🎓 Cloudflare U: Magic Transit Magicians

Okay, hello and welcome to another episode of Cloudflare U. This episode is called Magic Transit Magicians because each of the three interns that I have with me today work in some capacity on magic transit, which we will explain a little bit later what that even means.

But to kick off, my name is Ellie Jamison. I run the internship program at Cloudflare.

I've been here for almost three years. And I'm so excited to be here today to talk to the interns we have.

And with that, I will let Amrita introduce herself and we can go around the table.

Hi, everyone. My name is Amrita Lakhanpal and I'm a PM intern here at Cloudflare working on the magic transit team.

I'm a rising junior at Duke University studying computer science. And I'll pass it off to Meyer.

Hello, I'm Meyer Zinn. I am a software engineering intern on magic transit and a rising sophomore in the Turing Scholars program at UT Austin.

I guess I will hand it over to Zeke. I'm Zeke. I do the same thing as Meyer.

I'm a software engineering intern on the magic transit team. I am a rising senior at Berkeley.

Awesome. All right. So before we get into the meat of the content, I thought it'd be fun to go around and do some icebreakers.

So we'll just do kind of like a flash round.

But first question, and I'll pass it to Amrita again, is TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter?

I'd say definitely TikTok. I think my screen time speaks for itself when I waste too much of my day on TikTok.

Fair. What about Meyer?

Definitely TikTok for entertainment and then Twitter for drama. Zeke?

I'm a big Instagram and Twitter fan. I don't like TikTok that much. I'm a big Instagram girl, so I'll say Instagram.

Next question, ThinkPad or Mac? I'll pass it to you, Amrita.

Definitely Mac. Meyer? Meyer? Is ThinkPad still around? I was told ThinkPads are used by engineers.

I did not know this. I'm definitely a Mac person.

I've been using a Mac, but I'm constantly frustrated by having to run a virtual machine inside of my Mac to run Linux on.

So I think if I had to do it again, I'd use a ThinkPad and run Linux on it.

Okay, good. So we have one for ThinkPad.

Next question, what is your most used emoji, Amrita? Minus the one that looks like they're blowing their nose with a tissue on it.

I use that one a lot. Why? It just fits in a lot of situations.

It's very versatile, so it comes out a lot. Nice.

All right, what about you, Meyer? I think either the flushed emoji or the grimace emoji, those tend to come up often in engineering circles.

That's fair. I really like the cowboy emoji.

Me too. Okay, I was going to say that one. The cowboy emoji is very versatile, so I agree.

Last icebreaker, so 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s, which decade would you love the most and why?

If you could go back in time.

I feel like for me, it's definitely the 80s. I thought the fashion was really fun and vibrant, and also there was just so much amazing music that I listened to that came out of the 80s, so it'd be fun to be a part of that.

All right, Meyer? I don't really know anything about them except for the 90s were pretty cool for tech, so I think that would be a good place to land.

Yeah, I think I'd like the 90s as well, just because it's closer to modern medicine, which is nice to have.

That's fair.

I think I would say the 60s because I'm in San Francisco right now, and I think San Francisco had such a moment in the 60s, it would be fun to go back.

All right, so those are our icebreakers, and now that you know a little bit about our emoji preferences, we can start talking about your internships at Cloudflare.

So first things first, tell me about what team you're on, the role you play on your team, your location, and also you already kind of went over what school you went to, so we can just do team and location.

And Rita, I'll pass to you. Right, so I'm a product manager intern based out on the Magic Transit team, and typically that team is based out of Champaign, but I think if the internship had been in person, I would have been in San Francisco, but right now I'm calling in from home, which is Alabama.

Okay, Meyer, what about you?

Yeah, so I'm software engineering. Specifically, I guess we sort of, we're all Magic Transit interns, but I work on the part of Magic Transit that deals with like where and how we route customer traffic, and I guess my location is like, it's complicated.

Right now, I'm talking to you from Baltimore. I've been in New York this summer, and I'm from Dallas, Texas originally, but I live in Austin.

Yeah, and I'm also on the Magic Transit team.

I've actually been here since January.

I took a semester off, so I didn't graduate in the middle of COVID. What was the other part of the question?

What do I do? I've mostly been working on monitoring for Magic Transit to know when something is wrong, I've also worked on turning it off when something goes wrong, and some work on Magic WAN.

Great, and then just a quick follow-up for those that don't know that are watching, can someone describe like in layman's terms what Magic Transit is and how it functions like with Cloudflare overall?

I'll just open that up to anyone. Let me take a stab at this, and then Amrita and Zeke can clean up like everywhere I go wrong here, but essentially Magic Transit is Cloudflare's DOS protection service at the level three, or layer three, and so what that means is instead of protecting websites, we're protecting entire networks.

