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Category Archives for "Networking"

Generating Network Diagrams from Netbox with Pynetbox

Here’s my typical disclaimer: I’m not a developer. I have the ability to make code give me an expected output, but I do not do anything “the right way.”

All the code I write for these blog posts is in my Github repo that you can and should freely copy and modify. Here’s the environment I’m running this stuff in. Python. Pynetbox. You know the drill by now.

Python         :  3.9.10
Pynetbox       :  7.0.0
Netbox version :  3.5.8

We’ve been working through some stuff, and, at this point, we have a lot of stuff in our Netbox instance. Let’s step up the game a little, though, and see if we can’t generate a network diagram based on that data. Let’s set some expectations, though. This is not going to be comparable to that Visio diagram you’ve managed by hand for the last 8 years. This is going to be a very simple diagram with subnet, nodes, and IP addresses — enough for an auditor or for some architect who doesn’t know what’s in their own data centers.

The logic is pretty easy. The first thing we do it query for all our prefixes. Continue reading

New report: The state of Calico Open Source 2023

We are excited to announce the publication of our 2023 State of Calico Open Source, Usage & Adoption report! The report compiles survey results from more than 1,200 Calico Open Source users from around the world, who are actively using Calico in their container and Kubernetes environments. It sheds light on how they are using Calico across various environments, while also highlighting different aspects of Calico’s adoption in terms of platforms, data planes, and policies.

Report highlights

The report shows that Calico continues to be a pivotal part of the container and Kubernetes ecosystem, finding large-scale adoption across major Kubernetes platforms.

  • Calico Open Source is mainly used for Kubernetes networking and security
    • 63% are using Calico as a security policy engine on top of an existing CNI
  • The top 3 Calico capabilities driving user adoption are its scalable networking, security policies and interoperability across different environments
  • Calico users are using a combination of data planes including eBPF, standard Linux and Windows
    • 16% of respondents use Calico’s newer eBPF data plane
  • Calico policy creation and deployment is driven by the need for workload access control and secure egress access
    • 85% of users need to achieve network segmentation and protect east-west traffic

Continue reading

How GitHub Learned How Hard Distributed Systems Are

Anne Baretta found a great video describing the October 2018 GitHub failure. Here’s the TL&DW:

  • The failure was caused by a short (~ 1 minute) disconnect of the primary data center
  • The database replicas failed over to the secondary data center, but that failover was never tested and of course some stuff didn’t work.
  • In the meantime, batch jobs modified data in the primary data center, making the two replicas out-of-sync.
  • It took them over 24 hours to clean up the mess.
Read more …

How GitHub Learned How Hard Distributed Systems Are

Anne Baretta found a great video describing the October 2018 GitHub failure. Here’s the TL&DW:

  • The failure was caused by a short (~ 1 minute) disconnect of the primary data center
  • The database replicas failed over to the secondary data center, but that failover was never tested and of course some stuff didn’t work.
  • In the meantime, batch jobs modified data in the primary data center, making the two replicas out-of-sync.
  • It took them over 24 hours to clean up the mess.
Read more …

The Top Feature Releases In Kubernetes v1.28

Kubernetes version 1.28, just came out. The latest version is called Planternetes, in part because a lot of the maintainers of Kubernetes are getting really into the idea of ensuring that Kubernetes is running as effectively and efficiently as possible. In this  post, I highlight a few of the great features and updates in version […]

The post The Top Feature Releases In Kubernetes v1.28 appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Networking vendors highlight AI opportunities as order backlog challenges begin to subside

The heavy buzz around all things AI got louder in the financial reports of networking vendors this quarter, even though AI hasn’t made a significant impact on most vendors’ financial performance and supply chain challenges remain a more immediate concern.Vendors such as Cisco, Arista, Juniper, Extreme and HPE’s Aruba report that they are shipping more products, thanks to multi-month efforts that include significant product redesigns and relentless efforts by their supply-chain teams to address component shortages. But the situation is still challenging, and some enterprise customers still face order delays.To read this article in full, please click here

Heavy Wireless 009: Ham Radio For Wi-Fi Folks

In this podcast episode, Keith Parsons, Glenn Kate, and Lee Badman discuss the intersection of ham radio and Wi-Fi. Glenn and Lee share their personal experiences and involvement in both fields. They talk about how they got started in ham radio and Wi-Fi, the importance of joining amateur radio clubs, and the various activities and […]

The post Heavy Wireless 009: Ham Radio For Wi-Fi Folks appeared first on Packet Pushers.

