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HN739: High Stakes Network Observability for High Frequency Trading

High Frequency Trading in finance demands the utmost quality and speed from a network, making flawless observability a must. Our guest today is Radu Ionco from Jump Trading, and he tells us about how they built their own custom network observability platform, even creating a monitoring system for the monitoring system. We talk through streaming... Read more »

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Exam-ining recent Internet shutdowns in Syria, Iraq, and Algeria

The practice of cheating on exams (or at least attempting to) is presumably as old as the concept of exams itself, especially when the results of the exam can have significant consequences for one’s academic future or career. As access to the Internet became more ubiquitous with the growth of mobile connectivity, and communication easier with an assortment of social media and messaging apps, a new avenue for cheating on exams emerged, potentially facilitating the sharing of test materials or answers. Over the last decade, some governments have reacted to this perceived risk by taking aggressive action to prevent cheating, ranging from targeted DNS-based blocking/filtering to multi-hour nationwide shutdowns across multi-week exam periods.

Syria and Iraq are well-known practitioners of the latter approach, and we have covered past exam-related Internet shutdowns in Syria (2021, 2022, 2023) and Iraq (2022, 2023) here on the Cloudflare blog. It is now mid-June 2024, and exams in both countries took place over the last several weeks, and with those exams, regular nationwide Internet shutdowns. In addition, Baccalaureate exams also took place in Algeria, and we have written about related Internet disruptions there in the past ( Continue reading

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Worth Reading: You Probably Don’t Need AI

Here’s another rant to spice up your weekend: focus on fixing your company’s problems instead of chanting the AI mantra. Have fun ;)

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Worth Reading: You Probably Don’t Need AI

Here’s another rant to spice up your weekend: focus on fixing your company’s problems instead of chanting the AI mantra. Have fun ;)

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VPP with loopback-only OSPFv3 – Part 2

Introduction

When I first built IPng Networks AS8298, I decided to use OSPF as an IPv4 and IPv6 internal gateway protocol. Back in March I took a look at two slightly different ways of doing this for IPng, notably against a backdrop of conserving IPv4 addresses. As the network grows, the little point to point transit networks between routers really start adding up.

I explored two potential solutions to this problem:

1. [Babel] can use IPv6 nexthops for IPv4 destinations - which is super useful because it would allow me to retire all of the IPv4 /31 point to point networks between my routers.
2. [OSPFv3] makes it difficult to use IPv6 nexthops for IPv4 destinations, but in a discussion with the Bird Users mailinglist, we found a way: by reusing a single IPv4 loopback address on adjacent interfaces

In May I ran a modest set of two canaries, one between the two routers in my house (chbtl0 and chbtl1), and another between a router at the Daedalean colocation and Interxion datacenters (ddln0 and chgtg0). AS8298 has about quarter of a /24 tied up in these otherwise pointless point-to-point transit networks (see what Continue reading

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Consistency – Making Progress One Step at a Time

People often ask me how I manage to write so many blog posts. With 5-6 posts a month, it might seem like a lot, but my answer is always the same, consistency. I’ve been blogging for over three years now, and writing has become a part of my daily life. It’s all about sticking to it day after day. In this post, I’ll share how maintaining consistency has not only improved my blogging but can also help you in any area of your life.

I want to start off by acknowledging that while it’s easy to talk about being consistent, actually implementing it can be really tough. Take my own struggle with running, for example. I’ve been trying to make it a consistent part of my life for the past few years, but it’s been a real challenge. I might run for a week, then give up, start again, and then stop. It’s a cycle that’s hard to break. So, I understand that being consistent isn’t always straightforward or easy. I just wanted to get that out of the way before we proceed into this topic.

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Need To Know More About AI Design And Deployment?

SPONSORED POST: Now in its seventh year, the 2024 AI Hardware and Edge AI Summit will be held at the Signia by Hilton hotel in San Jose, CA between the 9^th and 12^th of September. …

Need To Know More About AI Design And Deployment? was written by David Gordon at The Next Platform.

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Palo Alto Firewall Packet Capture

Packet capture is very useful when you troubleshoot network connectivity issues or monitor suspicious activity.

