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Project Calico wants to hear from you! The 2023 Calico Open Source Adoption Survey

Project Calico is made possible thanks to you—thank you for your ongoing support of Project Calico, and for being an essential part of our growing open-source community. To improve Calico, we want to hear from you.

That’s why we’ve created the 2023 Calico Open Source Adoption Survey, a 16-question survey designed specifically to help us gather your feedback and insights.

Why take this survey?

Not only will this be a chance to share extensive feedback,  your input will actually help us prioritize future development efforts and ensure that we are addressing the most pressing needs of the community. We want to make sure that Project Calico continues to be the best possible solution for networking and security in Kubernetes and container environments.

We know that your time is valuable, but we believe that your feedback is essential to our success. We hope that you will take a few moments to complete the survey and share your thoughts with us.

Thank you again for your continued support, and we look forward to hearing from you soon.

Take the survey

The post Project Calico wants to hear from you! The 2023 Calico Open Source Adoption Survey appeared first on Tigera.

Introducing Calico Runtime Threat Defense—The most extensive security coverage for containers and Kubernetes

Containerized applications are complex, which is why an effective container security strategy is difficult to design and execute. As digitalization continues to push applications and services to the cloud, bad actors’ attack techniques have also become more sophisticated, which further challenges container security solutions available on the market.

Despite the discussion around agent vs agentless in the cloud security landscape and which type of solution is better, the most valuable solution is one that provides a wide breadth of coverage. Calico is unique as it is already installed as part of the underlying platform and provides the dataplane for a Kubernetes cluster. When Calico Cloud or Calico Enterprise is deployed, security and observability capabilities can be enabled on top of these core components. We provide a simple plug-and-play active security solution that focuses on securing workloads and the Kubernetes platform with the least amount of complexity and configuration.

Runtime attack vectors

Cloud-native applications are susceptible to many attack vectors. We have broken them down to eight, as seen in the following illustration:

Fig 1: Cloud-native attack vectors

In previous blogs, we have explained how the use of vulnerability management, zero-trust workload security, and microsegmentation can help reduce the Continue reading

Hedge 173: If Multicast is the answer, what was the question?

Multicast hasn’t ever really “gone viral” (In modern terms!) throughout the Internet—in fact, it’s not widely used even in networks supporting enterprises. why not? Join Dirk Trossen, Russ White, and Tom Ammon as we discuss the many facets of multicast, and what the future holds.

Dirk’s paper on multicast can be found here.

download

Japan to hike subsidies to 2nm chip maker Rapidus, an IBM partner

Japan will increase the financial support it's giving to semiconductor maker Rapidus — established with the aim of making cutting-edge, 2-nanometer chips — in order to further support domestic production, according to Japanese trade and industry minister Yasutoshi Nishimura.“The government is ready to continue and beef up financial support to the company,” Nishimura said in an interview with Bloomberg. He added that the plan will require the government to invest trillions of yen in the project.The Tokyo-based manufacturer was established in 2022 with the aim of making 2nm chips in Japan by 2025. To date, it has received ¥70 billion (US$532 million) from the Japanese government, in addition to investments from Toyota, Sony, and telecom giant NT&T.To read this article in full, please click here

Japan to hike subsidies to 2nm chip maker Rapidus, an IBM partner

Japan will increase the financial support it's giving to semiconductor maker Rapidus — established with the aim of making cutting-edge, 2-nanometer chips — in order to further support domestic production, according to Japanese trade and industry minister Yasutoshi Nishimura.“The government is ready to continue and beef up financial support to the company,” Nishimura said in an interview with Bloomberg. He added that the plan will require the government to invest trillions of yen in the project.The Tokyo-based manufacturer was established in 2022 with the aim of making 2nm chips in Japan by 2025. To date, it has received ¥70 billion (US$532 million) from the Japanese government, in addition to investments from Toyota, Sony, and telecom giant NT&T.To read this article in full, please click here

Verifying bash script arguments

Many bash scripts use arguments to control the commands that they will run and the information that will be provided to the people running them. This post examines a number of ways that you can verify arguments when you prepare a script and want to make sure that it will do just what you intend it to do – even when someone running it makes a mistake.Displaying the script name, etc. To display the name of a script when it’s run, use a command like echo $0. While anyone running a script will undoubtedly know what script they just invoked, using the script name in a usage command can help remind them what command and arguments they should be providing.To read this article in full, please click here

Verifying bash script arguments

Many bash scripts use arguments to control the commands that they will run and the information that will be provided to the people running them. This post examines a number of ways that you can verify arguments when you prepare a script and want to make sure that it will do just what you intend it to do – even when someone running it makes a mistake.Displaying the script name, etc. To display the name of a script when it’s run, use a command like echo $0. While anyone running a script will undoubtedly know what script they just invoked, using the script name in a usage command can help remind them what command and arguments they should be providing.To read this article in full, please click here

Protect your domain with Zone Holds

Protect your domain with Zone Holds
Protect your domain with Zone Holds

Today, we are announcing Zone Holds, a new capability for enterprise customers that gives them control of if and when someone else can add the same zone to another Cloudflare account. When multiple teams at a company want to use Cloudflare, one team might accidentally step on another’s toes and try to manage the same zone in two accounts. Zone Holds ensure that this cannot happen by enforcing that only one account can contain a given domain, optionally inclusive of subdomains or custom hostnames, unless explicit permission is granted by the account owner of the zone.

What can go wrong today

Cloudflare already requires zones to be authenticated via DNS before traffic is proxied through our global network. This ensures that only domain owners can authorize traffic to be sent through and controlled with Cloudflare. However, many of our customers are large organizations with many teams all trying to protect and accelerate their web properties. In these cases, one team may not realize that a given domain is already being protected with Cloudflare. If they activate a second instance of the same domain in Cloudflare, they end up replacing the original zone that another team was already managing with Cloudflare. Continue reading

IPv6 Buzz 123: Why You Need An IPv6 Security Plan

Today's IPv6 Buzz podcast explores why you need a plan for IPv6 security. Even if you haven't actively deployed IPv6, you've got v6-enabled hosts on your LAN and remote workers connecting to you over v6 networks. We discuss key elements to consider in your plan, evaluating IPv6 support in security products and services, and more.

The post IPv6 Buzz 123: Why You Need An IPv6 Security Plan appeared first on Packet Pushers.

IPv6 Buzz 123: Why You Need An IPv6 Security Plan

Today's IPv6 Buzz podcast explores why you need a plan for IPv6 security. Even if you haven't actively deployed IPv6, you've got v6-enabled hosts on your LAN and remote workers connecting to you over v6 networks. We discuss key elements to consider in your plan, evaluating IPv6 support in security products and services, and more.

Kicking the Tires of GitHub Copilot

A friend sent me a video demo of his AI-driven network device configuration proof-of-concept. Before commenting on that idea, I wanted to see how well AI works as an assistant. Once Kristian Larsson mentioned he was using GitHub Copilot, it was obvious what to do next: try it out while working on the next netlab release.

TL&DR:

  • It works.
  • Some Copilot suggestions are uncannily accurate; others are fishing expeditions.
  • It’s bland.

Juniper Version Selection

Picking the right Junos version is important. If you’re not familiar with Juniper, finding and downloading the right software package is confusing. Here’s some guidance on picking the right version.

It’s useful to understand Junos version numbering, and the upgrade policy. Then check the Suggested Releases page to see what they recommend, check if that makes sense, and figure out how to get from here to there.

