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Category Archives for "Networking"

Test Driving Inter Regional VPC peering in AWS

Connect AWS VPCs hosted in different regions. AWS Virtual Private Cloud(VPC) provides a way to isolate a tenant’s cloud infrastructure. To a tenant a VPCs provide a view of his own virtual infrastructure in the cloud that is completely isolated, has its own compute, storage, network connectivity, security settings etc. In the physical world, Amazon’s … Continue reading Test Driving Inter Regional VPC peering in AWS

Custom VPC and Internet Access in AWS

Create your VPC, launch EC2 instances and get internet access with Public IP. With a Virtual Private Cloud(VPC), tenants can create his own cloud based infrastructure in AWS. While AWS provides a default VPC for a new tenant, there are always use cases that need creation of custom VPC. While exploring custom VPC, I found … Continue reading Custom VPC and Internet Access in AWS

BGP LLGR: robust and reactive BGP sessions

On a BGP-routed network with multiple redundant paths, we seek to achieve two goals concerning reliability:

  1. A failure on a path should quickly bring down the related BGP sessions. A common expectation is to recover in less than a second by diverting the traffic to the remaining paths.

  2. As long as a path is operational, the related BGP sessions should stay up, even under duress.

Detecting failures fast: BFD⚓︎

To quickly detect a failure, BGP can be associated with BFD, a protocol to detect faults in bidirectional paths,1 defined in RFC 5880 and RFC 5882. BFD can use very low timers, like 100 ms.

However, when BFD runs in a process on top of a generic kernel,2 notably when running BGP on the host, it is not unexpected to loose a few BFD packets on adverse conditions: the daemon handling the BFD sessions may not get enough CPU to answer in a timely manner. In this scenario, it is not unlikely for all the BGP sessions to go down at the same time, creating an outage, as depicted in the last case in the diagram below.

BGP and failed sessions
Examples of failures on a network using BGP Continue reading

Tech calendar 2018-19: Upcoming events of interest to IT pros

Tech Events Event Description Starts Ends Location AWS re:Invent AWS Re:invent is Amazon's opportunity to update IT and business leaders on the latest features of its cloud service.The event features keynote announcements, training and certification opportunities, access to more than 2,000 technical sessions, a partner expo, and more. 2018-11-26 2018-11-30 Las Vegas, NV IT Roadmap This one-day event focused on powering the agile enterprise looks at the latest approaches to make IT more responsive, nimble, and robust. 2018-12-06 2018-12-06 Washington, D.C. SXSW Covering everything from entertainment to entrepreneurship, this sprawling conference has tracks dedicated to Tech Industry & Enterprise, Coding & Development, Blockchain & Cryptocurrency, Health & Medtech, and VR/AR/MR. 2019-03-08 2019-03-17 Austin, TX Enterprise Connect Aimed at companies looking to upgrade or replace legacy systems or deploy and integrate next-gen communications and collaboration systems, services, apps and networks. 2019-03-18 2019-03-21 Orlando, FL Google Cloud Next Google Cloud Next is where the company announces all the latest updates to the Google Cloud Platform. The conference also offers educational, networking and hands-on opportunities for its more than 10,000 attendees. 2019-04-09 2019-04-11 San Francisco, CA Computex Taipei Based in Asia, this massive technology trade show and expo focuses on information Continue reading

