A complete stack trace is needed for a number of debugging and optimization
tasks, but getting such traces reliably can be surprisingly challenging.
At the 2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management and BPF Summit, Steve Rostedt and Indu Bhagat
described a mechanism called SFrame that enables the creation of reliable
user-space stack traces in the kernel without
the memory and run-time overhead of some other solutions.
Here are your AWS updates from the previous 7 days. Last week I was in Turin, Italy for CloudConf, a conference I’ve had the pleasure to participate in for the last 10 years. AWS Hero Anahit Pogosova was also there sharing a few serverless tips in front of a full house. Here’s a picture I took from the last row during her keynote.
On Thursday, May 25, I’ll be at the AWS Community Day in Dublin to celebrate the 10 years of the local AWS User Group. Say hi if you’re there!
Last Week’s Launches Last week was packed with announcements! Here are the launches that got my attention:
Amazon EventBridge – EventBridge now delivers events up to 80% faster than before, as measured by the time an event is ingested to the first invocation attempt. No change is required on your side.
Amazon CloudFront – CloudFront now supports two new control directives to help improve performance and availability: stale-while-revalidate (to immediately deliver stale responses to users while it revalidates caches in the background) and the stale-if-error cache (to define how long stale responses should be reused if there’s an error).
Amazon Timestream – Timestream now enables to export query results to Amazon S3 in a cost-effective and secure manner using the new UNLOAD statement.
AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry – The tail sampling and the group-by-trace processors are now generally available in the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) collector. For example, with tail sampling, you can define sampling policies such as “ingest 100% of all error cases and 5% of all success cases.”
Upcoming AWS Events Here are some opportunities to meet and learn:
AWS Data Insights Day (May 24) – A virtual event to discover how to innovate faster and more cost-effectively with data. This event focuses on customer voices, deep-dive sessions, and best practices of Amazon Redshift. You can register here.
AWS Silicon Innovation Day (June 21) – AWS has designed and developed purpose-built silicon specifically for the cloud. Join to learn AWS innovations in custom-designed Amazon EC2 chips built for high performance and scale in the cloud. Register here.
AWS re:Inforce (June 13–14) – You can still register for AWS re:Inforce. This year it is taking place in Anaheim, California.
AWS Global Summits – Sign up for the AWS Summit closest to where you live: Hong Kong (May 23), India (May 25), Amsterdam (June 1), London (June 7), Washington, DC (June 7-8), Toronto (June 14), Madrid (June 15), and Milano (June 22). If you want to meet, I’ll be at the one in London.
AWS Community Days – Join these community-led conferences where event logistics and content is planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders: Dublin, Ireland (May 25), Shenzhen, China (May 28), Warsaw, Poland (June 1), Chicago, USA (June 15), and Chile (July 1).
That’s all from me for this week. Come back next Monday for another Week in Review!
Business disruptions can be devastating, as any business owner who has been through one will tell you. This stat isn’t meant to stoke fear, but the Atlas VPN research team found that 31% of businesses in the U.S. are forced to close for a period of time as a consequence of falling victim to ransomware attacks.
It’s likely some, if not most, of those businesses had backups in place. But, having backups alone won’t necessarily save your business if it takes you days or weeks to restore operations from those backups. And true disaster recovery means more than simply having backups and a plan to restore: It means testing that plan regularly to make sure you can bring your business back online.
Today, we’re sharing news of a new disaster recovery service built on Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage that’s aimed to help businesses restore faster and more affordably: Continuity Centers’ Cloud Instant Business Recovery (Cloud IBR) which instantly recovers Veeam backups from the Backblaze B2 Storage Cloud.
Helping Businesses Recover After a Disaster
We launched the first generation version of this solution—Instant Recovery in Any Cloud—in May of 2022 to help businesses complete their disaster recovery playbook. And now, we’re building on that original infrastructure as code (IaC) package, to bring you Cloud IBR.
Cloud IBR is a second generation solution that further simplifies disaster recovery plans. The easy-to-use interface and affordability make Cloud IBR an ideal disaster recovery solution designed for small and medium size businesses (SMBs) who are typically priced out of enterprise-scale disaster recovery solutions.
