Helping To Build Cloudflare, Part 2: The Most Difficult Two Weeks
This is part 2 of a six part series based on a talk I gave in Trento, Italy. Part 1 is here.
It’s always best to speak plainly and honestly about the situation you are in. Or as Matthew Prince likes to put it “Panic Early”. Long ago I started a company in Silicon Valley which had the most beautiful code. We could have taught a computer science course from the code base. But we had hardly any customers and we failed to “Panic Early” and not face up to the fact that our market was too small.
Ironically, the CEO of that company used to tell people “Get bad news out fast”. This is a good maxim to live by, if you have bad news then deliver it quickly and clearly. If you don’t the bad news won’t go away, and the situation will likely get worse.
Cloudbleed
Cloudflare had a very, very serious security problem back in 2017. This problem became known as Cloudbleed. We had, without knowing it, been leaking memory from inside our machines into responses returned to web browsers. And because our machines are shared across millions of web sites, that meant that HTTP requests Continue reading
Build a network emulator using Libvirt
I want to explore some of the network virtualization and emulation building blocks available on a Linux system. In this post, I create a simple network emulation scenario using Libvirt, the Qemu/KVM hypervisor, and Linux bridges to create and manage interconnected virtual machines on a host system.
Libvirt provides a command-line interface that hides the low-level virtualization and networking details, enabling one to easily create and manage virtual networking scenarios. It is already used as a basis for some existing network emulators, and other applications and tools. It is available in almost every Linux distribution.
The network emulation scenario
As you work through the examples in this post, you will create a very simple network topology which is intended to demonstrate the use of Libvirt and other virtualization tools to build a network emulator and is not intended to emulate a real-world network. However, once you understand its operation, you may use Libvirt to create large, complex network topologies intended to emulate real-world network scenarios.
The example I created for this post consists of three virtual machines serving as routers connected to each other in a ring topology. On each side of this emulated network, you will create Continue reading
SDxCentral Weekly Wrap: Cisco Pushes ACI to AWS and Azure, Embraces ‘Data Center Anywhere’ Strategy
SDxCentral Weekly Wrap for Feb. 1, 2019: Cisco expands its Application Centric Infrastructure into AWS and Azure, Vodafone pauses Huawei purchases, and Juniper's disappointing results.
AWS Cloud Revenue Jumps 45% in Q4, Microsoft Azure Revenue Up 76%
Microsoft has been chasing AWS as it tries to overtake its larger rival as the leading cloud infrastructure vendor. But it doesn’t look like that will happen any time soon.
Orange’s Cyberdefense Unit Gets a Leg Up With SecureData Purchase
The U.K.-based managed security service provider SecureData, and its security consulting arm, will continue to operate independently alongside Orange’s own security unit.
Ericsson Touts 4 Cellular IoT Segments to Serve Industry Verticals
One analyst said Ericsson is responding to a concern by carriers about following the old fashioned "build it and they will come" approach to network deployment.
Weekend Reads 020119
But when designing underlying cyber protections, too many architects are taking zero trust to be the primary objective. This is a misinterpretation. In the first instance, we should look to protect our resources from attack. What zero trust reminds us is that we are fallible, and that we should put in place backup plans in the form of monitoring and incident response for the (hopefully rare) cases where our protection Continue reading
Advanced Solutions Customer Story Part 1: Why NSX-T?
Customer Overview
Advanced Solutions, a DXC Technology company, was formed in 2004 and employs about 500 staff to support the government of the Canadian province of British Columbia and other public sector customers with IT and business process solutions. For government agencies and services to continue operating efficiently and effectively, it is essential that the IT resources that they require are provided quickly and accurately.
Key Pain Points
All IT organizations are acutely familiar with the wide range of pain points and obstacles that can stand in the way of delivering resources to empower their businesses to move with speed and agility. One of the most common hindrances to IT, and therefore business agility is painfully slow provisioning processes, which can take weeks just to provision an application. The most common bottleneck within these processes is provisioning networking and security services. This is a key pain point for Advanced Solutions, but one that VMware is helping them solve with the VMware NSX Data Center network virtualization platform.
Dan Deane, Solutions Lead at Advanced Solutions says, “The key IT pain points that VMware solutions are helping us solve are around networking and provisioning.”
New Use Cases
Advanced Solutions was Continue reading
Heavy Networking 427: Hype Vs. Reality On Hot Topics In Networking
Today's Heavy Networking aims to separate the hype from the substance on hot tech topics including SD-whatever, cloud native, container networking, service meshes, microsegmentation, and more. Our guests are Avi Freedman and Jon Mendoza.
