Cloud Security is Hard Because Multi-Cloud is Complex
In today’s multi-cloud world, security-as-a-service is growing as a strategic means of standardizing security practices that span all applications, no matter where they are deployed.Day Two Cloud 173: Istio Ambient Mesh Minimizes Sidecar Proxies
Today on Day Two Cloud we examine Istio Ambient Mesh, a new option for building service meshes in a microservices environment. Istio Ambient Mesh essentially brings the concept of a load balancer to a cluster of containers. Rather than run a sidecar proxy for each pod or container, you can run Ambient Mesh per node. Our guest and guide to this open source project is Christian Posta, Global Field CTO at Solo.io.
The post Day Two Cloud 173: Istio Ambient Mesh Minimizes Sidecar Proxies appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Day Two Cloud 173: Istio Ambient Mesh Minimizes Sidecar Proxies
Today on Day Two Cloud we examine Istio Ambient Mesh, a new option for building service meshes in a microservices environment. Istio Ambient Mesh essentially brings the concept of a load balancer to a cluster of containers. Rather than run a sidecar proxy for each pod or container, you can run Ambient Mesh per node. Our guest and guide to this open source project is Christian Posta, Global Field CTO at Solo.io.Why Cloudflare’s one of the Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces in 2022
This post is also available in Français, 日本語, 简体中文, 한국어, Español.
At Cloudflare, we have strived to build a workplace where our entire team feels safe and excited to bring their whole selves to work, so they can do their best work. That’s why we are proud to share that Cloudflare has been named one of the Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces in 2022 by Newsweek and Best Practice Institute (BPI). Most Loved Workplaces recognizes companies where their workers love, and feel in sync with, the company they work for.
With this, and as we’re approaching the end-of 2022, we thought this was a good time to reflect on some of the things that go into being one of these Most Loved Workplaces and just some of what makes up our workplace and culture.
Something that really grounds our entire team is Cloudflare’s mission: to help build a better Internet. When you are solving some of the toughest challenges facing the Internet — helping make the Internet secure, fast, private, and reliable globally — you need a range of talented individuals to do this. The people at Cloudflare are exactly that, and are essential to our Continue reading
Integrated Routing and Bridging (IRB) Design Models
Imagine you built a layer-2 fabric with tons of VLANs stretched all over the place. Now the users want to exchange traffic between those VLANs, and the obvious question is: which devices should do layer-2 forwarding (bridging) and which ones should do layer-3 forwarding (routing)?
There are four typical designs you can use to solve that challenge:
- Exchange traffic between VLANs outside of the fabric (edge routing)
- Route on core switches (centralized routing)
- Route on ingress (asymmetric IRB)
- Route on ingress and egress (symmetric IRB)
This blog post is an overview of the design models; we’ll cover each design in a separate blog post.
Integrated Routing and Bridging (IRB) Design Models
Imagine you built a layer-2 fabric with tons of VLANs stretched all over the place. Now the users want to exchange traffic between those VLANs, and the obvious question is: which devices should do layer-2 forwarding (bridging) and which ones should do layer-3 forwarding (routing)?
There are four typical designs you can use to solve that challenge:
- Exchange traffic between VLANs outside of the fabric (edge routing)
- Route on core switches (centralized routing)
- Route on ingress (asymmetric IRB)
- Route on ingress and egress (symmetric IRB)
This blog post is an overview of the design models; we’ll cover each design in a separate blog post.
Heavy Strategy 037 – Metaversing The Office is More Than One Thing
Are there angles on future metaverse that make sensee ? Johna and Greg dive into their perspectives on what is a metaverse and converge on the face that its a form of collaboration. Potentially it could be immersive with VR googles but more likely it’s about engaging data from external domains into the collaboration experience.
The post Heavy Strategy 037 – Metaversing The Office is More Than One Thing appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Heavy Strategy 037 – Metaversing The Office is More Than One Thing
Are there angles on future metaverse that make sensee ? Johna and Greg dive into their perspectives on what is a metaverse and converge on the face that its a form of collaboration. Potentially it could be immersive with VR googles but more likely it’s about engaging data from external domains into the collaboration experience.
