Lessons Learned Working Abroad
This post was originally published in the Packet Pushers’ Human Infrastructure newsletter on September 1, 2022. You can subscribe to the newsletter for free here. Over a year ago, my wife and I moved from the eastern United States to Seoul, South Korea. A great opportunity presented itself for her career, and my US-based employer was […]
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When Were You Last a Beginner?
In a couple of weeks I’m taking the opportunity to broaden my leadership horizons by attending the BSA leadership course known as Philmont Leadership Challenge. It’s a course that builds on a lot of the things that I’ve been learning and teaching for the past five years. It’s designed to be a sort of capstone for servant leadership and learning how to inspire others. I’m excited to be a part of it in large part because I get to participate for a change.
Being a member of the staff for my local council Wood Badge courses has given me a great opportunity to learn the material inside and out. I love being able to teach and see others grow into leaders. It’s also inspired me to share some of those lessons here to help others in the IT community that might not have the chance to attend a course like that. However the past 3 years have also shown me the value of being a beginner at something from time to time.
Square One
Everyone is new at something. No one is born knowing every piece of information they’ll need to know for their entire lives. We learn language and Continue reading
Heavy Networking 645: Secure Wireless Planning And Design
On today’s episode of Heavy Networking, we discuss secure wireless planning and design with Jennifer "JJ Minella. JJ is the author of the book "Wireless Security Architecture." We talk about the goals for planning a wireless design, why it's worth the upfront investment, keeping operators in mind as you design your deployment, the importance of communication, design iteration, and more.Heavy Networking 645: Secure Wireless Planning And Design
On today’s episode of Heavy Networking, we discuss secure wireless planning and design with Jennifer "JJ Minella. JJ is the author of the book "Wireless Security Architecture." We talk about the goals for planning a wireless design, why it's worth the upfront investment, keeping operators in mind as you design your deployment, the importance of communication, design iteration, and more.
The post Heavy Networking 645: Secure Wireless Planning And Design appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Log analytics using ClickHouse
This is an adapted transcript of a talk we gave at Monitorama 2022. You can find the slides with presenter’s notes here and video here.
When a request at Cloudflare throws an error, information gets logged in our requests_error pipeline. The error logs are used to help troubleshoot customer-specific or network-wide issues.
We, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), manage the logging platform. We have been running Elasticsearch clusters for many years and during these years, the log volume has increased drastically. With the log volume increase, we started facing a few issues. Slow query performance and high resource consumption to list a few. We aimed to improve the log consumer's experience by improving query performance and providing cost-effective solutions for storing logs. This blog post discusses challenges with logging pipelines and how we designed the new architecture to make it faster and cost-efficient.
Before we dive into challenges in maintaining the logging pipelines, let us look at the characteristics of logs.
Characteristics of logs
Unpredictable - In today's world, where there are tons of microservices, the amount of logs a centralized logging system will receive is very unpredictable. There are various reasons why capacity estimation of log volume is so difficult. Continue reading
Why Migrating a Database to the Cloud is Like a Heart Transplant
Migrating your organization's on-premises database to a native-cloud database is fraught with challenges and potential benefits. Here are recommendations to ensure this ‘heart transplant’ doesn't fail.A Second Look at QUIC Use
A couple of months ago, in July 2022, I wrote about our work in measuring the level of use of QUIC in the Internet. Getting this measurement “right” has been an interesting exercise, and it’s been a learning experience that I’d like to relate here. We’ll start from the end of the previous article and carry on from there.Video: Kubernetes Services Overview
After completing the discussion of basic Kubernetes networking with a typical inter-pod traffic scenario, Stuart Charlton tackled another confusing topic: an overview of what Kubernetes services are.
Parts of Kubernetes Networking Deep Dive webinar (including this video) are available with Free ipSpace.net Subscription.
Experimenting TCP Congestion Control(WIP)
Introduction
I have always found TCP congestion control algorithms fascinating, and at the same time, I know very little about them. So once in a while, I will spend some time with the hope of gaining some new insights. This blog post will share some of my experiments with various TCP congestion control algorithms. We will start with TCP Reno, then look at Cubic and ends with BBR.I am using Linux network namespaces to emulate topology for experimentation, making it easier to run than setting up a physical test bed.
TCP Reno
For many years, the main algorithm of congestion control was TCP Reno. The goal of congestion control is to determine
how much capacity is available in the network, so that source knows how
many packets it can safely have in transit (Inflight). Once a source has these packets in transit, it uses the ACK’s
arrival as a signal that packets are leaving the network, and therefore it’s safe to send more packets into the network.
By using ACKs for pacing the transmission of packets, TCP is self-clocking. The number of packets which
TCP can inject into the network is controlled by Congestion Window(cwnd).
Congestion Window:
