Exploring Batfish with Cumulus – Part 2

In Part 1 of our look into navigating Batfish with Cumulus, we explored how to get started with communicating with the pybatfish SDK, as well as getting some basic actionable topology information back. With the introduction out of the way, we’re going to take a look at some of the more advanced use cases when it comes to parsing the information we get back in response to our queries. Finally, we’re going to reference an existing CI/CD pipeline, where templates are used to dynamically generate switch configuration files, and see exactly where and how Batfish can fit in and aid in our efforts to dynamically test changes.

For a look under the covers, the examples mentioned in this series of posts are tracked in “https://gitlab.com/permitanyany/cldemo2”

Enforcing Policy

As you may remember, in Part 1 we gathered the expected BGP status of all our sessions via the bgpSessionStatus query and added some simple logic to tell us when any of those sessions would report back as anything but “Established”. Building on that type of policy expectation, we’re going to add a few more rules that we want to enforce in our topology.

For example:

• “A leaf switch should Continue reading

Vodafone Ireland Activates 5G Service in 5 Cities

Heavy Networking 465: Looking Backward and Forward with Harry Quackenboss

Harry Quackenboss is long time veteran of infrastructure technology. In networking he was a VP of Sales of Crescendo for FDDI networking (to the desktop) which was acquired by Cisco. He later founded Woven Systems as a high speed Ethernet company of the time and more lately CEO of cPlane, a SDN company now relaunched […]

The post Heavy Networking 465: Looking Backward and Forward with Harry Quackenboss appeared first on Packet Pushers.

CenturyLink’s Edge Strategy Starts With ‘Several Hundred Million’ Investment

MANRS Observatory: Monitoring the State of Internet Routing Security

Routing security is vital to the future and stability of the Internet, but it’s under constant threat. Which is why we’ve launched a free online tool so that network operators can see how they’re doing, and what they can improve, while anyone can see the health of the Internet at a glance. The MANRS Observatory measures networks’ adherence to MANRS – their “MANRS readiness” – a key indicator of the state of routing security and resiliency of the Internet.

Here’s what the MANRS Observatory is in a nutshell:

• Performance Barometer: MANRS participants can easily monitor how well they adhere to the requirements of this initiative and make any necessary adjustments to their security controls.
• Business Development: Participants can see how they and their peers are performing. They can leverage the MANRS Observatory to determine whether potential partners’ security practices are up to par.
• Government: Policymakers can better understand the state of routing security and resilience and help improve it by calling for MANRS best practices.
• Social Responsibility: MANRS implementation is simple, voluntary, and non-disruptive. The Observatory can help participants ensure they and their peers are keeping their networks secure, which helps improve routing security of the Internet as a whole.

Continue reading

SaaS-ifing Backup Scores Clumio $51M in Funding

Magic Transit makes your network smarter, better, stronger, and cheaper to operate

Today we’re excited to announce Cloudflare Magic Transit. Magic Transit provides secure, performant, and reliable IP connectivity to the Internet. Out-of-the-box, Magic Transit deployed in front of your on-premise network protects it from DDoS attack and enables provisioning of a full suite of virtual network functions, including advanced packet filtering, load balancing, and traffic management tools.

Magic Transit is built on the standards and networking primitives you are familiar with, but delivered from Cloudflare’s global edge network as a service. Traffic is ingested by the Cloudflare Network with anycast and BGP, announcing your company’s IP address space and extending your network presence globally. Today, our anycast edge network spans 193 cities in more than 90 countries around the world.

Once packets hit our network, traffic is inspected for attacks, filtered, steered, accelerated, and sent onward to the origin. Magic Transit will connect back to your origin infrastructure over Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) tunnels, private network interconnects (PNI), or other forms of peering.

Enterprises are often forced to pick between performance and security when deploying IP network services. Magic Transit is designed from the ground up to minimize these trade-offs: performance and security are better together. Magic Transit deploys IP security Continue reading

Magic Transit: Network functions at Cloudflare scale

Today we announced Cloudflare Magic Transit, which makes Cloudflare’s network available to any IP traffic on the Internet. Up until now, Cloudflare has primarily operated proxy services: our servers terminate HTTP, TCP, and UDP sessions with Internet users and pass that data through new sessions they create with origin servers. With Magic Transit, we are now also operating at the IP layer: in addition to terminating sessions, our servers are applying a suite of network functions (DoS mitigation, firewalling, routing, and so on) on a packet-by-packet basis.

