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Category Archives for "Networking"

Network operations: A new role for AI and ML

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are still viewed with skepticism by many in IT, despite a decades-long long history, continuing advances within academia and industry, and numerous successful applications. But it’s not hard to understand why: The very concept of an algorithm running on a digital computer being able to duplicate and even improve upon the knowledge and judgement of a highly-experienced professional – and, via machine learning, improve these results over time – still sounds at the very least a bit off in the future. And yet, thanks to advances in AI/ML algorithms and significant gains in processor and storage performance and especially the price/performance of solutions available today, AI and ML are already hard at work in network operations, as we’ll explore below.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Announcing SSH Access through Cloudflare

Announcing SSH Access through Cloudflare

We held our annual Cloudflare Retreat last week. Over 750 team members from nearly a dozen offices spent three days learning, bonding and some of them got to smash a VPN piñata on stage with a baseball bat. Yes, you read that right.

The latest feature added to Cloudflare Access let us celebrate the replacement of our clunky VPN with a faster, safer way to reach our internal applications. You can now place applications that require SSH connections, like your source control repository, behind Cloudflare Access. We’re excited to release that same feature so that your team can also destroy your own VPN (piñata not included).

Announcing SSH Access through Cloudflare

How we smashed our VPN

We built Access to replace our corporate VPN. We started with browser-based applications, moved to CLI operations, and then began adding a growing list of single sign-on integrations. Our teammates added single sign-on support to the Cloudflare dashboard by combining Access and our serverless product, Workers. We improved the daily workflow of every team member each time we moved another application behind Access. However, SSH connections held us back. Whenever we needed to push code or review a pull request, we had to fall back to our Continue reading

Segment Routing and MPLS VPN

MPLS VPN and Segment Routing. Many people have been asking what are the differences between MPLS VPN and Segment Routing.       In fact, this is a wrong question, because Segment Routing provides transport, MPLS VPN provides Service.   They are not mutually exclusive but they are complementary. In order to create end to …

The post Segment Routing and MPLS VPN appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Segment Routing and MPLS VPN

MPLS VPN and Segment Routing. Many people have been asking what are the differences between MPLS VPN and Segment Routing.       In fact, this is a wrong question, because Segment Routing provides transport, MPLS VPN provides Service.   They are not mutually exclusive but they are complementary. In order to create end to …

The post Segment Routing and MPLS VPN appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Segment Routing and MPLS VPN

MPLS VPN and Segment Routing. Many people have been asking what are the differences between MPLS VPN and Segment Routing.       In fact, this is a wrong question, because Segment Routing provides transport, MPLS VPN provides Service.   They are not mutually exclusive but they are complementary. In order to create end to […]

The post Segment Routing and MPLS VPN appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Don’t Let the Automation Snowflakes Stop You

You know that time of year when snowflakes mean more than description of uniqueness of your networking infrastructure? Some people love to complain about that season and how the weather hinders them, others put on sturdy winter boots and down jackets, change tires on their car, and have tons of fun.

Network automation is no different. Sometimes you can persuade your peers that it makes sense to simplify and standardize the infrastructure to make it easier to abstract and automate (consider that an equivalent of going to a tropic island with shiny beaches and everlasting summer), other times you have to take out your winter boots and make the best out of what you got.

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Spectrum shake-up to deliver more Wi-Fi, connections

The United States' Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to expand available spectrum in order to increase bandwidth for connected devices, such as IoT and broadband data, including those communicating via Wi-Fi. One reason is because ISPs want to get into wireless, and they are putting pressure on. The expansion, however, will be good for all Internet of Things (IoT), too.A number of significant unlicensed bandwidth blocks are, or will be, available, including at 6GHz, 5.9GHz, and 3.5GHz. Potential stumbles include that interference mitigation needs to be resolved in a couple instances.[ Also read: Wi-Fi 6 is coming to a router near you. | Get regularly scheduled insights: Sign up for Network World newsletters. ] 6GHz In the first block, the FCC is proposing making available a large 1200 megahertz of spectrum in the 6GHz band for devices, including IoT sensors, and Wi-Fi, which predominantly uses 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz now.To read this article in full, please click here

Bandwidth Alliance Partners – Exciting Choices

Bandwidth Alliance Partners - Exciting Choices
Bandwidth Alliance Partners - Exciting Choices

We are tremendously excited about the value our Bandwidth Alliance partner ecosystem adds to our customers. We’re on a mission to help make the internet a better place; and ensuring everyone can access cloud resources at zero-egress rates supports that mission in many ways. It’s an easy way for our clients to build modern, cloud-centric applications without the design constraint and financial burden of egress fees.

The cloudflare bandwidth alliance partner landscape continues to grow, and incorporate a diverse group of partners, with today’s second wave announcement.  With over a dozen different partners, the range of choices can quickly become overwhelming. And, while these are all high-quality platforms which we are happy to recommend to our clients - their important differences will help determine the best fit for you, the customer.

In this post, I’ll lay out some of Cloudflare’s approach to this solution design question through the lens of a large client we recently worked with. We apply this approach across our full range of products and services, including many use cases far different from the Storage need we’ll dig into in this post. I hope that this can help all of our clients, or anyone else interested, mirror Continue reading

Expanding the Bandwidth Alliance: sharing the benefits of interconnected networks

Expanding the Bandwidth Alliance: sharing the benefits of interconnected networks
Expanding the Bandwidth Alliance: sharing the benefits of interconnected networks

At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better Internet. That means making the Internet faster, smarter, safer, but also more cost efficient with the help of our partners. We are always on the lookout for ways to help save customers money. With that goal we announced the Bandwidth Alliance with our founding partners during our Birthday week.

The key concept of the Bandwidth Alliance is to help reduce and in many cases waive data transfer charges, sometimes known as "bandwidth” or “egress” charges, for our mutual customers. We achieve this in partnership with the founding partners through strongly interconnected networks over peered connections. These connections typically occur within the same facility with no middleman. So, neither Cloudflare nor the cloud provider bears incremental costs. Further, we will also use our smart routing system (read details in this technical blog post) to ensure that all our customers’ traffic on participating cloud providers, once their systems are set up, qualify for this offer.

Expanding the Bandwidth Alliance: sharing the benefits of interconnected networks

Expanding the Alliance: new Partners Committed to Discounting Data Transfer Fees

We are proud to announce the following cloud providers and hosting companies have joined the Bandwidth Alliance in committing to zero data transfer fees for Continue reading

Route Leak Causes Major Google Outage

Google recently faced a major outage in many parts of the world thanks to a BGP leak. This incident that was caused by a Nigerian ISP – Mainone – occurred on 12 November 2018 between 21.10 and 22.35 UTC, and was identified in tweets from the BGP monitoring service BGPMon, as well as the network monitoring provider Thousand Eyes.

Google also announced the problem through their status page:

We’ve received a report of an issue with Google Cloud Networking as of Monday, 2018-11-12 14:16 US/Pacific. We have reports of Google Cloud IP addresses being erroneously advertised by internet service providers other than Google. We will provide more information by Monday, 2018-11-12 15:00 US/Pacific.

In order to understand this issue, MainOne Inc (AS37282) is peering at IXPN (Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria) in Lagos where Google (AS151169) and China Telecom (AS4809) are also members.

Google (AS15169) advertise their prefixes (more than 500) through the IXPN Route Server, where PCH (Packet Clearing House) collects a daily snapshot of BGP announcements of IXPN. Unfortunately, 212 prefixes (aggregates of those 500+ announcements) from Google were leaked, which was recorded by BGPMon and RIPEstat.

Looking at the RIPE stats it is evident Continue reading