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

A Narrow Window of Opportunity for Rural Connectivity in the U.S.

As COVID-19 continues to shine a spotlight on the vital role the Internet plays, a short window of opportunity has opened for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to do their part in connecting rural Indigenous communities in the United States.

The Tribal Priority Window is currently open for federally-recognized tribes, Alaska Native Villages, and Hawaiian Homelands to apply for Educational Broadband Service (EBS) spectrum, but it closes on August 3rd. Access to the EBS spectrum would enable Indigenous communities to build their own Internet networks.

The FCC set this deadline before the pandemic, but Tribal governments are now overwhelmed by handling the Coronavirus with limited resources. The FCC must give them more time to apply to the priority window. COVID-19 will not simply disappear from tribal lands in time for tribal governments to pull together applications.

The need for reliable, affordable Internet access is more pressing than ever.

Need proof? One only has to look at the fact that Indigenous communities in the US face the lowest rate of broadband access and the highest per capita rate of COVID-19 infections. The need for access to accurate information and telehealth is at an all-time high. Tribal communities are at serious risk Continue reading