted, with native MySQL drivers, and with optimal performance.
Connecting to MySQL databases from Workers has been an area we’ve been focusing on for quite some time. We want you to build your apps on Workers with your existing data, even if that data exists in a SQL database in us-east-1. But connecting to traditional SQL databases from Workers has been challenging: it requires making stateful connections to regional databases with drivers that haven’t been designed for the Workers runtime.
After multiple attempts at solving this problem for Postgres, Hyperdrive emerged as our solution that provides the best of both worlds: it supports existing database drivers and libraries while also providing best-in-class performance. And it’s such a critical part of connecting to databases from Workers that we’re making it free (check out the Hyperdrive free tier announcement).
With new Node.js compatibility improvements and Hyperdrive support for the MySQL wire protocol, we’re happy to say MySQL support for Cloudflare Workers has been achieved. If you want to Continue reading
“Just use Vite”… with the Workers runtime
Today, we are announcing the 1.0 release of the Cloudflare Vite plugin, as well as official support for React Router v7!
Over the past few years, Vite’s meteoric rise has seen it become one of the most popular build tools for web development, with a large ecosystem and vibrant community. The Cloudflare Vite plugin brings the Workers runtime right into its beating heart! Previously, the Vite dev server would always run your server code in Node.js, even if you were deploying to Cloudflare Workers. By using the new Environment API, released experimentally in Vite 6, your Worker code can now run inside the native Cloudflare Workers runtime (workerd). This means that the dev server matches the production behavior as closely as possible, and provides confidence as you develop and deploy your applications.
Vite 6 includes the most significant changes to Vite’s architecture since its inception and unlocks many new possibilities for the ecosystem. Fundamental to this is the Environment API, which enables the Vite dev server to interact with any number of custom runtime environments. This means that it is now possible to run server code in alternative JavaScript runtimes, such as our Continue reading
HS100: Lead Without Lying: The (Radical) Strategy of Honesty
Is it actually possible to run a team without lying? Steven Gaffney, author of the book, “Just Be Honest”, joins Johna and John to talk about why being honest is harder than it sounds–and how (and why) to do it anyway. Steven spends his career advising science and technology leaders about how to be more... Read more »