Introducing Workers Unbound

Introducing Workers Unbound
Introducing Workers Unbound

We launched Cloudflare Workers® in 2017 with the goal of building the development platform that we wished we had. We want to enable developers to build great software while Cloudflare manages the overhead of configuring and maintaining the infrastructure. Workers is with you from the first line of code, to the first application, all the way to a globally scaled product. By making our Edge network programmable and providing servers in 200+ locations around the world, we offer you the power to execute on even the biggest ideas.

Behind the scenes at Cloudflare, we’ve been steadily working towards making development on the Edge even more powerful and flexible. Today, we are excited to announce the next phase of this with the launch of our new platform, Workers Unbound, without restrictive CPU limits in a private beta (sign up for details here).

Introducing Workers Unbound

What is Workers Unbound? How is it different from Cloudflare Workers?

Workers Unbound is like our classic Cloudflare Workers (now referred to as Workers Bundled), but for applications that need longer execution times. We are extending our CPU limits to allow customers to bring all of their workloads onto Workers, no matter how intensive. It eliminates the choice Continue reading

Conference Preview: WISP Virtual Summit 2020

photo credit: Jeff Little

It seems like ages ago that we blocked out time in our schedules to fly to technical conferences and immerse ourselves with great people and content for an entire week.

In reality, it’s only been a few months but 2020 has made it seem like a lifetime.

However, those of us in tech are quick to adapt and virtual conferences are now a thing.

For the fixed wireless industry, in-person conferences are critical because most of the attendees are entrepreneurs.

For a small business owner in tech, going to a show is one of the best ways to evaluate content and business opportunities needed to stay competitive in a short amount of time.

The first virtual conference for Wireless ISPs

Thankfully, due to some amazing effort and collaboration in the WISP industry led by Preseem and supported by WISPA, we are about to kick off the first virtual conference for the fixed wireless industry on July 28th, 2020.

An enormous amount of work has gone into planning and preparation to replicate the experience of an in-person technical conference as much as possible.

First thing’s first….get registered

Kick off the registration process by visiting: https://wispvirtualsummit2020. Continue reading

The Edge Computing Opportunity: It’s Not What You Think

The Edge Computing Opportunity: It’s Not What You Think
The Edge Computing Opportunity: It’s Not What You Think

Cloudflare Workers® is one of the largest, most widely used edge computing platforms. We announced Cloudflare Workers nearly three years ago and it's been generally available for the last two years. Over that time, we've seen hundreds of thousands of developers write tens of millions of lines of code that now run across Cloudflare's network.

Just last quarter, 20,000 developers deployed for the first time a new application using Cloudflare Workers. More than 10% of all requests flowing through our network today use Cloudflare Workers. And, among our largest customers, approximately 20% are adopting Cloudflare Workers as part of their deployments. It's been incredible to watch the platform grow.

Over the course of the coming week, which we’re calling Serverless Week, we're going to be announcing a series of enhancements to the Cloudflare Workers platform to allow you to build much more complicated applications, lower your serverless computing bills, make your applications even faster, and prove that the Workers platform is secure to its core.

Matthew’s Hierarchy of Developers' Needs

Before the week begins, I wanted to step back and talk a bit about what we've learned about edge computing over the course of the last three years. When we Continue reading

How to Create an Online Networking Event Invite for a Zoom Party

Video conferencing is the best way to communicate with others if you are working remotely or you are a part of a global team. However, now it has become a basic necessity. We have all heard of Zoom, and this year, it has become very popular.

We see people celebrating birthdays and having cocktail parties on Zoom now. People now consider Zoom parties to be the most convenient and safe way of staying in touch with one another. It has become the new norm of networking online. However, creating Zoom parties requires a bit of learning, especially if this is your first time hosting a virtual party.

How to Set Up a Zoom Party

In this article we will talk about the steps to set up a Zoom party, especially for those who have not yet discovered how to do so.

