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Category Archives for "Networking"

Day Two Cloud 181: Implementing Patterns And Practices For Infrastructure as Code

On today's Day Two Cloud podcast we talk about Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and software practices you might want to put in place for the parts of your team who know what they're doing with infrastructure but may not be familiar with developer practices that can help make code more reliable and operational processes more repeatable. Our guest is author Rosemary Wang.

The post Day Two Cloud 181: Implementing Patterns And Practices For Infrastructure as Code appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Day Two Cloud 181: Implementing Patterns And Practices For Infrastructure as Code

On today's Day Two Cloud podcast we talk about Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and software practices you might want to put in place for the parts of your team who know what they're doing with infrastructure but may not be familiar with developer practices that can help make code more reliable and operational processes more repeatable. Our guest is author Rosemary Wang.

Welcome to Wildebeest: the Fediverse on Cloudflare

Welcome to Wildebeest: the Fediverse on Cloudflare
Welcome to Wildebeest: the Fediverse on Cloudflare

The Fediverse has been a hot topic of discussion lately, with thousands, if not millions, of new users creating accounts on platforms like Mastodon to either move entirely to "the other side" or experiment and learn about this new social network.

Today we're introducing Wildebeest, an open-source, easy-to-deploy ActivityPub and Mastodon-compatible server built entirely on top of Cloudflare's Supercloud. If you want to run your own spot in the Fediverse you can now do it entirely on Cloudflare.

The Fediverse, built on Cloudflare

Today you're left with two options if you want to join the Mastodon federated network: either you join one of the existing servers (servers are also called communities, and each one has its own infrastructure and rules), or you can run your self-hosted server.

There are a few reasons why you'd want to run your own server:

  • You want to create a new community and attract other users over a common theme and usage rules.
  • You don't want to have to trust third-party servers or abide by their policies and want your server, under your domain, for your personal account.
  • You want complete control over your data, personal information, and content and visibility over what Continue reading

Extreme adds network fabric support to its SD-WAN

Extreme Networks has added network fabric capabilities to its flagship SD-WAN platform to enable customers to link and manage distributed resources more securely.Additional enhancements to the ExtremeCloud SD-WAN platform include improved automated workflows and direct connectivity to cloud systems such as Microsoft Azure and AWS.“The overarching idea is to help customers more effectively connect distributed sites, especially the smaller branch office, without increasing optical or management overhead,” said Rob Hull, product marketing director at Extreme. “For the smaller sites, especially, with maybe no IT person or few, it gives them the big-site quality-of-service feel and big-site centralized management capability.”To read this article in full, please click here

Extreme adds network fabric support to its SD-WAN

Extreme Networks has added network fabric capabilities to its flagship SD-WAN platform to enable customers to link and manage distributed resources more securely.Additional enhancements to the ExtremeCloud SD-WAN platform include improved automated workflows and direct connectivity to cloud systems such as Microsoft Azure and AWS.“The overarching idea is to help customers more effectively connect distributed sites, especially the smaller branch office, without increasing optical or management overhead,” said Rob Hull, product marketing director at Extreme. “For the smaller sites, especially, with maybe no IT person or few, it gives them the big-site quality-of-service feel and big-site centralized management capability.”To read this article in full, please click here

Response: Nothing Works (in Enterprise IT)

Dmitry Perets left a thoughtful comment on my Nothing Works blog post describing why enterprise IT might be even worse than consumer world.

I think another reason for the “Nothing Works” world is that the only true Management Plane separation that exists in our industry is that of the real “human” management. In the medium/large enterprises they (and their interests, KPIs and so on) are very much separated from the technical workforce. And increasingly so, because today the technical workforce might not even be the employees of the same enterprise. They are likely to come from some IT consultancy outsource – degree of separation which makes a true SDN evangelist envious.

Response: Nothing Works (in Enterprise IT)

Dmitry Perets left a thoughtful comment on my Nothing Works blog post describing why enterprise IT might be even worse than consumer world.