How Does Cloud IBR Work?
Continuity Centers combines the automation-driven Veeam REST API calls with phoenixNAP Bare Metal Cloud platform into a unified system, and completely streamlines the user experience.
The fully-automated service deploys a recovery process through a simple web UI, and, in the background, uses phoenixNAP’s Bare Metal Cloud servers to import Veeam backups stored in Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, and fully restores the customer’s server infrastructure. The solution hides the complexity of dealing with automation scripts and APIs and offers a simple interface to stand up an entire cloud infrastructure when you need it. Best of all, you pay for the service only for the period of time that you need.
Cloud IBR gives small and mid-market companies the highest level of business continuity available, against disasters of all types. It’s a simple and accessible solution for SMBs to embrace. We developed this solution with affordability and availability in mind, so that businesses of all sizes can benefit from our decades of disaster recovery experience, which is often financially out of reach for the SMB.
—Gregory Tellone, CEO of Continuity Centers.
Right-Sized Disaster Recovery
Previously, mid-market businesses were underserved by disaster recovery and business continuity planning because the requirements and efforts to create a disaster recovery (DR) plan are often foregone in favor of more immediate business demands. Additionally, many disaster recovery solutions are designed for larger size companies and do not meet the specific needs for SMBs. Cloud IBR allows businesses of all sizes to instantly stand up their entire server infrastructure in the cloud, at a moment’s notice and with a single click, making it easy to plan for and easy to execute.
In addition to being a stand-alone offering that can be purchased alongside pay-as-you-go cloud storage, the Cloud IBR Silver Package will be offered at no cost for one year to any Veeam customers that purchase Backblaze through our capacity-based cloud storage packages, B2 Reserve. Those customers can activate Cloud IBR within 30 days of purchasing Backblaze’s B2 Reserve service.
The kernel developers try hard to avoid duplicating functionality in the
kernel, which is enough of a challenge to maintain as it is. So it has
often seemed out of character for the kernel to support three different
slab allocators (called SLAB, SLOB, and SLUB), all of which handle the
management of small memory allocations in similar ways. At the 2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management and BPF Summit, slab maintainer Vlastimil Babka
updated the group on progress toward the goal of reducing the number of
slab allocators in the kernel and gave an overview of what to expect in
that area.
The kernel’s swapping code tends to not get much love. Users try to avoid
it, and developers often find better things to do with their time than
trying to improve it. At the 2023 Linux
Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit, though, Yosry
Ahmed dedicated a memory-management-track session to the problem of the
swap layer and what might be done to make it better.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (cups-filters, imagemagick, libwebp, sqlite, and texlive-bin), Fedora (chromium and vim), Gentoo (librecad, mediawiki, modsecurity-crs, snakeyaml, and tinyproxy), Mageia (apache-mod_security, cmark, dmidecode, freetype2, glib2.0, libssh, patchelf, python-sqlparse, sniproxy, suricata, and webkit2), Oracle (apr-util and firefox), Red Hat (git), SUSE (containerd, openvswitch, python-Flask, runc, terraform-provider-aws, and terraform-provider-null), and Ubuntu (tar).
Developer Week 2023 is officially a wrap. Last week, we shipped 34 posts highlighting what has been going on with our developer platform and where we’re headed in the future – including new products & features, in-depth tutorials to help you get started, and customer stories to inspire you.
We’ve loved already hearing feedback from you all about what we’ve shipped:
🤯 Serverless machine learning deployments – OMG! We used to need a team of devops to deploy a todo list MVP, it’s now 3 clicks with workers. They’re gonna do the same with ML workloads. Just like that. Boom. https://t.co/AcKUQ79fv0
Love this direction, for open source, for demos and running things on edge.
It's still in development, but as someone who've built an AI product on top of Cloudflare and has been asking for something like this, I'm really excited! https://t.co/AnywRDqecb
Yes! Loving this! I definitely this is the right direction and will help the general DevX and onboarding to the platform a lot ❤️! https://t.co/rEQWreeS96
We hope you’re able to spend the coming weeks slinging some code and experimenting with some of the new tools we shipped last week. As you’re building, join us in our developers discord and let us know what you think.
In case you missed any of our announcements here’s a handy recap:
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) is going to change the way developers write, debug, and modify code. Developer Platforms need to evolve to integrate AI capabilities to assist developers in their journeys.
Run pre-trained machine learning models and inference tasks on Cloudflare’s global network with Constellation AI. We’ll maintain a catalog of verified and ready-to-use models, or you can upload and train your own.
When getting started with a new technology comes a lot of questions on how to get started. Finding answers quickly is a time-saver. To help developers build in the fastest way possible we’ve introduced Cursor, an experimental AI assistant, to answer questions you may have about the Developer Platform. The assistant responds with both text and relevant links to our documentation to help you go further.
ChatGPT, recently allowed the ability for developers to create custom extensions to make ChatGPT even more powerful. It’s now possible to provide guidance to the conversational workflows within ChatGPT such as up-to-date statistics and product information. We’ve published plugins for Radar and our Developer Documentation and a tutorial showing how you can build your own plugin using Workers.
With any new technology comes concerns about risk and AI is no different. If you want to build with AI and maintain a Zero Trust security posture, Cloudflare One offers a collection of features to build with AI without increased risk. We’ve also compiled some best practices around securing your LLM.
Training large language models requires massive amount of compute which has led AI companies to look at multi-cloud architectures, with R2 and MosaicML companies can build these infrastructures at a fraction of the cost.
AI startups no longer need affiliation with an accelerator or an employee referral to gain access to the Startup Program. Bootstrapped AI startups can apply today to get free access to Cloudflare services including R2, Workers, Pages, and a host of other security and developer services.
A tutorial on building your first LangChainJS and Workers application to build more sophisticated applications by switching between LLMs or chaining prompts together.
We’ve partnered with other database providers, including Neon, PlanetScale, and Supabase, to make authenticating and connecting back to your databases there just work, without having to copy-paste credentials and connection strings back and forth.
Connect back to existing PostgreSQL and MySQL databases directly from Workers with outbound TCP sockets allowing you to connect to any database when building with Workers.
D1 is now not only significantly faster, but has a raft of new features, including the ability to time travel: restore your database to any minute within the last 30 days, without having to make a manual backup.
Bringing compute closer to the end user isn’t always the right answer to improve performance. Smart Placement for Workers and Pages Functions moves compute to the optimal location whether that is closer to the end user or closer to backend services and data.
Get valuable insights from your data when you use Snowflake to query data stored in your R2 data lake and load data from R2 into Snowflake’s Data Cloud.
Create Cloudflare CLI (C3) is a companion CLI to Wrangler giving you a single entry-point to configure Cloudflare via CLI. Pick your framework, all npm dependencies are installed, and you’ll receive a URL for where your application was deployed.
Manage all your Workers scripts and Pages projects from a single place in the Cloudflare dashboard. Over the next year we’ll be working to converge these two separate experiences into one eliminating friction when building.
Now in beta, the build system for Pages includes the latest versions of Node.js, Python, Hugo, and more. You can opt in to use this for existing projects or stay on the existing system, so your builds won’t break.
Having a local development environment that mimics production as closely as possible helps to ensure everything runs as expected in production. You can test every aspect prior to deployment. Wrangler 3 now leverages Miniflare3 based on workerd with local-by-default development.
Our terms of service were not clear about serving content hosted on the Developer Platform via our CDN. We’ve made it clearer that customers can use the CDN to serve video and other large files stored on the Developer Platform including Images, Pages, R2, and Stream.
A retrospective on the first year of Workers for Platform, what’s coming next, and featuring how customers like Shopify and Grafbase are building with it.
Deploy a Worker script that requires Browser Rendering capabilities through Wrangler.
Watch on Cloudflare TV
If you missed any of the announcements or want to also view the associated Cloudflare TV segments, where blog authors went through each announcement, you can now watch all the Developer Week videos on Cloudflare TV.
