Building real-time games using Workers, Durable Objects, and Unity

Building real-time games using Workers, Durable Objects, and Unity
Building real-time games using Workers, Durable Objects, and Unity

Durable Objects are an awesome addition to the Workers developer ecosystem, allowing you to address and work inside a specific Worker to provide consistency in your applications. That sounds exciting at a high-level, but if you're like me, you might be wondering "Okay, so what can I build with that?"

There’s nothing like building something real with a technology to truly understand it.

To better understand why Durable Objects matter, and how newer announcements in the Workers ecosystem like WebSockets play with Durable Objects, I turned to a category of software that I've been building in my spare time for a few months now: video games.

The technical aspects of games have changed drastically in the last decade. Many games are online-by-default, and the ubiquity of tools like Unity have made it so anyone can begin experimenting with developing games.

I've heard a lot about the ability of Durable Objects and WebSockets to provide real-time consistency in applications, and to test that use case out, I've built Durable World: a simple 3D multiplayer world that is deployed entirely on our Cloudflare stack: Pages for serving the client-side game, which runs in Unity and WebGL, and Workers as the Continue reading

Packet Forwarding and Routing over Unnumbered Interfaces

In the previous blog posts in this series, we explored whether we need addresses on point-to-point links (TL&DR: no), whether it’s better to have interface or node addresses (TL&DR: it depends), and why we got unnumbered IPv4 interfaces. Now let’s see how IP routing works over unnumbered interfaces.

The Challenge

A cursory look at an IP routing table (or at CCNA-level materials) tells you that the IP routing table contains prefixes and next hops, and that the next hops are IP addresses. How should that work over unnumbered interfaces, and what should we use for the next-hop IP address in that case?

Packet Forwarding and Routing over Unnumbered Interfaces

In the previous blog posts in this series, we explored whether we need addresses on point-to-point links (TL&DR: no), whether it’s better to have interface or node addresses (TL&DR: it depends), and why we got unnumbered IPv4 interfaces. Now let’s see how IP routing works over unnumbered interfaces.

The Challenge

A cursory look at an IP routing table (or at CCNA-level materials) tells you that the IP routing table contains prefixes and next hops, and that the next hops are IP addresses. How should that work over unnumbered interfaces, and what should we use for the next-hop IP address in that case?

Juniper Networks upgrades its Apstra intent-based networking software

Juniper Networks is releasing the latest version of its Apstra intent-based networking software that includes new monitoring features and configuration templates as well as better integration with VMware’s NSX virtualization and security platform.In January, Juniper bought Apstra and its Apstra Operating System (AOS), which was developed from the start to support IBN features. Once deployed, AOS—now just called Apstra—keeps a real-time repository of configuration, telemetry and validation information to ensure the network is doing what customers want it to do. Apstra also includes automation features to provide consistent network and security policies for workloads across physical and virtual infrastructures.To read this article in full, please click here

Juniper Networks upgrades its Apstra intent-based networking software

Juniper Networks is releasing the latest version of its Apstra intent-based networking software that includes new monitoring features and configuration templates as well as better integration with VMware’s NSX virtualization and security platform.In January, Juniper bought Apstra and its Apstra Operating System (AOS), which was developed from the start to support IBN features. Once deployed, AOS—now just called Apstra—keeps a real-time repository of configuration, telemetry and validation information to ensure the network is doing what customers want it to do. Apstra also includes automation features to provide consistent network and security policies for workloads across physical and virtual infrastructures.To read this article in full, please click here

Cloudflare’s SOC as a Service

Cloudflare’s SOC as a Service

When Cloudflare started, sophisticated online security was beyond the reach of all but the largest organizations. If your pockets were deep enough, you could buy the necessary services — and the support that was required to operate them — to keep your online operations secure, fast, and reliable. For everyone else? You were out of luck.

We wanted to change that: to help build a better Internet. To build a set of services that weren’t just technically sophisticated, but easy to use. Accessible. Affordable. Part of this meant that we were always looking to build and equip our customers with all the tools they needed in order to do this for themselves.

Of course, a lot has changed since we started. The Internet has only increased in importance, fast becoming the most important channel for many businesses. Cybersecurity threats have only become more prevalent — and more sophisticated. And the products that Cloudflare offers to keep you safe on the Internet have attracted some of the largest and most recognizable organizations in the world.

Ask some of these larger organizations about cybersecurity, and they’ll tell you a few things: first, they love our products. But, second, that when something happens Continue reading

Full Stack Journey 054: Changes Big And Small

On today's Full Stack Journey podcast, host Scott Lowe shares some personal changes in his life, including leaving VMware for a startup called Kong, selling a house and moving, and buying and using an M1-based MacBook Pro. He shares his reflections on career changes, his decision-making process, and more.

