In late November 2024, Anthropic announced a new way to interact with AI, called Model Context Protocol (MCP). Today, we’re excited to show you how to use MCP in combination with Cloudflare to extend the capabilities of Claude to build applications, generate images and more. You’ll learn how to build an MCP server on Cloudflare to make any service accessible through an AI assistant like Claude with just a few lines of code using Cloudflare Workers.
MCP is an open standard that provides a universal way for LLMs to interact with services and applications. As the introduction on the MCP website puts it,
“Think of MCP like a USB-C port for AI applications. Just as USB-C provides a standardized way to connect your devices to various peripherals and accessories, MCP provides a standardized way to connect AI models to different data sources and tools.”
From an architectural perspective, MCP is comprised of several components:
MCP hosts: Programs or tools (like Claude) where AI models operate and interact with different services
MCP clients: Client within an AI assistant that initiates requests and communicates with MCP servers to Continue reading
OpenAI announced support for WebRTC in their Realtime API on December 17, 2024. Combining their Realtime API with Cloudflare Calls allows you to build experiences that weren’t possible just a few days earlier.
Previously, interactions with audio and video AIs were largely single-player: only one person could be interacting with the AI unless you were in the same physical room. Now, applications built using Cloudflare Calls and OpenAI’s Realtime API can now support multiple users across the globe simultaneously seeing and interacting with a voice or video AI.
Here’s what this means in practice: you can now invite ChatGPT to your next video meeting:
We built this into our Orange Meets demo app to serve as an inspiration for what is possible, but the opportunities are much broader.
In the not-too-distant future, every company could have a 'corporate AI' they invite to their internal meetings that is secure, private and has access to their company data. Imagine this sort of real-time audio and video interactions with your company’s AI:
"Hey ChatGPT, do we have any open Jira tickets about this?"
"Hey Company AI, who are the competitors in the space doing Continue reading
Here is what memory bandwidth and a certain amount of capacity is worth in the GenAI revolution. …
Micron Is Fashionably Late To The HBM Party, But Not Too Late was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
When I went of in search of warmer climates in Australia I moored up at the Aylesbury Canal Society on the Grand Union’s Aylesbury arm. As fortune dictated the weekend before I got back a lock on the arm collapsed meaning I was going to be stuck there for sometime so decided to be productive and try and finish off the interior of the boat.
The market for cloud infrastructure is now so large that it is very difficult for it to change drastically. …
Cloud Spending Forecast Trimmed For This Year And Next was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
For a while now, I’ve been using Direnv to manage environment variables when I enter or leave certain directories. Since I have to work with more than one AWS account, one of the use cases for me has been populating AWS-specific environment variables, like AWS_REGION
or AWS_PROFILE
. This generally works really well for me, but recently I ran into a bit of a corner case involving multiple AWS regions, Pulumi, and using S3 as the Pulumi backend. In this post, I’ll share the workaround that allows this configuration to work as expected.
I describe this as a “bit of a corner case” because it only affects specific configurations (which included my configuration):
AWS_REGION
environment variable and not setting the aws:region
configuration value used by the Pulumi AWS provider.s3://bucket-name
.In my specific situation, my backend state bucket resides in the AWS us-west-2 (Oregon) region, as this offers the lowest latencies from my home office in Colorado. Continue reading
For years, scientists in the field of molecular dynamics have been squeezed in their research. …
Gordon Bell Prize Awarded To Molecular Dynamics-Quantum Mechanics Mashup On “Frontier” Supercomputer was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
COMMISSIONED AI and advanced storage systems ensure a smooth and profitable winter shopping season, so retailers don’t miss a beat during the holiday rush. …
From Black Friday To Christmas Eve: The Data-Driven Holiday Hustle was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Hello my friend,
So far we have covered almost all possible data types in Python and Go (Golang), at least the ones we are going to use ourselves for network automation. One of these data types, which we have introduced in the previous blog post, that is object/class or struct, has without overestimations enormous importance as it opens for us doors into object oriented programming. As doors are opened, let’s enter them.
Meaning, apart of spending time your family and friends, cooking, eating and dancing, you also study network automation with our trainings!
We offer the following training programs in network automation for you:
During these trainings you will learn the following topics:
Phishing remains one of the most dangerous and persistent cyber threats for individuals and organizations. Modern attacks use a growing arsenal of deceptive techniques that bypass traditional secure email gateways (SEGs) and email authentication measures, targeting organizations, employees, and vendors. From business email compromise (BEC) to QR phishing and account takeovers, these threats are designed to exploit weaknesses across multiple communication channels, including email, Slack, Teams, SMS, and cloud drives.
Phishing remains the most popular attack vector for bad actors looking to gain unauthorized access or extract fraudulent payment, and it is estimated that 90% of all attacks start with a phishing email. However, as companies have shifted to using a multitude of apps to support communication and collaboration, attackers too have evolved their approach. Attackers now engage employees across a combination of channels in an attempt to build trust and pivot targeted users to less-secure apps and devices. Cloudflare is uniquely positioned to address this trend thanks to our integrated Zero Trust services, extensive visibility from protecting approximately 20% of all websites, and signals derived from processing billions of email messages a year.
Cloudflare recognizes that combating phishing requires an integrated approach and a more complete view Continue reading
The hyperscalers, cloud builders, HPC centers control the design and manufacturing of own AI infrastructure. …
Databricks Is Going To Be The Next Platform For Many Enterprises was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
In Kubernetes, pods often need to securely communicate with external resources, such as internet services or APIs. Traditional Kubernetes network policies use IP addresses to identify these external resources. However, managing policies with IP addresses can be challenging because IPs often change, especially when dealing with dynamic websites or APIs.
Calico Enterprise addresses this challenge by extending Kubernetes network policies to support Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs). This allows users to define policies using domain names instead of IP addresses, making it easier to manage and secure egress traffic. By dynamically mapping domain names to IPs, Calico ensures that policies remain up-to-date, enabling seamless and secure connectivity to external resources.
While this approach is conceptually simple, practical implementation is tricky. DNS mappings are dynamic: domain names often resolve to different IPs with each query, and wildcard support (e.g., *.example.com
) adds complexity. To address this, Calico monitors DNS traffic to create and manage domain-to-IP mappings dynamically, translating high-level DNS-based rules into efficient low-level constructs like iptables
, nftables
, or eBPF.
The DNS policy implementation significantly impacts performance and reliability. Currently, Calico offers three different modes to operate the DNS Continue reading