In 2018, we first launched our Open Source Software Sponsorships program, and since then, we've been listening to your feedback, and realized that it's time to introduce a fresh and enhanced version of the program that's more inclusive and better addresses the needs of the OSS community.
A subset of open source projects on Cloudflare. See more >>
Previously, our sponsorship focused on engineering tools, but we're excited to announce that we've now opened it to include any non-profit and open source projects.
Program criteria and eligibility
To qualify for our Open Source Sponsorship Program, projects must be open source and meet the following criteria:
Can Cloudflare help your open source project be successful and sustainable? Fill out the application form to submit your project for review, and please share this so that more open source projects can be supported by Cloudflare.
We launched the $2B Workers Launchpad Funding Program in late 2022 to help support the over one million developers building on Cloudflare’s Developer Platform, many of which are startups leveraging Cloudflare to ship faster, scale more efficiently, and accelerate their growth.
Cohort #1 wrap-up
Since announcing the program just a few months ago, we have welcomed 25 startups from all around the world into our inaugural cohort and recently wrapped up the program with the Demo Day. Cohort #1 gathered weekly for Office Hours with our Solutions Architects for technical advice and the Founders Bootcamp, where they spent time with Cloudflare leadership, preview upcoming products with our Developer Platform Product Managers, and receive advice on a wide range of topics such as how to build Sales teams and think about the right pricing model for your product.
Learn more about what these companies are building and what they’ve been up to below:
Why they chose Cloudflare “Cloudflare is the de facto Infrastructure for building resilient serverless products, it was a no-brainer to migrate to Cloudflare Workers to build the most frictionless experience for our customers.”
Recent updates Learn more about how Authdog is using Cloudflare’s Developer Platform in their Built With Workerscase study.
Automotive Commerce APIs to Buy & Sell Cars Online.
Demo Day pitch
Why they chose Cloudflare “We believe that Cloudflare is the next-generation of cloud computing platforms, and Drivly is completely built on Cloudflare, from Workers, Queues, PubSub, and especially Durable Objects.”
Recent updates Drivly made their public launch at Demo Day!
Why they chose Cloudflare “Simplicity and Performance. Using Pages and KV is extremely easy, but what really impresses are Workers with a nearly instant cold start!”
Recent updates Check out how Cloudflare is helping Flethy improve and accelerate API service integrations for developers here.
The easiest way to build and deploy GraphQL backends.
Demo Day pitch
Why they chose Cloudflare “The Grafbase platform is built from the ground up to be highly performant and deployed to the edge using Rust and WebAssembly. Services like Cloudflare Workers, KV, Durable Objects, Edge Caching were a natural choice as it fits perfectly into our vision architecturally.”
Recent updates Grafbase, which is building on Workers for Platforms among other Cloudflare products, celebrated their public launch and 7 new features in their April 2023 Launch Week.
The last line of defense for the software supply chain.
Demo Day pitch
Why they chose Cloudflare “Cloudflare's developer products offer effortlessly powerful building blocks essential to scaling up product to meet strenuous customer demand while enabling our developers to deliver faster than ever.”
Recent updates Karambit recently received a grant from the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation to help scale their commercial growth.
A no-code analytics platform for growth teams that automatically turns raw data into actionable narratives.
Demo Day pitch
Why they chose Cloudflare “Our customers benefit as we improve the quality of insights for them by running advanced algorithms for finding unqualified data points and quickly solving them with the unlimited power of Cloudflare Workers.”
Recent updates Learn more about how Cloudflare is helping Narrative BI improve the quality of insights they generate for customers here.
API-first personalization and experimentation solution to give your customers blazing-fast experiences.
Demo Day pitch
Why they chose Cloudflare “Cloudflare’s developers platform allows us to fully deploy our everything-on-the-edge approach to both data and delivery means personalized experience cause zero loading lag and zero interruptions for the customer.”
Recent updates Ninetailed recently launched integrations with Contentstack, Zapier, and other tools to improve and personalize digital customer experiences. Learn more on the Ninetailed blog and their Built with Workers case study.
Scalable, secure and cost-effective digital infrastructure, without the complexities of it.
