Automatically generating types for Cloudflare Workers

Automatically generating types for Cloudflare Workers
Automatically generating types for Cloudflare Workers

Historically, keeping our Rust and TypeScript type repos up to date has been hard. They were manually generated, which means they ran the risk of being inaccurate or out of date. Until recently, the workers-types repository needed to be manually updated whenever the types changed. We also used to add type information for mostly complete browser APIs. This led to confusion when people would try to use browser APIs that aren’t supported by the Workers runtime they would compile but throw errors.

That all changed this summer when Brendan Coll, whilst he was interning with us, built an automated pipeline for generating them. It runs every time we build the Workers runtime, generating types for our TypeScript and Rust repositories. Now everything is up-to-date and accurate.

A quick overview

Every time the Workers runtime code is built, a script runs over the public APIs and generates the Rust and TypeScript types as well as a JSON file containing an intermediate representation of the static types. The types are sent to the appropriate repositories and the JSON file is uploaded as well in case people want to create their own types packages. More on that later.

This means the static types Continue reading

JavaScript modules are now supported on Cloudflare Workers

JavaScript modules are now supported on Cloudflare Workers
JavaScript modules are now supported on Cloudflare Workers

We’re excited to announce that JavaScript modules are now supported on Cloudflare Workers. If you’ve ever taken look at an example Worker written in JavaScript, you might recognize the following code snippet that has been floating around the Internet the past few years:

addEventListener("fetch", (event) => {
  event.respondWith(new Response("Hello Worker!"));
}

The above syntax is known as the “Service Worker” API, and it was proposed to be standardized for use in web browsers. The idea is that you can attach a JavaScript file to a web page to modify its HTTP requests and responses, acting like a virtual endpoint. It was exactly what we needed for Workers, and it even integrated well with standard Web APIs like fetch() and caches.

Before introducing modules, we want to make it clear that we will continue to support the Service Worker API. No developer wants to get an email saying that you need to rewrite your code because an API or feature is being deprecated; and you won’t be getting one from us. If you’re interested in learning why we made this decision, you can read about our commitment to backwards-compatibility for Workers.

What are JavaScript modules?

JavaScript modules, Continue reading

Introducing Services: Build Composable, Distributed Applications on Cloudflare Workers

Introducing Services: Build Composable, Distributed Applications on Cloudflare Workers
Introducing Services: Build Composable, Distributed Applications on Cloudflare Workers

First, there was the Worker script. It was simple, yet elegant. With just a few lines of code, you could rewrite an HTTP request, append a header, or make a quick fix to your website.

Though, what if you wanted to build an entire application on Workers? You’d need a lot more tools in your developer toolbox. That’s why we’ve introduced extensions to Workers platform like KV, our distributed key-value store; Durable Objects, — a strongly consistent, object-oriented database; and soon R2, the no-egress object storage. While these tools allow you to build a more robust application, there’s still a gap when it comes to building a system architecture, composed of many applications or services.

Imagine you’ve built an authentication service that authorizes requests to your API. You’d want to re-use that logic among all your other services. Moreover, when you make changes to that authentication service, you’d want to test it in a controlled environment that doesn’t affect those other services in production. Well, you don’t need to imagine anymore.

Introducing Services

Services are the new building block for deploying applications on Cloudflare Workers. Unlike the script, a service is composable, which allows services to talk Continue reading

Optimizing the Time-to-First-Byte

I don’t think I’ve ever met someone saying “I wish my web application would run slower.” Everyone wants their stuff to run faster, but most environments are not willing to pay the cost (rearchitecting the application). Welcome to the wonderful world of PowerPoint “solutions”.

The obvious answer: The Cloud. Let’s move our web servers closer to the clients – deploy them in various cloud regions around the world. Mission accomplished.

Not really; the laws of physics (latency in particular) will kill your wonderful idea. I wrote about the underlying problems years ago, wrote another blog post focused on the misconceptions of cloudbursting, but I’m still getting the questions along the same lines. Time for another blog post, this time with even more diagrams.

Read more …

Optimizing the Time-to-First-Byte

I don’t think I’ve ever met someone saying “I wish my web application would run slower.” Everyone wants their stuff to run faster, but most environments are not willing to pay the cost (rearchitecting the application). Welcome to the wonderful world of PowerPoint “solutions”.

The obvious answer: The Cloud. Let’s move our web servers closer to the clients – deploy them in various cloud regions around the world. Mission accomplished.