I think another reason for the “Nothing Works” world is that the only true Management Plane separation that exists in our industry is that of the real “human” management. In the medium/large enterprises they (and their interests, KPIs and so on) are very much separated from the technical workforce. And increasingly so, because today the technical workforce might not even be the employees of the same enterprise. They are likely to come from some IT consultancy outsource – degree of separation which makes a true SDN evangelist envious.

Cisco adds services, hardware to better support industrial IoT

Cisco has added new visibility and security software to its cloud-based dashboard for managing configuration and applications for IoT devices in industrial settings.The company has upgraded its IoT Operations Dashboard with Cisco Cyber Vision, software that automatically builds a detailed inventory of all operational technology (OT) devices and identifies vulnerabilities.Cyber Vision can share its inventories with SecureX, Cisco’s enterprise Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platform to provide a combined inventory of both IT and OT assets, and that can make threat investigations easier and build remediation workflows, according to Vikas Butaney, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of cloud connectivity and industrial IOT networking.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco security upgrades strengthen access control, risk analysis

Cisco has strengthened some of its key security software packages with an eye toward better protecting distributed enterprise resources.Specifically, Cisco added more intelligence to its Duo access-protection software and introduced a new application called Business Risk Observability that can help enterprises measure the impact of security risks on their core applications. The company also enhanced its SASE offering by expanding its SD-WAN integration options.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco security upgrades strengthen access control, risk analysis

Cisco has strengthened some of its key security software packages with an eye toward better protecting distributed enterprise resources.Specifically, Cisco added more intelligence to its Duo access-protection software and introduced a new application called Business Risk Observability that can help enterprises measure the impact of security risks on their core applications. The company also enhanced its SASE offering by expanding its SD-WAN integration options.To read this article in full, please click here

How Cloudflare erroneously throttled a customer’s web traffic

How Cloudflare erroneously throttled a customer’s web traffic
How Cloudflare erroneously throttled a customer’s web traffic

Over the years when Cloudflare has had an outage that affected our customers we have very quickly blogged about what happened, why, and what we are doing to address the causes of the outage. Today’s post is a little different. It’s about a single customer’s website not working correctly because of incorrect action taken by Cloudflare.

Although the customer was not in any way banned from Cloudflare, or lost access to their account, their website didn’t work. And it didn’t work because Cloudflare applied a bandwidth throttle between us and their origin server. The effect was that the website was unusable.

Because of this unusual throttle there was some internal confusion for our customer support team about what had happened. They, incorrectly, believed that the customer had been limited because of a breach of section 2.8 of our Self-Serve Subscription Agreement which prohibits use of our self-service CDN to serve excessive non-HTML content, such as images and video, without a paid plan that includes those services (this is, for example, designed to prevent someone building an image-hosting service on Cloudflare and consuming a huge amount of bandwidth; for that sort of use case we have paid image and video Continue reading

Hard-drive failure rates tied to age in latest Backblaze analysis

Cloud backup and storage provider Backblaze released its latest annual report dissecting hard-drive failure rates, and it’s clear that age is a key determinant of a drive’s potential for failure.Backblaze has become something of a go-to source for hard-drive durability, thanks to its quarterly analysis of its own fleet, which included 231,309 hard drives used to store data as of December 31. (After excluding drives used for testing purposes and low-count models, Backblaze analyzed 230,921 devices for its report.)To read this article in full, please click here

Hard-drive failure rates tied to age in latest Backblaze analysis

Cloud backup and storage provider Backblaze released its latest annual report dissecting hard-drive failure rates, and it’s clear that age is a key determinant of a drive’s potential for failure.Backblaze has become something of a go-to source for hard-drive durability, thanks to its quarterly analysis of its own fleet, which included 231,309 hard drives used to store data as of December 31. (After excluding drives used for testing purposes and low-count models, Backblaze analyzed 230,921 devices for its report.)To read this article in full, please click here

Improve BGP Startup Time on Cisco IOS

I like using Cisco IOS for my routing protocol virtual labs1. It uses a trivial amount of memory2 and boots relatively fast. There was just one thing that kept annoying me: Cisco IOS release 15.x takes forever to install local routes in the BGP table and even longer to select the best routes and propagate them3.

I finally found the culprit: bgp update-delay nerd knob. Here’s what the documentation has to say about it: