This Week in NET

In this week's program, João Tomé discusses with Jocelyn Woolbright from our Public Policy team how Cloudflare is assisting in safeguarding numerous upcoming elections in 2024. We also share Thanksgiving trends and stories. We travel to London to learn from Oxana Kharitonova of our Linux Kernel team why part 4 of the deep dive, "How to execute an object file" (the AArch64 edition), is relevant in our data centers.

From New York, our VP of Developer Relations, Ricky Robinett, introduces two Workers AI (our developer platform with AI capabilities) updates: Stable Diffusion and Code Llama, both now available as part of Workers AI, which is operational in over 100 cities across Cloudflare's global network with AI inference capabilities. Additionally, we've incorporated the Mistral-7B-v0.1-instruct into Workers AI.

In the short segment "Ask the CTO," our CTO, John Graham-Cumming, answers audience questions:

You can check the mentioned blog posts:

After a special episode about the Cloudflare Control Plane and Analytics Outage, which you can check here, this week's program features insights from two speakers at the Web Summit conference held this week in Lisbon, Portugal. Cassie Kozyrkov, former Chief Decision Scientist at Google and CEO of Data Scientific, shares her perspectives. Additionally, we hear from Andrew Sullivan, President and CEO of the Internet Society. The full interview will be published in the upcoming weeks.

Continuing from Lisbon, João Tomé joins Celso Martinho, our Senior Director of Engineering, to discuss two ongoing projects. The first project, Email Routing, now includes subdomain support, new APIs, and enhanced security protocols. The second project, Workers AI, our serverless GPU-powered inference platform that operates on Cloudflare’s global network, now is offering streaming and longer context lengths for LLMs. We explain what that is and how helpful it can be.

There are also some news about Cloudflare One audit capabilities, and WAF rules creation simplified with the introduction of hostname and ASN lists.

Taking a nostalgic turn, we go into retro gaming memories, commemorating the 40th anniversary of the ZX Spectrum home computer, a popular device in the UK and Europe during the 1980s (now in its 41st year in the UK).

Lastly, in the short segment "Ask the CTO," our CTO, John Graham-Cumming, answers audience questions:

You can check the mentioned blog posts:

In this special episode, João Tomé is joined by Nitin Rao, Cloudflare’s Interim CPO, to discuss the Cloudflare Control Plane and Analytics outage. The incident lasted from November 2 until November 4, impacting several customers.

We explain how one of our core data center providers failed catastrophically, and steps were taken to ensure it never happens again. These measures, which we’re calling Code Orange, involve reducing dependence on our core data centers, requiring all Generally Available products and features to have a reliable disaster recovery plan that is tested, recurring audits, and much more.

The mentioned blog:

This is a special episode of “This Week in NET” dedicated to the recent Okta compromise, which has been making headlines and affecting Okta and its customers, including Cloudflare. Since it's October 31, 2023, we're also sharing some Halloween stories. João Tomé is joined by Sourov Zaman, our Incident Response Manager, to discuss how Cloudflare discovered and mitigated another Okta compromise.

We also provide general advice to companies on how to avoid compromises after security breaches and vulnerabilities, even when they stem from vendors. We explain how we ensured that no Cloudflare customer information or systems were impacted by this event, thanks to the real-time detection and swift actions taken by our Security Incident Response Team (SIRT). Our Zero Trust security posture and the use of hardware keys played a vital role.

Furthermore, we delve into how Cloudflare swiftly introduced a HAR Sanitizer tool, available to everyone at no cost, not just our customers. This tool was developed to enhance the security of HAR sharing and was introduced as a response to the recent Okta breach.

You can check the mentioned blog posts:

Cloudflare's Security Incident Response Team is hiring.

In this week's program, João Tomé is initially joined by Omer Yoachimik (based in London, UK), Cloudflare’s product manager for DDoS Protection and Security Reporting. They discuss two blog posts written this week related to cyberattacks in the Israel-Hamas war and our DDoS threat report for Q3 2023. They cover DDoS attacks against Israeli and Palestinian websites, record-breaking hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks enabled by VM-based botnets, and how users and companies can stay protected.

Next, we go to Boston, in the US, to discuss with David Belson, our head of Data Insights, our Q3 2023 Internet disruption summary. They cover various causes of outages, from government-directed exam-related Internet shutdowns to the earthquake in Morocco and fires in Hawaii, along with problems related to damage to submarine cables. They also highlight the disruptions caused more recently in Palestinian networks in the Gaza Strip due to the ongoing conflict.

There’s still time to highlight how Cloudflare mitigated yet another Okta compromise, something we are going to delve more deeply into next week on the show. Additionally, we discuss how our Cache Rules product, alongside Cache Reserve (to enhance control to minimize egress costs), is now generally available, providing users with a better quality of life. We also announce three new features that will help make Email Routing more secure, flexible, and powerful than ever. This includes Email Routing subdomain support, new APIs, and security protocols.

In our “Around NET” short segment, Dan Hollinger joins us from Munich, Germany. Then, in the “Ask the CTO” segment, our CTO, John Graham-Cumming, answers an audience question about how his background in mathematics shapes his approach to tech and programming.

You can check the mentioned blog posts:

In this week's program, we mix it up with different topics and different guests. First, we do a recap and update on our Birthday Week 2023, which was three week ago. Dina Kozlov, a product manager, helps put some highlights into context, and popular announcements.

From Lisbon, where João Tomé and Dina are, we go to Atlanta, in the US. Chris Draper goes over how network flow monitoring is now generally available and why that's relevant for network engineers.

