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Category Archives for "Networking"

Is BGP Good Enough?

In a recent podcast, Ivan and Dinesh ask why there is a lot of interest in running link state protocols on data center fabrics. They begin with this point: if you have less than a few hundred switches, it really doesn’t matter what routing protocol you run on your data center fabric. Beyond this, there do not seem to be any problems to be solved that BGP cannot solve, so… why bother with a link state protocol? After all, BGP is much simpler than any link state protocol, and we should always solve all our problems with the simplest protocol possible.

TL;DR
  • BGP is both simple and complex, depending on your perspective
  • BGP is sometimes too much, and sometimes too little for data center fabrics
  • We are danger of treating every problem as a nail, because we have decided BGP is the ultimate hammer

 
Will these these contentions stand up to a rigorous challenge?

I will begin with the last contention first—BGP is simpler than any link state protocol. Consider the core protocol semantics of BGP and a link state protocol. In a link state protocol, every network device must have a synchronized copy of the Link State Continue reading

JNCIA-Junos

I recently completed the entry level Juniper certification. I thought it would be a good idea to study for something other than the mighty Cisco, so Juniper’s JNCIA-Junos seemed like a good choice.

It was a very fair exam I can highly recommend.

Next up is AWS Solution Architect Associate. Need to get some cloud skills as thats where everything is going right? ?

The Week in Internet News: More Communities Building Their Own Broadband Networks

Build-your-own broadband: Small towns in the United States and the United Kingdom are increasingly bypassing large ISPs and building their own broadband networks, according to two recent stories. Reuters notes that rural communities in the U.K. are building networks to improve speeds and expand coverage, while Wired.com reports that independent broadband networks are proliferating across the United States in small towns, with speeds often exceeding a gigabit per second.

Where the IT jobs are: If you understand blockchain or Artificial Intelligence, job recruiters are looking for you. SHRM.org, the website for the Society of Human Resource Management, notes there’s been a 500 percent increase in blockchain-related job postings on Stack Overflow in the past year. Meanwhile, the Economic Times of India reports that AI experts are getting job offers that include major salary increases.

Power grid and IoT security don’t mix: Princeton researchers have suggested that insecure IoT devices could be used against the power grid, potentially leading to local power outages or even widescale blackouts, SecurityBoulevard.com reports. During a recent conference, the researchers demonstrated how an IoT botnet of Internet-connected high wattage devices could give attackers the ability to launch large-scale attacks on the Continue reading

Do We Need Leaf-and-Spine Fabrics?

Evil CCIE left a lengthy comment on one of my blog posts including this interesting observation:

It's always interesting to hear all kind of reasons from people to deploy CLOS fabrics in DC in Enterprise segment typically that I deal with while they mostly don't have clue about why they should be doing it in first place. […] Usually a good justification is DC to support high amount of East-West Traffic....but really? […] Ask them if they even have any benchmarks or tools to measure that in first place :)

What he wrote proves that most networking practitioners never move beyond regurgitating vendor marketing (because that’s so much easier than making the first step toward becoming an engineer by figuring out how technology really works).

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Porting Our Software to ARM64

Porting Our Software to ARM64

As we enable more ARM64[1] machines in our network, I want to give some technical insight into the process we went through to reach software parity in our multi-architecture environment.

To give some idea of the scale of this task, it’s necessary to describe the software stack we run on our servers. The foundation is the Linux kernel. Then, we use the Debian distribution as our base operating system. Finally, we install hundreds of packages that we build ourselves. Some packages are based on open-source software, often tailored to better meet our needs. Other packages were written from scratch within Cloudflare.

Industry support for ARM64 is very active, so a lot of open-source software has already been ported. This includes the Linux kernel. Additionally, Debian made ARM64 a first-class release architecture starting with Stretch in 2017. This meant that upon obtaining our ARM64 hardware, a few engineers were able to bring Debian up quickly and smoothly. Our attention then turned to getting all our in-house packages to build and run for ARM64.

Our stack uses a diverse range of programming languages, including C, C++, Go, Lua, Python, and Rust. Different languages have different porting requirements, with some being easier Continue reading

Weekly Show 405: Juniper Contrail SD-WAN: Driving Wave Two (Sponsored)

In today's Weekly Show we drill into Contrail SD-WAN with sponsor Juniper Networks. We discuss Contrail SD-WAN's three pillars--routing, VPNs, and security--and look at how the product distinguishes itself from its competitors. Our guest is Tony Sarathchandra, Director, Product Management - Software Defined Networking Technology and Solutions at Juniper Networks.

The post Weekly Show 405: Juniper Contrail SD-WAN: Driving Wave Two (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Networking in the Cloud – Different but the Same

Networking in the cloud is impressive. Building redundant internet access is as easy as attaching an internet gateway (IGW) to your VPC. In an on-premises network we would have to build VLANs, subnets, IGPs, possibly HSRP and BGP etc. This holds true for many of the services in the cloud.

I’ve seen statements as “The networking team is going away because everyone is moving to the cloud”. “The networking team is going away because webscaler/startup company X networking team is only Y number of people”. This is like comparing apples to ostridges. I call BS. Why?

