Network Break 265: Cisco Chips At Broadcom With New ASIC; AWS Gives Networking Some Love

On today's Network Break we analyze Cisco's new ASIC platform and the 8000 router series, dig into a string of AWS announcements related to networking and security, and discuss new products from Cato Networks and Silver Peak.

The post Network Break 265: Cisco Chips At Broadcom With New ASIC; AWS Gives Networking Some Love appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Deep Dive Into the New Docker Desktop filesharing Implementation Using FUSE

The latest Edge release of Docker Desktop for Windows 2.1.7.0 has a completely new filesharing system using FUSE instead of Samba. The initial blog post we released presents the performance improvements of this new implementation and explains how to give feedback. Please try it out and let us know what you think. Now, we are going to go into details to give you more insight about the new architecture.

New Architecture

Instead of Samba running over a Hyper-V virtual network, the new system uses a Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) server running over gRPC over Hypervisor sockets.

The following diagram shows the path taken by a single request from a container, for example to read a PHP file:

In step (1) the web-server in the container calls “read” which is a Linux system call handled by the kernel’s Virtual File System (VFS) layer. The VFS is modular and supports many different filesystem implementations. In our case we use Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) which sends the request to a helper process running inside the VM labelled “FUSE client.” This process runs within the same namespace as the Docker engine. The FUSE client can handle some requests locally, but Continue reading

BrandPost: Customers Demonstrate the Benefits of Secure SD-WAN Across Industries

Given today’s expanding networks, largely being driven by cloud transformation and similar digital transformation efforts, keeping everything connected in a single, easily manageable environment is a critical challenge. Extending things like cloud services to your mobile workers and branch offices will inevitably impact your network’s performance – especially if you are still trying to route traffic through your central network using things like WAN routers and MPLS connections in a hub and spoke design. Routing cloud-based applications through a WAN link to the central network can severely impact productivity and user experience while creating continually increasing bandwidth loads.To read this article in full, please click here

Figure Out What Problem You’re Trying to Solve

A long while ago I got into an hilarious Tweetfest (note to self: don’t… not that I would ever listen) starting with:

Which feature and which Cisco router for layer2 extension over internet 100Mbps with 1500 Bytes MTU

The knee-jerk reaction was obvious: OMG, not again. The ugly ghost of BRouters (or is it RBridges or WAN Extenders?) has awoken. The best reply in this category was definitely:

I cannot fathom the conversation where this was a legitimate design option. May the odds forever be in your favor.

A dozen “this is a dumpster fire” tweets later the problem was rephrased as:

Read more ...

End of term

My children broke up from school this past weekend, which seems as good a reason as any to call this ‘end of term’ for The Morning Paper. I’ll be taking a break until the New Year, topping up my reading lists and getting ready for a whole new crop of papers and discoveries. The Morning Paper will resume on Monday 6th January.

Since term began on the 19th August we’ve looked at 50 different papers, and I had the pleasure of attending VLDB and HPTS in person as well. I learned a ton! I hope you found something you enjoyed in the paper selections as well.

Here’s a small selection of my personal highlights from the term, in case you missed any of them (in the order in which they originally appeared on the blog):

7 considerations when buying network-automation tools

The concept of network automation has been around for as long as there have been networks, and until now the uptake has been slow for a number of reasons including resistance from network engineers.  But now forces are coming together to create a perfect storm of sorts, driving a need for network automation tools.One factor is that more and more network teams are starting to feel the pain of working in the fast-paced digital world where doing things the old way simply does not work.  The manual, box-by-box, method of configuring and updating routers and switches through a command-line interface (CLI) is too slow and error prone. [Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Also, the rise of software-defined networks (SDN), including software-defined WANs (SD-WAN), has enabled network-automation tools to evolve from operationally focused point products that address things like change management and configuration into policy and orchestration tools.To read this article in full, please click here

Physically man-in-the-middling an IoT device with Linux Bridge

This is a quick writeup of how I did some analysis of an IoT device (The Thing) by physically inserting a Linux box into the network path between The Thing and the network service it consumed. The approach described here involves being physically close to the target system, but it should work equally well1 anywhere there's an Ethernet link along the path between The Thing and it's server.


First, the topology: The Thing is attached to an Ethernet switch and is part of the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet. We'll be physically inserting ourselves into the path of the red cable in this diagram.