Not really; the laws of physics (latency in particular) will kill your wonderful idea. I wrote about the underlying problems years ago, wrote another blog post focused on the misconceptions of cloudbursting, but I’m still getting the questions along the same lines. Time for another blog post, this time with even more diagrams.

Read more …

HPE Wins Another European HPC Center With Cray EX Plus AMD Compute

Per aspera, ad astra, an old Latin adage that means “through striving, to the stars,” is the root of the name for a hybrid HPC and AI supercomputer that the Grand Équipment National de Calcul Intensif (GENCI), working in conjunction with the Centre Informatique National de l’Enseignement Supérieur (CINES), one of three national HPC centers in France, will be building next year to bring a factor of 20X more compute power to bear on scientific applications. …

HPE Wins Another European HPC Center With Cray EX Plus AMD Compute was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

AX.25 in user space

The Linux kernel AX.25 implementation (and userspace) is pretty poor. I’ve encountered many problems. E.g.:

  • you can’t read() and write() from the same socket at the same time

  • DGRAM receiving just plain doesn’t work.

  • CRC settings default such that at least all my radios (and direwolf) drop the first two packets sent. (fix with kissparms radio -c 1)

  • Setting CRC mode resets all other settings.

  • On 64bit Raspberry Pi OS setsockopt for some flags don’t take effect at all (e.g. setting AX25_EXTSEQ), and treat other obvious correct ones as invalid (e.g. can’t set AX25_WINDOW to any value at all).

  • I also get kernel null pointer dereferences on 32bit Raspberry Pi OS when testing AX.25. Not exactly comforting.

  • Other OSs don’t have AX.25 socket support. E.g. OpenBSD. And it’s not obvious to me that this is best solved in kernel space.

  • It doesn’t seem clear to anyone how the AX.25 stack in the kernel is supposed to work. E.g. should axparms -assoc be an enforcing ACL? It’s not, but is it supposed to be?

  • I’ve also seen suggestions that AX.25 should be ripped out of the Linux kernel. Continue reading

New Cisco/Intel feature provides troubleshooting-data from Intel Wi-Fi endpoints

Cisco and Intel have extended their technology relationship to enable Cisco Wi-Fi gear to gather data from Intel-based PCs in order to troubleshoot and optimize wireless connections for end-user machines.The companies announced Intel Connectivity Analytics, a feature that helps to evaluate Wi-Fi connectivity and for IT teams to monitor wireless resources.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] The feature is supported by Intel-based PCs deployed with Wi-Fi 6/6E chipsets and Cisco Wi-Fi offerings including the Cisco Catalyst 9800 series wireless-controller family, its Embedded Wireless Controller, and the full range of Meraki cloud-managed access points.To read this article in full, please click here

New Cisco/Intel feature provides troubleshooting data from Intel Wi-Fi endpoints

Cisco and Intel have extended their technology relationship to enable Cisco Wi-Fi gear to gather data from Intel-based PCs in order to troubleshoot and optimize wireless connections for end-user machines.The companies announced Intel Connectivity Analytics, a feature that helps to evaluate Wi-Fi connectivity and for IT teams to monitor wireless resources.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] The feature is supported by Intel-based PCs deployed with Wi-Fi 6/6E chipsets and Cisco Wi-Fi offerings including the Cisco Catalyst 9800 series wireless-controller family, its Embedded Wireless Controller, and the full range of Meraki cloud-managed access points.To read this article in full, please click here

Learn How Real-World Organizations Benefited from an Overhaul of their Security Lifestyle 

Achieving better security is something we all know is necessary but can struggle to get there. It’s like improving your diet: you know you need to eat better and exercise to cultivate a healthier, more well-rounded lifestyle. But you don’t do it because it’s hard, often expensive, and can be a pain. So, you avoid it (trust me, we’ve all been there). But, you learn that putting one foot in front of the other forces you to take small steps toward big results. The same notion applies to needing better security. We know we need it, but it’s not always easy to know where to begin.    

There is no quick fix for sustainable change. Sure, we can make better choices each day, but it takes consistency and a solid structural foundation – a lifestyle change – to maintain these advancements. Losing weight is one thing; when it comes to better multi-cloud security, this is a process that leaves little room for fluctuation. Start with the fundamentals and tighten your belt over time.   

