April 2019 Summaries

On April 26th, 2019 at 8:04 PM, Connor Peshek and Andrew Fitch introduced the fourth edition of The Serverlist. This publication provides updates on serverless technology, offers developer tutorials, promotes discussions among serverless developers, and highlights upcoming meetups and conferences in the field. To receive The Serverlist directly to your email, sign up using the provided link while ensuring that your privacy is maintained.

Cloudflare, a company located at County Hall behind the London Eye, has opened up its large event space to host technical meetups for developers. The space includes an auditorium that can accommodate 250 attendees and is equipped with a kitchen area for food and beverages. Meetup organizers are encouraged to apply through a form or email if interested in hosting their events at Cloudflare's London office. Additionally, the company also offers event space in its San Francisco office for Bay Area-based meetups.

The author, Steven Pack, is a Product Manager at Cloudflare who identifies a need for a new tool around service ownership within the company. He explains that as a fast-growing engineering organization, service ownership frequently changes and often leads to time wasted in chats asking questions like "Who owns service x now?". To address this issue, he proposes using Cloudflare Workers + Workers KV due to their benefits of reduced operational overhead and development time. He outlines the requirements for the tool, including a Google Chat interface, and provides an example implementation using a Command Factory pattern. The author also discusses testing strategies and plans for adding authentication in Part 2 of this project. In summary, the author is developing a service ownership tool using Cloudflare Workers + Workers KV to improve efficiency within his organization by reducing time spent on administrative tasks.

The text discusses how a tool called xdpcap was developed as a replacement for tcpdump in the context of XDP (eXpress Data Path), a Linux kernel technology used for high-performance packet processing. Due to XDP's design, regular debugging tools like tcpdump are unable to see packets that have been redirected or dropped. To address this issue, xdpcap was created and open-sourced on GitHub. The tool uses a BPF (classic BPF) compiler called cbpfc, which is also open-source. Xdpcap reuses the same syntax as tcpdump and can write packets to a pcap file or decode them with tcpdump. The text goes into detail about how xdpcap was built, including its use of eBPF (extended BPF) and how it leverages features like tail-calls and perf_event_output to expose matching packets and the original action taken for them to userspace.

The text discusses the role of power in modern technology and its impact on the environment. It highlights that traditional ways of generating power are unsustainable, leading to global warming and threatening ecosystems. While data centers account for only 2-3% of total global power use, internet industry analysts predict that their energy consumption may double every four years. Cloudflare's network infrastructure contributes to power consumption by offering both content delivery and compute services. The company reduces its carbon footprint through efficient utilization of resources, such as running a homogeneous network with high CPU utilization and using caching to save energy. Additionally, Cloudflare Workers, a serverless computing platform, offers lightweight code execution with less overhead, improving efficiency. To offset the remaining carbon footprint, the company purchases Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) to match its electricity use worldwide.

The text discusses how to automate deployment of Cloudflare Workers using the Serverless Framework. It provides a step-by-step guide on setting up and configuring a project with serverless.yml file, which includes details about service name, provider configuration, plugins, functions, and events. The author also explains how to use custom variables for different stages of deployment, automate resource creation, manage environment variables, and conduct unit testing using tools like mocha and sinon. The text concludes by encouraging readers to get involved with the project on GitHub and explore further information in the Serverless Framework documentation.

The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project aims to improve mobile web browsing by using an AMP HTML framework that enables quick loading of web pages. It was initially designed for news organizations and has since become valuable for various other sites, including e-commerce stores and media platforms. However, the use of caches in serving AMP content from locations close to end users can lead to confusion as it may display a URL starting with https://google.com/amp/. To address this issue, Google introduced "AMP Real URL," which allows pages to be stored in an AMP cache and served quickly while retaining the original site's URL. This solution uses Web Packaging and cryptographic proof of the page's origin, ensuring brand protection, easier analytics, increased screen space, reduced bounce rates, and content signing. AMP Real URL is now free for all Cloudflare customers, with support from Google starting today in Chrome browsers.

In 2013, Andrew A. Schafer joined Cloudflare after two years of Peace Corps service in China. Despite having limited technical knowledge, he was hired due to his strong work ethic and ability to learn quickly. Over the years, Schafer has grown with the company, learning about technology and adapting to the fast-paced environment of Silicon Valley. He has contributed significantly to Cloudflare's growth by creating the "Big Horse Award for Strong Work" and helping expand the company's presence in China. His journey from academia to tech demonstrates the importance of resourcefulness, adaptability, and a willingness to learn new skills.

On April 5th, 2019 at 4:03 PM, Ryan Knight announced that the Cloudflare blog is set for a major update. The blog currently has over 150 contributors and more than 1,000 posts. Despite its popularity among readers, it hasn't seen any significant updates in years. To improve the user experience, Cloudflare is seeking feedback from its users through a survey or a remote user study with one of their researchers. The goal is to understand what users think about the blog and how they can make improvements.

Cloudflare has launched the 1.1.1.1 App with WARP performance and security technology to improve mobile Internet speed, security, and privacy beyond just DNS. The app is designed to thrive in harsh conditions of modern mobile Internet and includes all the work that Neumob team did to improve mobile internet performance. It uses a UDP-based protocol optimized for mobile internet and leverages Cloudflare's massive global network. The basic version of WARP is included as an option with the 1.1.1.1 App for free, while a premium version called WARP+ will be available at a low monthly fee.