Company
Date Published
Author
Mark Rodgers, Sphoorti Metri, Ash Pallarito
Word count
1626
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

IPv4 addresses have become a costly commodity due to their growing scarcity, leading organizations to rely on the secondary market for acquisition. The prices of these addresses have surged, with costs varying based on block size and demand. In response, Cloudflare has introduced new flexibility in how they handle Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) prefixes, allowing customers to use parts of any prefix for additional use with CDN or Spectrum. This enhancement provides much-needed flexibility while keeping costs under control. To address the challenges of migrating BYOIP prefixes between services, Cloudflare has developed a dynamic reallocation process that involves updating IP address lists and firewall rules on each server. They have also created an eBPF-based service called Tubular, which allows services to listen on a single socket dynamically, without requiring a restart when addresses change. This solution enables businesses to optimize their IP address usage while minimizing disruptions. Cloudflare is actively working to replace its current ingress proxy with a new one by 2026 and has implemented systems that will reduce the transition time of IP address prefixes between services from hours to just minutes, significantly improving reliability. The company envisions a future where customers have granular control over how their traffic moves through its global network, not just by service, but down to the port level, enabling programmable traffic orchestration across different services.