Over the past nine years, we’ve built a robust, scalable global network that currently spans 193 cities in over 90 countries and is ever growing. All Cloudflare customers benefit from this scale thanks to two important techniques. The first is anycast networking. Cloudflare was an early adopter of anycast, using this routing technique to distribute Internet traffic across our data centers. It means that any data center can handle any customer’s traffic, and we can spin up new data centers without needing to acquire and provision new IP addresses. The second technique is homogeneous server architecture. Every server in each of our edge data centers is capable of running every task. We Continue reading

BrandPost: Integrations are Essential to Secure SD-WAN

Improved network security is a top business driver of SD-WAN adoption, as a previous blog in this series revealed. However, SD-WAN isn’t necessarily an off-the-shelf panacea for all your network security challenges. While the typical SD-WAN products include some native security capabilities, an enterprise must take an approach that combines native SD-WAN security with integrated, on-premises, and cloud-based security solutions.Some early adopters of SD-WAN have failed to take this comprehensive approach. For instance, EMA’s WAN Transformation research found that enterprises that have completed a production deployment of an SD-WAN solution are 1.3 times more likely than the average enterprise to have experienced a security breach in a remote site over the last year. EMA suspects that these particular enterprises have been oversold on the native security capabilities of their chosen vendors.To read this article in full, please click here

Network Break 247: Data Centers Are Not Quite Dead, AI is a Feature Not A Product

Not everything is broken this week although some things definitely are looking grim. We consider how really dead data centers are according to Gartner, Cisco gobbles some more AI for Webex while HPE gets more AI-ish for Bluedata. GTT Communications is in trouble while ATT Bribery case highlights that big companies are dumb. Snark and virtual donuts all round this week.

The post Network Break 247: Data Centers Are Not Quite Dead, AI is a Feature Not A Product appeared first on Packet Pushers.

What is instant recovery? A way to quickly restore lost files and test backup systems

The concept of instant recovery is relatively simple – the ability to run a virtual machine directly from a backup of that VM – but the possibilities offered by such a simple concept are virtually limitless, which explains why it’s considered one of the most important advances in backup and recovery for many years.Before the advent of instant recovery all restores were basically the same, starting with how backups were stored – in some type of container or image. Prior to commercial backup-and-recovery software, backups were stored in formats such as tar, cpio, or dump. More about backup and recovery:To read this article in full, please click here

Checkpoint Endpoint Security VPNs

GTT’s Stock Plummets in Wake of Q2 Loss

Microsoft Scores Cloud Deal With India’s Reliance Jio

Vendors Push 5G for Enterprise Services First

How SD-Branch addresses today’s network security concerns

Secure software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) has become one of the hottest new technologies, with some reports claiming that 85% of companies are actively considering SD-WAN to improve cloud-based application performance, replace expensive and inflexible fixed WAN connections, and increase security.But now the industry is shifting to software-defined branch (SD-Branch), which is broader than SD-WAN but introduced several new things for organizations to consider, including better security for new digital technologies. To understand what's required in this new solution set, I recently sat down with John Maddison, Fortinet’s executive vice president of products and solutions.To read this article in full, please click here

How SD-Branch addresses today’s network security concerns

Secure software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) has become one of the hottest new technologies, with some reports claiming that 85% of companies are actively considering SD-WAN to improve cloud-based application performance, replace expensive and inflexible fixed WAN connections, and increase security.But now the industry is shifting to software-defined branch (SD-Branch), which is broader than SD-WAN but introduced several new things for organizations to consider, including better security for new digital technologies. To understand what's required in this new solution set, I recently sat down with John Maddison, Fortinet’s executive vice president of products and solutions.To read this article in full, please click here

Xilinx launches new FPGA cards that can match GPU performance

Xilinx has launched a new FPGA card, the Alveo U50, that it claims can match the performance of a GPU in areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.The company claims the card is the industry’s first low-profile adaptable accelerator with PCIe Gen 4 support, which offers double the throughput over PCIe Gen3. It was finalized in 2017, but cards and motherboards to support it have been slow to come to market.The Alveo U50 provides customers with a programmable low-profile and low-power accelerator platform built for scale-out architectures and domain-specific acceleration of any server deployment, on premises, in the cloud, and at the edge.To read this article in full, please click here

Xilinx launches new FPGA cards that can match GPU performance

Xilinx has launched a new FPGA card, the Alveo U50, that it claims can match the performance of a GPU in areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.The company claims the card is the industry’s first low-profile adaptable accelerator with PCIe Gen 4 support, which offers double the throughput over PCIe Gen3. It was finalized in 2017, but cards and motherboards to support it have been slow to come to market.The Alveo U50 provides customers with a programmable low-profile and low-power accelerator platform built for scale-out architectures and domain-specific acceleration of any server deployment, on premises, in the cloud, and at the edge.To read this article in full, please click here

When should enterprises move to 5G?

Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow, but eventually everyone will be on 5G. However, before rushing to implement it in your business be sure to know what the available benefits are and which types of users will notice a real improvement in their mobile experience.