So we're guarding governments, corporations that have large internal private networks from sort of ransomware and other large-scale DOS attacks that can be launched today.

I feel like you did a great job. Great, and I asked this yesterday, but do you know why it's called Magic Transit?

I have no clue.

I know Ressam, who was the initial product manager of Magic Transit when it first launched, came up with the name, but I don't know how they came up with it, but I guess it's just stuck.

Yeah, I actually don't know the answer either.

I think the transit part is easier to understand because we're acting at a low enough layer on the OSI networking model that we're sort of controlling the transit of information on the Internet to some extent, but I think Ressam just has a big thing for magic.

Totally fair.

A lot of magic happening in Cloudflare, so I guess that's where it started from.

Good, good. Okay, so moving on to talking more about your projects and what you've actually been working on throughout the summer.

So tell me a little bit more about your projects, and you can go technical or non-technical for this piece, and essentially what are the problems that you're trying to solve?

So anyone who wants to share first can go.

I can jump in and we'll just follow that same order.

So I've been working on building a new onboarding portal for Magic Transit customers that will essentially centralize all information and actions relating to onboarding to Magic Transit.

So the goal with that is to provide more visibility into the onboarding process for our customers, but also to make the requirements for each step much clearer to the customer, which will reduce the number of back-ends or the amount of back-and -forth communication that we have between our team and our customers, and also reduce the number of support tickets we see relating to Magic Transit and incorrect setups.

And I guess the reason that we're doing this is right now the onboarding process as it stands today is really long, and it takes about two weeks to complete.

And like I said, there's a lot of back-and-forth communication and also internal processes that have to be completed by numerous teams on our side, as well as our customer side.

So just because of the nature of the process and how complex it is, like one small delay will push back our customers' go-live date significantly just because of the number of steps that are there.

So with the onboarding portal, we'll hopefully make the process less complex and easier to understand on our customer side and easier to track through things like a quick start guide and a status checklist to just give customers a smoother introduction to Magic Transit.

Yeah, that's so important. The faster that we can onboard customers, the more customers we can serve.

So that's such a great project to be working on. All right, Myer, what about you?

Sure. So I sort of alluded to this earlier, but one of the major points about Magic Transit is that we are not just a simple routing solution where we just take in packets and then send them to predetermined locations.

We also try and route the data that's coming through us in a direction that it's most likely to actually be received by the customer.

And so that means we need to have a way of continuously sort of monitoring the Internet weather and seeing, oh, is some router between us and the customer having a really bad day and dropping packets?

Do we need to route around that? And so this summer, I've been working on essentially rewriting the system that does that to be able to scale with the number of customers that we're onboarding.

Yeah, I guess I kind of touched on this earlier, but sort of along with what Myer said, you know, Magic Transit operates at a whole network layer.

So being reliable is really important.

So a lot of the work I've done this summer has been trying to detect sort of adverse routing situations inside of Magic Transit and then getting the robots to tell us when those happen.

And this is, there's sort of a variety of, this really got into technical weeds.

It turns out to be quite difficult to distinguish between adverse routing conditions as a result of Magic Transit and adverse routing conditions as a result of other people messing up on the way to Magic Transit.

But I thought it was kind of fun.

The Internet weather is very mysterious. Yeah, it was kind of cool. Like one of the things that I learned from this work is like, we were looking at, you know, when is traffic being routed kind of interestingly on the Internet?

And you do see it like, oh, Internet, like we now, because Cloudflare is so big and has so much scale, like we now see and detect when other people are messing up and you have this very clear, like, oh, that was this, these guys messed this up.

That was this ASN.

Like it's, it gives you an actual practical look into what like Internet weather is.

So kind of neat. Yeah, that's so interesting. So question about the technologies that y'all have used to work on your projects.

Were you familiar with all the programs, platforms that you've been using before your internship?

Or did you kind of learn as you went as you joined Cloudflare? What was that experience like?

I know for me, this was my first experience with product management in industry.

So a lot of the tools that we use to track product development life cycles or check feature requests or things like that.

So like Jira, Salesforce, Sendesk, Figma for design.

I hadn't had too much exposure to, but fortunately I had some great mentors that are product managers here with my manager and my mentor and other product managers at the company that were able to help me get accustomed to using that software.

But I think the biggest thing was just exploring on my own and picking around on the tools to see what they can do.

And that helped me learn a lot.

And Rita, do you think that your perspective on ticket management things has changed since you've gone from being doing CS to PM stuff?

I feel like I've become more of a fan of tracking tasks through tickets on the PM side.

It's just, I realized how helpful it is because I guess when I used to be on the engineering side, I just got the tickets and wasn't really in charge of knowing where they came from or creating them.

But with being a PM, you're working with engineering, design, product content, like so many teams across the company.

So it's hard to keep track of who's working on what and what progress has been made.

