A Community Group for Web-interoperable JavaScript runtimes

A Community Group for Web-interoperable JavaScript runtimes
A Community Group for Web-interoperable JavaScript runtimes

Today, Cloudflare – in partnership with Vercel, Shopify, and individual core contributors to both Node.js and Deno – is announcing the establishment of a new Community Group focused on the interoperable implementation of standardized web APIs in non-web browser, JavaScript-based development environments.

The W3C and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (or WHATWG) have long pioneered the efforts to develop standardized APIs and features for the web as a development environment. APIs such as fetch(), ReadableStream and WritableStream, URL, URLPattern, TextEncoder, and more have become ubiquitous and valuable components of modern web development. However, the charters of these existing groups have always been explicitly limited to considering only the specific needs of web browsers, resulting in the development of standards that are not readily optimized for any environment that does not look exactly like a web browser. A good example of this effect is that some non-browser implementations of the Streams standard are an order of magnitude slower than the equivalent Node.js streams and Deno reader implementations due largely to how the API is specified in the standard.

Serverless environments such as Cloudflare Workers, or runtimes like Node.js and Deno, have Continue reading

Cloudflare and StackBlitz partner to deliver an instant and secure developer experience

Cloudflare and StackBlitz partner to deliver an instant and secure developer experience
Cloudflare and StackBlitz partner to deliver an instant and secure developer experience

We are starting our Platform Week focused on the most important aspect of a developer platform — developers. At the core of every announcement this week is developer experience. In other words, it doesn’t matter how groundbreaking the technology is if at the end of the day we’re not making your job as a developer easier.

Earlier today, we announced the general availability of a new Wrangler version, making it easier than ever to get started and develop with Workers. We’re also excited to announce that we’re partnering with StackBlitz. Together, we will bring the Wrangler experience closer to you – directly to your browser, with no dependencies required!

StackBlitz is a web-based code editor provided with a fresh and fast development environment on each page load. StackBlitz’s development environments are powered by WebContainers,  the first WebAssembly-based operating system, which boots secure development environments entirely within your browser tab.

Introducing new Wrangler, running in your browser

Cloudflare and StackBlitz partner to deliver an instant and secure developer experience

One of the Wrangler improvements we announced today is the option to easily run Wrangler in any Node.js environment, including your browser which is now powered by WebContainers!

StackBlitz’s WebContainers are optimized for starting any project within seconds, including the installation of Continue reading

10 things I love about Wrangler v2.0

10 things I love about Wrangler v2.0
10 things I love about Wrangler v2.0

Last November, we announced the beta release of a full rewrite of Wrangler, our CLI for building Cloudflare Workers. Since then, we’ve been working round the clock to make sure it's feature complete, bug-free, and easy to use. We are proud to announce that Wrangler goes public today for general usage, and can’t wait to see what people build with it!

Rewrites can be scary. Our goal for this version of Wrangler was backward compatibility with the original version, while significantly improving the developer experience. I'd like to take this opportunity to present 10 reasons why you should upgrade to the new Wrangler!

1. It's simpler to install:

10 things I love about Wrangler v2.0
A simpler way to get started.

Previously, folks would have to install @cloudflare/wrangler globally on a system. This made it hard to use different versions of Wrangler across projects. Further, it was hard to install on some CI systems because of lack of access to a user's root folder.  Sometimes, folks would forget to add the @cloudflare scope when installing, confusing them when a completely unrelated package was installed and didn't work as expected.

Let's fix that. We've simplified this by now publishing to the wrangler package, so you can run npm Continue reading

Continuous Detection and Mitigation (CDM)

Overview

What is CDM?

The CDM model

Ansible for security automation

Ansible for the CDM use case

Summary

Where to go next

Overview

Per NASCIO, the top priority for state CIOs is cybersecurity and risk management. A key focus for this initiative is to leverage the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) framework provided by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). In this blog post we will explore a high level view of the CDM framework, review Ansible’s role in security automation and finally understand how Ansible can help agencies with Day 0 through Day 2 tasks while working with the CDM framework.

What is CDM?

