What Happens When Hyperscalers And Clouds Buy Most Servers And Storage?

We have a long-standing joke that dates from the early 2000s, when the hyperscalers – there were not yet cloud builders as we now know them – started having hundreds of millions of users and millions of servers and storage arrays to run applications for them at the same time there was the beginnings of consolidation among the OEMs who created the servers and storage used by nearly all enterprises, including dot-com startups. …

What Happens When Hyperscalers And Clouds Buy Most Servers And Storage? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

NAN060: Python for Network Engineering with Kirk Byers (Part 2)

Tracking EC2 Instances used by EKS with AWS CLI

As a sort of follow-up to my previous post on using the AWS CLI to track the specific Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs) used by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) cluster nodes, this post focuses on the EC2 instances themselves. I feel this is less of a “problem” than tracking ENIs, but I wanted to share this information nevertheless. In this post, I’ll show you which AWS CLI command to use to list all the EC2 instances associated with a particular EKS cluster.

If you read the previous post on tracking ENIs used by EKS, you might think that you could use a very similar AWS CLI command (aws ec2 describe-instances instead of aws ec2 describe-network-interfaces) to track the EC2 instances in a cluster—and you’d be mostly correct. Like the ENIs, EKS does add a cluster-specific tag to all EC2 instances in the cluster. However, just to make life interesting, the tag used for EC2 instances is not the same as the tag used for ENIs. (If someone at AWS knows of a technical reason why these tags are different, I’d love to hear it.)

Instead of using the cluster.k8s.amazonaws.com/name tag that is used Continue reading

Power Efficiency, Customization Will Drive Arm’s Role In AI

More than a decade ago, executives at Arm Ltd saw the energy costs in datacenters soaring and sensed an opportunity to extend the low-power architecture of its eponymous systems-on-a-chip that has dominated the mobile phone markets from the get-go and took over the embedded device market from PowerPC into enterprise servers. …

Power Efficiency, Customization Will Drive Arm’s Role In AI was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Navigating the NaaS Era with a Customer-First Approach

How Cloudflare Cloud Email Security protects against the evolving threat of QR phishing

In the ever-evolving landscape of cyber threats, a subtle yet potent form of phishing has emerged — quishing, short for QR phishing. It has been 30 years since the invention of QR codes, yet quishing still poses a significant risk, especially after the era of COVID, when QR codes became the norm to check statuses, register for events, and even order food.

Since 2020, Cloudflare’s cloud email security solution (previously known as Area 1) has been at the forefront of fighting against quishing attacks, taking a proactive stance in dissecting them to better protect our customers. Let’s delve into the mechanisms behind QR phishing, explore why QR codes are a preferred tool for attackers, and review how Cloudflare contributes to the fight against this evolving threat.

How quishing works

The impact of phishing and quishing are quite similar, as both can result in users having their credentials compromised, devices compromised, or even financial loss. They also leverage malicious attachments or websites to provide bad actors the ability to access something they normally wouldn’t be able to. Where they differ is that quishing is typically highly targeted and uses a QR code to further obfuscate itself from detection.

Since Continue reading

FRRouting Loopback Interfaces and OSPF Costs

TL&DR: FRRouting advertises the IP prefix on the lo loopback interface with zero cost.

Let’s start with the background story. When we added FRRouting containers support to netlab, someone decided to use lo0 as the loopback interface name. That device doesn’t exist in a typical Linux container, but it’s not hard to add it:

$ ip link add lo0 type dummy
$ ip link set dev lo0 up

DNSSEC and .nz

Ampere Readies 256-Core CPU Beast, Awaits The AI Inference Wave

How many cores is enough for server CPUs? All that we can get, and then some. …

Ampere Readies 256-Core CPU Beast, Awaits The AI Inference Wave was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

PP010: CISA’s Cyber Incident Reporting Law: What You Need to Know

HW025: Easy as Pi: The WLAN Pro’s Swiss Army Knife

DDoS threat report for 2024 Q1

Welcome to the 17th edition of Cloudflare’s DDoS threat report. This edition covers the DDoS threat landscape along with key findings as observed from the Cloudflare network during the first quarter of 2024.

What is a DDoS attack?

But first, a quick recap. A DDoS attack, short for Distributed Denial of Service attack, is a type of cyber attack that aims to take down or disrupt Internet services such as websites or mobile apps and make them unavailable for users. DDoS attacks are usually done by flooding the victim's server with more traffic than it can handle.

To learn more about DDoS attacks and other types of attacks, visit our Learning Center.

