Today's Day Two Cloud discusses how Azure's use of hollow core fiber will impact customers, building networks to support AI workloads, the general availability of Virtual Network Manager, routing improvements, a tech preview of IPAM in vNet Manager, updates around containers and security, and other network-related topics in Azure. Microsoft is the sponsor of this episode.
It’s hard to influence the behavior of someone with strong opinions (just ask any parent with a screaming toddler), and trying to persuade an upstream ISP not to send the traffic over a backup link is no exception – sometimes even AS path prepending is not a strong enough argument.
Since the advent of distributed computing, there has been a tension between the tight coherency of memory and its compute within a node – the base level of a unit of compute – and the looser coherency over the network across those nodes. …
Thanks to everyone who joined us in Chicago this month at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2023. We had a chance to have many meaningful conversations about Kubernetes and container security, the latest in the open source ecosystem, and of course—Calico! Here are some highlights from the conference.
Calico at KubeCon
We had a ton of visitors at our booth this year and were happy to catch up with old friends as well as meet new ones. Tech problems for business needs, such as how to provide fixed IPs to workloads for communication outside of the Kubernetes cluster instead of architectural debates about the underlying dataplane, was a popular topic of discussion. Another was runtime security at the workload level (default-deny/zero trust). The issue of visibility into workload communication at scale overlaid with effective security policies also came up often. We were all too happy to show how Calico can help!
Cruise Party
Those who joined us for our private cruise party enjoyed a guided architecture tour of the spectacular Chicago lakefront. The evening went swimmingly and offered our guests a chance to unwind and network while enjoying great food and an open bar, against a backdrop of glittering skyscrapers.
Throughout the year, special events lead to changes in Internet traffic. We observed this with Thanksgiving in the US last week, where traffic dipped, and during periods like Black Friday (November 24, 2023) and Cyber Monday (November 27, 2023), where traffic spiked.
But how significant are these Cyber Week days on the Internet? Is it a global phenomenon? Does e-commerce interest peak on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, and are attacks increasing during this time? These questions are important to retailers and stakeholders around the world. At Cloudflare, we manage substantial traffic for our customers, which gives us a unique vantage from which to analyze traffic and attack patterns across large swaths of the Internet.
As we'll explore next, we observed varying trends. From a global perspective, there was a clear Internet traffic winner: Cyber Monday was the highest overall traffic day of 2023 (as it was for 2022), followed by Black Friday, and then Monday, November 21 from the same week. But zooming in, this pattern didn’t hold in some countries.
For this analysis, we examined anonymized samples of HTTP requests crossing our network, as well as DNS queries. Cloudflare's global data shows that peak request traffic occurred on Continue reading
If you’re not paying attention to mDNS traffic, it might be hurting your Wi-Fi performance. Bryan Ward shares his research looking at the mDNS protocol on a higher ed network and its dramatic impact on Wi-Fi airtime. Bryan shares his experience of identifying and resolving network issues related to mDNS traffic and client isolation. He... Read more »
Our conversation begins with an exploration of the concept of cognitive load in relation to platforms. David, despite being an IT professional and not a psychiatrist, brought an intriguing perspective to the table. He emphasized how platforms, such as VMware, Kubernetes, and Cloud Foundry, are designed to remove effort from users, making it easier for... Read more »
For more than a year, we have been expecting for Amazon Web Services to launch its Graviton4 processor for its homegrown servers at this year’s re:Invent, and lo and behold, chief executive officer Adam Selipsky rolled out the fourth generation in the Graviton CPU lineup – and the fifth iteration including last year’s overclocked Graviton3E processor aimed at HPC workloads – during his thrombosis-inducing keynote at the conference. …
Special guest David Stengel shares his unique perspective on the cognitive load of platforms in organizations, and the challenges of getting things done even when using tools that abstract workload.
If you’re not paying attention to mDNS traffic, it might be hurting your Wi-Fi performance in a big way. Bryan Ward shares his research looking at the mDNS protocol on a higher ed network and its dramatic impact on Wi-Fi airtime.
Cisco’s approach to AI includes a processor designed for AI's networking demands, leveraging Cisco’s AI capabilities to bolster security and observability, and more.
As developers, we’ve all experienced times when our code doesn’t work like we expect it to. Whatever the root cause is, being able to quickly dive in, diagnose the problem, and ship a fix is invaluable.
If you’re developing with Cloudflare Workers, we provide many tools to help you debug your applications; from your local environment all the way into production. This additional insight helps save you time and resources and provides visibility into how your application actually works — which can help you optimize and refactor code even before it goes live.
In this post, we’ll explore some of the tools we currently offer, and do a deep dive into one specific area — breakpoint debugging — looking at not only how to use it, but how we recently implemented it in our runtime, workerd.
Available Debugging Tools
Logs
console.log. It might be the simplest tool for a developer to debug, but don’t underestimate it. Built into the Cloudflare runtime is node-like logging, which provides detailed, color-coded logs. Locally, you can view these logs in a terminal window, and they will look like this:
Outside local development, once your Worker is deployed, console.log statements are visible via Continue reading
The IETF met in Prague in the first week of November 2023, and, as usual there was a flurry of activity in the DNS-related Working groups. Here's a roundup of those DNS topics I found to be of interest at that meeting.
I am excited to announce that I joined Cloudflare last month as Head of Australia & New Zealand, to continue to build on Cloudflare’s success in the region through extending our valuable relationships with our customers and partners.
My journey to Cloudflare
I’ve been fortunate over my 25-year career in the IT industry to have worked for some of the most recognised and innovative organisations such as Oracle, Salesforce, and Zendesk. It’s been exciting to be inside these businesses as they’ve taken new ideas about how software can be developed and delivered to solve real world problems for any organisation’s customers. I’ve learned a lot by being a part of the industry, but probably more importantly, I’ve learned the most from the smart, experienced, diverse groups of talented people that I’ve had the pleasure to work with in ANZ and across Asia Pacific. I have always been interested in the problems that organisations are trying to solve through technology — for example, responding to strategic challenges, reducing cost, improving revenue, reducing risk — and joining Cloudflare is an opportunity to stay focussed on addressing those critical issues with our customers and partners using Cloudflare’s innovative solutions.
If you are looking for an alternative to Nvidia GPUs for AI inference – and who isn’t these days with generative AI being the hottest thing since a volcanic eruption – then you might want to give Groq a call. …
Now that Broadcom’s $69 billion VMware acquisition is complete, will Broadcom invest more in VMware to compete in multi-cloud or settle for profitable revenue collection from existing customers? Nvidia debuts a SuperNIC designed to accelerate Ethernet to support AI workloads and announces partnerships with server makers to bundle its NIC in an AI Ethernet stack.... Read more »