Jerikan: a configuration management system for network teams

There are many resources for network automation with Ansible. Most of them only expose the first steps or limit themselves to a narrow scope. They give no clue on how to expand from that. Real network environments may be large, versatile, heterogeneous, and filled with exceptions. The lack of real-world examples for Ansible deployments, unlike Puppet and SaltStack, leads many teams to build brittle and incomplete automation solutions.

We have released under an open-source license our attempt to tackle this problem:

  • Jerikan, a tool to build configuration files from a single source of truth and Jinja2 templates, along with its integration into the GitLab CI system,
  • an Ansible playbook to deploy these configuration files on network devices, and
  • a redacted version of the configuration data and the templates for our, now defunct, datacenters in San Francisco and South Korea, covering many vendors (Facebook Wedge 100, Dell S4048 and S6010, Juniper QFX 5110, Juniper QFX 10002, Cisco ASR 9001, Cisco Catalyst 2960, Opengear console servers, and Linux), and many functionalities (provisioning, BGP-to-the-host routing, edge routing, out-of-band network, DNS configuration, integration with NetBox and IRRs).

Here is a quick demo to configure a new peering:

This work is the collective effort of Continue reading

DockerCon 2021: Women in Tech Panel

At Docker, we feel strongly about embracing diversity and we are committed to being proactive with respect to inclusion. As an example of our support for diversity, we are hosting the Community Rooms during DockerCon with panels and sessions for our global audience in their native languages. We are also highlighting the contributions from our women Captains and community developers.

At DockerCon, the Women in Tech panel will focus on the breadth and depth of knowledge from our panelists and their experiences using Docker technology throughout their career. Join us as we discuss the career choices that led these women to become application developers and hear about key innovations that they are working on.  

Women in Tech Panel 4:15 Pacific on May 27, 2021

This panel is just one event out of a one day event packed with demonstrations, product announcement, company updates and more – all of it is focused on modern application delivery in a cloud-native world.

Our panelists and moderators include:

Hema Ganapathy – Moderator
Product Marketing, Docker

Hema is a highly seasoned technology professional with 30+ years of experience in software development, telecommunications, cloud computing and big data.  She has held senior positions in Continue reading

Aruba Wi-Fi 6E access point to launch this fall

Business users looking for an upgrade to the very latest Wi-Fi standard, also known as Wi-Fi 6E, now have the option of Aruba’s new AP 635, the company announced this morning. Wi-Fi resources Test and review of 4 Wi-Fi 6 routers: Who’s the fastest? How to determine if Wi-Fi 6 is right for you Five questions to answer before deploying Wi-Fi 6 Wi-Fi 6E: When it’s coming and what it’s good for Wi-Fi 6E works much the same as Wi-Fi 6, sharing that standard’s improved ability to handle dense client environments, high throughput, and advanced multi-user and multi-antenna functionality. The new feature is the ability to use the 6GHz spectrum that the FCC opened in April 2020 to unlicensed users, representing a two-fold increase in the spectrum available for WI-Fi. That added spectrum means that Wi-Fi users can take advantage of much wider channels, leading to commensurately higher throughput.To read this article in full, please click here

Mythbusting: NFV Data Center Fabric Buffering Requirements

Every now and then I stumble upon an article or a comment explaining how Network Function Virtualization (NFV) introduces new data center fabric buffering requirements. Here’s a recent example:

For Telco/carrier Cloud environments, where NFVs (which are much slower than hardware SGW) get used a lot, latency is higher with a lot of jitter due to the nature of software and the varying link speeds, so DC-level near-zero buffer is not applicable.

It seems to me we’re dealing with another myth. Starting with the basics:

Mythbusting: NFV Data Center Fabric Buffering Requirements

Every now and then I stumble upon an article or a comment explaining how Network Function Virtualization (NFV) introduces new data center fabric buffering requirements. Here’s a recent example:

For Telco/carrier Cloud environments, where NFVs (which are much slower than hardware SGW) get used a lot, latency is higher with a lot of jitter due to the nature of software and the varying link speeds, so DC-level near-zero buffer is not applicable.

It seems to me we’re dealing with another myth. Starting with the basics:

Ampere points server chip roadmap toward cloud computing

Ampere, the chip startup building Arm-based server processors and led by former Intel exec Renee James, has updated its product roadmap and announced new customers.The biggest news is that the company is designing its own custom cores for release in 2022. Ampere Altra processors are already on the market but use the Neoverse core from Arm. When it introduces the next generation Ampere built on a 5nm process next year, it will be with a homegrown core optimized around cloud workloads."If you go back to the objectives we had, which were delivering predictable, high performance, scalability and power efficiency, we really need to develop our own cores ... to be able to actually focus in on the exact way that the cloud wants single-threaded performance," Jeff Wittich, chief product officer for Ampere, told Network World.To read this article in full, please click here