When it comes to novel computing architectures, whether in quantum, deep learning, or neuromorphic, it can be tricky to get a handle on how incremental improvements in processor counts translate to real world improvements since these bumps in element counts often don’t have perfect parallels to CPUs or even GPUs. …
Keith Townsend stops by Network Break to lend analysis and commentary on our review of the biggest announcements to come out of VMworld, including Project Monterey and the SaltStack acquisition. We also discuss new products from Arista, acquisitions by Arista and Juniper, Google joining the Linux Foundation's LF Networking, and more.
Keith Townsend stops by Network Break to lend analysis and commentary on our review of the biggest announcements to come out of VMworld, including Project Monterey and the SaltStack acquisition. We also discuss new products from Arista, acquisitions by Arista and Juniper, Google joining the Linux Foundation's LF Networking, and more.
Today we’re announcing the availability of DDoS attack alerts. The alerts are available for free for all Cloudflare’s customers on paid plans.
Unmetered DDoS protection
Last week we celebrated Cloudflare’s 10th birthday in what we call Birthday Week. Every year, on each day of Birthday Week, we announce a new product with the goal of helping make the Internet a better place -- one that is safer and faster. To do that, over the years we’ve democratized many products that were previously only available to large enterprises by making them available for free (or at very low cost) to all. For example, on Cloudflare’s 7th birthday in 2017, we announced free unmetered DDoS protection as part of every Cloudflare product and every plan, including the free plan.
DDoS attacks aim to take down websites or online services and make them unavailable to the public. We wanted to make sure that every organization and every website is available and accessible, regardless if they can or can’t afford enterprise-grade DDoS protection. This has been a core part of our mission. We’ve been heavily investing in our DDoS protection capabilities over the last 10 years, and we will continue to do so in Continue reading
No deal: A U.S. judge has temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s order to ban Chinese app TikTok from the Apple and Android app stores, CNBC reports. Trump has argued that the app is a security risk. Oracle and Walmart are in talks to buy a piece of TikTok’s U.S. operations as a way to appease Trump, though it appears that there’s disagreement with Chinese owner ByteDance over the outlines of a deal.
Breaking up is hard to do:The Hill has commentary about Trump’s attempt to ban TikTok and WeChat, another Chinese app, saying these are “only the most recent signs that the once open, global internet is slowly being replaced by 200, nationally-controlled, separate internets.” Trump’s efforts follow a long-term Chinese government drive to create a walled off Internet inside its own borders.
It’s nice to share: The European Union is preparing new regulations that would require large tech companies to share their customer data files with smaller competitors, Euronews says. An early draft of the Digital Services Act says companies like Amazon and Google “shall not use data collected on the platform … for [their] own commercial activities … unless they [make it] accessible to business users active Continue reading
We are standing on the eve of the 5G era… 5G, as a monumental shift in cellular communication technology, holds tremendous potential for spurring innovations across many vertical industries, with its promised multi-Gbps speed, sub-10 ms low latency, and massive connectivity.
There are high hopes for 5G, for example unlocking new applications in UHD streaming and VR, and machine-to-machine communication in IoT. The first 5G networks are now deployed and operational. In today’s paper choice, the authors investigate whether 5G as deployed in practice can live up to the hype. The short answer is no. It’s a great analysis that taught me a lot about the realities of 5G, and the challenges ahead if we are to eventually get there.
The study is based on one of the world’s first commercial 5G network deployments (launched in April 2019), a 0.5 x 0.92 km university campus. As is expected to be common during the roll-out and transition phase of 5G, this network adopts the NSA (Non-Standalone Access) deployment model whereby the 5G radio is used for the data Continue reading
We shifted this year's Interop to an online event. And it's this week. We've used the extra time to develop an incredibly strong networks and infrastructure track.
We’ve always used birthdays as an opportunity to give back to the Internet. But this year — a year in which the Internet has been so central to giving us all some degree of connectedness and normalcy — it feels like giving back to the Internet has been more important than ever.
And while we couldn’t celebrate in person, we were humbled by some of the incredible minds that joined us online to talk about how the Internet has changed over the last ten years — and what we might see over the next ten.
With that, let’s recap the key announcements from Birthday Week 2020.
Day 1, Monday: Workers
During Birthday Week in 2017, Cloudflare announced Workers — a serverless platform that represented a completely new way to build applications: by writing your code directly onto our network edge. On Monday of this year’s Birthday Week, we announced Durable Objects and Cron Triggers — both of which continue to expand the use cases that Workers can address.
Many folks associate the serverless paradigm with functions as a service — which, at its core, is stateless. Workers KV started Continue reading
We've added support for the new AVIF image format in Image Resizing. It compresses images significantly better than older-generation formats such as WebP and JPEG. It's supported in Chrome desktop today, and support is coming to other Chromium-based browsers, as well as Firefox.
What’s the benefit?
More than a half of an average website's bandwidth is spent on images. Improved image compression can save bandwidth and improve overall performance of the web. The compression in AVIF is so good that images can reduce to half the size of JPEG and WebP
Currently JPEG is the most popular image format on the Web. It's doing remarkably well for its age, and it will likely remain popular for years to come thanks to its excellent compatibility. There have been many previous attempts at replacing JPEG, such as JPEG 2000, JPEG XR and WebP. However, these formats offered only modest compression improvements, and didn't always beat JPEG on image quality. Compression and image quality in AVIF is better than in all of them, and by a wide margin.
Justin Pietsch is back with another must-read article, this time focused on high-speed Ethernet switching ASICs. I’ve rarely seen so many adjacent topics covered in a single easy-to-read article.
Justin Pietsch is back with another must-read article, this time focused on high-speed Ethernet switching ASICs. I’ve rarely seen so many adjacent topics covered in a single easy-to-read article.
Welcome to Technology Short Take #131! I’m back with another collection of articles on various data center technologies. This time around the content is a tad heavy on the security side, but I’ve still managed to pull in articles on networking, cloud computing, applications, and some programming-related content. Here’s hoping you find something useful here!
Networking
This recent Ars Technica article points out that a feature in Chromium—the open source project leveraged by Chrome and Edge, among others—is having a significant impact on root DNS traffic. More technical details can be found in an associated APNIC blog post.
Quentin Machu outlines a series of problems his company experienced using Weave Net as the CNI for their Kubernetes clusters, as well as describes the migration process to a new CNI. His blog post is well worth a read, IMO.
Jed Salazar of Isovalent (the company behind Cilium) has a fairly detailed article showing some examples of how Cilium protects against certain network attacks.
Tom Hollingsworth stops by the Heavy Networking podcast to weigh in on a few topics, including the conflict between Broadcom and NVIDIA, and whether whitebox networking is becoming too risky for enterprise networks.
Tom Hollingsworth stops by the Heavy Networking podcast to weigh in on a few topics, including the conflict between Broadcom and NVIDIA, and whether whitebox networking is becoming too risky for enterprise networks.