Using Calico to create a Kubernetes cluster mesh for multi-cluster environments
Kubernetes has come of age with more organizations adopting a microservices architecture at scale. But scale brings a whole slew of new challenges, especially with Kubernetes, which is designed to operate as a single cluster. However, the usage of Kubernetes, especially at leading-edge organizations operating at scale, has crossed the single-cluster threshold. Organizations are building and deploying services across multiple clusters for high availability, disaster recovery, application isolation, compliance, latency concerns, staged migration, and multi-tenancy reasons.
Regardless of the reasons to deploy multiple clusters, platform and application teams must address networking, security, and observability issues related to microservices deployed across multi-clusters, sometimes spanning hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Calico, the most widely adopted container networking and security solution (according to a recently published container adoption report by Datadog), provides an operationally simple solution to solve the networking, security, and observability challenges of running multi-cluster Kubernetes environments.
Security, observability, and networking requirements for multiple Kubernetes clusters
In simple terms, creating a multi-cluster Kubernetes environment requires stitching multiple Kubernetes clusters together to provide a common set of services. To create a single logical environment spanning multiple clusters, the key requirements are:
- Enabling inter-cluster communication – Communication across pods located in different clusters is Continue reading
Network Modernization is Critical to the Future of Healthcare
Healthcare organizations must react to changes quickly by making their networks as automated as possible.Network Automation: a Service Provider Perspective
Antti Ristimäki left an interesting comment on Network Automation Considered Harmful blog post detailing why it’s suboptimal to run manually-configured modern service provider network.
I really don’t see how a network any larger and more complex than a small and simple enterprise or campus network can be developed and engineered in a consistent manner without full automation. At least routing intensive networks might have very complex configurations related to e.g. routing policies and it would be next to impossible to configure them manually, at least without errors and in a consistent way.
Network Automation: a Service Provider Perspective
Antti Ristimäki left an interesting comment on Network Automation Considered Harmful blog post detailing why it’s suboptimal to run manually-configured modern service provider network.
I really don’t see how a network any larger and more complex than a small and simple enterprise or campus network can be developed and engineered in a consistent manner without full automation. At least routing intensive networks might have very complex configurations related to e.g. routing policies and it would be next to impossible to configure them manually, at least without errors and in a consistent way.
Network Automation with CUE – Advanced workflows
What I’ve covered in the previous blog post about CUE and Ansible were isolated use cases, disconnected islands in the sea of network automation. The idea behind that was to simplify the introduction of CUE into existing network automation workflows. However, this does not mean CUE is limited to those use cases and, in fact, CUE is most powerful when it’s used end-to-end — both to generate device configurations and to orchestrate interactions with external systems. In this post, I’m going to demonstrate how to use CUE for advanced network automation workflows involving fetching information from an external device inventory management system, using it to build complex hierarchical configuration values and, finally, generating and pushing intended configurations to remote network devices.
CUE vs CUE scripting
CUE was designed to be a simple, scalable and robust configuration language. This is why it includes type checking, schema and constraints validation as first-class constructs. There are some design decisions, like the lack of inheritance or value overrides, that may take new users by surprise, however over time it becomes clear that they make the language simpler and more readable. One of the most interesting features of CUE, though, is that all code Continue reading
Reference Architecture and Easy Deployment Design Guides – NSX 3.2 Update
We are excited to announce an updated version of the NSX Reference Design and the NSX Easy Adoption Design guide based on the generally available NSX-T release 3.2. NSX-T 3.2 is part of the recently released VCF 4.5 software bundle, making it a very popular release among our customers.
To support you in your network and security virtualization journey, we introduced the NSX-T reference architecture design guide on the NSX-T 2.0 release, showing how you should design your data centers with NSX-T. Over time we introduced additional design guides such as the NSX-T Multi-Location Design Guide (Federation + Multisite), the Easy Adoption Design guide, and the NSX-T Data Center and EUC Design Guide for more specific use cases.
These latest updates cover the new features included in the 3.2 versions and the design and implementation guidelines we developed working tightly with our customers on their NSX projects.
The NSX Reference Design guide version 3.2
This document is the most essential document for any NSX practitioner. Whether you are just starting with NSX or have already successfully implemented NSX in your environment, the NSX Reference Design guide provides a clear and detailed description Continue reading