We highlight some other topics of the week, from a storage-saving partnership with the company Prisma to Project Argus, which brings flexibility to implement multiple server management and security solutions. Also, Cloudflare now has a local presence in Mexico. And in Israel, a rocket alert app, Red Alert, which provides real-time rocket alerts for Israeli citizens, was the target of a malicious app impersonation to get user information, phone calls, and SMS.

There’s also the short segment “Around NET,” with Rebecca Weekly, Cloudflare’s VP of Infrastructure, talking directly from San Jose, California, at the OPC Conference — a summit for the IT Ecosystem.

Last but not least, there’s “A bit of Cloudflare’s history,” with our CTO, John Graham-Cumming, going over how Cloudflare had in 2016 an “Evenly Distributed Future” principle and how it evolved into the “connectivity cloud” of today.

You can check the mentioned blog posts:

In this week's program, João Tomé is joined by two Cloudflare guests based in Texas (US) and London (UK): John Engates (Field CTO) and Lucas Pardue (systems engineer and HTTP expert). The main focus is explaining what the recently discovered HTTP/2 Zero-Day vulnerability is, its significant impact on the Internet at large (resulting in never-before-seen DDoS attacks), and how Cloudflare’s customers are already protected.

Next, two other vulnerabilities are highlighted: the Atlassian Confluence CVE-2023-22515 and the hidden WebP vulnerability, which has more significant implications than originally anticipated.

We also delve into some Internet traffic patterns from Israel and the Gaza Strip after a conflict in the region was ignited by the October 7 Hamas attack.

Cloudflare is also celebrating its inclusion as a Top 100 Most Loved Workplace, according to Newsweek. We also explain why the general availability of the Magic WAN Connector makes life easier for large customers.

If you enjoy technical deep dives, this “Virtual networking 101” blog is about the intricacies of tap devices (a virtual network interface that looks like an ethernet network card) and how they are being used for virtual machines, reversing their original purpose.

Last but not least, we premiere our short segment “Ask the CTO”, with John Graham-Cumming answering audience questions.

You can check the mentioned blog posts:

In this week's program, we're taking a look back at one year of episodes in our #40 episode. We've got highlights from innovation weeks covering developers, our Supercloud, CIOs, general impact, security, and speed. Plus, we'll share some historical moments and take you on a journey around the globe with colleagues from Australia to Texas in the US.

You can check previous episodes in our show page:

Welcome to our weekly review of stories from our blog and other sources, covering a range of topics from product announcements, tools and features to disruptions on the Internet. João Tomé is joined by our CTO, John Graham-Cumming.

In this week's program, we kick things off with an intro directly from the balcony of our Lisbon office. Then, we dive into the week packed with announcements, tools, and products from Cloudflare’s Birthday Week, where we aim to give back to the Internet.

On Monday, our 13th birthday brought us important sustainability stats (you can cut your network carbon emissions by up to 96%), and we highlighted the significance of dynamically routing traffic across the globe, along with the introduction of Incident Alerts.

Tuesday was all about explaining how Cloudflare functions as a connectivity cloud, providing a modern way to connect and protect your clouds, networks, applications, and users. There’s also mention to the Amazon’s $2bn IPv4 tax — and how you can avoid paying it.

Wednesday was AI day, featuring the launch of Workers AI (serverless GPU-powered inference on Cloudflare’s global network), Vectorize (a vector database for shipping AI-powered applications to production, fast), AI Gateway (making AI applications more observable, reliable, and scalable), and the use of WebGPU in Cloudflare Workers. We also announced a slew of AI-related partnerships, and the annual Founders’ Letter comes with an AI poem (from a model running on Workers AI).

Thursday put the spotlight on databases and a partnership with Microsoft to power their Edge Secure Network. We delved into topics like Hyperdrive (making databases feel global), new Workers pricing (never pay to wait on I/O again), and the arrival of the D1 open beta.

Finally, Friday revolved around privacy and security. We made Post Quantum Cryptography generally available (to safeguard against quantum computers) and introduced Cloudflare Email Retro Scan to tackle email threats lurking in your Office 365. Other highlights included our ability to detect zero-days before they become an issue, and the fact that Cloudflare is now free of CAPTCHAs (Turnstile is free for everyone).

Check our Birthday Week 2023 Hub to see all the blog posts and related Cloudflare TV segments.

Welcome to our weekly review of stories from our blog and other sources, covering a range of topics from product announcements, tools and features to disruptions on the Internet. João Tomé is joined by our CTO, John Graham-Cumming.

In this week's program, we'll explain what to expect during our Birthday Week — the first blog post arrives this Sunday, September 24, 2023. It will bring announcements that will help people build the future on Cloudflare (with AI playing a pivotal role), surprising products, partnerships, and topics from climate and carbon emissions to performance, security, and privacy. But before that, we start with an interesting remote work trend: kneeling chairs, which are making a comeback now after being popular 30 years ago.

Moving from chairs, we delve into our Waiting Room product. There's a behind-the-scenes blog post that explains how we've evolved the core mechanism of our Waiting Room product, detailing exactly how it functions to queue traffic in response to spikes. We also have updates to our Client-Side Security Product: Page Shield. Cloudflare Analytics makes an appearance as well, as it can now suggest rate-limiting thresholds based on historic traffic patterns.

Last but not least, we'll discuss a blog post about typo traps, analyzing traffic to exmaple.com (or is it example.com?).

Plus, we're celebrating one year of episodes of "This Week in NET." This one is episode #38. 🎉

You can check the mentioned blog posts: