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Category Archives for "Networking"

Data-center requirements should drive network architecture

If you like survey data, here’s an interesting fact for you. Every year since 2000, when I started surveying enterprises on the question, the most important factor driving investment and change in enterprise networks was the data center. It’s like the network is the tail of a big, fuzzy, maybe-largely-invisible dog, and it’s time we look at where that dog might be leading us.Today’s virtual private networks (VPNs) evolved from the days when companies leased time-division-multiplexed (TDM) lines and connected their own routers. That approach focused companies on how to network sites, and they now think about networking people instead. But people are half the story; the other half is what the people are doing, which is accessing (increasingly via the cloud) data-center applications and databases.To read this article in full, please click here

Data-center requirements should drive network architecture

If you like survey data, here’s an interesting fact for you. Every year since 2000, when I started surveying enterprises on the question, the most important factor driving investment and change in enterprise networks was the data center. It’s like the network is the tail of a big, fuzzy, maybe-largely-invisible dog, and it’s time we look at where that dog might be leading us.Today’s virtual private networks (VPNs) evolved from the days when companies leased time-division-multiplexed (TDM) lines and connected their own routers. That approach focused companies on how to network sites, and they now think about networking people instead. But people are half the story; the other half is what the people are doing, which is accessing (increasingly via the cloud) data-center applications and databases.To read this article in full, please click here

netlab Release 1.4.1: Cisco ASAv

The star of the netlab release 1.4.1 is Cisco ASAv support: IPv4 and IPv6 addressing, IS-IS and BGP, and libvirt box building instructions.

Other new features include:

Upgrading is as easy as ever: execute pip3 install --upgrade networklab.

New to netlab? Start with the Getting Started document and the installation guide.

Day Two Cloud Invite: Recording At TopGolf Las Vegas Nov. 30, 2022

If you're headed to AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, you can catch Ned & me recording a show live. On Wednesday, November 30, 2022, we’ll be at TopGolf with sponsor Prosimo from 4 to 7 pm. Join us to have some fun! Links and drinks, meet fellow engineers building clouds for their companies, and then watch us record the show. Space is limited, so register at prosimo.io. We’ll see you at TopGolf Las Vegas on Wednesday the 30th!

The post Day Two Cloud Invite: Recording At TopGolf Las Vegas Nov. 30, 2022 appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Day Two Cloud Invite: Recording At TopGolf Las Vegas Nov. 30, 2022

If you're headed to AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, you can catch Ned & me recording a show live. On Wednesday, November 30, 2022, we’ll be at TopGolf with sponsor Prosimo from 4 to 7 pm. Join us to have some fun! Links and drinks, meet fellow engineers building clouds for their companies, and then watch us record the show. Space is limited, so register at prosimo.io. We’ll see you at TopGolf Las Vegas on Wednesday the 30th!

Congestion Control Algorithms Are Not Fair

Creating a mathematical model of queuing in a distributed system is hard (Queuing Theory was one of the most challenging ipSpace.net webinars so far), and so instead of solutions based on control theory and mathematical models we often get what seems to be promising stuff.

Things that look intuitively promising aren’t always what we expect them to be, at least according to an MIT group that analyzed delay-bounding TCP congestion control algorithms (CCA) and found that most of them result in unfair distribution of bandwidth across parallel flows in scenarios that diverge from spherical cow in vacuum. Even worse, they claim that:

[…] Our paper provides a detailed model and rigorous proof that shows how all delay-bounding, delay-convergent CCAs must suffer from such problems.

It seems QoS will remain spaghetti-throwing black magic for a bit longer…

Mastodon – Part 3 – statsd and Prometheus

About this series

Mastodon

I have seen companies achieve great successes in the space of consumer internet and entertainment industry. I’ve been feeling less enthusiastic about the stronghold that these corporations have over my digital presence. I am the first to admit that using “free” services is convenient, but these companies are sometimes taking away my autonomy and exerting control over society. To each their own of course, but for me it’s time to take back a little bit of responsibility for my online social presence, away from centrally hosted services and to privately operated ones.

In my [first post], I shared some thoughts on how I installed a Mastodon instance for myself. In a [followup post] I talked about its overall architecture and how one might use Prometheus to monitor vital backends like Redis, Postgres and Elastic. But Mastodon itself is also an application which can provide a wealth of telemetry using a protocol called [StatsD].

