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Introducing workers.new, custom builds, and improved logging for Workers

Cloudflare Workers® aims to be the easiest and most powerful platform for developers to build and deploy their applications. With Workers, you can quickly solve problems without having to wonder: “is this going to scale?”

You write the JavaScript and we handle the rest, from distribution to scaling and concurrency.

In the spirit of quickly solving problems, we’re excited to launch three new improvements to the Workers experience, so you can take your next idea and ship it even faster.

Introducing... workers.new

First, we’re introducing https://workers.new, a shortcut that takes you directly to a JavaScript editor for creating a new Worker. Anytime you have a cool idea, need a quick fix to a problem, or just want to debug some JavaScript, you now have a simple way to go from idea to prototype. What’s more is you don’t even need to deploy the Worker to try it out!

We’ve also updated the default Worker template to help you go a few steps beyond the typical “Hello, World!”. When you open the editor, you’ll now see a few examples that demonstrate how to redirect requests, modify headers, and parse responses.

Customize your build scripts

For developers Continue reading

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Node.js support in Cloudflare Workers

We released Cloudflare Workers three years ago, making edge compute accessible to the masses with native support for the world’s most ubiquitous language — JavaScript.

The Workers platform has transformed so much since its launch. Developers can not only write sandboxed code at our edge, they can also store data at the edge with Workers KV and, more recently, coordinate state within our giant network using Durable Objects. Now, we’re excited to share our support of an 11 year old technology that’s still going strong: Node.js.

Node.js made a breakthrough by enabling developers to build both the frontend and the backend with a single language. It took JavaScript beyond the browser and into the server by using Chrome’s JavaScript engine, V8.

Workers is also built on V8 Isolates and empowers developers in a similar way by allowing you to create entire applications with only JavaScript — except your code runs across Cloudflare’s data centers in over 100 countries.

Our Package Support Today

There is nothing more satisfying than importing a library and watching your code magically work out-of-the-box.

For over 20k packages, Workers supports this magic already: any Node.js package that uses webpack or another polyfill Continue reading

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Cloudflare Stream now supports NFTs

Cloudflare Stream has been helping creators publish their videos online without having to think about video quality, device compatibility, storage buckets or digging through FFmpeg documentation. These creators want to be able to claim ownership of their works and assert control over how that ownership claim is transferred. Increasingly, many of those creators are looking to Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).

NFTs are a special type of smart contract that allows provable ownership of the contract on the blockchain. Some call NFTs collectibles because like coins or stamps, collectors who enjoy them buy, sell and trade them. Collectors keep track of NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain which acts as a shared source of truth of all the activity.

Today, we’re introducing a new API that takes a ERC-721 token ID and contact address and sets it on a video so every video on Stream can be represented with an NFT.

curl -X POST -H "Authorization: Bearer $AUTH_TOKEN" --data '{"contract":"0x57f1887a8bf19b14fc0d912b9b2acc9af147ea85","token":"5"}' https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/$ACCOUNT_ID/stream/$VIDEO_ID/nft

Once you set it, you cannot change these values so be sure to set it to an NFT you own! If you set a video you own to an NFT you don’t own, the owner of the NFT can claim Continue reading

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Announcing Cloudflare’s Database Partners

Cloudflare Workers is the easiest way for developers to deploy their application’s code with performance, scale and security baked in. No configuration necessary. Worker code scales to serve billions of requests close to your users across Cloudflare’s 200+ data centers.

But that’s not the only interesting problem we need to solve. Every application has two parts: code and state.

State isn’t always the easiest to work in a massive distributed system. When an application runs in 200+ data centers simultaneously, there’s an inherent tradeoff between distributing the data for better performance, availability, scale, and guaranteeing that all data centers see the same data at a given point in time.

Our goal is to make state at the edge seamless. We started that journey with Workers KV, which provides low-latency access to globally distributed data. We’re since added Durable Objects, with strong consistency and the ability to design coordination patterns on top of Workers. We’re continuing to invest in and build out these products.

However, some use cases aren’t easily implemented with Workers KV or Durable Objects. Think querying complex datasets, or communicating with an existing system-of-record. Even if we built this functionality ourselves, there will always be customers who want Continue reading

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How to use the blkid command: 2-Minute Linux Tips

In this Linux tip, learn how to use the blkid command. It gives you a very useful view of block devices on your Linux system. First, it shows the devices (e.g., /dev/sda1). It shows the UUIDs (the 128 bit long "universally unique identifiers") associated with each of them, the block sizes, the file system types and, when available, the PARTUUIDs.