Networking in the cloud is relatively easy when you can leverage the standard services available, which is not always the case. It’s relatively easy because people are in the beginning of their cloud journey. They have one or a couple of VPCs. If they really move a major part of their app stack to the cloud, networking won’t be so easy. Let’s think about some examples.

In the cloud you can provision resources into different subnets, meaning different availability zones. This leads to a very high availability but it’s not enough. To build a really resilient service you need to be in different regions. Continue reading

The Long And Winding Network Road

How do you see your network? Odds are good it looks like a big collection of devices and protocols that you use to connect everything. It doesn’t matter what those devices are. They’re just another source of packets that you have to deal with. Sometimes those devices are more needy than others. Maybe it’s a phone server that needs QoS. Or a storage device that needs a dedicated transport to guarantee that nothing is lost.

But what does the network look like to those developers?

Work Is A Highway

When is the last time you thought about how the network looks to people? Here’s a thought exercise for you:

Think about a highway. Think about all the engineering that goes into building a highway. How many companies are involved in building it. How many resources are required. Now, think of that every time you want to go to the store.

It’s a bit overwhelming. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of companies that are dedicated to building highways and other surface streets. Perhaps they are architects or construction crews or even just maintenance workers. But all of them have a function. All for the sake of letting us drive on Continue reading

Updates To The CCIE/CCDE Evolving Technologies

Cisco just rolled out the Evolving Technologies v1.1 update, which will affect anyone taking their CCIE certification exams on, or after, August 30, 2018. Fortunately, the v1.1 updates are fairly minor. The CCIE/CCDE Evolving Technologies section still includes three overall categories; Cloud, Network Programmability and Internet of things, and still makes up 10% of all CCIE/CCDE written exams. However, changes can be found in the specific topics tested in each of the evolving technologies categories.

Cloud – v1.1

Compare and contrast public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud design considerations

  • Infrastructure, platform, and software as a service (XaaS)
  • Performance, scalability, and high availability
  • Security implications, compliance, and policy
  • Workload migration

Describe cloud infrastructure and operations

  • Compute virtualization (containers and virtual machines)
  • Connectivity (virtual switches, SD-WAN and SD-Access)
  • Virtualization functions (NFVi, VNF, and L4/L1)
  • Automation and orchestration tools (cloud center, DNA-center, and Kubernetes)

Network Programmability (SDN) – v1.1

Describe architectural and operational Considerations for a programmable network

  • Data models and structures (YANG, JSON and XML)
  • Device programmability (gRPC, NETCONF and RESTCONF)
  • Controller based network design (policy driven configuration and northbound/ southbound APIs)
  • Configuration management tools (agent and agent-less) and version control systems (Git and SVN)

Internet of Things (IOT) Continue reading

Weekend Reads 083118

Portland, Maine—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the ACLU are urging the state’s highest courts in Massachusetts and Maine to rule that law enforcement agents need a warrant to access real-time location information from cell phones, a clear application of a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling from June. @EFF

Survey data from Qualia suggests that as DevOps becomes mainstream, both organizational resources and budget allocation tied to measurable business outcomes will be attached to this method of rapid application development. DevOps enables a faster iterative process that drives innovation while doing more with less and increasing efficiency. —Thomas MacIsaac @Data Center Journal

Cobalt Group (aka TEMP.Metastrike), active since at least late 2016, have been suspected in attacks across dozens of countries. The group primarily targets financial organizations, often with the use of ATM malware. Researchers also believe they are responsible for a series of attacks on the SWIFT banking system which costs millions in damages to the impacted entities. @Netscout

At the end of our last post we had just emerged from the Fireswamp only to be captured by the six-fingered man. No, no, that’s not right. We had just caught up to the present, in which the Continue reading

Indigenous Communities: “Stuck…Between Technology and Tradition”

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 her story.

Christel White, geographic information system (GIS) specialist for the Pueblo of Cochiti, is no stranger to intertribal dynamics. White is an enrolled member of the Onondaga people and grew up on the Seneca Nation reservation in New York State. In her current role, she ponders how the specific culture and needs of the people of Cochiti impacts the role of connectivity. “I want to bring in GIS online, but we don’t want cultural sites out in circulation,” explains White. “Do we want new land on there?”

The lack of Internet speed in tribal offices means White currently works from home, but says that it impacts her ability to interact with the public. If someone comes into the office with a question, White is not always physically there, but she can’t otherwise complete her work without a better connection.  “Indigenous communities are often stuck on Continue reading

IoT gets smarter but still needs backend analytics

One way of looking at IoT deployments is this – a large array of not-particularly-sophisticated endpoints, mindlessly sending individual data points like temperature and pressure levels to either an edge device somewhere on a factory floor, or all the way out to a cloud back-end or data center.And that’s largely correct, in many cases, but it’s increasingly not the whole story – IoT endpoints are getting closer and closer to the ability to do their own analysis, leading to simpler architectures and more responsive systems. It’s not the right fit for every use case, but there are types of IoT implementation that are already putting the responsibility for the customizing their own metrics on the devices themselves, and more that could be a fit for such an architecture.To read this article in full, please click here

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