Understanding Version Numbering

These days Juniper publishes a new release train every quarter. Versioning is simple “<year>.<quarter>.R<release number>”. So 21.4R1 is released in the 4th quarter of 2021. New releases add new features and support new hardware. Configs may break

They then publish “service releases” on top of that, for example 21.4R1-S1 and 21.4R1-S2. These are supposed to only be bugfixes, but complacency breeds contempt. So sometimes they throw in throw in breaking changes that may render your existing config non-bootable, because why the hell not? Continue reading

3 ways network teams can influence SASE decisions

Secure access service edge (SASE) has gotten a lot of attention during the past two years from enterprises interested in improving their security posture, specifically as part of an effort to adopt Zero Trust frameworks.That puts a lot of energy behind cybersecurity initiatives, but what about the network?The fact is, the network is central to Zero Trust and to SASE. When coined by analysts, the concept of SASE rested on several functional pillars including SD-WAN, secure Web gateway, cloud-access security broker, next-generation firewall, and Zero Trust Network Access. SD-WAN is the most foundational, though—so fundamental that, whereas a SASE solution might legitimately omit other pillars and still be classed as SASE, omitting the SD-WAN turns it into something else: a secure service edge solution.To read this article in full, please click here

Google claims AI supercomputer speed superiority with new Tensor chips

A new white paper from Google details the company’s use of optical circuit switches in its machine learning training supercomputer, saying that the TPU v4 model with those switches in place offers improved performance and more energy efficiency than general-use processors.Google’s Tensor Processing Units — the basic building blocks of the company’s AI supercomputing systems — are essentially ASICs, meaning that their functionality is built in at the hardware level, as opposed to the general use CPUs and GPUs used in many AI training systems. The white paper details how, by interconnecting more than 4,000 TPUs through optical circuit switching, Google has been able to achieve speeds 10 times faster than previous models while consuming less than half as much energy.To read this article in full, please click here

Google claims AI supercomputer speed superiority with new Tensor chips

A new white paper from Google details the company’s use of optical circuit switches in its machine learning training supercomputer, saying that the TPU v4 model with those switches in place offers improved performance and more energy efficiency than general-use processors.Google’s Tensor Processing Units — the basic building blocks of the company’s AI supercomputing systems — are essentially ASICs, meaning that their functionality is built in at the hardware level, as opposed to the general use CPUs and GPUs used in many AI training systems. The white paper details how, by interconnecting more than 4,000 TPUs through optical circuit switching, Google has been able to achieve speeds 10 times faster than previous models while consuming less than half as much energy.To read this article in full, please click here

Perfection Paralysis

This is a sort of companion piece to my post last week because I saw a very short post here about doing less. It really hit home with me because I’m just as bad as Shawn about wanting everything to be perfect when I write it or create it.

Maximizing Mistakes

One of the things that I’ve noticed in a lot of content that I’ve been consuming recently is the inclusion of mistakes. When you’re writing you have ample access to a backspace key so typos shouldn’t exist (and autocorrect can bugger off). But in video and audio content you can often make a mistake and not even realize it. Flubbing a word or needed to do a retake for something happens quite often, even if you never see or hear them.

What has me curious and a bit interested is that more of those quick errors are making it in. These are things that could easily be fixed in post production and yet they stay. It’s almost like the creators are admitting that mistakes happen and it’s hard to read scripts perfectly every time like some kind of robot. Honest mistakes over things like pronunciation or difficult word combinations Continue reading

UK regulator slams AWS, Microsoft for cloud interoperability hurdles

UK communications regulator Ofcom has announced a provisional plan to refer Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft to the country's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) over “significant concerns” that they are allegedly harming competition in online cloud services and abusing their market positions with practices that make interoperability difficult.A market study carried out by Ofcom has provisionally identified features and practices that make it difficult for customers to switch or use multiple cloud suppliers, the regulator wrote on its website, adding that it was “particularly concerned” about the practices of Amazon and Microsoft because of their market position.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco lays groundwork for 800G networks as AI, 5G and video traffic demands grow

Cisco has amped-up its support for 800G capacity networks with an eye toward helping large enterprises, cloud and service providers handle the expected demand from AI, video, and 5G services.At the core of its recently developments is a new 28.8Tbps / 36 x 800G line card and improved control software for its top-of-the-line Cisco 8000 Series routers.The 28.8T line card is built on Cisco’s Silicon One P100 ASIC, and brings 800G capability to the modular Cisco 8000 Series Router, which can scale to 230Tbps in a 16 RU form factor with the eight-slot Cisco 8808, and up to 518Tbps in the 18-slot chassis, according to Cisco.To read this article in full, please click here