VMware, Nvidia team on enterprise-grade AI platform

Companies trying to deploy generative AI today have a major problem. If they use a commercial platform like OpenAI, they have to send data up to the cloud, which may run afoul of compliance requirements and is expensive. If they download and run a model like Llama 2 locally, they need to know a lot about how to fine-tune it, how to set up vector databases to feed it live data, and how to operationalize it.VMware's new partnership with Nvidia aims to solve these issues by offering a fully integrated, ready-to-go generative AI platform that companies can run on premises, in colocation facilities, or in private clouds. The platform will include Llama 2 or a choice of other large language models, as well as a vector database to feed up-to-date company information to the LLM.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware combines SASE and edge management in new orchestration platform, announces private 5G service

Combining things to make them easier to manage and secure is a recurring theme at this week's VMware Explore conference in Las Vegas. To that end, VMware is announcing a single console for its SASE platform and edge stack to enable unified management of edge networking, security and compute infrastructure.SASE – secure access service edge – is a way to provide security and networking to end users and manage it in the cloud. It's grown in popularity since the pandemic as employees were sent home to work and companies scrambled to figure out how to get them connected.To read this article in full, please click here

Unnumbered Links In OSPF

This post is going to be a real deep dive! First, I want to send my sincere thanks to the maestro Peter Palúch and the guru Ivan Pepelnjak for helping me research this topic. Ivan wrote a couple of great posts on unnumbered links:

In VXLAN fabrics, it is quite common to build the underlay using unnumbered links. The concept is not new. In the past, unnumbered links were mainly used with point to point serial links using encapsulation such as Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP). There was a time before variable length subnet masks where addressing interfaces could be very wasteful. Using unnumbered links reduced the need for addressing. It was generally not allowed on multi access interfaces such as Ethernet, though. Even though we often use Ethernet as point to point links.

What benefits do unnumbered links provide in today’s networks? There are a few:

  • Reduce the number of IP addresses needed to address links.
  • Less unique configuration for each device.
  • Fewer lines of configuration.

Let’s dive deeper into each of these:

Reduced need of IP addresses – While these may be private IP addresses, it still Continue reading

VMware NSX+ centralizes cloud networking and security for multicloud environments

VMware customers that have both on-prem and cloud-based architecture can now manage networking and security for both in a single management console. Unveiled at this week's VMware Explore conference in Las Vegas, NSX+ is new cloud-managed service that’s geared for multicloud environments and is designed to enable consistent network and security operations, centralized security policy management, network and application visibility, and network detection and response.This latest evolution of VMware's core networking package will be available to current NSX customers as an upgrade and to new customers as both a free trial and a paid offering effective today. By the end of the year, NSX+ will also extend to businesses running their cloud infrastructure natively in public clouds, says Rob Markovich, who leads product marketing for multicloud networking and network virtualization for VMware.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware Cloud gains faster ransomware recovery, expanded management capabilities

VMware announced a raft of improvements to its VMware Cloud platform at this week's VMware Explore conference in Las Vegas.Previously, VMware's on-premises private cloud solution, VMware Cloud Foundation, and its public cloud offerings were managed separately. Now, enterprises will be able to manage all their cloud deployments from a single location. In addition, customers will see improved integrations with the major cloud providers as well as faster disaster and ransomware recovery.Central management "We're actually bringing together a lot of disparate solutions under a common framework, VMware Cloud," says Rick Walsworth, VMware's director of product marketing for the cloud infrastructure team.To read this article in full, please click here

Announcing VMware NSX+ Advanced Load Balancer Cloud Controller

Continuing the operational simplicity journey with VMware NSX+ Advanced Load Balancer Cloud Services that now include Cloud Controller

Applications are the lifeline of today’s businesses. By 2025, 750 million different applications will exist. Load balancing a variety of applications is no easy task, and cloud admins will have their work cut out for them. To meet the needs of modern applications, load balancers need to be agile, and have the ability to scale with modern applications while maintaining operational simplicity. Therefore, legacy load balancing solutions may not be a good fit for modern applications. Software defined load balancing solutions such as the NSX Advanced Load Balancer (ALB) are purpose built for such emerging scenarios.