First things first, use a laptop. Zoom has a mobile application too, but attending a virtual zoom party can be hard as you will have to keep holding the phone, which will soon become draining. Other than that, attending a Zoom party on a laptop is a lot more fun, you can see all the faces and eat Continue reading

Reflecting on my first year at Cloudflare as a Field Marketer in APAC

Reflecting on my first year at Cloudflare as a Field Marketer in APAC
Reflecting on my first year at Cloudflare as a Field Marketer in APAC

Hey there! I am Els (short form for Elspeth) and I am the Field Marketing and Events Manager for APAC. I am responsible for building brand awareness and supporting our lovely sales team in acquiring new logos across APAC.

I was inspired to write about my first year in Cloudflare, because John, our CTO, encouraged more women to write for our Cloudflare blog after reviewing our blogging statistics and found out that more men than women blog for Cloudflare. I jumped at the chance because I thought this is a great way to share many side stories as people might not know about how it feels to work in Cloudflare.

Why Cloudflare?

Before I continue, I must mention that I really wanted to join Cloudflare after reading our co-founder Michelle’s reply on Quora regarding "What is it like to work in Cloudflare?." Michelle’s answer as follows:

“my answer is 'adult-like.' While we haven’t adopted this as our official company-wide mantra, I like the simplicity of that answer. People work hard, but go home at the end of the day. People care about their work and want to do a great job. When someone does a good job, Continue reading

Heavy Networking 531: Hyperscale Multi-Cloud Networking With Arrcus (Sponsored)

Today's Heavy Networking podcast examines a new multi-cloud networking product from sponsor Arrcus. Arrcus streamlines and secures multi-cloud networks via its new ArcEdge and ArcOrchestrator products that connect the data center and edge locations to the cloud. Our guest are Keyur Patel, CTO of Arrcus; and Sree Kannan, VP of Product Management.

The post Heavy Networking 531: Hyperscale Multi-Cloud Networking With Arrcus (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Review: Anker PowerExpand Elite Thunderbolt 3 Dock

Over the last couple of weeks or so, I’ve been using my 2017 MacBook Pro (running macOS “Mojave” 10.14.6) more frequently as my daily driver/primary workstation. Along with it, I’ve been using the Anker PowerExpand Elite 13-in-1 Thunderbolt 3 Dock. In this post, I’d like to share my experience with this dock and provide a quick review of the Anker PowerExpand Elite.

Note that I’m posting this as a customer of Anker. I paid for the PowerExpand Elite out of my own pocket, and haven’t received any compensation of any kind from anyone in return for my review. This is just me sharing my experience in the event it will help others.

First Impressions

The dock is both smaller than I expected (it measures 5 inches by 3.5 inches by 1.5 inches) and yet heavier than I expected. It feels solid and well-built. It comes with a (rather large) power brick and a Thunderbolt 3 cable to connect to the MacBook Pro. Setup was insanely easy; plug it in, connect it to the laptop, and you’re off to the races. (I did need to reboot my MacBook Pro for macOS to recognize the network interface in Continue reading

Video Meetings and Learning Styles

Have you noticed that every meeting needs to be on video now? Of course, that’s a rhetorical question. It’s one of the first and most constant things that is brought up in the pandemic-influenced tech community of today. Meetings that used to be telephone-only or even wordy emails are now video chats that take half an hour or more. People complain that they are spending time and money to spruce up their office to look presentable at 720p to people that likely aren’t paying attention anyway. It’s a common complaint. But have you ever thought about why?

Listening and Looking to Learn

There are three major styles of learning that get brought up in academic courses.

  • Physical, or kinesthetic, learners learn best from touching things. They want to manipulate and feel things as they learn. They like to gesture when they talk. They also get bored quickly when things are taking too long or they have to sit still too much.
  • Visual learners learn best from seeing things. They like to look around and tend to think in pictures. They would rather see something instead of hearing someone speak.
  • Auditory learners like to hear things being spoken. They want to Continue reading

A (Fairly) Non-Technical Guide to Routing Security Basics

On the MANRS website, we write about routing security. We dig into the details of technical problems, research the origins of route leaks and hijacks, analyze trends and statistics related to networks around the globe via the MANRS Observatory, and generally get pretty nerdy about how to improve the routing system that underpins the Internet. Last week, we took a step back and published a series of posts regarding Routing Security Basics.

This 5-part series covers the following topics:

While it’s difficult to explain routing security without assuming some baseline knowledge, our intent is for these posts to be as non-technical as possible to help non-experts understand this sometimes-complicated topic.

It all started with a Twitter thread on a Friday afternoon, comparing routing security to online dating. We then expanded this silly analogy into a series of blog posts. Follow along as Juan, Maria, and Bad Guy Chad help us explain the types of routing incidents that happen and how the simple, concrete MANRS actions can help.

We hope you’ll read the Routing Security Basics posts, and if you’re Continue reading

Diversity Welcome – A Latinx journey into Cloudflare

Diversity Welcome - A Latinx journey into Cloudflare
Diversity Welcome - A Latinx journey into Cloudflare

I came to the United States chasing the love of my life, today my wife, in 2015.

A Spanish native speaker, Portuguese as my second language and born in the Argentine city of Córdoba more than 6,000 miles from San Francisco, there is no doubt that the definition of "Latino" fits me very well and with pride.

Cloudflare was not my first job in this country but it has been the organization in which I have learned many of the things that have allowed me to understand the corporate culture of a society totally alien to the one which I come from.

I was hired in January 2018 as the first Business Development Representative for the Latin America (LATAM) region based in San Francisco. This was long before the company went public in September 2019. The organization was looking for a specialist in Latin American markets with not only good experience and knowledge beyond languages ​​(Spanish/Portuguese), but understanding of the economy, politics, culture, history, go-to-market strategies, etc.—I was lucky enough to be chosen as "that person". Cloudflare invested in me to a great extent and I was amazed at the freedom I had to propose ideas and bring them Continue reading

Announcing the Tigera – Nutanix Partnership

Today we are pleased to announce our partnership with Nutanix, creators of the industry’s most popular hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) technology. HCI combines datacenter hardware using locally-attached storage resources with intelligent software to create flexible building blocks that replace legacy infrastructure consisting of separate servers, storage networks, and storage arrays.

Networking and securing microservices running Kubernetes and securely accessing external resources can be challenging, often requiring the use of overlay networks and NATs. At scale, this becomes extremely complex. Cloud-native enterprises seeking a consistent container networking experience across multiple cloud environments have adopted Calico, the de facto standard in open-source Kubernetes networking technologies.

Nutanix is now offering Calico as a component of Karbon, Nutanix’s enterprise Kubernetes management solution that enables turnkey provisioning, operations, and lifecycle management of Kubernetes. With this integration, Karbon users can now take advantage of simplified Kubernetes networking and production-grade network security based on Calico’s native tooling, providing scalable throughput that meets the performance demands of Karbon users.

“Karbon, now with Calico embedded, gives our customers significantly more powerful networking and network security capabilities while preserving the simplicity of provisioning and operating a Kubernetes cluster,” said Greg Muscarella, VP of Products at Nutanix. “Calico eliminates Continue reading

Next Platform TV for July 23, 2020

On Next Platform TV today we cover several bases, from cost-optimizing GPU types in cloud environments, to calculating storage TCO with downtime in the mix, and also some straight talk about the viability of quantum computing in healthcare with one expert’s view followed by a separate interview focused on financial services.

Next Platform TV for July 23, 2020 was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Securing Tower Installer Passwords

One of the crucial pieces of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is Ansible Tower. Ansible Tower helps scaling IT automation, managing complex deployments and speeding up productivity. A strength of Ansible Tower is its simplicity that also extends to the installation routine: when installed as a non-container version, a simple script is used to read in variables from an initial configuration to deploy Ansible Tower. The same script and initial configuration can even be re-used to extend the setup and add, for example, more cluster nodes.

However, part of this initial configuration are passwords for the database, Ansible Tower itself and so on. In many online examples, these passwords are often stored in plain text. One question I frequently get as a Red Hat Consultant is how to protect this information. A common solution is to simply remove the file after you complete the installation of Ansible Tower. But, there are reasons you may want to keep the file around. In this article, I will present another way to protect the passwords in your installation files.

 

Ansible Tower’s setup.sh

For some quick background, setup.sh is the script used to install Ansible Tower and is provided in Continue reading