#BetterInternet: Join the Movement
When it comes to overall awareness of Cloudflare, it seems most folks fall into one of three camps: 1) those who don’t know much about Cloudflare at all, 2) those who are familiar with one or two of Cloudflare’s many solutions (i.e. DDoS protection, caching, DNS, etc.), and finally, 3) those who understand the full breadth and scope of Cloudflare’s global cloud network. This latter group of folks are especially excited about the broad scope of Cloudflare’s mission, which is: “to help build a better Internet.” Last week our co-founder Michelle Zatlyn explained in a blog post what this mission actually means:
“Our mission at Cloudflare is to help build a better Internet. That is a big, broad mission that means many things. It means that we push to make Internet properties faster. It means respecting individual’s privacy. It means making it harder for malicious actors to do bad things. It means helping to make the Internet more reliable. It means supporting new Internet standards and protocols, and making sure they are accessible to everyone. It means democratizing technology and making sure the widest possible group has access to it. It means increasing value for our community, Continue reading
We’ve Added an AWS Course to Our Video Library!
Hello! My name is Miles Karabas. I would like to tell you about my new course, AWS Certified SysOps Administrator, that just got released. The primary objective of this course is to teach the core components and services, and the basic concepts of AWS platform, and prepare you for the Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate level exam.
Why Get AWS Certified?
Amazon is the world leader in web services, and it’s services are used by thousands of companies around the world. AWS certifications show a potential employer that you have the skills to design, deploy and manage secure, highly available, cost efficient, scalable and fault tolerant systems on the AWS Platform. An AWS certification also puts you in an elite group of cloud engineers. These certifications are highly valued by employers. Last, AWS Certified engineers are among the highest paid IT professionals.
About the Course
The Certified AWS SysOps Administrator Exam focuses on specific processes of implementation, monitoring and managing of AWS services.
The course will cover the following topics:
- Compute
- Load Balancing & Auto Scaling
- Storage
- Databases
- Security & Identity
- Management Tools
- Analytics
- Networking & Content Delivery
- Messaging
- Monitoring
AWS exams are experience based, this course includes several hours Continue reading
Radisys Will Use ETSI’s MEC Standards for its Edge Software Platform
Radisys says operators want a platform that supports specific applications. They don't want to uncertainty about which platform to use.
Indigenous Access: It Will Benefit All Generations
In November 2017, the Internet Society hosted the inaugural Indigenous Connectivity Summit in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The event brought together community network operators, Internet service providers, community members, researchers, policy makers, and Indigenous leadership to work together to bridge the connectivity gap in indigenous communities in North America. One of the participants shared his story.
“My background is in architecture. This is all brand new,” said Merrill Yazzie, tribal community planner and project coordinator for the Pueblo of Cochiti. The pueblo had just begun to lay fiber to improve tribal Internet access. “The community itself doesn’t have Internet. The one line just goes to the government, to the administrative building,” said Yazzie. “Everyone relies on their cellular phones or satellite services, which can be pretty expensive.”
According to Yazzie, an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, there are many advantages to increased Internet access. “It will benefit all generations,” said Yazzie. “Economically it will be a benefit. You don’t have access to the universities because you don’t have a vehicle or public transportation is not available. One way to access education would be through online courses.” Further, he mentioned the benefit increased connectivity could bring to basic services: Continue reading
AWS ABCs – Can I Firewall My Compute Instances?
In a previous post, I reviewed what a public subnet and Internet Gateway (IGW) are and that they allowed outbound and inbound connectivity to instances (ie, virtual machines) running in the AWS cloud.
If you’re the least bit security conscious, your reaction might be, “No way! I can’t have my instances sitting right on the Internet without any protection”.
Fear not, reader. This post will explain the mechanisms that the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) affords you to protect your instances.
Security Groups
In a nutshell: security groups (SGs) define what traffic is allowed to reach an instance.
“Security group” is a bit of a weird name for what is essentially a firewall that sits in front of an instance, however if you think about it in terms of all servers at a particular tier in an N-tier application (eg, all the web servers) or all the servers that have a common function (eg, all PostgreSQL servers) and how each group would have its own security requirements when it comes to allowed ports, protocols, and IP addresses, then it makes a bit more sense: the security rules appropriate for a group of servers are all put together within Continue reading
A minimalist approach to network architecture
Minimalism, as a current concept, is not just about owning fewer things, or eliminating distractions, or consuming only specific coffees sold in unlabeled packaging at chairless coffee shops. Minimalism is a philosophical force and practical approach to life, that when applied correctly, can bring peace, happiness, and enrichment to your way of living. How do these core virtues of minimalism apply to network design? Read on. (And don’t worry, you can keep all of your stuff, your color TV and cell phones, and your roomy house, too – we’re just talking about networks here.)
Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, who founded theminimalists.com, sacrificed their former careers to share the concept of minimalism all over the globe, helping more than 20 million people live more meaningful lives. They’ve grounded the concepts of minimalism into a practical and elegant foundation that fits nicely in a modern society. They defined what many believe to be the core virtues of minimalism, ideas to internalize on your journey through life. When it comes to network design, here are five core virtues that prove to be incredibly valuable:
• Reclaim your time
• Create more, consume less
• Contribute beyond yourself
• Experience Continue reading
Getting Multi-cloud Right with Per-app Architectures
How by-the-app solutions can tackle common cloud migration roadblocks including ramp up, risk management, and operational overhead.
Network Troubleshooting Guidelines
It all started with an interesting weird MLAG bugs discussion during our last Building Next-Generation Data Center online course. The discussion almost devolved into “when in doubt reload” yammering when Mark Horsfield stepped in saying “while that may be true, make sure to check and collect these things before reloading”.
I loved what he wrote so much that I asked him to turn it into a blog post… and he made it even better by expanding it into generic network troubleshooting guidelines. Enjoy!
Read more ...Virtual Cloud Network Deep Dive: Join us in New York and Toronto!
Attention New York and Toronto, the NSX team is heading your way to deliver Deep Dive Sessions to help you get a jump start on taking your company’s networking and security to the next level!
With fall in the air, many of us are in the planning stages for big improvements for the year ahead. If your IT team is feeling pressure to increase agility, stay productive and help your company innovate, then you won’t want to miss these sessions to get a head start on the latest approach to networking and security.
The Problem with the Old Approach to Networking and Security
Traditional, hardware-based approaches to networking and security are pedantic, inflexible, and notoriously slow-moving. At the same time, the complexity around applications, services and data is increasing, while new, more sophisticated and ever-evolving threats are also in the mix – making IT teams responsible for more environments than ever before (data, cloud, branches, and the edge, oh my!). That’s all to say, there’s a lot to solve for. Luckily the NSX team has your back.
Build Your Foundation for a Virtual Cloud Network
VMware NSX® is an innovative networking and security approach that changes the Continue reading
AWS ABCs — Can I Firewall My Compute Instances?
In a previous post, I reviewed what a public subnet and Internet Gateway (IGW) are and that they allowed outbound and _in_bound connectivity to instances (ie, virtual machines) running in the AWS cloud.
If you're the least bit security conscious, your reaction might be, “No way! I can't have my instances sitting right on the Internet without any protection”.
Fear not, reader. This post will explain the mechanisms that the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) affords you to protect your instances.
Inspur Donates New Server Configurations to the Open Compute Project
The Chinese server vendor Inspur participates in all of the open hardware platforms, including OCP, the Open Data Center Community, and Open19.
Systemd traffic marking
This article describes a recent extension to the Host sFlow systemd module, mapping sampled traffic to the individual services the generate or consume them. The ability to color traffic by application greatly simplifies service discovery and service dependency mapping; making it easy to see how services communicate in a multi-tier application architecture.
The following /etc/hsflowd.conf file configures the Host sFlow agent, hsflowd, to sampling packets on interface eth0, monitor systemd services and mark the packet samples, and track tcp performance:
sflow {
collector { ip = 10.0.0.70 }
pcap { dev = eth0 }
systemd { markTraffic = on }
tcp { }
}The diagram above illustrates how the Host sFlow agent is able to efficiently monitor and classify traffic. In this case both the Host sFlow agent and an Apache web server are are running as services managed by systemd. A network connection , shown in Continue reading
The Facebook Breach: Some Lessons for the Internet
Last week Facebook found itself at the heart of a security breach that put at risk the personal information of millions of users of the social network.
On September 28, news broke that an attacker exploited a technical vulnerability in Facebook’s code that would allow them to log into about 50 million people’s accounts.
While Facebook was quick to address the exploit and fix it, they say they don’t know if anyone’s accounts actually were breached.
This breach follows the Cambridge Analytica scandal earlier this year that resulted in the serious mishandling of the data of millions of people who use Facebook.
Both of these events illustrate that we cannot be complacent about data security. Companies that hold personal and sensitive data need to be extra vigilant about protecting their users’ data.
Yet even the most vigilant are also vulnerable. Even a single security bug can affect millions of users, as we can see.
There are a few things we can learn from this that applies to the other security conversations: Doing security well is notoriously hard, and persistent attackers will find bugs to exploit, in this case a combination of three apparently unrelated ones on the Facebook platform.
This Continue reading