Today more than ever, cyber threats mean that securing and defending our networks are of utmost importance. A recent report published by the National League of Cities revealed that an astonishing 44% of local governments report they experience a cyberattack daily or even hourly. So it is not surprising to see that cybersecurity and risk management is the number one priority for our state CIOs. With that background, let’s understand the CDM program.

Source: https://www.cisa.gov/cdm-training

 

The CDM framework is defined by CISA. CDM provides capabilities and tools that help identify Continue reading

Open source Managed Components for Cloudflare Zaraz

Open source Managed Components for Cloudflare Zaraz
Open source Managed Components for Cloudflare Zaraz

In early 2020, we sat down and tried thinking if there’s a way to load third-party tools on the Internet without slowing down websites, without making them less secure, and without sacrificing users’ privacy. In the evening, after scanning through thousands of websites, our answer was “well, sort of”. It seemed possible: many types of third-party tools are merely collecting information in the browser and then sending it to a remote server. We could theoretically figure out what it is that they’re collecting, and then instead just collect it once efficiently, and send it server-side to their servers, mimicking their data schema. If we do this, we can get rid of loading their JavaScript code inside websites completely. This means no more risk of malicious scripts, no more performance losses, and fewer privacy concerns.

But the answer wasn’t a definite “YES!” because we realized this is going to be very complicated. We looked into the network requests of major third-party scripts, and often it seemed cryptic. We set ourselves up for a lot of work, looking at the network requests made by tools and trying to figure out what they are doing – What is this parameter? When is Continue reading

The next chapter for Cloudflare Workers: open source

The next chapter for Cloudflare Workers: open source
The next chapter for Cloudflare Workers: open source

450,000 developers have used Cloudflare Workers since we launched.

When we announced Cloudflare Workers nearly five years ago, we had no idea if we’d ever be in this position. But a lot of care, hard work — not to mention dogfooding — later, we’ve been absolutely blown away by the use cases and applications built on our developer platform, not to mention the community that’s grown around the product.

My job isn’t just speaking to developers who are already using Cloudflare Workers, however. I spend a lot of time talking to developers who aren’t yet using Workers, too. Despite how cool the tech is — the performance, the ability to just code without worrying about anything else like containers, and the total cost advantages — there are two things that cause developers to hesitate in engaging with us on Workers.

The first: they worry about being locked in. No matter how bullish on the technology you are, if you’re betting the future of a company on a development platform, you don’t want the possibility of being held to ransom. And second: as a developer, you want a local development environment to quickly iterate and test your changes. These concerns might Continue reading

The three-way race for GPU dominance in the data center

The modern graphics processing unit (GPU) started out as an accelerator for Windows video games, but over the last 20 years has morphed into an enterprise server processor for high-performance computing and artificial-intelligence applications.Now GPUs are at the tip of the performance spear used in supercomputing, AI training and inference, drug research, financial modeling, and medical imaging. They have also been applied to more mainstream tasks for situations when CPUs just aren’t fast enough, as in GPU-powered relational databases. [ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]To read this article in full, please click here

Intel’s Gelsinger predicts chip shortage will run through 2024

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger expects chip shortages will continue into 2024 due to a lack of manufacturing equipment and tools to make the chips. Gelsinger made the comments during an interview with CNBC's TechCheck about Intel’s first quarter earnings. While the company did well in Q1, the outlook for Q2 is not as positive, and Intel stock took a hit for it.Semiconductor manufacturers have faced a number of challenges to meet demand, most notably production shutdowns due to the Covid pandemic. However, Gelsinger specifically linked the shortages to a lack of manufacturing equipment and difficulty building new semiconductor fabrication plants, or fabs.To read this article in full, please click here

The three-way race for GPU dominance in the data center

The modern graphics processing unit (GPU) started out as an accelerator for Windows video games, but over the last 20 years has morphed into an enterprise server processor for high-performance computing and artificial-intelligence applications.Now GPUs are at the tip of the performance spear used in supercomputing, AI training and inference, drug research, financial modeling, and medical imaging. They have also been applied to more mainstream tasks for situations when CPUs just aren’t fast enough, as in GPU-powered relational databases. [ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]To read this article in full, please click here