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Video: Transparent Bridging Fundamentals

Years ago I wrote a series of blog posts comparing transparent bridging and IP routing, and creating How Networks Really Work materials seemed like a perfect opportunity to make that information more structured, starting with Transparent Bridging Fundamentals.

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Video: Transparent Bridging Fundamentals

Years ago I wrote a series of blog posts comparing transparent bridging and IP routing, and creating How Networks Really Work materials seemed like a perfect opportunity to make that information more structured, starting with Transparent Bridging Fundamentals.

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Sky’s the Limit: Pluribus Keeps Growing with Second Consecutive Financial Times ‘Americas’ Fastest Growing Companies’ Ranking

I’m thrilled to share news that Pluribus has been named to the list of the Americas’ Fastest Growing Companies, a...

The post Sky’s the Limit: Pluribus Keeps Growing with Second Consecutive Financial Times ‘Americas’ Fastest Growing Companies’ Ranking appeared first on Pluribus Networks.

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The Hedge 79: Brooks Westbrook and the Data Driven Lens

Many networks are designed and operationally drive by the configuration and management of features supporting applications and use cases. For network engineering to catch up to the rest of the operational world, it needs to move rapidly towards data driven management based on a solid understanding of the underlying protocols and systems. Brooks Westbrook joins Tom Amman and Russ White to discuss the data driven lens in this episode of the Hedge.

download

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What Does Aruba Do With No SASE To Sell? It Changes The Conversation

SASE was clearly on the minds of Aruba executives during its Atmosphere 2021 event, but without an actual SASE offering in its portfolio, Aruba had to steer the conversation toward SD-WAN and Aruba's role as a partner that can help enterprises transform at their own pace.

The post What Does Aruba Do With No SASE To Sell? It Changes The Conversation appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Released: Docker Desktop for Mac [Apple Silicon]

Today we are excited to announce the general availability of Docker Desktop for Mac [Apple Silicon], continuing to support developers in our community with their choice of local development environments.  

First, we want to say a big thank you to our community. The excitement you have shown about being able to run Docker Desktop on the new M1 chip has been tremendous and hugely motivating to us. Your engagement on testing builds and reporting problems has been invaluable. As soon as Apple announced the new M1 chip, you let us know on our public roadmap that this was a high priority for you, and it quickly became by far our most upvoted roadmap item ever. You also responded very positively to our previous blog posts.

After the M1 machines were publicly available, those of you on our developer preview program tested some very early builds. And then as we moved into public tech previews and release candidates, many more of you joined in with testing your enormous variety of use cases, and reporting bugs. In total we have had 45,000 downloads of the various preview builds, and 140 tickets raised on our public bug tracker, not to Continue reading

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Network Architecture 2021: Old Network Technologies Remain Relevant

Solved problems are still there but they don't need attention

The post Network Architecture 2021: Old Network Technologies Remain Relevant appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Benefits Of Coworking Spaces

Coworking spaces have seen a rapid increase in recent years. In 2018, coworking spaces in the U.S increased by more than 16%. On the other hand, these spaces outside the U.S increased by 36%. So, what is the reason for this increase?

Are coworking spaces that effective? Let’s find out.

1. People Find Work More Meaningful In Coworking Spaces

We are all familiar with office politics. It exists in every business, and there is no way out of it. However, freelancers sharing coworking spaces don’t feel the need to put another persona when they work here.

That is because they are among people doing different kinds of work, and no one competes with each other. That is why it enhances the identity of one’s own work. Through this strong identity, people find more meaning as what they do seems more unique and interesting in such an environment.

2. Networking

Networking is perhaps one of the most important benefits of utilizing a coworking space. People connect with each other that they would not normally meet if it wasn’t for the space. These connections help in being part of a community.

However, if you are running a small business through Continue reading

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Cloud Native Networking – Andree Toonk, Internet Infrastructure Architect

Andree is an experienced technologist and entrepreneur with a passion for all aspects of Internet infrastructure. He is also the founder of BGPMon.