And having tickets where you can go back and check status and see comments has been really, really helpful.

That's neat.

Yeah. So I guess for me, I came in, this is my first experience as a software engineer in industry.

All my experience beforehand is academic work and research.

So I was totally unfamiliar with the tools like JIRA, ticket tracking, and even a lot of the specific softwares that we use for metrics and observability and that sort of stuff.

And like Amrita said, I was really fortunate to have a good mentorship that really helped me get into just deep dive headfirst into these technologies and get more familiar and then hit the ground running.

But I learned a lot.

And there will be a forthcoming Cloudflare blog post hopefully about this, about some of the lessons I learned and how the tools interact.

Yeah.

I think I had done a good amount of networking work before I came to Cloudflare.

And so I kind of expected that I would know what I was doing and I didn't at all, which I think it was kind of insightful.

The Internet, like I'd really done stuff on like layer four and layer five before this.

And so I was like, oh, I know how networking works.

I know what TCP is and what an HTTP request is pretty well.

But it turns out there actually is good abstraction between layers on the Internet and understanding some of them definitely does not mean that you understand the rest of them.

So it's been a really big learning experience to really understand the IP layer, which is where Magic Transit operates.

Yeah, that's so great.

And I think a few of you mentioned how you each had mentors that kind of guided you through learning the new technologies and also the workload.

So I also want to talk a little bit about mentorship.

So who are some of the mentors that you've had this summer?

And what would you say like your big takeaways from the learnings from them are?

I can jump in here.

I mentioned them in my previous answer, but I think my manager and my like allocated mentor have been two of my biggest support systems while I've been here.

So if they're watching, shout out to Dina and Anika. They're both amazing.

But they're both, you know, product managers here in different realms of product at Cloudflare.

So it's been a really great experience really amazing to be able to learn from them because they are definitely quite different in the ways that they complete their product management responsibilities.

So, you know, they've always been there when I had questions or needed advice on product decisions or just wasn't sure on how to move forward and when stuck on an issue.

So I'd say the two of them have really helped me understand what it's like to be a product manager and, you know, know the ins and outs of what the process looks like and how to make the best decisions possible and just make the most of my experience here as well.

So I know my experience wouldn't be half of what it was if it wasn't for the two of them.

Yeah, I think for me, I had my direct mentor on the engineering side.

Michael Vanderwater was amazing.

You know, the amount of time that he spent just like helping me get up to speed and, you know, giving me feedback on the work that I did was incredible.

I think even more than my direct mentor, though, was just the accessibility of everyone on the team.

Like if I had a question, there was not like a, you know, you go up three layers on the tier list and you ask that person and then they go back down and find the right person.

I just messaged whoever was responsible and then they would always respond no matter like, no matter how basic a question it is or, you know, like what their current work was, they were always there to like help me.

So I think that was really an incredible part of the experience.

But yeah, shout out to Michael. Thank you for approving my PRs. Yeah, I think when I started, I was working a lot with Derek, which was great and learned a lot there.

I think I will echo to what Myra said, like I've been here for a little while and I think this team, as opposed to other places I've worked, it feels very accessible for asking questions, which has been like, like I spend very little time toiling to learn something that someone else knows on this team, which I think is like, which is very nice.

Yeah, I definitely echo that same sentiment too.

And I think that expands to outside of the Magic Transit team, just with the whole company.

I know like asking questions can sometimes be intimidating and that's something that I've found hard to do in the past, but here I learned really quickly that like everyone wants to answer your questions and like wants to help out the interns and loves working with us.

And I think just like for me, something I wanted to do was like sit in on a lot of customer calls and understand what that was like.

And it was easy as messaging another product manager on chat and like I immediately got added to their customer calls they had coming up or they're always willing to help.

So I mean, I think one of my biggest takeaways is just how helpful and accessible the people at Cloudflare like across the entire company are and that definitely have helped me learn as much as I can from this internship.

That's really great to hear.

And I also want to give kudos to all of you because having a remote internship and asking for help is a hard thing to do.

I think it's hard enough in person and you know to ping someone you've never interacted with before that is also very intimidating.

So it takes a lot and so thank you all for doing that and sticking your neck out this summer.

The next thing I want to talk about is I know you're obviously early on in your careers, you're still in school, you're going back to school, but how has your time at Cloudflare you know contributed to maybe knowing closer what you want to do with your life and your career?

Has it helped? Do you have a more narrow view now on what you might want to do?

How are you feeling now after you know coming to a close of your internship? I think for me, like I said earlier, this was my first industry experience with product management.

I had done only software engineering internships in the past, which I realized after last summer especially that that wasn't my thing.

And so I wanted to use this as like a test to see if product management was more for me and I think you can see from my responses I've absolutely loved it.

I definitely think it's more up my alley.

