no more cubes

Tag: cloudflare

  • Cloudflare blocks AI scrapers now

    Even by default, reports Ars Technica.

    This has been sitting in my inbox as a draft for a couple of days. Still, I wanted to make this Block post nevertheless foremost because I think it’s noteworthy. What Cloudflare does – or tries – here in this context, is basically a shift in a business model.

    Under the old model, or regular approach, AI scrapers are trying to pick up as much content as they can. This practice has been under a discussion for as long as the hype took up. Content owners, be it, individual contributors or communities see a violation of their rights, whereas AI companies rely on this data to improve their models. So far, there is no law to regulate the approach to automated processing through AI.

    Only Cloudflare tries to change this situation now, with their new offering, with not only blocking AI scrapers, but actually offer an option to content owners to charge per scrape.

  • The “Supercloud”

    It used to be client/server architecture. That became the cloud. With distributed content delivery infrastructures moving towards compute models, it became “edge.”

    Whereas the debate has always been where code should run. On the server, that is remote, or with the client, that is possibly weak in compute and does not have the data necessary.

    In the beginning it was all Mainframes, with dumb terminals. First Flash and than browsers allowed quick execution of code on the client side wide spread. With the advent of virtual cloud resources, cost effectiveness added to the equation. And so code moved back and forth between client and server.

    Edge only became a marketing term for cloud providers to shift compute from the datacenter towards the client on their own terms.

    Cloudflare now claims to have build a hybrid model, that they call the #Supercloud. I’d say it’s a bold marketing term. One that may actually hit a nerve.

    Cloudflare

    Every developer wants to get code running on one machine and perfect it. It’s so much easier to work that way. We just happen to have one machine that scales to the size of the Internet: a global, distributed, supercomputer. It’s our Supercloud, and we build our own products on it, and you can too

    From blog.cloudflare.com

    Source: Welcome to the Supercloud (and Developer Week 2022)

  • Cloudflare announces R2 Storage

    CloudFlare Logo
    CloudFlare Logo

    CloudFlare hat heute eine neue Storage Option vorgestellt. Der Service, abgekürzt R2, das alternativ für “Really Requestable”,  “Ridiculously Reliable” oder “Radically Reprogrammable” stehen soll, ist der Ankündigung zufolge vollständig mit S3 von Amazon API kompatibel. Der wichtigste Punkt der Ankündigung scheint aber die Kosten Abgrenzung zu anderen Cloud-Storgae Services zu sein. Gleich in der Ankündigung ist die Rede davon, dass für diesen Service keine Express Kosten anfallen. Zusammen mit dem Service für eine “automatic migration” richtet sich das Angebot eindeutig an Entwickler und Nutzer des Amazon Services, die mit Kosten unzufrieden sind. Insgesamt fällt das Produkt damit auf den ersten Blick in eine Linie mit anderen Cloud-Angeboten, die die Cloud als solche in Richtung der Null-Grenzkosten-Ökonomie bewegen. Den Anspruch auf Verfügbarkeit und Flexibilität muss das Produkt erst beweisen. Und auch die Kostenfrage wird sich bei Nutzern stellen, die schlussendlich das Zero-Rating dieses Angebots ausgeschöpft haben.

    Introducing Cloudflare’s S3-compatible Object Storage service, with zero egress bandwidth charges and automatic migration from S3-compatible services.

    Source: Announcing Cloudflare R2 Storage: Rapid and Reliable Object Storage, minus the egress fees

  • appfleet joins Cloudflare

    appfleet is a Poland based company that develops and offers edge hosting of containerised apps. Edge computing is a trend that emerged a few years back and allows to bring applications closer to the end user, therefore reducing latency and improving user experience. Cloudflare, a player strong in this space, now acquired appfleet, augmenting it’s portfolio of workers with container capabilities. No details of the deal have been made public, however, we will see more of these type of acquisitions with the market starting to consolidate.

    appfleet console

    Summary: Due to a great synergy between our products, I am happy to announce that Cloudflare and appfleet are joining forces! The appfleet platform is shutting down, with all clusters going offline on October 31st 2021. Long story: When we started working on appfleet our goal was to build an

    from the article

    Source: appfleet joins Cloudflare

  • Multiplayer Doom on Cloudflare Workers

    “Does it run Doom?” is the ultimate nerd test for technology. CloudFlare passed today running multiplayer Doom on their edge worker network:

    So, if a developer wants to run their next hit, say a real-time multiplayer game, using nothing but their app and Workers, without any servers or traditional infrastructure, can they? Let’s prove they can. Here’s Doom Multiplayer running on top of Cloudflare Workers.

    Source: Multiplayer Doom on Cloudflare Workers

  • CloudFlare extends to China

    CloudFlare extends it’s presence in China through partnering with JD Cloud & AI. The company is currently present in 17 datacenters in mainland China. Cloudflare maintains a partnership with Baidu, through that recently announced partnership the Cloud vendor can leverage 150 more datacenters and therefore vastly extend it’s footprint in the region.

    Cloudflare partners with JD to expand its network in China
    Source: TechCrunch

  • Cloudflare sets IPO price range

    https://news.crunchbase.com/news/cloudflare-sets-initial-ipo-price-range-valuing-it-as-high-as-3-5b/

  • Specification of DNS over Dedicated QUIC Connections

    While a lot of people debate DNS-over-https (and it’s dependencies), IETF has a specification for DNS-over-QUIC on it’s standards track.

    This document describes the use of QUIC to provide transport privacy for DNS. The encryption provided by QUIC has similar properties to that provided by TLS, while QUIC transport eliminates the head-of-line blocking issues inherent with TCP and provides more efficient error corrections than UDP. DNS over QUIC (DNS/QUIC) has privacy properties similar to DNS over TLS specified in RFC7858, and performance similar to classic DNS over UDP.

    Source: Specification of DNS over Dedicated QUIC Connections

  • Net Defender CloudFlare Goes Down, Taking Many Websites With It

    The Internet was built with de-centralized infrastructures in mind. To scale globally, network providers like CloudFlare have emerged, to run decentralized infrastructures and offer them as a service. In general, keeping service independent of each others and maintaining heterogeneous networks have a proven track record of resilience, that is not necessarily inherent to the architecture of these providers. Just like Akamai had a bad day in 2004, CloudFlare today suffered from a global outage, that left many obvious collateral problems visible all over the Internet. Bloomberg, among others, reports:

    CloudFlare Inc., an internet service meant to protect websites from going down, faced its own network issues on Tuesday, leading to several prominent sites — like blogging platform Medium and video game chat provider Discord — being unavailable for some time.

    Source: Net Defender CloudFlare Goes Down, Taking Many Websites With It – Bloomberg