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Category Archives for "Networking – The New Stack"

Solo.io Launches Gloo Mesh Enterprise to General Availability

After a couple of years in development and just released Gloo Mesh Enterprise service mesh to general availability this month, marking API stability and a slate of new features, built in response to customer feedback during the beta period. Gloo Mesh Enterprise is the company’s enterprise-grade, Kubernetes-native solution to help organizations install and manage Istio service mesh deployments. While Gloo Mesh Enterprise may just now be reaching this milestone, Idit Levine speaks of massive, unnamed customers already using the product in production, in deployments spanning more than 40 data centers, and 1,200 clusters and Istio service mesh instances. “When you’re running with that scale, there are a lot of things that you need to do. This is exactly what Gloo Mesh is for. Gloo Mesh is basically saying, ‘crawl, walk, run, fly.'” said Levine, referring to the product’s ability to help not only with the initial steps of service mesh adoption and installation but also the day two operations and added capabilities to handle complex multicluster, multicloud, multiregion deployments. To start (or “crawl”), Gloo Mesh Enterprise provides Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) compliance and long-term support for Istio Continue reading

Behind the Scenes of the SunBurst Attack

Check Point sponsored this post. Lior Sonntag Lior is a Security Researcher at Check Point Software Technologies. He is a security enthusiast who loves to break stuff and put it back together. He's passionate about various InfoSec topics such as Cloud Security, Offensive Security, Vulnerability Research and Reverse Engineering. The biggest cyberattack in recent times came in the form of what seems like a

Why You Should Choose NGAC as Your Access Control Model

Tetrate sponsored this post. Jimmy Song Jimmy is a developer advocate at Tetrate, CNCF Ambassador, co-founder of ServiceMesher, and Cloud Native Community (China). He mainly focuses on Kubernetes, Istio, and cloud native architectures. Different companies or software providers have devised countless ways to control user access to functions or resources, such as Discretionary Access Control (DAC), Mandatory Access Control (MAC), Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC). In essence, whatever the type of access control model, three basic elements can be abstracted: user, system/application, and policy. In this article, we will introduce ABAC, RBAC, and a new access control model — Next Generation Access Control (NGAC) — and compare the similarities and differences between the three, as well as why you should consider NGAC. What Is RBAC? Ignasi Barrera Ignasi is a founding engineer at Tetrate and is a member of the Apache Software Foundation. RBAC, or Role-Based Access Control, takes an approach whereby users are granted (or denied) access to resources based on their role in the organization. Every role is assigned a collection of permissions and restrictions, which is great because you don’t need to keep track of every system user and their attributes. You just Continue reading

Best Practices for Securely Setting up a Kubernetes Cluster

David Bisson David Bisson is an information security writer and security junkie. He's a contributing editor to IBM's Security Intelligence, Tripwire's The State of Security Blog, and a contributing writer to Bora. He also regularly produces written content for Zix and a number of other companies in the digital security space. Organizations are increasingly looking to containers to fuel their digital transformations. In 2020, documentation: Load balancing. Organizations turn to Kubernetes to make Continue reading

Why Open Source Project Maintainers are Reluctant to use Digital Signatures, Two-Factor Authentication

We all agree that open source development methods help create better code. The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” which explained how the methodology of openness worked in Fetchmail project. But, that’s a general rule. Open source can still be abused by unscrupulous developers. So, why don’t we make sure when a programmer attempts to merge code into a program that they’re really who they say they are, by using two-factor authentication (2FA) or a digital signature? Good question. You might not think this is a real problem. Alas, it is. For example, in 2019 CursedGrabber malware was successfully Linux Foundation’s 2020 FOSS Contributor Survey, when developers were asked if the open source projects Continue reading

Using Traefik Ingress Controller with Istio Service Mesh

Tetrate sponsored this post. Petr McAllister Petr is an IT Professional with more than 20+ years of international experience and Master’s Degree in Computer Science. He is a technologist at Tetrate. The Istio service mesh comes with its own ingress, but we see customers with requirements to use a non-Istio ingress all the time. Previously, we’ve covered Traefik ingress. With some slight adjustments to the approach we suggested previously, we at Tetrate learned how to implement Traefik as the ingress gateway to your Istio Service Mesh. This article will show you how. The flow of traffic is shown on the diagram below. As soon as requests arrive at the service mesh from the Traefik ingress, Istio has the ability to apply security, observability and traffic steering rules to the request: Incoming traffic bypasses the Istio sidecar and arrives directly at Traefik, so the requests terminate at the Traefik ingress. Traefik uses the IngressRoute config to rewrite the “Host” header to match the destination, and forwards the request to the targeted service, which is a several step process: Requests exiting Traefik Ingress are redirected to the Istio sidecar Continue reading

