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Announcing Workers for Platforms: making every application on the Internet more programmable

As a business, whether a startup or Fortune 500 company, your number one priority is to make your customers happy and successful with your product. To your customers, however, success and happiness sometimes seems to be just one feature away.

“If only you could customize X, we’ll be able to use your product” - the largest prospect in your pipeline. “If you just let us do Y,  we’ll expand our usage of your product by 10x” - your most strategic existing customer.

You want your product to be everything to everybody, but engineering can only keep up so quickly, so, what gives?

Today, we’re announcing Workers for Platforms, our tool suite to help make any product programmable, and help our customers deliver value to their customers and developers instantaneously.

A more programmable interface

One way to give your customers the ability to programmatically interact with your product is by providing them with APIs. That is a big part of why APIs are so prolific today — enabling code (whether your own, or that of a 3rd party) to engage with your applications is nothing short of revolutionary.

But there’s still a problem. While APIs can give developers the ability Continue reading

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Service Bindings are generally available, with efficient pricing

Today, we’re happy to unveil a new way to communicate between your Workers. In the spirit of baking more and more flexibility into our Developer Platform, our team has been hard at work building a new API to facilitate Worker to Worker communication: Service Bindings. Service Bindings allow your Workers to send requests to other Workers Services, from your code, without those requests going over the Internet. It opens up a world of composability that was previously closed off by a difficult interface, and makes it a lot easier for you to build complex applications on our developer platform.

Service Bindings allow teams to segment application logic across multiple Workers. By segmenting your logic, your teams can now build with more confidence by only deploying narrowly scoped changes to your applications, instead of recommitting the whole application every time. Service Bindings give developers both composability and confidence. We’ve seen some excellent uses so far, and today we’ll go through one of the more common examples. Alongside this functionality, we'll show you how Cloudflare’s cost efficiency will save you money.

Example: An API Gateway

Service Bindings allow you to easily expand the number of services running on a single request. Developers Continue reading

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Workers visibility: announcing Logpush for Worker’s Trace Events

Writing an application is like building a rocket. Countless hours in development and thousands of moving parts all come down to one moment - launch day. Picture the countdown: T minus 10 seconds. The entire team is making sure that things are running smoothly by monitoring dashboards that measure the health of every part of the system.

It’s every developer’s dream to get the level of visibility that NASA has in their mission control room, but for their own code. For flight directors and engineering directors alike, it’s important to have visibility into the systems that are built throughout development and after release. Today, we’re excited to announce Logpush for Worker’s Trace Events, making it easier than ever to gain visibility into applications built on Workers.

Workers Visibility Today

Today, we have lots of tools that are used to find out what’s happening in a Worker.

• Workers metrics & analytics
• Workers logs on the dashboard
• wrangler tail
• Observability Ecosystem Partners: Sentry, New Relic, Datadog

These tools are awesome for debugging, generalizing trends and monitoring Workers on third parties. They emphasize ease of use and make it effortless to get visibility quickly from your Workers.

As Workers have evolved, we’re Continue reading

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A new era for Cloudflare Pages builds

Music is flowing through your headphones. Your hands are flying across the keyboard. You’re stringing together a masterpiece of code. The momentum is building up as you put on the finishing touches of your project. And at last, it’s ready for the world to see. Heart pounding with excitement and the feeling of victory, you push changes to the main branch…. only to end up waiting for the build to execute each step and spit out the build logs.

Starting afresh

Since the launch of Cloudflare Pages, there is no doubt that the build experience has been its biggest source of criticism. From the amount of waiting to inflexibility of CI workflow, Pages had a lot of opportunity for growth and improvement. With Pages, our North Star has always been designing a developer platform that fits right into your workflow and oozes simplicity. User pain points have been and always will be our priority, which is why today we are thrilled to share a list of exciting updates to our build times, logs and settings!

Over the last three quarters, we implemented a new build infrastructure that speeds up Pages builds, so you can iterate quickly and efficiently. In February, Continue reading

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Introducing Direct Uploads for Cloudflare Pages

With Pages, we are constantly looking for ways to improve the developer experience. One of the areas we are keen to focus on is removing any barriers to entry for our users regardless of their use case or existing set up. Pages is an all-in-one solution with an automated Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline to help you build and deploy your site with one commit to your projects’ repositories hosted on GitHub or GitLab.