In this post, I’ll show how I tie these all together in a custom Grafana Mastodon dashboard!

Mastodon Statistics

I noticed in the [Mastodon docs], that there’s a one-liner breadcrumb that might be easy to overlook, Continue reading

An early look at Thanksgiving 2022 Internet trends

An early look at Thanksgiving 2022 Internet trends

"The more you practice the art of thankfulness, the more you have to be thankful for."

— Norman Vincent Peale, American author  

The turkey. The sweet potatoes. The stuffing. The pumpkin pie. Yesterday, November 24, 2022, was Thanksgiving Day in the US. A time for families and loved ones to be together and thankful, according to the tradition. Last year, we saw how the US paused shopping (and browsing) for Thanksgiving. So, how was it this year? Not only did we see Internet traffic go down (by 13%) during Thanksgiving dinner, but it was much higher than usual the day before and the day after (the Black Friday effect… so far). There was also a clear, but short, Thanksgiving day effect on e-commerce DNS trends.

We'll have to wait to see what Black Friday looks like.

Let’s start with Internet traffic at the time of Thanksgiving dinner. Although every family is different, a 2018 survey of US consumers showed that for 42% early afternoon (between 13:00 and 15:00 is the preferred time to sit at the table and start to dig in). But 16:00 seems to be the “correct time” — The Atlantic explains why.

That said, Cloudflare Continue reading

Cloudflare servers don’t own IPs anymore – so how do they connect to the Internet?

Cloudflare servers don't own IPs anymore – so how do they connect to the Internet?
Cloudflare servers don't own IPs anymore – so how do they connect to the Internet?

A lot of Cloudflare's technology is well documented. For example, how we handle traffic between the eyeballs (clients) and our servers has been discussed many times on this blog: “A brief primer on anycast (2011)”, "Load Balancing without Load Balancers (2013)", "Path MTU discovery in practice (2015)",  "Cloudflare's edge load balancer (2020)", "How we fixed the BSD socket API (2022)".

However, we have rarely talked about the second part of our networking setup — how our servers fetch the content from the Internet. In this blog we’re going to cover this gap. We'll discuss how we manage Cloudflare IP addresses used to retrieve the data from the Internet, how our egress network design has evolved and how we optimized it for best use of available IP space.

Brace yourself. We have a lot to cover.

Terminology first!

Cloudflare servers don't own IPs anymore – so how do they connect to the Internet?

Each Cloudflare server deals with many kinds of networking traffic, but two rough categories stand out:

  • Internet sourced traffic - Inbound connections initiated by eyeball to our servers. In the context of this blog post we'll call these "ingress connections".
  • Cloudflare sourced traffic - Outgoing connections initiated by our servers to other Continue reading

Heavy Networking 657: New VMware Client Connects Users To SASE, SD-WAN (Sponsored)

Today on Heavy Networking, a discussion with sponsor VMware about SD-WAN and SASE. We’re diving into announcements from VMware Explore Barcelona 2022 covering a new SD-WAN client and more. With this client, you’ll be able to connect your users to the SASE cloud with software--no hardware edge box required. We dive into how it works, the network architecture, use cases, and more.

The post Heavy Networking 657: New VMware Client Connects Users To SASE, SD-WAN (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Heavy Networking 657: New VMware Client Connects Users To SASE, SD-WAN (Sponsored)

Today on Heavy Networking, a discussion with sponsor VMware about SD-WAN and SASE. We’re diving into announcements from VMware Explore Barcelona 2022 covering a new SD-WAN client and more. With this client, you’ll be able to connect your users to the SASE cloud with software--no hardware edge box required. We dive into how it works, the network architecture, use cases, and more.

10 most powerful network management companies

Network management has never been easy, and the proliferation of IoT devices, the shift to remote work, and the migration of applications to multi-cloud environments have added new levels of complexity to enterprise networks.IT execs are dealing with network management tool sprawl and employee skills gaps. They are also struggling to gain visibility across increasingly distributed networks, including SaaS instances that are not under their direct control.To read this article in full, please click here

10 most powerful network management companies

Network management has never been easy, and the proliferation of IoT devices, the shift to remote work, and the migration of applications to multi-cloud environments have added new levels of complexity to enterprise networks.IT execs are dealing with network management tool sprawl and employee skills gaps. They are also struggling to gain visibility across increasingly distributed networks, including SaaS instances that are not under their direct control.To read this article in full, please click here

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