Initial setup

The first step is to get a dual-homed Linux box into the path. I used an Ubuntu 18.04 machine with the following netplan configuration:

 network:  
  version: 2  
  renderer: networkd  
  ethernets:  
   eth0:  
    dhcp4: no  
   eth1:  
    dhcp4: no  
  bridges:  
   br0:  
    addresses: [192.168.1.2/24]  
    gateway4: 192.168.1.1  
    interfaces:  
     - eth0  
     - eth1


This configuration defines an internal software-based bridge for handling traffic between The Thing and the switch. Additionally, it creates an IP interface for the Linux host to communicate with neighbors attached to the bridge (everybody on 192.168.1. Continue reading

Packet and Sprint on Why Bare Metal Is the ‘Lowest-Common Denominator’

IFX2019. In this latest The New Stack Makers podcast recorded live at Zachary Smith, CEO and co-founder of Packet, and Sprint, discussed how bare metal fits into the emerging Internet of Things. The Dec. 4-5 event was Packet’s second annual vendor-neutral infrastructure conference and ran at the same time as AW Re:Invent. A metaphor Rook used to describe bare-metal deployments for Sprint, a Packet customer, came from his daughter who had to tell her grade school class what her father did for a living: she said her father was a “machine whisperer.” Subscribe: Fireside.fm | Stitcher | Overcast | TuneIn The metaphor fits well because it aptly reflects what bare-metal machines “try to tell you,” Rook said. “An individual machine cannot tell you much, but what machines tell you only start to make sense when you do two things: Number one is you start to listen to all of them at same time, and number two is you start to learn what they tell Continue reading

This is finally the year of the ARM server

"RISC" was an important architecture from the 1980s when CPUs had fewer than 100,000 transistors. By simplifying the instruction set, they free up transistors for more registers and better pipelining. It meant executing more instructions, but more than making up for this by executing them faster.

But once CPUs exceed a million transistors around 1995, they moved to Out-of-Order, superscalar architectures. OoO replaces RISC by decoupling the front-end instruction-set with the back-end execution. A "reduced instruction set" no longer matters, the backend architecture differs little between Intel and competing RISC chips like ARM. Yet people have remained fixated on instruction set. The reason is simply politics. Intel has been the dominant instruction set for the computers we use on servers, desktops, and laptops. Many instinctively resist whoever dominates. In addition, colleges indoctrinate students on the superiority of RISC. Much college computer science instruction is decades out of date.

For 10 years, the ignorant press has been championing the cause of ARM's RISC processors in servers. The refrain has always been that RISC has some inherent power efficiency advantage, and that ARM processors with natural power efficiency from the mobile world will be more power efficient for the data center.

None Continue reading

Samsung Expands 5G Footprint With Videotron

Samsung will provide massive MIMO and dual-band base stations to support the operator’s 4G LTE...

Read More »

© SDxCentral, LLC. Use of this feed is limited to personal, non-commercial use and is governed by SDxCentral's Terms of Use (https://www.sdxcentral.com/legal/terms-of-service/). Publishing this feed for public or commercial use and/or misrepresentation by a third party is prohibited.

Google Transfer Service Mitigates Cloud Migration Migraines

Transfer Service aims to removes inherent complexities with large-scale data transfers and moving...

Read More »

© SDxCentral, LLC. Use of this feed is limited to personal, non-commercial use and is governed by SDxCentral's Terms of Use (https://www.sdxcentral.com/legal/terms-of-service/). Publishing this feed for public or commercial use and/or misrepresentation by a third party is prohibited.

Heavy Networking 494: Hybrid Cloud Networking – All The Details

Today's Heavy Networking drills into routing complexities and options for hybrid cloud networking. Our guest is William Collins, lead cloud architect at a large healthcare company. He shares his experiences connecting resources on premises to public cloud services. We also discuss the importance of design and governance, and why your networking skills are absolutely critical when it comes to the cloud.

The post Heavy Networking 494: Hybrid Cloud Networking – All The Details appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Amazon Leads Linux Foundation’s Edge NOS Project

DENT will use the Linux Kernel and other Linux-based projects as the basis for the open source NOS,...

Read More »

© SDxCentral, LLC. Use of this feed is limited to personal, non-commercial use and is governed by SDxCentral's Terms of Use (https://www.sdxcentral.com/legal/terms-of-service/). Publishing this feed for public or commercial use and/or misrepresentation by a third party is prohibited.

Service to service communication within GKE cluster

In my last blog, I covered options to access GKE services from external world. In this blog, I will cover service to service communication options within GKE cluster. Specifically, I will cover the following options: Cluster IP Internal load balancer(ILB) Http internal load balancer Istio Traffic director In the end, I will also compare these … Continue reading Service to service communication within GKE cluster →

Ciena Chief Calls Infinera 600G Uncompetitive Amid Strong Q4

Amid double-digital growth in 2019, Ciena CEO Gary Smith says Infinera's 600G optics lack the...

Read More »

© SDxCentral, LLC. Use of this feed is limited to personal, non-commercial use and is governed by SDxCentral's Terms of Use (https://www.sdxcentral.com/legal/terms-of-service/). Publishing this feed for public or commercial use and/or misrepresentation by a third party is prohibited.

1 … 1,063 1,064 1,065 1,066 1,067 … 3,835