Demo Day pitch
Why they chose Cloudflare “Workers provides us with a global network of edge compute that we can use to route data internally to our user's deployments, providing our users with infinite scale.”
Recent updates Patr was recently highlighted as a Product of the Day on Product Hunt!
Quest is a code-generation tool that automatically generates frontend code for business applications.
Demo Day pitch
Why they chose Cloudflare “We chose Cloudflare's Workers and Pages product to augment our frontend code-gen to include backend and hosting capabilities.”
Recent updates Quest has been hard at work expanding their platform and recently added animations, CSS grid, MUI & Chakra UI support, NextJS support, breakpoints, nested components, and more.
Simple & Secure User Access. Rollup is all your authentication and authorization needs bundled into one great package.
Demo Day pitch
Why they chose Cloudflare “We chose Cloudflare’s developer platform because it provides us all the tools to build a logical user graph at the edge. We can utilize everything from Durable Objects, D1, R2, and more to build a fast and distributed auth platform.”
Recent updates Rollup ID recently made their public debut and has rolled out lots of new features since. Learn more here.
Translating videos at the speed of social media using AI.
Demo Day pitch
Why they chose Cloudflare “Cloudflare Stream allows us to compete with YouTube's scale while being a 1-person startup, and Cloudflare Workers handles millions of unique views on Targum without waking us up at night.”
Recent updates Targum launched its platform to customers and hit $100K MRR in just a few days! Check out their Built With Workers case study to learn more.
Why they chose Cloudflare “Workers and the Cloudflare developer platform have been pivotal in enabling us to modernize and enhance existing website platforms and grow their conversions by 5X with little to no code.”
Recent updates Touchless has been growing their ecosystem and recently joined the RudderStack Solutions Partner Program.
Introducing Cohort #2 of the Workers Launchpad!
We have received hundreds of applications from startups from nearly 50 different countries. There were many AI or AI-related companies helping everyone from developers, to security teams and sales organizations. We also heard from many startups looking to improve developer tooling and collaboration, new social and gaming platforms, and companies solving a wide range of problems that ecommerce, consumer, real estate, and other businesses face today.
While these applicants are tackling a diverse set of real-world problems, the common thread is that they chose to leverage Cloudflare’s developer platform to build more secure, scalable, and feature-rich products faster than they otherwise could.
Without further ado, we are thrilled to announce the 25 incredible startups selected for Cohort #2 of the Workers Launchpad:
All-in-one web framework designed for speed. Pull your content from anywhere and deploy everywhere, all powered by your favorite UI components and libraries.
Buildless is a global build cache, like Cloudflare for compiled code; we cache artifacts and make them available over the internet to exponentially accelerate developer velocity.
We are looking forward to working with each of these companies over the next few months and sharing what they’re building with you.
If you’re building on Cloudflare’s Developer Platform, head over to @CloudflareDev or join the Cloudflare Developer Discord community to stay in the loop on Launchpad updates. In the early fall, we’ll be selecting Cohort #3 — apply early here!
Cloudflare is not providing any funding or making any funding decisions, and there is no guarantee that any particular company will receive funding through the program. All funding decisions will be made by the venture capital firms that participate in the program. Cloudflare is not a registered broker-dealer, investment adviser, or other similar intermediary.
It combines asynchronous I/O, system call polybatching, and
flexible buffer management, and is IMHO the most substantial
development in the Linux I/O model since Berkeley sockets (yes, I’m
aware Berkeley sockets preceded Linux. Let’s then say that they’re
the most substantial development in the UNIX I/O model to originate
in Linux)
Google has backtracked on its plan to delete inactive YouTube videos—at least for now. Of course, it could change its mind anytime it wants.
It would be nice if this would get people to think about the vulnerabilities inherent in letting a for-profit monopoly decide what of human creativity is worth saving.
That title may be a bit challenging, but it is valid. With the UK-based Isambard 3 supercomputer NVIDIA Grace will have a 2.7PF supercomputer that NVIDIA is pointing out is one of the three greenest. Perhaps the bigger part of this announcement is that it is a vote of confidence for Grace. NVIDIA Notches a […]
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