Hedge 315: Engineering Psychology
We often talk about “human infrastructure” in network engineering–but what does this mean, and how do we help engineers “produce” while helping them to flourish as individuals? Catherine Hicks joins Tom and Russ to discuss the psychology of software engineering, and how the lessons learned apply to network engineering.
You can find Catherine’s new book on the psychology of software engineering here.
If you would like to follow Catherine’s writing in this area, including the impact of AI on work, you can find her blog here.
You can connect with Catherine on LinkedIn.
Unveiling good and bad behaviors on the Agentic Internet
The Internet isn’t a single lane of traffic. For a long time, the rule of thumb in web security was that bots are bad, while humans are good. Of course, we’re far past this generalization. Humans can be fraudulent, and bots can be helpful at different levels. Site owners actively want some automated traffic to interact with our sites to make the Internet functional and discoverable.
To complicate things further, the line between "human" and "bot" is blurring more and more. Now, we have a type of “hybrid” traffic where a single session shifts from human to agentic and back again. (Think of a user browsing a store, and then handing off the checkout process to an automated shopping assistant.)
So, how do website owners manage this kind of complexity? What matters here is assessing behaviors. Is this behavior abusive? Malicious? What’s the risk presented here, and can I trust this visitor based on their actions? Solving this requires moving beyond static, point-in-time checks. It requires analyzing continuous behaviors to evaluate Trust.
In this post, we’ll share an inside look into the strategy of the Web Integrity & Trust team (covering the bots and fraud problem spaces) around detecting Continue reading
Introducing Radar Researcher: An AI tool for exploring Internet data in plain language
Since launching in 2020, Cloudflare Radar has provided one-of-a-kind insight into Internet traffic on a global scale. The open data that Radar publishes from our global network is used by a variety of experts in different domains: human rights advocates, journalists, academic researchers, network operators, and more.
Today, as part of Agents Week, Radar is beta-launching a new tool: Radar Researcher.
Now, if you want to answer a question with Radar’s data, you can just ask in plain language and get an answer back with real, interactive charts, all built on Cloudflare's developer platform. You no longer need to find the right page, choose the right filters, or read the API documentation to write a query.
Why we built Radar Researcher
Over the past six years, the Radar team has worked to provide clear, accessible, reliable data visualizations of complex datasets. This is not without its challenges: our user base is vast and ranges from curious novices to technical network experts. Even so, we publish as much insight into the Internet as seen from our network as we can: DNS queries from our public resolver 1.1.1.1, HTTP traffic from across our global network, Continue reading
Announcing Cloudflare Ambassadors, Community Engineers, and another $1M in open-source funding
As a platform for helping build a better Internet, Cloudflare helps turn ideas into real products and experiences around the world. Across communities and backgrounds, developers build with Cloudflare using the tools they love, shaping what comes next for the Internet while inspiring, collaborating with, and teaching others.
The community is where some of Cloudflare’s best moments happen. Students show their friends how to deploy Workers for the first time. Discord users answer questions from other developers via working code samples, instead of links to documentation. Open-source contributors build novel solutions to solve their own problems, then share them with the world. Organizers host events that give builders from all backgrounds the space to start building their dream project.
All of these represent a community at its best: people helping other people build.
This spirit of community is an exciting and vital part of helping to build the Internet. Those who step up to educate and support others, or to invent, build, or maintain tools shared across the ecosystem, make lasting contributions to the health and potential of the Internet.
We want to have their backs.
That's why today we’re announcing an improved community program, designed to better support, recognize, Continue reading
Unifying Workers AI and AI Gateway into a single AI control plane
AI Gateway and Workers AI first started as distinct products, but over time, we noticed our users were converging. With AI Gateway, you can proxy requests to any model provider and get built-in observability, logging, access, and security. On Workers AI, we host models on the GPU infrastructure that we manage, exposing an API endpoint you can leverage to access inference-as-a-service.
The architecture of these products looks different, but to an end user, it achieves the same goal: connecting you to models with a sophisticated control plane. Today, we're excited to share our plans on how these products converge into one unified path, so you can connect to any model provider (including Workers AI), while managing things like observability, billing, security, and logging from a single control plane.
It’s the next step toward some big plans we have — read on to learn what a unified control plane means for the future of model routing.