The post Heavy Networking 427: Hype Vs. Reality On Hot Topics In Networking appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Check Point GAiA as Personal Firewall on Linux – Part1
Check Point GAiA is the next generation Secure Operating System for all Check Point appliances, open servers and virtualized gateways. In this tutorial we will create a network infrastructure which supports usage of Gaia Qemu VM as a personal firewall on Ubuntu Linux. We will also go through the entire installation of Gaia on Qemu VM. This firewall appliance can be used up to 15 days period covered by a free trial Gaia license (no registration needed).
Hardware: Asus K55VM laptop:
- Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3610QM CPU @ 2.30GHz
- RAM - 2 x Kingston DDR3 8192MB,
- HDD - ST1000LM024 HN-M101MBB 1000GB
Hardware requirements:
- Gaia QEMU VM: RAM - 4096MB, HDD - 15GB
- Windows 7 QEMU VM: RAM 2048MB, HDD - 15 GB
Software:
Host - Kubuntu Linux 18.04.1 LTS with installed QEMU emulator version 3.0.0 and KVM module
Guest 1 - Checkpoint GAiA R80.10, OS build 462, OS kernel version 2.6.18-92cpx86_64
Guest 2 - Windows 7 Home Premium, x86 with installed Smart Console R80.10 Build 991140073
Credentials - username/password:
- Gaia web portal: admin/check123point
- Gaia expert mode: check123point
- Windows 7: no password Continue reading
SDxCentral’s Weekly Roundup — February 1, 2019
The Linux Foundation gains a mapping platform; Intel plans a new chip factory in Oregon; and Google Cloud adds a serverless document database.
Helping To Build Cloudflare, Part 3: Audacity, Diversity and Change
This is part 3 of a six part series based on a talk I gave in Trento, Italy. To start from the beginning go here.
After Cloudbleed, lots of things changed. We started to move away from memory-unsafe languages like C and C++ (there’s a lot more Go and Rust now). And every SIGABRT or crash on any machine results in an email to me and a message to the team responsible. And I don’t let the team leave those problems to fester.
Making 1.1.1.1
So Cloudbleed was a terrible time. Let’s talk about a great time. The launch of our public DNS resolver 1.1.1.1. That launch is a story of an important Cloudflare quality: audacity. Google had launched 8.8.8.8 years ago and had taken the market for a public DNS resolver by storm. Their address is easy to remember, their service is very fast.
But we thought we could do better. We thought we could be faster, and we thought we could be more memorable. Matthew asked us to get the address 1.1.1.1 and launch a secure, privacy-preserving, public DNS resolver in a couple of months. Continue reading
Ethernity ENET vRouter Aimed at a Programmable Network Bottleneck
The platform divides the two flows – the control layer and the data layer – and handles them in a way that makes sense for each.
Community Network Champions Take a Rural Dip in India
By Digital Empowerment Foundation
In the last 25 years, half the world has been connected to the Internet and the almost infinite opportunities it has to offer. Most of these, among the 3.5 billion connected individuals of the world, are people who are largely economically empowered, literate, and reside in urban or accessible areas. However, there is also half the world that is yet to get online and access what the Internet has to offer them.
The biggest barrier to widespread connectivity is the high cost of infrastructure. With many telecom companies unwilling or unable to build infrastructure in far flung and rural areas, large swathes of the world have remained in media darkness. Evidently, most of those who are excluded from digital ecosystems are people who are largely at the bottom of the pyramid and reside in rural or inaccessible areas. They are people who have not been connected by the mainstream Internet Service Providers (ISP) – and who may have to wait a long time to be connected.
So who will take the responsibility of connecting them?
It has to be the community themselves.
Over the years, community network providers have proved to be great enablers for Continue reading
Why Lenovo’s One to Watch in 2019
The data center server vendor made several smart partnerships around HCI and cloud last year, and now it’s moving into edge and IoT.
Helping To Build Cloudflare, Part 1: How I came to work here
This is the text I prepared for a talk at Speck&Tech in Trento, Italy. I thought it might make a good blog post. Because it is 6,000 words I've split it into six separate posts.
Here's part 1:
I’ve worked at Cloudflare for more than seven years. Cloudflare itself is more than eight years old. So, I’ve been there since it was a very small company. About twenty people in fact. All of those people (except one, me) worked from an office in San Francisco. I was the lone member of the London office.
Today there are 900 people working at Cloudflare spread across offices in San Francisco, Austin, Champaign IL, New York, London, Munich, Singapore and Beijing. In London, my “one-person office” (which was my spare bedroom) is now almost 200 people and in a month, we’ll move into new space opposite Big Ben.
The numbers tell a story about enormous growth. But it’s growth that’s been very carefully managed. We could have grown much faster (in terms of people); we’ve certainly raised enough money to do so.
I ended up at Cloudflare because I gave a really good talk at a conference. Well, Continue reading