So I think my time here at Cloudflare as a product manager intern definitely helped me realize that this is what I want to do and help focus me on my path forward with my career.

Yeah, this is actually my first industry experience, period.

And so this has definitely been helpful in expanding sort of my understanding of what computer science is and what computer scientists do.

It's not just, you know, academics and school.

There's, you know, a lot of really interesting problems just out there in the world waiting for people to solve them.

So that's definitely one of my key takeaways is just I'm interested in exploring more of these like problem areas and seeing how I can sort of leverage computer science and address them.

Yeah, I think that, so this is one of my, this is like my third internship I've done.

And one of the things that I really wanted to accomplish with this was doing a longer, a longer internship.

And I think that has been like being here for the seven months I have been here has been like a very eye-opening experience where I've learned a lot about I think really writing software because previously if I wrote bad code and the code had a bug, I was gone in two months anyway.

But now I think it's been interesting to really like see systems that I wrote at the beginning of this internship and like learning about maintaining those and sort of what that involves.

I think it's really improved. It's definitely improved my ability to write good software, I think.

Yeah, that's really great to hear.

And Zeke has been at Cloudflare since January. So you've gotten to have, you know, almost double the internship that the other students get to have.

So I think that's a really cool experience. Okay, so another question I have is maybe what is something that surprised you about your time at Cloudflare?

Whether it is something unexpected you didn't expect coming in or, you know, anything like that.

I'd say for me, the most surprising thing was how much autonomy and control that I had over the work that I was doing.

Like in previous internships, I'd just be handed tasks and they'd be like, okay, this is what you're doing.

Like, go do it. But with like my project here, I came in and they're like, we want to build an onboarding portal, but you know, figure out how we want to do it, what we want it to look like, who you want to work with, things like that.

So I think as an intern, being able to do that and like lead stand up and things like that, that I never expected to do as someone that just came out of their sophomore year of college, I think that was really surprising.

But I also think the structure of the program here, and I know this same sentiment is echoed across all the interns that I've talked to at Cloudflare, has really helped me learn as much as I can.

And, you know, I've had to figure things out as I go rather than being told what to do.

So, you know, made mistakes, but, you know, we learn from our mistakes and I feel like that's what's helped me get the most out of my time here.

Yeah. And a super similar vein to the autonomy.

I, coming out of, out of freshman year of college, I had no idea that I would work on something that like actually impacts customers and that the project that I'm working on changes, like how we route trillions of bytes of data every day around the Internet.

And that this has like a tangible impact on people's everyday experience on the Internet.

Like that was just such a wild concept to me, going from doing a school project every week, that's like one and done, right?

And then, like Zeke said, working on a system that you have to maintain and that actually has like stakes to it.

That's been, I think, like the big surprise to me.

I thought I would just get like a throwaway intern project, right?

And then here I am tinkering with the Internet. Yeah, I'll echo what Meyer said.

I think it's, it's interesting. It's, it's pretty, pretty neat how like Cloudflare does a lot with not that much, you know, like a surprisingly small number of people.

And like, really, we feel like you have a lot of impact, even just as an intern.

I've also been surprised by how much the Linux kernel does for you.

I really didn't appreciate how powerful Linux was until I came here.

And now I'm like, wow, really do a lot with this.

That's great. Okay, so we only have two minutes, less than two minutes left.

So we can do kind of a quickfire round. But what's your advice for future interns at Cloudflare just in general anywhere?

Mine is just meet as many people as possible.

You know, you have 12 weeks here, which seems like a lot, but it flies by.

But for me, I've started setting up coffee chats initially with other product managers, but first out of that product org and talk to people in marketing, sales, engineering, you know, all over the company.

And I feel like that is one of the avenues where I've learned the most just about how a business is run, what it takes to run a company like Cloudflare.

And those conversations have just been so valuable and looking forward to staying in touch with the people that I've talked to.

So, yeah, I think, you know, there's so much happening at Cloudflare, and you'll learn a lot from the work that you do, but explore beyond that too.

Yeah, I want to echo everything that Amrita said.

That is so true. I think my single biggest takeaway, sort of to paraphrase Carr's movie, go slow to go fast.

Sometimes it's better to think about a problem for a little bit longer before you ship a solution and then to ship a solution and find out it's half-baked later.

Yeah, I echo what Mayer said. Take the time to really learn what you're doing.

Like, really make, like, do experiments and, like, understand, like, it's almost like there should be no thinking left when you start writing code that's going to go into production.

At that point, it should only be thoughts of how will this go into production and not how do I do this.

I think I've really learned that throughout this internship.

That's so great. Well, I just want to say thank you all so much for being here at Cloudflare in general.

Your work is so valuable to our team.

I hope you all consider coming back full-time someday, but in the meantime, I will miss you and thank you for everything that you've done this summer.

Thank you.