Observe VM Service Meshes with Apache SkyWalking and the Envoy Access Log Service

Tetrate sponsored this post. Hongtao Gao Hongtao is a Tetrate engineer and former Huawei Cloud expert. One of PMC members of Apache SkyWalking, he participates in such popular open source projects as Apache ShardingSphere and Elastic-Job. Want to observe a service mesh that extends to virtual machines? A new analyzer in previous article, we talked about observability of service mesh in a Kubernetes environment and applied it to the bookinfo application in practice. But in that scenario, in order to map IP addresses to services, SkyWalking would need access to service metadata from a Kubernetes cluster — which is not available for services deployed in VMs. In this tutorial, we’ll demonstrate how SkyWalking’s new analyzer can give you better observability of a mesh that includes virtual machines. How It Works What makes VMs different from Kubernetes is that, for VM services, there are no places where we can fetch the metadata to map the IP addresses to services. The mechanics of SkyWalking Analyzer are the same Continue reading

HAProxy Bonds with HashiCorp Consul to Extend Automated Service Discovery

Version 2.2 of offers service discovery and native support for the HashiCorp’s Daniel Corbett, head of product, HAProxy Technologies, in a blog post. Through a RESTful HTTP API, HAProxy connects directly to a defined Consul server and ingests the list of services and nodes from a Consul catalog, Corbett later told The New Stack. The API will set off a process that can “define an HAProxy backend and pool of servers to match this catalog and automatically scale up or down nodes/servers on-demand based on changes within the Consul catalog,” Corbett said. Corbett noted in the has also released version 2.3 of HAProxy itself, adding features such as forwarding, prioritizing, and translating of messages sent over the Syslog Protocol on both UDP and TCP, an OpenTracing SPOA, Stats Contexts, SSL/TLS enhancements, an improved cache, and changes in the connection layer that lay the foundation for support for HTTP/3/QUIC. For more information on the HAProxy’s Data Plane API,

Istio’s Complexity Leads Some Users to Linkerd

Twain Taylor Twain is a guest blogger for Twistlock and a Fixate IO Contributor. He began his career at Google, where, among other things, he was involved in technical support for the AdWords team. His work involved reviewing stack traces and resolving issues affecting both customers and the Support team, and handling escalations. Today, as a technology journalist, he helps IT magazines, and startups change the way teams build and ship applications. Service meshes have been getting quite a bit of attention, and with good reason. By providing reliability, security, and observability at the platform layer, service meshes can play a mission-critical role in Kubernetes applications. But tales of adoption are mixed: some practitioners report shying away from adopting a service meshes due to their apparent complexity, while others report getting them up and running with apparent ease. So which is it? Are service meshes too complex to be worth the effort, or ready for adoption today? In this article I wanted to focus on

Offloading Authentication and Authorization from Application Code to a Service Mesh

Tetrate sponsored this post. Zack Butcher Zack is a Tetrate engineer. He is an Istio contributor and member of the Istio Steering Committee and co-author of 'Istio: Up and Running (O’Reilly: 2019).' In an upcoming Ramaswamy Chandramouli, we’ll be presenting recommendations around safely and securely offloading authentication and authorization from application code to a service mesh. We’ll be discussing the advantages and disadvantages of that approach. This article presents an overview of the paper that will be presented later this month, at

Build Resilient, Secure Microservices with Microsegmentation

About 10 to 12 years ago, the world of software experienced a shift in the architectural aspects of enterprise applications. Architects and software builders started moving away from the giant, tightly coupled, monolithic applications deployed in the private data centers to a more microservices-oriented architecture hosted in public cloud infrastructure. The inherent distributed nature of microservices is a new security challenge in the public cloud. Over the last decade, despite the growing adoption of microservices-oriented architecture for building scalable, autonomous, and robust enterprise applications, organizations often struggle to protect against this new attack surface in the cloud compared to the traditional data centers. It includes concerns around multitenancy and lack of visibility and control over the infrastructure, as well as the operational environment. This architectural shift makes meeting security goals harder, especially with the paramount emphasis placed on faster container-based deployments. The purpose of this article is to understand what microsegmentation is and how it can empower software architects, DevOps engineers, and IT security architects to build secure and resilient microservices. Specifically, I’ll discuss the network security challenges associated with the popular container orchestration mechanism Kubernetes, and I will illustrate the value of microsegmentation to prevent lateral movement when a Continue reading

