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Category Archives for "Networking"

Hedge 175: Mike B on Personal Superpowers

When the economy starts contracting, career advisors start talking about the importance of “soft skills.” What are “soft skills,” exactly—and why are they “soft?” Mike Bushong joins Tom Amman and Russ White to talk about why these skills are important, why they are not “soft,” and how we should talk about people skills instead. They are superpowers,” and there isn’t anything “soft” about them.

 
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Leveraging security policy recommender to tighten your cluster’s security posture

We’ve noticed that many of our customers are currently undergoing a significant transformation in their application architecture, transitioning from legacy vertical applications to distributed microservices running on Kubernetes. This shift brings along a range of benefits, such as improved scalability, resilience, and agility. However, it also creates a larger attack surface that needs to be managed effectively.

To minimize the attack surface, it is crucial to have a clear understanding of how each microservice communicates microservices within, and outside, the cluster to implement robust network configuration and security policies. This can be challenging, especially when dealing with re-architected applications that can consist of hundreds of microservices.

To make the life of the security and DevOps teams easier, there are a few things that can be done. Firstly, providing them with access to detailed information on how microservices communicate within and outside the cluster. Secondly, having automated policy recommendations to improve their configuration and security. Finally, providing visibility and audit reports to help identify vulnerabilities in the system and prevent potential breaches.

In this blog, we will discuss how to leverage the security policy recommender to rapidly create security policies to minimize the attack surface and improve the security posture.

Gathering Continue reading

Secure by default: recommendations from the CISA’s newest guide, and how Cloudflare follows these principles to keep you secure

Secure by default: recommendations from the CISA’s newest guide, and how Cloudflare follows these principles to keep you secure
Secure by default: recommendations from the CISA’s newest guide, and how Cloudflare follows these principles to keep you secure

When you buy a new house, you shouldn’t have to worry that everyone in the city can unlock your front door with a universal key before you change the lock. You also shouldn’t have to walk around the house with a screwdriver and tighten the window locks and back door so that intruders can’t pry them open. And you really shouldn’t have to take your alarm system offline every few months to apply critical software updates that the alarm vendor could have fixed with better software practices before they installed it.

Similarly, you shouldn’t have to worry that when you buy a network discovery tool it can be accessed by any attacker until you change the password, or that your expensive hardware-based firewalls can be recruited to launch DDoS attacks or run arbitrary code without the need to authenticate.

This “default secure” posture is the focus of a recently published guide jointly authored by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), NSA, FBI, and six other international agencies representing the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, and New Zealand. In the guide, the authors implore technology vendors to follow Secure-by-Design and Secure-by-Default principles, shifting the burden of security as much Continue reading

Oxy: Fish/Bumblebee/Splicer subsystems to improve reliability

Oxy: Fish/Bumblebee/Splicer subsystems to improve reliability
Oxy: Fish/Bumblebee/Splicer subsystems to improve reliability

At Cloudflare, we are building proxy applications on top of Oxy that must be able to handle a huge amount of traffic. Besides high performance requirements, the applications must also be resilient against crashes or reloads. As the framework evolves, the complexity also increases. While migrating WARP to support soft-unicast (Cloudflare servers don't own IPs anymore), we needed to add different functionalities to our proxy framework. Those additions increased not only the code size but also resource usage and states required to be preserved between process upgrades.

To address those issues, we opted to split a big proxy process into smaller, specialized services. Following the Unix philosophy, each service should have a single responsibility, and it must do it well. In this blog post, we will talk about how our proxy interacts with three different services - Splicer (which pipes data between sockets), Bumblebee (which upgrades an IP flow to a TCP socket), and Fish (which handles layer 3 egress using soft-unicast IPs). Those three services help us to improve system reliability and efficiency as we migrated WARP to support soft-unicast.

Oxy: Fish/Bumblebee/Splicer subsystems to improve reliability

Splicer

Most transmission tunnels in our proxy forward packets without making any modifications. In other words, given Continue reading

SONiC test lab gains industry support

Enterprises that want to kick the tires on the open-source network operating system SONiC got a new option this week as Aviz Networks and a group of well-established industry vendors and organizations said they would collaborate on a new testing facility.The lab, the Open Networking Experience (ONE) Center for SONiC is being offered by SONiC startup Aviz and will be supported by collaboration with the Linux Foundation, The Open Compute Project, Celestica, Cisco, Edgecore, Nvidia, Ragile, Supermicro, Wistron, and Keysight.The center will feature online and in-person access at no cost for network operators to try out the capabilities of SONiC across a wide range of hardware, according to Aviz. To read this article in full, please click here

SONiC test lab gains industry support

Enterprises that want to kick the tires on the open-source network operating system SONiC got a new option this week as Aviz Networks and a group of well-established industry vendors and organizations said they would collaborate on a new testing facility.The lab, the Open Networking Experience (ONE) Center for SONiC is being offered by SONiC startup Aviz and will be supported by collaboration with the Linux Foundation, The Open Compute Project, Celestica, Cisco, Edgecore, Nvidia, Ragile, Supermicro, Wistron, and Keysight.The center will feature online and in-person access at no cost for network operators to try out the capabilities of SONiC across a wide range of hardware, according to Aviz. To read this article in full, please click here

Things Change. Some New content.

Once again it has been awhile. But I wanted to get some new content out. This year I was elected as a member of the board for WAA. Part of my time on the board will include writing articles for our membership. From the second I heard this I knew what I wanted to do. …

Day Two Cloud 191: Modernizing Cloud Security And Optimizing Costs With Jo Peterson

Today's Day Two Cloud delves into cloud security and cloud cost optimization for SaaS and public clouds. Our guest is Jo Peterson. On the security front, we compare and contrast traditional on-prem and cloud security challenges, explore the shared responsibility model of cloud security, and more. For cost optimization we discuss the growing concern about cloud costs, why optimization tools still need humans, tips for tracking multicloud spending, and more.

The post Day Two Cloud 191: Modernizing Cloud Security And Optimizing Costs With Jo Peterson appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Day Two Cloud 191: Modernizing Cloud Security And Optimizing Costs With Jo Peterson

Today's Day Two Cloud delves into cloud security and cloud cost optimization for SaaS and public clouds. Our guest is Jo Peterson. On the security front, we compare and contrast traditional on-prem and cloud security challenges, explore the shared responsibility model of cloud security, and more. For cost optimization we discuss the growing concern about cloud costs, why optimization tools still need humans, tips for tracking multicloud spending, and more.