Today Andree focusses on designing and building cloud native (networking) applications. Make sure to check out his blog https://toonk.io/ and latest project https://www.mysocket.io/.

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A Boring Announcement: Free Tunnels for Everyone

A few months ago, we announced that we wanted to make Zero Trust security accessible to everyone, regardless of size, scale, or resources. Argo Tunnel, our secure method of connecting resources directly to Cloudflare, is the next piece of the puzzle.

Argo Tunnel creates a secure, outbound-only connection between your services and Cloudflare by deploying a lightweight connector in your environment. With this model, your team does not need to go through the hassle of poking holes in your firewall or validating that traffic originated from Cloudflare IPs.

In the past, Argo Tunnel has been priced based on bandwidth consumption as part of Argo Smart Routing, Cloudflare’s traffic acceleration feature. Starting today, we’re excited to announce that any organization can use the secure, outbound-only connection feature of the product at no cost. You can still add the paid Argo Smart Routing feature to accelerate traffic.

As part of that change (and to reduce confusion), we’re also renaming the product to Cloudflare Tunnel. To get started, sign up today.

If you’re interested in how and why we’re doing this, keep scrolling.

A Private Link to the Public Internet

In 2018, Cloudflare introduced Argo Tunnel, a private, secure connection between your origin Continue reading

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Bangkok’s Neutral Peering Hub Scales Its Capacity

Bangkok Neutral Internet Exchange (BKNIX) recently expanded its Internet exchange capacity thanks to outstanding carrier-class equipment provided by the Internet Society In 2015, Bangkok Neutral Internet Exchange (BKNIX) was launched with the ambition to fix slow Internet, improve online experience for users, and lower the cost of Internet access for people in Thailand. BKNIX knew […]

The post Bangkok’s Neutral Peering Hub Scales Its Capacity appeared first on Internet Society.

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What is gNMI?

A few weeks ago we released an episode on the fundamentals of gRPC. And while programmatic interfaces are excellent tools for network automation, often that is only the beginning of the story. That’s no exception with gRPC. In this episode we continue down the path of that gRPC conversation and into gNMI, a standards based approached to programmatic interaction with network devices utilizing gRPC. We discuss what it is, how it works, and where it stands in today’s fast moving environment.

Relevant Links:

• Cisco’s reference to using gNMI with Python
• Nick Russo’s Evolving Technologies book
• gNMIc Tool

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Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post What is gNMI? appeared first on Network Collective.

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Fundamentals: Is Switching Latency Relevant?

One of my readers wondered whether it makes sense to buy low-latency switches from Cisco or Juniper instead of switches based on merchant silicon like Trident-3 or Jericho (regardless of whether they are running NX-OS, Junos, EOS, or Linux).

As always, the answer is it depends, but before getting into the details, let’s revisit what latency really is. We’ll start with a simple two-node network.

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Fundamentals: Is Switching Latency Relevant?

One of my readers wondered whether it makes sense to buy low-latency switches from Cisco or Juniper instead of switches based on merchant silicon like Trident-3 or Jericho (regardless of whether they are running NX-OS, Junos, EOS, or Linux).

As always, the answer is it depends, but before getting into the details, let’s revisit what latency really is. We’ll start with a simple two-node network.

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Cut-Through Switching Isn’t A Thing Anymore

So, cut-through switching isn’t a thing anymore. It hasn’t been for a while really, though in the age of VXLAN, it’s really not a thing. And of course with all things IT, there are exceptions. But by and large, Cut-through switching just isn’t a thing.

And it doesn’t matter.

Cut-through versus store-and-forward was a preference years ago. The idea is that cut-through switching had less latency than store and forward (it does, to a certain extent). It was also the preferred method, and purchasing decisions may have been made (and sometimes still are, mostly erroneously) on whether a switch is cut-through or store-and-forward.

In this article I’m going to cover two things:

• Why you can’t really do cut-through switching
• Why it doesn’t matter that you can’t do cut-through switching

Why You Can’t Do Cut-Through Switching (Mostly)

You can’t do cut-through switching when you change speeds. If the bits in a frame are sent at 10 Gigabits, they need to go into a buffer before they’re sent over a 100 Gigabit uplink. The reverse is also true. You can’t stuff a frame that’s piling into an interface 10 times faster than it’s sending (though it’s not slowed down).

So any switch Continue reading