Let’s take a look at real-world organizations that have benefitted from doing the hard stuff. They’ve done the work and have seen the results. Continue reading

Top500 Supercomputers: Hungry For The Exascale Feast

Let’s just cut right to the chase scene. The latest Top500 ranking of supercomputers, announced today at the SC21 supercomputing conference being held in St Louis, needed the excitement of an actual 1 exaflops sustained performance machine running the High Performance Linpack benchmark at 64-bit precision. …

Top500 Supercomputers: Hungry For The Exascale Feast was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller 12

Good day every one,

As you certainly know, we are now rebranding DCNM 11 to Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller, consequently, NDFC 12 is the new acronym to automate and operate NX-OS based fabrics

It is NOT just about changing the name, there are several significant changes with NDFC 12. To list few of them:

  • Enhanced Topology View
  • Ability to modify switch discovery IP
  • Flexible CLI option – config profile or native NXOS CLI
  • Performance Programmable reports
  • Granular RBAC
  • Secure POAP User
  • Simplified and flexible Image Management
  • Server Smart Licensing
  • Automate IOS-XR configuration
  • Automate VXLAN EVPN fabric deployment with Cat9k

One of the key evolution in regard to NDFC is that it now joins the ecosystem of services that runs natively on top of the common Nexus dashboard platform.

One of the key advantages for the network operators with this evolution, is that they just need a single experience, it doesn’t really matter what application you run, from the installation process to the common Web GUI. All applications or services look with the same logic behind any requests.

You have a single pane of glass which is the Nexus dashboard platform through which the end-user can consume different applications for the Continue reading

Tech Bytes: Containerlab Makes Container And VM Networking Labs Easy (Sponsored)

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we discuss Containerlab, open-source software that lets you build virtual network labs on a server or even a laptop. It supports a variety of network OSs for network emulation, training, and testing. Containerlab was developed by Nokia, our sponsor for this episode.

The post Tech Bytes: Containerlab Makes Container And VM Networking Labs Easy (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Thoughts on Auto Disaggregation and Complexity

Way in the past, the EIGRP team (including me) had an interesting idea–why not aggregate routes automatically as much as possible, along classless bounds, and then deaggregate routes when we could detect some failure was causing a routing black hole? To understand this concept better, consider the network below.

In this network, B and C are connected to four different routers, each of which is advertising a different subnet. In turn, B and C are aggregating these four routes into 2001:db8:3e8:10::/60, and advertising this aggregate towards A. From a control plane state perspective, this is a major win. The obvious gain is that the amount of state is reduced from four routes to one. The less obvious gain is A doesn’t need to know about any changes in the state for the four destinations aggregated into the /60. Depending on how often these links change state, the reduction in the rate of change is, perhaps, more important than the reduction in the amount of control plane state.

We always know there will be a tradeoff when reducing state; what is the tradeoff here? If C somehow loses its connection to one of the four routers, say the router advertising 11::/64, Continue reading

Nvidia announces new InfiniBand networking hardware

Networking equipment was the news of the day at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC), with new hardware for improved end-to-end performance.Nvidia announced the Quantum-2 platform, a 400Gbps InfiniBand networking platform consisting of the Quantum-2 switch, ConnectX-7 network adapter, BlueField-3 data processing unit (DPU), and all the software to support the new architecture.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] At 400Gbps, NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand doubles the network speed and triples the number of network ports over the Quantum-1 product. With a three-fold performance increase in performance, data-center fabric switches can be reduced by six-fold, cutting data center power consumption and reducing the overall data center space by 7%, the company says.To read this article in full, please click here

Nvidia announces new InfiniBand networking hardware

Networking equipment was the news of the day at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC), with new hardware for improved end-to-end performance.Nvidia announced the Quantum-2 platform, a 400Gbps InfiniBand networking platform consisting of the Quantum-2 switch, ConnectX-7 network adapter, BlueField-3 data processing unit (DPU), and all the software to support the new architecture.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] At 400Gbps, NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand doubles the network speed and triples the number of network ports over the Quantum-1 product. With a three-fold performance increase in performance, data-center fabric switches can be reduced by six-fold, cutting data center power consumption and reducing the overall data center space by 7%, the company says.To read this article in full, please click here

Rethinking the WAN: Zero Trust network access can play a bigger role

The WAN as initially conceived was about one simple job: the WAN was the network that “connects my sites to each other.” That is, the network connecting users in corporate sites to corporate IT resources in other corporate sites or perhaps colocation facilities. It was all inside-to-inside traffic.Over the past decade so much has changed that, just before COVID-19 work-from-home mandates took hold, only about 37% of a typical WAN’s traffic was still inside-to-inside, according to Nemertes’ “Next Generation Networks Research Study 2020-2021”. The rest touched the outside world, either originating there as with remote work against data-center systems or terminating there as with SaaS use from a company site or both as with VPNing into the network only to head back out to a SaaS app.To read this article in full, please click here

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