Merging the binding and API
We've been hinting at the fact that these products are becoming more unified through our entrypoints: the Workers binding and the REST API. We have an AI binding that you can use to call AI Gateway and Workers AI. Continue reading
SONiC Deep Dive: Configuring VLAN 10 from CLI to ASIC
Introduction
In this chapter, we
examine what happens under the hood when we configure a Layer-2 VLAN on a SONiC
switch, enable two host-facing interfaces, and associate them with the
previously created VLAN as untagged access ports. Figure 5-1 illustrates the
conceptual configuration in which Host-1 and Host-2 are connected to interfaces
Eth1/1 and Eth1/2, respectively. Both interfaces are members of VLAN 10, which
at this stage functions as a Layer-2 broadcast domain. The host-facing
interfaces are single-lane 25-Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.
We begin by creating VLAN 10 and examining the complete SONiC processing sequence, from the user's VLAN configuration to ASIC programming. Next, we study what happens when the interfaces are enabled and associated with VLAN 10. Finally, we verify that Host-1 and Host-2 have IP connectivity through Leaf-1. Although this is a very basic configuration example, many SONiC components participate in the process. The database examples presented in this chapter are taken from the lab environment. The communication between processes is explained at a conceptual level because the focus is on SONiC operation rather than the underlying Linux communication mechanisms.
Figure
5-1: Host Connectivity.
Step 1: Configure Vlan 10
Figure 5-2 depicts the conceptual sequence of Continue reading
Mengenal Alvinocaris Alexandri: Udang Vent Unik di Laut Dalam
Udang vent Alvinocaris alexandri merupakan salah satu makhluk laut yang menarik perhatian para ilmuwan dan pecinta biologi kelautan saat ini. Ditemukan di habitat unik yaitu sekitar ventilasi hidrotermal di dasar laut, spesies ini memiliki peranan penting dalam ekosistem ekstrem yang sulit ditembus oleh mahluk lain. Dalam artikel ini, kita akan membahas berbagai aspek mengenai Alvinocaris alexandri mulai dari morfologi, habitat, perilaku, hingga perannya dalam ekologi dasar laut berdasarkan data dan penelitian periode terbaru.
Apa itu Alvinocaris Alexandri?
Fokus pada alvinocaris alexandri tidak terlepas dari keistimewaan habitatnya dan adaptasi biologis yang dimiliki. Udang ini merupakan salah satu jenis krustasea yang hidup di lingkungan dengan suhu sangat tinggi dan kondisi kimia yang ekstrem. Nama “alvinocaris” sendiri berasal dari kapal penelitian Alvin yang digunakan untuk menjelajahi dasar laut dan menemukan berbagai jenis makhluk laut baru, termasuk udang vent ini.
Alvinocaris alexandri mampu bertahan pada tekanan dasar laut yang sangat tinggi dan kandungan gas beracun yang tinggi di sekitar ventilasi hidrotermal, merupakan contoh sempurna dari bagaimana kehidupan laut dapat beradaptasi bahkan dengan kondisi yang paling ekstrem sekalipun.
Morfologi dan Ciri Khusus Alvinocaris Alexandri
Sebagai udang vent, alvinocaris alexandri memiliki bentuk tubuh yang relatif kecil, biasanya berukuran beberapa sentimeter hingga puluhan sentimeter saja. Morfologi tubuhnya Continue reading
Misteri Fenomena Bannock Evaporite Wall di Bannock Basin
Fenomena alam yang jarang dan menarik terus memikat perhatian para ilmuwan dan peneliti, salah satunya adalah bannock evaporite wall yang eksis di wilayah Bannock Basin. Hingga saat ini, fenomena ini masih menjadi salah satu topik penelitian yang mendalam karena kompleksitas pembentukannya dan pengaruhnya terhadap ekosistem serta aktivitas manusia di sekitarnya. Artikel ini akan membahas lebih lengkap tentang misteri di balik Bannock Basin Brine Evaporite Wall, perkembangan penelitian terkini, serta relevansi fenomena ini dalam konteks geologi dan lingkungan saat ini.
Pendahuluan: Apa Itu Bannock Evaporite Wall?