Intel’s Gelsinger predicts chip shortage will run through 2024

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger expects chip shortages will continue into 2024 due to a lack of manufacturing equipment and tools to make the chips. Gelsinger made the comments during an interview with CNBC's TechCheck about Intel’s first quarter earnings. While the company did well in Q1, the outlook for Q2 is not as positive, and Intel stock took a hit for it.Semiconductor manufacturers have faced a number of challenges to meet demand, most notably production shutdowns due to the Covid pandemic. However, Gelsinger specifically linked the shortages to a lack of manufacturing equipment and difficulty building new semiconductor fabrication plants, or fabs.To read this article in full, please click here

Living with Small Forwarding Tables

A friend of mine working for a mid-sized networking vendor sent me an intriguing question:

We have a product using an old ASIC that has 12K forwarding entries, and would like to extend its lifetime. I know you were mentioning some useful tricks, would you happen to remember what they were?

This challenge has no perfect solution, but there are at least three tricks I’ve encountered so far (as always, comments are most welcome):

Living with Small Forwarding Tables

A friend of mine working for a mid-sized networking vendor sent me an intriguing question:

We have a product using an old ASIC that has 12K forwarding entries, and would like to extend its lifetime. I know you were mentioning some useful tricks, would you happen to remember what they were?

This challenge has no perfect solution, but there are at least three tricks I’ve encountered so far (as always, comments are most welcome):

Welcome to Platform Week

Welcome to Platform Week
Welcome to Platform Week

Principled. It’s one of Cloudflare’s three core values (alongside curiosity and transparency).

It’s a word that we came back to quite a bit in thinking through a question that has been foundational in driving us for this year’s Platform Week: what makes a truly great developer platform?

Of course, when it comes to evaluating developer platforms, the temptation is to focus on the “feeds and speeds” part of the equation. Who is the fastest? Who has the coolest tech? Who lets you do stuff that previously you could not?

Undoubtedly, these are all important questions. But we realized that the fun and shiny things which are often answers to these questions can easily become distractions from the true promise of developing on the Internet — and even traps that the less principled developer platforms can use to lure you into their arms.

The promise being, of course: that you can pull together solutions from a variety of different providers, to build something greater than what you’d be able to do with any one of them alone. That you can build something based on whatever is best when you sit down to create your application. And of course, if something better Continue reading

Announcing our Spring Developer Speaker Series

Announcing our Spring Developer Speaker Series
Announcing our Spring Developer Speaker Series

We love developers.

Late last year, we hosted Full Stack Week, with a focus on new products, features, and partnerships to continue growing Cloudflare’s developer platform. As part of Full Stack Week, we also hosted the Developer Speaker Series, bringing 12 speakers in the web dev community to our 24/7 online TV channel, Cloudflare TV. The talks covered topics across the web development ecosystem, which you can rewatch at any time.

We loved organizing the Developer Speaker Series last year. But as developers know far too well, our ecosystem changes rapidly: what may have been cutting edge back in November 2021 can be old news just a few months later in 2022. That’s what makes conferences and live speaking events so valuable: they serve as an up-to-date reference of best practices and future-facing developments in the industry. With that in mind, we're excited to announce a new edition of our Developer Speaker Series for 2022!

Check out the eleven expert web dev speakers, developers, and educators that we’ve invited to speak live on Cloudflare TV! Here are the talks you’ll be able to watch, starting tomorrow morning (May 9 at 09:00 PT):

The Bootcampers Companion – Caitlyn Greffly
In Continue reading

Cisco Catalyst Stack Upgrade

Well… It will reboot your whole switch stack at once, In case you were wondering. But it has a neat feature of automatic rollback to the previous IOS XE version if something goes south with the newly upgraded switches. The same goes for non-stacked Cisco Catalyst C9200 and C9300 switches, but the question was, and the answer is hard to find if the stack would reload members sequentially or it would just reload all members at once. The answer is of course the least good option which makes the upgrade impossible without network outage even if other devices are connected

The post Cisco Catalyst Stack Upgrade appeared first on How Does Internet Work.