However, we realize that this excluded repositories that used a source control provider that Pages didn’t yet support and required varying build complexities. Even though Pages continues to build first-class integrations – for example, we added GitLab support in November 2021 – there are numerous providers to choose from, some of which use `git` alternatives like SVN or Mercurial for their version control systems. It’s also common for larger companies to self-host their project repositories, guarded by a mix of custom authentication and/or proxy protocols.

Pages needed a solution that worked regardless of the repository’s source location and accommodate build project’s complexity. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Pages now supports direct uploads to give you more power to build and iterate how you want and with Continue reading

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Cohesity launches FortKnox to protect data from ransomware attacks

Data management specialist Cohesity is launching a new data isolation and recovery tool called FortKnox, in a bid to help customers protect their data from ransomware attacks.FortKnox provides an additional layer of off-site protection for customers by keeping data in a secure ‘vault,’ with physical separation, network and management isolation to keep threat actors from accessing sensitive data.An object lock requires a minimum of two or more people to approve critical actions, such as changes of vault policy, and access can be managed using granular role-based access control, multi-factor authentication, and encryption both in-flight and at rest.To read this article in full, please click here

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Cohesity launches FortKnox to protect data from ransomware attacks

Data management specialist Cohesity is launching a new data isolation and recovery tool called FortKnox, in a bid to help customers protect their data from ransomware attacks.FortKnox provides an additional layer of off-site protection for customers by keeping data in a secure ‘vault,’ with physical separation, network and management isolation to keep threat actors from accessing sensitive data.An object lock requires a minimum of two or more people to approve critical actions, such as changes of vault policy, and access can be managed using granular role-based access control, multi-factor authentication, and encryption both in-flight and at rest.To read this article in full, please click here

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IPv6 Unique Local Addresses (ULA) Made Useless

Recent news from the Department of Unintended Consequences: RFC 6724 changed the IPv4/IPv6 source/destination address selection rules a decade ago, and it seems that the common interpretation of those rules makes IPv6 Unique Local Addresses (ULA) less preferred than the IPv4 addresses, at least according to the recent Unintended Operational Issues With ULA draft by Nick Buraglio, Chris Cummings and Russ White.

End result: If you use only ULA addresses in your dual-stack network¹, IPv6 won’t be used at all. Even worse, if you use ULA addresses together with global IPv6 addresses (GUA) as a fallback mechanism, there might be hidden gotchas that you won’t discover until you turn off IPv4. Looks like someone did a Truly Great Job, and ULA stands for Useless Local Addresses.

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IPv6 Unique Local Addresses (ULA) Made Useless

Recent news from the Department of Unintended Consequences: RFC 6724 changed the IPv4/IPv6 source/destination address selection rules a decade ago, and it seems that the common interpretation of those rules makes IPv6 Unique Local Addresses (ULA) less preferred than the IPv4 addresses, at least according to the recent Unintended Operational Issues With ULA draft by Nick Buraglio, Chris Cummings and Russ White.

End result: If you use only ULA addresses in your dual-stack network¹, IPv6 won’t be used at all. Even worse, if you use ULA addresses together with global IPv6 addresses (GUA) as a fallback mechanism, there might be hidden gotchas that you won’t discover until you turn off IPv4. Looks like someone did a Truly Great Job, and ULA stands for Useless Local Addresses.

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Running a Linux terminal in your Windows browser

If you want to try using a Linux terminal and aren’t sitting anywhere near a Linux system, don’t despair. There are some services that will allow you to run a Linux terminal inside a browser. This post examines some of these and should give you a feel for what you can do and the performance you might experience.The Linux terminal sessions described here were all run on a Windows system using a Chrome browser. While you could as easily run a Linux terminal in a browser on a Linux system, you’d likely be less motivated to do so.JSLinux JSLinux is essentially a computer that’s implemented in JavaScript. So, all you need to do is open a browser and type the right URL to get started.To read this article in full, please click here

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Running a Linux terminal in your Windows browser

If you want to try using a Linux terminal and aren’t sitting anywhere near a Linux system, don’t despair. There are some services that will allow you to run a Linux terminal inside a browser. This post examines some of these and should give you a feel for what you can do and the performance you might experience.The Linux terminal sessions described here were all run on a Windows system using a Chrome browser. While you could as easily run a Linux terminal in a browser on a Linux system, you’d likely be less motivated to do so.JSLinux JSLinux is essentially a computer that’s implemented in JavaScript. So, all you need to do is open a browser and type the right URL to get started.To read this article in full, please click here

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Come join us at Cloudflare Connect New York this Thursday!