Bannock evaporite wall merupakan dinding endapan evaporit yang terbentuk dari proses penguapan air asin (brine) yang sangat pekat di cekungan (basin) yang dikenal sebagai Bannock Basin. Evaporit sendiri adalah mineral yang terbentuk akibat penguapan air dengan konsentrasi garam tinggi, menghasilkan endapan seperti garam, kalsit, halit, dan mineral lainnya. Bannock Basin menjadi sangat penting karena fenomena ini terlihat secara mencolok serta memiliki karakteristik unik dibandingkan evaporite wall di lokasi lain.
Fenomena bannock evaporite wall ini menarik banyak peneliti karena tidak hanya terkait dengan proses kimia dan fisika dalam pembentukan mineral, tetapi juga melibatkan faktor geologi tektonik dan hidrogeologi yang kompleks. Hingga saat ini, penemuan lapisan-lapisan baru dari dinding ini terus memberikan wawasan baru tentang kondisi geokimia Continue reading
The New MCP Headers Are a Gift to Gateways
In short, buried in the transport section of the MCP 2026-07-28 release candidate are three changes that matter more to infrastructure teams than to anyone else: mandatory Mcp-Method and Mcp-Name headers, cache-control-style ttlMs and cacheScope fields, and standardized W3C Trace Context propagation. Together with the stateless core, they turn MCP from a protocol that gateways had to fight into one that meets them halfway. What the headers still don’t carry: who the caller is, whether the call should be allowed, and any record that it happened.
Everyone is writing about MCP going stateless, and the coverage is deserved. No handshake, no session ID, any request can hit any server replica, round-robin load balancing just works. If you want the deep dive on what that does to protocol state, my colleague Peter is writing one.
I want to talk about the part of the release candidate that made me sit up, because I spend my days around a gateway that authorizes agent traffic. It’s three transport changes, a few paragraphs in the announcement, and it fixes a problem every MCP-aware proxy has been engineering around since Streamable HTTP shipped in the 2025-03-26 revision.
The problem: MCP was opaque at the network Continue reading
IPB205: Moving to Disable IPv4
Franck Martin returns to the show to discuss the practical challenges of retiring IPv4 with hosts Ed, Nick, and Tom. Together they break down key strategies, how to work effectively with vendors, and how to mitigate potential outages during the transition. They also explore the cultural shifts necessary for successful IPv6 adoption and the importance... Read more »N4N061: Your First Wi-Fi Network Part 2
This week, Ethan and Holly continue their conversation around Wi-Fi. They go deeper into the benefits of Wi-Fi 7, look at what’s coming in Wi-Fi 8, and cover the differences among Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO), Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), and Multi-Link Operation (MLO). AdSpot Sponsor: Megaport If you’re supporting cloud projects, managing growing... Read more »Cloudflare AI Search: give your agents a search engine for your data
Today, we’re excited to announce a few developer experience improvements to Cloudflare AI Search to make it easy to manage a search solution out of the box. Previously, you had to stitch together components of the Cloudflare primitives (Workers AI, AI Gateway, Vectorize, R2, Browser Run) but now, AI Search can do this automatically — and better. Our goal is to give your agents their own search engine, where they can easily find data to provide better answers for themselves and their humans.
We’re also sharing an early preview of pricing for customers of AI Search so you can learn how this scales. We modeled pricing in a way that makes it predictable and scalable: embedding and reranking are free when you use the default models, so no need to worry about predicting token count.
In AI Search, users can now:
- Index a collection of data for your agent: Make structured and unstructured data easily accessible for your agent to build with, from individual files to websites you own. (Today, it must be a zone on your Cloudflare account, but with more ways to verify ownership coming soon.)
- Skip the sitemap for your websites: Previously, AI Search required Continue reading
From ranking to recommended: get your site ready to thrive in the age of AI agents
Your next customer may not find you through a search engine. Instead, they'll ask an AI assistant: "how do I do X?"; "which option is best for someone like me?"; "just handle it for me" and an agent will find the answer, weigh the options, and act on their behalf. Increasingly, the moment that determines whether a customer chooses you happens inside a model's response — before a human ever sees your homepage.
