Cisco Live 2022: A Kinder, Gentler, Cloudier Monster?
Cisco Live 2022 in Las Vegas kicked off with executive keynotes, including an address from CEO Chuck Robbins. My takeaways from the keynotes from Tuesday, June 14th are: Cisco knows it has to work harder to keep customers Cisco has big cloud ambitions Meraki is one key to Cisco’s cloud & simplicity goals Cisco Has […]
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Internal Network Security Mistakes to Avoid
Network security begins at home. Here's how to effectively secure threats from within your organization.Hedge 134: Ten Things
One of the many reasons engineers should work for a vendor, consulting company, or someone other than a single network operator at some point in their career is to develop a larger view of network operations. What are common ways of doing things? What are uncommon ways? In what ways is every network broken? Over time, if you see enough networks, you start seeing common themes and ideas. Just like history, networks might not always be the same, but the problems we all encounter often rhyme. Ken Calenza joins Tom Ammon, Eyvonne Sharp, and Russ White to discuss these common traits—ten things I know about your network.
EVPN-VXLAN Explainer 5 – Layer 3 with Asymmetrical IRB
Thus far, this series of posts have all been about Layer 2 over Layer 3 models; the customer ethernet frames encapsulated in UDP, traversing L3 networks. The routing has been confined underlay, the customer traffic has stayed within the same network.
No longer! In this post, things start getting a little more interesting, as we look at routing the customer traffic with an EVPN feature called Integrated Routing and Bridging, or IRB.
- First we look at the concept of routing in VXLAN networks.
- Then we have an in-depth look at asymmetrical IRB (I'll be dealing with symmetrical in the next post).
✅ L2 is intra-subnet, L3 is inter-subnet
📥 Intra-subnet
To define terms, when I say 'intra-subnet', that is L2 traffic transferred between nodes in the same subnet.
📤 Inter-subnet
'Inter-subnet' refers to a traffic flow that traverses subnet boundaries.
☎️ The Centralized IP L3 Gateways of Old
- With VXLAN networks in the past, inter-subnet communication was often performed by a centralized, IP only, gateway on behalf of the rest of the network.
- Traffic from customer-side networks would need to be sent to this central device for routing, which often created inefficient traffic flows, and possibly a bandwidth choke-point.
- Imagine Continue reading
Beware of Vendors Bringing White Papers
A few weeks ago I wrote about tradeoffs vendors have to make when designing data center switching ASICs, followed by another blog post discussing how to select the ASICs for various roles in data center fabrics.
You REALLY SHOULD read the two blog posts before moving on; here’s the buffer-related TL&DR for those of you ignoring my advice ;)
Beware of Vendors Bringing White Papers
A few weeks ago I wrote about tradeoffs vendors have to make when designing data center switching ASICs, followed by another blog post discussing how to select the ASICs for various roles in data center fabrics.
You REALLY SHOULD read the two blog posts before moving on; here’s the buffer-related TL&DR for those of you ignoring my advice ;)
Securing cloud workloads in 5 easy steps
As organizations transition from monolithic services in traditional data centers to microservices architecture in a public cloud, security becomes a bottleneck and causes delays in achieving business goals. Traditional security paradigms based on perimeter-driven firewalls do not scale for communication between workloads within the cluster and 3rd-party APIs outside the cluster. The traditional paradigm also does not provide granular access controls to the workloads and zero-trust architecture, leaving cloud-native applications with a larger attack surface.
Calico Cloud offers an easy 5-step process for fast-tracking your organization’s cloud-native application journey by making security a business enabler while mitigating risk.
Step 1: Visibility
Gaining visibility into workload-to-workload communication with all metadata context intact is one of the biggest challenges when it comes to deploying microservices. You can’t apply security controls to what you can’t see. The traffic is not just flowing from a client to a server in this new cloud native distributed architecture but also between namespaces that reside between many nodes, causing flow proliferation. With Calico Cloud, you get a dynamic visualization of all traffic flowing through your network in an easy-to-read UI.
Example 1: You can view all the inside and outside (east-west and north-south) connections directly from Calico’s Continue reading
3 SD-WAN Challenges and Solutions
Points to consider when selecting an SD-WAN solution include WAN/LAN branch architecture, deployment and service provisioning, and centralized management.Heavy Networking 635: Unified Network Fabrics With Juniper Apstra (Sponsored)
In today’s sponsored Heavy Networking we talk to Juniper Apstra about how how Apstra delivers on unified data center operations, why fabrics are everywhere, how Apstra differs from other automation and intent solutions, and more. Our guest is Mansour Karam, VP of Product Management.
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