Tech calendar 2018-19: Upcoming events of interest to IT pros

Tech Events Event Description Starts Ends Location AWS re:Invent AWS Re:invent is Amazon's opportunity to update IT and business leaders on the latest features of its cloud service.The event features keynote announcements, training and certification opportunities, access to more than 2,000 technical sessions, a partner expo, and more. 2018-11-26 2018-11-30 Las Vegas, NV IT Roadmap This one-day event focused on powering the agile enterprise looks at the latest approaches to make IT more responsive, nimble, and robust. 2018-12-06 2018-12-06 Washington, D.C. SXSW Covering everything from entertainment to entrepreneurship, this sprawling conference has tracks dedicated to Tech Industry & Enterprise, Coding & Development, Blockchain & Cryptocurrency, Health & Medtech, and VR/AR/MR. 2019-03-08 2019-03-17 Austin, TX Enterprise Connect Aimed at companies looking to upgrade or replace legacy systems or deploy and integrate next-gen communications and collaboration systems, services, apps and networks. 2019-03-18 2019-03-21 Orlando, FL Google Cloud Next Google Cloud Next is where the company announces all the latest updates to the Google Cloud Platform. The conference also offers educational, networking and hands-on opportunities for its more than 10,000 attendees. 2019-04-09 2019-04-11 San Francisco, CA Computex Taipei Based in Asia, this massive technology trade show and expo focuses on information Continue reading

App Micro-segmentation How To’s: Informatica, Oracle and SAP

consolidated posts from the VMware on VMware blog

Are you someone that prefers a blank sheet of paper or an empty text pad screen?  Do you get the time to have that thought process to create the words, images or code to fill that empty space?  Yes to both — I’m impressed!  Creating something from scratch is an absolutely magical feeling especially once it gets to a point of sharing or usefulness.  However, many of us spend a bit more of our time editing, building upon or debugging.  Fortunately, that can be pretty interesting as well.

In the case of setting up mico-segmentation with VMware NSX Data Center, you have a couple options on quickly getting started:

Those resources and more are great jumping off points especially since you likely have more than just Informatica, Oracle and SAP apps in your environments.

Now, should you have those Informatica, Oracle and SAP apps, then here’s the next level of details.  I’m Continue reading

Automation: Flow Control & Dimensionality

Human beings as we are, struggle sometimes to think multi-dimensionally about tasks. Our brains seem to have a conscious layer and a sub-conscious layer. Whether you think in words, noise or images, your brain is a single threaded engine with a silent co-processor that can either assist or annoy. Experience has shown that we look at network automation challenges through this shaped lens and try and solve things that makes sense to humans, but not necessarily for mechanized processes.

In an attempt not to lose my own thread, I’ll try and explain some different view points through examples.

Example One: I’m English, Make me some Tea!

Making a a cup of tea is a very English thing to do and the process of making one will suffice for this example.

Let’s look at the process involved:

// { type: activity}
(Start)-><a>[kettle empty]->(Fill Kettle)->|b|
<a>-(note: Kettle activities)
<a>[kettle full]->|b|->(Boil Kettle)->|c|
|b|->(Add Tea Bag)-><d>[Sugar: yes]->(Add Sugar)->(Add Milk)
<d>[Sugar: no]->(Add Milk)
<d>-(note: Sweet tooth?)
(Add Milk)->|c|->(Pour Boiled Water)
(Pour Boiled Water)->(Enjoy)->(Stop)

Fig.1

This makes us a relative standard cup of English breakfast tea.

Let’s assume macros exist for milk and sugar quantity and the dealing of a mug or best china Continue reading

When It Comes to IoT, We Must Work Together to #SecureIt

My first ever rendezvous with the word “IoT” was during my final year at a college conference, when a prominent regional start-up figure dispensed an oblique reference to it. I learned that IoT was the next big thing veering towards the mass market, which would eventually change the course of everyday human existence by making our way of life more convenient. What caught my attention was the term “things” in IoT – an unbounded category which could be anything from the the bed you sleep on, the clothes you drape, or even the personal toiletries you use.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a class of devices that “can monitor their environment, report their status, receive instructions, and even take action based on the information they receive.” IoT connotes not just the device but also the complex network connected to the device. Multiple studies have revealed that there are more connected devices than people on the planet. Although, combining computers and networks to devices has existed for long, they were previously not integrated to consumer devices and durable goods, used in ordinary day to day life. Furthermore, IoT being an evolving concept, exhibiting a range of ever-changing features, Continue reading