This agentic audience is already here: by our count, fewer than half of all HTML page requests now come from a human. Not all of those machines are agents acting for a person, but that share is growing fast, and answer engines, shopping assistants, and research tools will shape which businesses are found and recommended. Discoverability used to mean ranking on a results page. Now it means being found, read, and confidently recommended by the agents that guide your customers.
The old metrics, human clicks and page views, no longer paint the full picture. We spent time talking to site owners who were staring at access logs full of AI bots, completely blind to whether those bots were capable of using their site or recommending Continue reading
Building an open Agentic Internet: readable, discoverable, callable, and payable
Our data shows that a lot of traffic from well-behaved bots is re-fetching pages that have not changed. Billions of requests. An enormous amount of machine effort, attached to no outcome at all. That's the signature of a web built for humans being visited by something else.
Agents are here - not as a new kind of software, but as a new kind of visitor to the web.
The web reshaped around this new visitor is what we call the Agentic Internet. We see its future as readable, discoverable, callable, and payable. To realize that future, it needs its own tools and protocols.
Cloudflare's developer platform gave agents a place to run, and the first tools to build them. What's missing are the ones that let agents and domain owners cooperate instead of collide — on the open Internet, not just inside a single platform.
Every browser has always identified itself to the web with a header called User-Agent. The name only made sense once you realized the browser was acting on your behalf. Now a user agent is truly a user's agent: a program that fetches the web on a person's behalf. Today its most mature form is the Continue reading
Introducing Kitesurf: The agent-first browser that runs in V8 isolates on Cloudflare Workers
Should we build our own browser? This is one of those questions that has come up every few months internally at Cloudflare for years. Unsurprisingly, it’s the kind that triggers long threads with multiple reasons and persuasive arguments on why we should do it. The browser is obviously the most important software we use every day on our computers; it’s arguably the operating system of the Internet. We’re a company on a mission to build a better Internet — who wouldn’t want to take on the challenge of building a new browser?
But we never quite found the balance between the technical difficulty of such an endeavour and the unique problems we’d be solving by doing it. And so, the idea was shelved, over and over again. Until now.
Something magical happened: we reached a tipping point where a series of powerful technical advancements in our Developer Platform became a reality, while the advent of AI agents and the demand for a new kind of browser became critical at the same time.
Running WebAssembly (Wasm) in Workers is now very mature. Primitives like dynamic workers, SQLite-based Durable Objects, Worker-to-worker RPC, service bindings, higher NodeJS compatibility and Continue reading
The next generation of MCP
Over the last year and a half, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) has become the universal standard for how agents interact with external services.
But one of the main criticisms of MCP was that the protocol required a stateful connection between Client and Server. This evolved from MCP’s origins and the first STDIO transport, designed for local applications. When MCP Servers went remote, it translated the stateful connection that worked so well locally and transposed it onto web infrastructure. Building a well-behaved MCP Server meant managing request routing to sticky sessions, holding open streams, message replay, and generally more overhead and complexity than a traditional web server. This changes now.
The latest MCP 2026-07-28 specification was released last week, together with updated TypeScript, Python, Go, and C# SDKs. MCP is now a fully stateless protocol. The specification, interaction model and SDKs have all been rewritten to leverage this new protocol and simplify usage. This means that MCP servers can now run in just a Worker, no stateful infrastructure needed, and customers benefit from the operational simplicity and reduced cost of less moving parts.
A new MCP
At Cloudflare, our journey with MCP goes back to the very beginning. Continue reading
Give any website a WebMCP interface
Today we are launching a developer preview of WebMCP on Cloudflare. Switch it on and browser agents can start working with your site, with no code and nothing changed at your origin. Cloudflare adds a small bridge to your pages, which registers a set of tools for a visitor’s agent to use.
The web was built on the assumption that there is a person on the other end: someone to read the page, click buttons, and fill in the forms. But now more and more visits come from AI agents instead, to an Internet made for humans. The usual approach has been crawlers, which copy content back to a server and, too often, give the original site none of the traffic and little of the credit. There is a better way, and it does not involve scraping.
WebMCP is a new browser standard, shipping experimentally in Chrome 146, that shows up in the page as document.modelContext. A site can choose to expose a set of tools for agents running in the browser, meaning agents no longer have to guess their way through a page built for humans. This enables agents to have a different browsing experience from the user Continue reading