July 2019 Summaries

Raymond Maisano has recently joined Cloudflare as the Head of Australia and New Zealand (ANZ). In this new role, he aims to grow the company's brand recognition in ANZ, expand its local talent pool, and build on its successes worldwide. With over 20 years of experience in the market, Maisano is passionate about encouraging people from diverse backgrounds to pursue opportunities in business and tech. Cloudflare's mission to help build a better internet aligns with his beliefs, and he believes that their massive global network will enable businesses of all sizes in Australia and New Zealand to leverage their security, performance, and reliability solutions. The company already has data centers in Auckland, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney, ensuring a fast and reliable internet experience for customers in ANZ. Cloudflare is currently hiring globally, with open roles in Solutions Engineering and Business Development Representatives.

Cloudflare has released a new feature for its Access service, allowing users to replace their corporate VPN by deploying Access at an even greater scale. The updated version enables administrators to build policies using wildcard subdomains, making it easier to manage and secure access to internal web applications and servers in hybrid environments. This feature is particularly useful for teams that need to quickly share sites with a layer of authentication or lock down their entire infrastructure with the Access SSH feature. Additionally, Argo Tunnel can help reduce the burden of managing DNS records by allowing users to expose a server to the Internet without opening any inbound ports.

Cloudflare has open-sourced a new APT transport that allows customers to protect their private APT repositories using Cloudflare Access. The company's internal DevTools team built and tested the custom APT transport, which generates necessary tokens and passes correct headers in HTTPS requests to an internal APT repository server. By protecting your APT repository with Cloudflare Access, users can support authenticating via Single-Sign On (SSO) providers, defining comprehensive access-control policies, and monitoring access and change logs.

John Graham-Cumming, one of Cloudflare's first employees, reminisces about the company's growth from its early days in his spare bedroom to its current global presence. Today, Cloudflare is expanding further with a new technical hub in Lisbon, Portugal. The choice was made after careful consideration of various factors such as tech ecosystem, immigration policy, and living standards. Graham-Cumming has started learning Portuguese and looks forward to discovering the country's culture while building the new hub for Cloudflare.

On July 2, Cloudflare experienced a global outage due to a poorly written regular expression that caused CPU exhaustion on every CPU core handling HTTP/HTTPS traffic across their network worldwide. The incident resulted in customers seeing a 502 error page when visiting any Cloudflare domain. The company has since taken measures to prevent such an occurrence from happening again, including re-introducing the excessive CPU usage protection that was mistakenly removed and introducing performance profiling for all rules to the test suite. Additionally, they are switching to either the re2 or Rust regex engine which both have run-time guarantees.

In this podcast, John Gage, former CTO of Sun Microsystems, speaks with John Graham-Cumming, CTO of Cloudflare, about the evolution of computing and the role of networks in today's world. They discuss topics such as the development of computer chips, the importance of compression algorithms, and the challenges posed by cybersecurity threats. The conversation also touches on the history of Sun Microsystems and its impact on the tech industry.

Cloudflare recently registered the trademark "The Network is the Computer®" to represent its vision for the future of the internet, which revolves around utilizing its network to enhance security, performance, and reliability. The phrase was first coined by John Gage in 1984 while working at Sun Microsystems. Cloudflare's massive network spans over 180 cities in 80 countries, enabling the company to deliver various products and services, including its serverless edge computing offerings like Cloudflare Workers. The company is dedicated to immediate, open, transparent accountability for network performance. In March of 2018, they launched their serverless solution, Cloudflare Workers, which allows anyone to deploy code at the edge of their network.

In this conversation, Ray Rothrock, former Director of CAD/CAM Marketing at Sun Microsystems, discusses his time at Sun and how the Internet has evolved. He highlights the importance of trust as a principle, the growth of Sun in sales and marketing, and gives an interesting demo to Vice President Bush back in the Reagan administration. Rothrock also talks about the influence of open standards on the explosion of everything else we've seen with the internet today. He mentions how Sun was an enabler for companies with cool ideas for products and software to use Sun as the underpinning, much like Cloudflare does now.

In this conversation, Greg Papadopoulos, former CTO of Sun Microsystems, discusses the origins and meaning of "The Network is the Computer," a phrase coined by Sun in the 1980s. He explains how the idea has evolved over time to become more relevant with advancements in cloud computing and distributed networks. Papadopoulos also touches on the inevitability of latency, the limitations imposed by the speed of light, and the future of Cloudflare's newly acquired trademark. The discussion highlights the importance of network architecture, security, and the role of companies like Sun and Cloudflare in shaping the evolution of computing technology.

On July 10th, 2019 at 7:50 PM, Connor Peshek introduced the sixth edition of The Serverlist. This publication provides updates on serverless technology, offers tutorials for developers, encourages discussions among serverless developers, and highlights upcoming meetups and conferences. To receive The Serverlist directly in your email, sign up using the provided link while ensuring that your privacy is maintained.

This blog post discusses coverage-guided fuzzing, a powerful testing technique where an automated program feeds semi-random inputs to a tested program. The intention is to find such inputs that trigger bugs. Fuzzing is especially useful in finding memory corruption bugs in C or C++ programs. The author decided to use the AFL fuzzer and target the Linux Kernel netlink machinery, which is an obscure part of the kernel but relatively easy to automatically craft valid messages. The post provides a tutorial on how to set up and run the custom kernel within KVM virtualization. It also mentions prior work in this area, including syzkaller and Trinity fuzzer.

On July 2, 2019, Cloudflare experienced a massive spike in CPU utilization due to a bad software deploy, causing visitors to their sites to receive 502 errors for about 30 minutes. The issue was resolved by rolling back the problematic deployment. This incident was not an attack and was caused by a misconfigured rule within the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF) during a routine deployment of new WAF Managed rules. The spike in CPU utilization resulted in global network outage, with traffic dropping by 82% at its worst. The issue was resolved by issuing a 'global termination' on the WAF Managed Rulesets and re-enabling them after testing the fix. Cloudflare is reviewing their testing and deployment processes to prevent similar incidents in the future.