Accessing previous reports

Quick reminder that you can access previous editions of DDoS threat reports on the Cloudflare blog. They are also available on our interactive hub, Cloudflare Radar. On Radar, you can find global Internet traffic, attacks, and technology trends and insights, with drill-down and filtering capabilities, so you can zoom in on specific countries, industries, and networks. There’s also a free API allowing academics, data sleuths, and other web enthusiasts to investigate Internet trends across the globe.

To learn how we prepare this report, refer Continue reading

Unintended Consequences of IPv6 SLAAC

One of my friends is running a large IPv6 network and has already experienced a shortage of IPv6 neighbor cache on some of his switches. Digging deeper into the root causes, he discovered:

In my larger environments, I see significant neighbor table cache entries, especially on network segments with hosts that make many long-term connections. These hosts have 10 to 20 addresses that maintain state over days or weeks to accomplish their processes.

What’s going on? A perfect storm of numerous unrelated annoyances:

Los Alamos Pushes The Memory Wall With “Venado” Supercomputer

Today is the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the “Venado” supercomputer, which was hinted at back in April 2021 when Nvidia announced its plans for its first datacenter-class Arm server CPU and which was talked about in some detail – but not really enough to suit our taste for speeds and feeds – back in May 2022 by the folks at Los Alamos National Laboratory where Venado is situated. …

Los Alamos Pushes The Memory Wall With “Venado” Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Tracking ENIs used by EKS with AWS CLI

I’ve recently been spinning up lots of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) clusters (using Pulumi, of course) in order to test various Cilium configurations. Along the way, I’ve wanted to verify the association and configuration of Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs) being used by the EKS cluster. In this post, I’ll share a couple of AWS CLI commands that will help you track the ENIs used by an EKS cluster.

When I first set out to find the easiest way to track the ENIs used by the nodes in an EKS cluster, I thought that AWS resource tags might be the key. I was right—but not in the way I expected. In the Pulumi program (written in Go) that I use to create EKS clusters, I made sure to tag all the resources.

For example, when defining the EKS cluster itself I assigned tags:

eksCluster, err := eks.NewCluster(ctx, "eks-cluster", &eks.ClusterArgs{
    Name:    pulumi.Sprintf("%s-test", regionNames[awsRegion]),
    // Some code omitted here for brevity
    Tags: pulumi.StringMap{
        "Name":   pulumi.Sprintf("%s-test", regionNames[awsRegion]),
        "owner":  pulumi.String(ownerTag),
         Continue reading

Why I joined Cloudflare as Chief Partner Officer

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, the decision to join a company is not just about making a career move. Instead, it's about finding a mission, a community, and a platform to make a meaningful impact. Cloudflare’s remarkable technology and incredibly driven teams are two reasons why I’m excited to join the team.

Joining Cloudflare as the Chief Partner Officer is my commitment to driving innovation and impact across the Internet through our channel partnerships. In each conversation throughout the interview process, I found myself getting more and more excited about the opportunity. Several former trusted colleagues who have recently joined Cloudflare repeatedly told me how amazing the people and company culture are. A positive culture driven by people that are passionate about their work is key. We work too hard not to have fun while doing it.

When it comes to partnerships, I see the immense value that partners can provide. My philosophy revolves around fostering collaborative, value-driven partnerships. It is about building ecosystems where we jointly navigate challenges, innovate together, and collectively thrive in a rapidly evolving global marketplace where the success of our channel partners directly influences our collective achievements. It also involves investing in their growth Continue reading

NB474: Intel Strikes Back In GPU Wars; The Fork Is Strong With Valkey

Tech Bytes: Building an Effective Security Platform with Fortinet (Sponsored)

Where Are You on the Cybersecurity Readiness Index? Cisco Thinks You’re Probably Overconfident

New Course: Coding Skills for Network Engineers

This Friday, Marlon Bailey and I will be teaching a new four-hour class on coding skills for network engineers over on Safari Books Online through Pearson. From the course description:

Network engineers are increasingly expected to know how to perform basic coding, like building scripts to gather information and build or maintain an automation system. In larger organizations with full-time coders, network engineers are expected to effectively work with coders, on their own turf, to build and maintain network automation systems. All of these tasks require a basic knowledge of the structure and terminology of programming. There are a lot of courses that show you how to build your first program, or how to perform basic tasks using common programming languages—this course is different. This course will help you build a “mental map” of the software development space, gathering ideas and patterns learned across years into a simple-to-understand format. In this course you will learn data structures, program flow control, and—most importantly—how to structure software for efficiency and maintainability over the long haul.

For anyone who doesn’t know Marlon, you can find his LinkedIn profile here.

Register for the class here.