Today we are happy to announce yet another important milestone in the pursuit of making the NSX advanced load balancing solution simpler and more flexible. Starting today, NSX ALB will be natively available as a service on VMware Cloud on AWS. NSX+ ALB Cloud Controller is completely managed by VMWare, and aims to simplify Day 0, Day 1, and Day 2 operations. This capability is available today on VMware Cloud on AWS and will be made available on public clouds in subsequent releases.

Adding application awareness Continue reading

Announcing VMware NSX+: A Simpler Path to Consistent Multi-Cloud Networking

Deploying applications on multi-cloud infrastructure is challenging. VMware has long been committed to making multi-cloud networking and security simpler and more consistent through initiatives like Project Northstar which we announced at VMware Explore last year.

Today, we’re excited to continue our mission of simplifying the multi-cloud by introducing VMware NSX+, a new multi-cloud service offering for VMware NSX that makes it easier than ever to achieve a consistent and secure multi-cloud infrastructure for your applications.

Multi-cloud presents unique networking and security challenges

Securely deploying applications and infrastructure on-premises and across multiple clouds is complex

Multi-Cloud Challenges

 

 

 

 

  • Complex network design and operations: Each cloud can have its own set of tools and controls, slowing down network deployment and operations. ​
  • Limited visibility: Network operators often cannot achieve the end-to-end visibility and monitoring across clouds.
  • Secure Controls for Threat Detection: Lack of visibility into cross-cloud traffic increases the risk of lateral movement of undetected threats. Also, correlating threats across multiple clouds can be challenging because of the diversity of cloud environments.
  • Skills and resource gap: Public cloud providers have their own unique networking constructs and architectures, making it challenging to bridge the skills gap, and hire and train a team equipped to manage the complexity of Continue reading

Self Service Consumption with Virtual Private Clouds Powered by NSX

How cloud consumption is making its way natively into NSX and NSX+

We are excited to introduce Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for private clouds and VMware Clouds, with the release of NSX 4.1.1.

Thanks to NSX Network Virtualization, customers can operate their networking, security, and services from a single place through the UI or API. This functionality allows one-click deployment of multi-tier network topologies, backed by distributed networking and security. The software-defined networking solution enables large-scale, self-service IaaS initiatives.

In addition, the introduction of native multi-tenancy in NSX 4.1.0 allows multiple users to consume the platform in parallel without the risk of overlap or disruption. This makes it possible to provide users with direct access to NSX, but to segment each within isolated environments where they can configure their own NSX objects and apply rules only to their workloads.

Now we are taking it to the next level!

With the introduction of VPC in both NSX and NSX+, we are both extending the multi-tenancy framework and offering cloud consumption to users natively, both on-premises and in VMware Cloud. Customers can apply the VPC construct on the cloud/s of their choice with efficient and consistent operations. This Continue reading

Delivering a True Cloud Operating Model with Cloud Speed: NSX+ Innovates for Multi-Cloud

Companies in every geography and industry have had the fortune, in recent years, to choose from a variety of remarkable cloud platforms to run their applications—including on-prem private cloud, VMware clouds, and native public clouds. In fact, 83% of organizations surveyed by VMware have their application workloads distributed across multiple cloud environments1.  

But every major technological advancement creates new challenges and opportunities. IT leaders have been telling me that they need a true cloud operating model across multi-cloud to address two key challenges: 

  • First, they’re stuck in partial automation purgatory. It takes their siloed teams many IT tickets to set up security, networking, and load-balancing services to deploy an application. This isn’t just operationally inefficient, it breeds friction between the infrastructure and application owners. 
  • Second, operating across multi-cloud environments is complicated. Teams lack consistent visibility, policy, and operations across cloud deployments. This causes change management nightmares, security blind spots, and unprecedented delays in troubleshooting issues. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. Today, I’m proud to share that VMware is taking a significant step towards making a single cloud operating model for managing and securing networks a reality through our launch of NSX+. Our Continue reading

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