An Introduction to WebSockets with Ballerina

Ballerina language to demonstrate how you can effectively use WebSocket features. The Dynamic Web: Looking Back Anjana Fernando Anjana is Director of Developer Relations at WSO2. His latest venture is his role in the Ballerina project, where he has been involved extensively in the design and implementation of the language and its runtime, and now primarily works on its ecosystem engineering and evangelism activities. HTTP is commonly used for a typical request/response scenario. Using JavaScript, the Fetch API help send requests from the client to servers in the background. This allows us to execute data operations without refreshing or loading another web page. However, this doesn’t support the need for server push scenarios, where requests are initiated from the server and sent to the client. So people came up with workarounds to make Continue reading

Trying out Istio’s DNS Proxy

Tetrate sponsored this post. Nick Nellis Nick is a software engineer at Tetrate, the enterprise service mesh company. He is a DevOps expert on Istio, public cloud architecture, and infrastructure automation. You may have heard that DNS functionality was added in Istio 1.8, but you might not have thought about the impact it has. It solves some key issues that exist within Istio and allows you to expand your mesh architecture to include multiple clusters and virtual machines. An excellent explanation of the features can be found on the What’s new in Istio 1.8 (DNS Proxy). Enabling Istio’s DNS Proxy This feature is currently in Alpha but can be enabled in the IstioOperator config. View the code on

Developing Enterprise Software with Scalability Top of Mind

Yasser Ganjisaffar Yasser Ganjisaffar is the VP of Engineering at Forward Networks, overseeing all the company’s engineering efforts. He joined Forward Networks in 2014 as an early employee and led the team that scaled the computation core of Forward Enterprise product by 1000x in five years. Prior to that, he built large-scale search infrastructures in Facebook and Microsoft. He holds a Computer Science Ph.D. in the information retrieval domain. Developing enterprise software is far from simple. Designing a platform to serve hundreds of thousands of users, devices, or data streams (sometimes all at once) is a Herculean task. But that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to approach the design methodology in a way that encourages scalability in the future. Scalability is one of the most important considerations in making a new software solution. Without it, the software cannot support user growth without crippling the user experience, and similarly inhibiting sales. Making a scalable software platform is challenging simply because it’s near impossible to know what factors, options and problems the vendor needs to take into consideration beforehand, requiring companies to instead iterate along the way. That was the issue

Mizar: Scalable Multitenant Networking with XDP on Kubernetes

Mizar is an open source project providing cloud networking to run virtual machines, containers, and other compute workloads. We built Mizar from the ground up with large scale and high performance in mind. Built in the same way as distributed systems in the cloud, Mizar utilizes XDP (eXpress Data Path) and Kubernetes to allow for the efficient creation of multitenant overlay networks with massive amounts of endpoints. Each of these technologies brings valuable perks that enable Mizar to achieve its goals. With XDP, Mizar is able to: Skip unnecessary stages of the network stack whenever possible and transit packet processing to smart NICs. Efficiently use kernel packet processing constructs without being locked into a specific processor architecture. Produce very small packet processing programs (<4KB). With Kubernetes, Mizar is able to: Efficiently program the underlying core XDP programs. Manage the lifecycle of its abstractions via CRDs. Have a scalable and distributed management plane. Deploy its core components and modules across all specified hosts. Mizar’s Goals and Continue reading

Supercharge CoreDNS with Cluster Addons

Infoblox sponsored this post. Sandeep Rajan Sandeep is a software engineer at Infoblox focussing on open source contributions to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects CoreDNS and Kubernetes. There has been an increasing demand from users to be able to manage the health, status, rollout, rollback, etc., of CoreDNS in a Kubernetes cluster; and not just rely on CoreDNS being managed by the cluster management tools. Since the use of Operators in Kubernetes is now generally accepted, the aim of the

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