Beleaguered chip maker Intel has been looking for ways to capitalize on non-core, not large, but profitable parts of its business to raise funds for its ambitious plans to revitalize Intel Foundry and to also invest heavily in the Intel Products group. …
Why Did Silver Lake Buy A Majority Stake In Intel’s Altera FPGA Business? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Kubernetes, by default, adopts a permissive networking model where all pods can freely communicate unless explicitly restricted using network policies. While this simplifies application deployment, it introduces significant security risks. Unrestricted network traffic allows workloads to interact with unauthorized destinations, increasing the potential for cyberattacks such as Remote Code Execution (RCE), DNS spoofing, and privilege escalation.
To better understand these problems, let’s examine a sample Kubernetes application: ANP Demo App.
This application comprises a deployment that spawns pods and a service that exposes them to external users in a similar situation like any real word workload which you will encounter in your environment.
If you open the application service before implementing any policies, the application reports the following messages:
Data Center Quantized Congestion Notification (DCQCN) is a hybrid congestion control method. DCQCN brings together both Priority Flow Control (PFC) and Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) so that we can get high throughput, low latency, and lossless delivery across our AI fabric. In this approach, each mechanism plays a specific role in addressing different aspects of congestion, and together they create a robust flow-control system for RDMA traffic.
DCQCN tackles two main issues in large-scale RDMA networks:
1. Head-of-Line Blocking and Congestion Spreading: This is caused by PFC’s pause frames, which stop traffic across switches.
2. Throughput Reduction with ECN Alone: When the ECN feedback is too slow, packet loss may occur despite the rate adjustments.
DCQCN uses a two-tiered approach. It applies ECN early on to gently reduce the sending rate at the GPU NICs, and it uses PFC as a backup to quickly stop traffic on upstream switches (hop-by-hop) when congestion becomes severe.
DCQCN carefully combines Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) and Priority Flow Control (PFC) in the right sequence:
Early Action with ECN: When congestion begins to build up, the switch uses WRED thresholds (minimum and maximum) to mark packets. This signals the Continue reading
Priority Flow Control (PFC) is a mechanism designed to prevent packet loss during network congestion by pausing traffic selectively based on priority levels. While the original IEEE 802.1Qbb standard operates at Layer 2, using the Priority Code Point (PCP) field in Ethernet headers, AI Fabrics rely on Layer 3 forwarding, where traditional Layer 2-based PFC is no longer applicable. To extend lossless behavior across routed (Layer 3) networks, DSCP-based PFC is used.
In DSCP-based PFC, the Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) field in the IP header identifies the traffic class or priority. Switches map specific DSCP values to internal traffic classes and queues. If congestion occurs on an ingress interface and a particular priority queue fills beyond a threshold, the switch can send a PFC pause frame back to the sender switch, instructing it to temporarily stop sending traffic of that class—just as in Layer 2 PFC, but now triggered based on Layer 3 classifications.
This behavior differs from Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN), which operates at Layer 3 as well but signals congestion by marking packets instead of stopping traffic. ECN acts on the egress port, informing the receiver to notify the sender to reduce the transmission rate over Continue reading
Daryll Swer posted a very informative response to my NAT Traversal Mess blog post, focusing on:
Punching holes through that firewall is equivalent to establishing NAT translations.
It would be a shame to let that response wither as small print at the bottom of a blog post; here it is:
After years navigating the exhilarating world of high-growth tech, from Amazon to Twilio’s scaling journey and most recently Wiz’s rapid ascent, I’ve learned to recognize a truly special opportunity when I see one. That’s exactly what I have found at Cloudflare and why I’m thrilled to join.
What drew me to Cloudflare was the unique combination of a powerful mission, a transparent and results-oriented culture, and the sheer scale of impact. Cloudflare isn’t just a technology company — it’s a force for good, building a better Internet for everyone. This really resonates with my own values.
My career has been defined by building, scaling, and developing teams in dynamic environments. I’ve witnessed the transformative power of a strong culture in driving hypergrowth. I’ve experienced the intensity and agility required to disrupt a market. These experiences have reinforced my belief that people are the heart of any successful company, and that a people-first strategy is critical for long-term impact. During my interview process at Cloudflare, this belief was clearly evident in every conversation. Cloudflare is a place where people can do their best work and be proud of the impact they are making. Powered Continue reading
As we conclude Developer Week 2025, we’re proud to reflect upon the capabilities we’ve added to our developer platform. It’s so rewarding to deliver products, features and tools that help developers build smarter and ship faster, and even more so hearing your responses throughout the week!
Our VP of Product, Rita Kozlov, kicked off Developer Week 2025 discussing the ever-evolving landscape of development, particularly in the age of AI. AI is no longer just a buzzword or a trope for a science-fiction future — in the realm of modern development, it’s a core tenet (and utility) of how we build, innovate, and solve problems. It’s influencing how and how frequently we ship code, as well as enabling anyone to write it.
It’s exciting to not only witness this technical revolution, but also to be building a platform that enables developers to be part of it. We want to hear your feedback and see what you build with the new capabilities — reach out to us on Discord or X.
Here’s a recap of our Developer Week 2025 announcements:
Announcement | Summary |
Toolkit for AI Continue reading |
SPONSORED FEATURE: Back before there were AI factories, there were two generations of the AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure supercomputer, built by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan. …
ABCI Evolves To Meet Japan’s Changing AI Needs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
As I started describing the iBGP Local-AS Details, I discovered that anything I ever wrote about the BGP local-as feature was hosted on a now-extinct website. Fortunately, I found a copy of that article in the Internet Archive and migrated it to the ipSpace.net blog. Hope you’ll like it ;)
As explained in the preceding chapter, “Egress Interface Congestions,” both the Rail switch links to GPU servers and the inter-switch links can become congested during gradient synchronization. It is essential to implement congestion control mechanisms specifically designed for RDMA workloads in AI fabric back-end networks because congestion slows down the learning process and even a single packet loss may restart the whole training process.
This section begins by introducing Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) and Priority-based Flow Control (PFC), two foundational technologies used in modern lossless Ethernet networks. ECN allows switches to mark packets, rather than dropping them, when congestion is detected, enabling endpoints to react proactively. PFC, on the other hand, offers per-priority flow control, which can pause selected traffic classes while allowing others to continue flowing.
Finally, we describe how Datacenter Quantized Congestion Notification (DCQCN) combines ECN and PFC to deliver a scalable and lossless transport mechanism for RoCEv2 traffic in AI clusters.
I am pleased to introduce the work of one of my students, who developed a […]
The post Professional Corporate Network Simulation in Packet Tracer first appeared on Brezular's Blog.
It is almost the end of Developer Week and we haven’t talked about containers: until now. As some of you may know, we’ve been working on a container platform behind the scenes for some time.
In late June, we plan to release Containers in open beta, and today we’ll give you a sneak peek at what makes it unique.
Workers are the simplest way to ship software around the world with little overhead. But sometimes you need to do more. You might want to:
Run user-generated code in any language
Execute a CLI tool that needs a full Linux environment
Use several gigabytes of memory or multiple CPU cores
Port an existing application from AWS, GCP, or Azure without a major rewrite
Cloudflare Containers let you do all of that while being simple, scalable, and global.
Through a deep integration with Workers and an architecture built on Durable Objects, Workers can be your:
API Gateway: Letting you control routing, authentication, caching, and rate-limiting before requests reach a container
Service Mesh: Creating private connections between containers with a programmable routing layer
Orchestrator: Allowing you to write custom scheduling, scaling, and health checking logic for your containers
Instead Continue reading