Diagram

Few things to consider

1. Four packet capture filters can be added with a variety of attributes.
2. Packet captures are session/flow based, so having a single filter is enough for capturing both inbound and outbound traffic.

Packet Capture Stages

There are four stages:

1. drop - where packets get discarded. Example, security polciy denying the traffic
2. firewall - captures packets in the firewall stage.
3. receive - captures the packets as they ingress the firewall interface before they go into the firewall engine (pre-NAT)
4. transmit - captures packets as they egress out of the firewall engine (post-NAT)

Example 1 - Packet Capture without NAT

Initiate a ping from CLIENT to the SERVER and capture both ICMP echo request and ICMP echo reply.

You can configure packet capture by going to Monitor > Packet Capture

• Packets 1 & 2 are ingressing the firewall
• Packets 3 & 4 are egressing the firewall
• Packets 1 & 3 are the same
• Packets 2 & 4 are the same

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Step 1 - Configure capture filters

The filter shown below captures both echo request and echo reply on Continue reading

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Patrick Finn: why I joined Cloudflare as VP Sales for the Americas

I’m delighted to be joining Cloudflare as Vice President of Sales in the US, Canada, and Latin America.

I’ve had the privilege of leading sales for some of the world’s most iconic tech companies, including IBM and Cisco. During my career I’ve led international teams numbering in the thousands and driving revenue in the billions of dollars while serving some of the world's largest enterprise customers. I’ve seen first-hand the evolution of technology and what it can achieve for businesses, from robotics, automation, and data analytics, to cloud computing, cybersecurity, and AI.

I firmly believe Cloudflare is well on its way to being one of the next iconic tech companies.

Why Cloudflare

Cloudflare has a unique opportunity to help businesses navigate an enduring wave of technological change. There are few companies in the world that operate in the three most exciting fields of innovation that will continue to shape our world in the coming years: cloud computing, AI, and cybersecurity. Cloudflare is one of those companies. When I was approached for this role, I spoke to a wide range of connections across the financial sector, private companies, and government. The feedback was unanimous that Cloudflare is poised on the edge Continue reading

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Introducing Stream Generated Captions, powered by Workers AI

With one click, customers can now generate video captions effortlessly using Stream’s newest feature: AI-generated captions for on-demand videos and recordings of live streams. As part of Cloudflare’s mission to help build a better Internet, this feature is available to all Stream customers at no additional cost.

This solution is designed for simplicity, eliminating the need for third-party transcription services and complex workflows. For videos lacking accessibility features like captions, manual transcription can be time-consuming and impractical, especially for large video libraries. Traditionally, it has involved specialized services, sometimes even dedicated teams, to transcribe audio and deliver the text along with video, so it can be displayed during playback. As captions become more widely expected for a variety of reasons, including ethical obligation, legal compliance, and changing audience preferences, we wanted to relieve this burden.

With Stream’s integrated solution, the caption generation process is seamlessly integrated into your existing video management workflow, saving time and resources. Regardless of when you uploaded a video, you can easily add automatic captions to enhance accessibility. Captions can now be generated within the Cloudflare Dashboard or via an API request, all within the familiar and unified Stream platform.

This feature is designed with Continue reading

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HPE Goes After Enterprise AI With Nvidia GPU Engines

This week is another major conference for a server OEM, and that must mean it is another time for an OEM to announce its tight partnership with AI compute engine juggernaut Nvidia. …

HPE Goes After Enterprise AI With Nvidia GPU Engines was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

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NAN066: Operationalize Your Automations With torero (Sponsored)

When you’re trying to share your cool new network automation with your co-workers, the last thing you want to do is deal with other systems’ different libraries and dependencies gumming it up. That’s where our episode sponsor torero comes into play. As an “automation gateway,” torero dynamically creates an execution environment based on what has... Read more »

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D2C245: Don’t Fear Database DevOps

Most platform engineers are scared of databases, and most database administrators prefer it that way. But our guest today says it’s time to move forward together toward a future of database linters, observability, and abstraction. Adam Furmanek makes the case that just like how developers had to learn some networking, and networking tools were created... Read more »