We take a break from Platform Week to share big news – we’re going to New York this week for our Cloudflare Connect customer event.

We’re packing our bags, getting on planes and heading to New York to do our first live customer event since 2019 and we could not be more excited.  It is time with you – the people building, delivering and securing the apps and networks we know and trust – that are the inspiration for the innovation we deliver.  We can’t wait to spend time with you.

Our co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince will kick off the day with his view from the top.  We’ll then be breaking out into focused conversations to dig in on our latest product news and roadmaps.

Excited about what we’re talking about for Platform Week?  Come chat with the Workers team in person and hear more about the roadmap.

Intrigued by the latest DDoS stats we posted and want to learn more?  Meet with the team analyzing the attacks and learn about where we go from here.

Not sure where to start your Zero Trust journey?  We’ll talk you through what we’re seeing and introduce you to other customers who Continue reading

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Tech Bytes: How Nokia’s Digital Sandbox Enhances Intent-Based Automation (Sponsored)

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we dive into sponsor Nokia's Digital Sandbox, which creates a real-time model of a data center network by extracting state and configuration from leaf and spine switches. Network engineers can use this model to test and validate changes. We discuss how the sandbox works and how it ties into Nokia's approach to intent-based networking.

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Tech Bytes: How Nokia’s Digital Sandbox Enhances Intent-Based Automation (Sponsored)

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we dive into sponsor Nokia's Digital Sandbox, which creates a real-time model of a data center network by extracting state and configuration from leaf and spine switches. Network engineers can use this model to test and validate changes. We discuss how the sandbox works and how it ties into Nokia's approach to intent-based networking.

The post Tech Bytes: How Nokia’s Digital Sandbox Enhances Intent-Based Automation (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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How Much Of A Premium Will Nvidia Charge For Hopper GPUs?

There is increasing competition coming at Nvidia in the AI training and inference market, and at the same time, researchers at Google, Cerebras, and SambaNova are showing off the benefits of porting sections of traditional HPC simulation and modeling code to their matrix math engines. …

How Much Of A Premium Will Nvidia Charge For Hopper GPUs? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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BGP Policy (Part 7)

At the most basic level, there are only three BGP policies: pushing traffic through a specific exit point; pulling traffic through a specific entry point; preventing a remote AS (more than one AS hop away) from transiting your AS to reach a specific destination. In this series I’m going to discuss different reasons for these kinds of policies, and different ways to implement them in interdomain BGP.

In this post—the last post in this series—I’m going to cover do not transit options from the perspective of AS65001 in the following network—

There are cases where an operator does not traffic to be forwarded to them through some specific AS, whether directly connected or multiple hops away. For instance, AS65001 and AS65005 might be operated by companies in politically unfriendly nations. In this case, AS65001 may be legally required to reject traffic that has passed through the nation in which AS65005 is located. There are at least three mechanisms in BGP that are used, in different situations, to enforce this kind of policy.

Do Not Advertise Communities (Provider Specific)

Many providers supply communities a customer can use to block the advertisement of their routes to a particular AS. For instance, if Continue reading

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Network Break 381: TLS Vulnerability Affects Aruba, Avaya Switches; Cisco Teases Predictive Networks

Take a Network Break! This week we cover a vulnerable implementation of a TLS module that affects switches from HPE Aruba and Extreme Networks' Avaya brand, Cisco teases a forthcoming technology called Predictive Networks that promises analytics and automated problem-solving, Fortinet announces new firewalls, and more IT news.

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Rethinking The Edge In A Multicloud World

For the past decade or so, unless enterprises wanted to build more of their own datacenters, the cloud providers were the only game in town to tackle new workloads at massive scale. …

Rethinking The Edge In A Multicloud World was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

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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

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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

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