Calico Egress Gateway: A Cost-Effective NAT for Kubernetes

The Need for a Kubernetes NAT Gateway

When Kubernetes workloads need to connect to the outside world, whether to access external APIs, integrate with external systems, or connect to partner networks, they often face a unique challenge. The problem? Pod IP addresses inside Kubernetes clusters are dynamic and non-routable. For external systems to recognize and trust this traffic, workloads need a consistent, dependable identity. This means outbound connections require fixed, routable IP addresses that external services can rely on. This is where Network Address Translation (NAT) becomes essential. It assigns Kubernetes pods with a static, consistent IP for all outbound traffic, ensuring those connections work properly.

If you’re running Kubernetes in the cloud, a common solution is to use your cloud provider’s managed NAT gateway service. These are easy to use, but they can come at a cost. In AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, cloud-managed NAT gateways charge both an hourly fee and a per-gigabyte data processing fee. For high-traffic deployments, those charges can quickly add up, sometimes even exceeding your compute costs.

The good news: with Calico, you can handle NAT from inside your Kubernetes cluster, avoiding cloud NAT gateway fees and giving you more control over how egress Continue reading

Addressing the unauthorized issuance of multiple TLS certificates for 1.1.1.1

Over the past few days Cloudflare has been notified through our vulnerability disclosure program and the certificate transparency mailing list that unauthorized certificates were issued by Fina CA for 1.1.1.1, one of the IP addresses used by our public DNS resolver service. From February 2024 to August 2025, Fina CA issued twelve certificates for 1.1.1.1 without our permission. We did not observe unauthorized issuance for any properties managed by Cloudflare other than 1.1.1.1.

We have no evidence that bad actors took advantage of this error. To impersonate Cloudflare's public DNS resolver 1.1.1.1, an attacker would not only require an unauthorized certificate and its corresponding private key, but attacked users would also need to trust the Fina CA. Furthermore, traffic between the client and 1.1.1.1 would have to be intercepted.

While this unauthorized issuance is an unacceptable lapse in security by Fina CA, we should have caught and responded to it earlier. After speaking with Fina CA, it appears that they issued these certificates for the purposes of internal testing. However, no CA should be issuing certificates for domains and IP addresses without checking control. At Continue reading

Linux For Network Engineers (LFNE) – Now on Ubuntu 24.04

The Linux For Network Engineers (LFNE) Docker container has been refreshed and is now built on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. For those new to it, LFNE is a ready-to-use Linux environment preloaded with the most popular tools used by network engineers—from packet capture and traffic analysis utilities to configuration helpers and scripting support. Instead of spending […]

<p>The post Linux For Network Engineers (LFNE) – Now on Ubuntu 24.04 first appeared on IPNET.</p>

How Many Lab Devices Can netlab Handle?

TL&DR: Over 3000

A few weeks ago, Christian opened an issue describing how netlab breaks when the lab topology has more than 250 devices. We fixed that, only to get into another morass: some code has complexity higher than O(n) (meaning that going from 100 to 200 devices makes things more than twice as slow). Christian is working on one of those problems at the moment (it’s not that his ginormous labs won’t start, it just takes a long time), and I decided it’s time to polish a few other bits of the code.

TCG057: Following the Progress of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) With John Capobianco

John Capobianco is back! Just months after our first Model Context Protocol (MCP) discussion, John returns to showcase how this “USB-C of software” has transformed from experimental technology to an enterprise-ready solutions. We explore the game-changing OAuth 2.1 security updates, witness live demonstrations of packet analysis through natural language with Gemini CLI, and discover how... Read more »

D2DO281: Faddom: Providing a Unified Source of Truth for Security and IT Operations (Sponsored)

Faddom is re-envisioning what application dependency mapping and infrastructure inventory can be in the era of cloud and hybrid IT. Join us today on this sponsored episode as we speak with Faddom’s Itamar Rotem, CPO and Ofer Regev, CTO,  about how Faddom’s discovery process can help to improve migrations for any size organization and help... Read more »

AI Week 2025: Recap

How do we embrace the power of AI without losing control? 

That was one of our big themes for AI Week 2025, which has now come to a close. We announced products, partnerships, and features to help companies successfully navigate this new era.

Everything we built was based on feedback from customers like you that want to get the most out of AI without sacrificing control and safety. Over the next year, we will double down on our efforts to deliver world-class features that augment and secure AI. Please keep an eye on our Blog, AI Avenue, Product Change Log and CloudflareTV for more announcements.

This week we focused on four core areas to help companies secure and deliver AI experiences safely and securely:

  • Securing AI environments and workflows

  • Protecting original content from misuse by AI

  • Helping developers build world-class, secure, AI experiences 

  • Making Cloudflare better for you with AI

Thank you for following along with our first ever AI week at Cloudflare. This recap blog will summarize each announcement across these four core areas. For more information, check out our “This Week in NET” recap episode also featured at the end of this blog.

Securing AI Continue reading

The impact of the Salesloft Drift breach on Cloudflare and our customers

Last week, Cloudflare was notified that we (and our customers) are affected by the Salesloft Drift breach. Because of this breach, someone outside Cloudflare got access to our Salesforce instance, which we use for customer support and internal customer case management, and some of the data it contains. Most of this information is customer contact information and basic support case data, but some customer support interactions may reveal information about a customer's configuration and could contain sensitive information like access tokens. Given that Salesforce support case data contains the contents of support tickets with Cloudflare, any information that a customer may have shared with Cloudflare in our support system—including logs, tokens or passwords—should be considered compromised, and we strongly urge you to rotate any credentials that you may have shared with us through this channel.

As part of our response to this incident, we did our own search through the compromised data to look for tokens or passwords and found 104 Cloudflare API tokens. We have identified no suspicious activity associated with those tokens, but all of these have been rotated in an abundance of caution. All customers whose data was compromised in this breach have been informed directly by Continue reading

HS111: When Someone Makes Your Cloud Service Go Poof!

The modern enterprise is built on cloud, with most organizations using SaaS for their “horizontal” work horse layers, such as communications, conferencing, HR, and payroll. That makes the enterprise entirely dependent on the good-faith execution and good-will delivery of the cloud providers. Those providers have a huge economic incentive to reliably deliver software – but... Read more »

Automate IP, VLAN & BGP Resource Allocation With Infrahub Resource Manager

Automate IP, VLAN & BGP Resource Allocation With Infrahub Resource Manager

Have you ever had two teams accidentally assign the same IP address? Or heard someone ask, “Can I get a VLAN? I’m not sure which one to use.” I’m also certain you have because manually managing infrastructure resources like IP addresses, IP prefixes, VLAN IDs, and BGP ASNs is still all too common in a lot of environments. Manual resource management is also time-consuming and painful, and often results in duplicate resource assignments, which means more work to clean things up later.

SPONSORED

Disclaimer – OpsMill has partnered with me for this post, and they also support my blog as a sponsor. The post is originally published under https://opsmill.com/blog/infrahub-resource-manager-automate-allocation/

The Infrahub Resource Manager is designed to eliminate those pains while speeding up your workflows. The Resource Manager automatically hands out resources from managed pools and ensures every allocation is tracked and unique.

Automate IP, VLAN & BGP Resource Allocation With Infrahub Resource Manager

In this guide, we’ll show you how the Infrahub Resource Manager works and give you three ways to build pools and allocate resources with it.


Common use cases for the Infrahub Resource Manager

The Resource Manager can be used in many areas of network design and automation. A common use case is data center expansion Continue reading