Understanding Data Center Fabrics 05: Butterfly Scaling – Video
Episode of this series focuses on the butterfly fabric. While similar to a Clos fabric, the butterfly design is built around pods of switches. In this video, Russ White explains the differences in the butterfly design, physical limitations for ToR switches, how to scale the fabric to thousands of available ports without using chassis switches, […]
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Embarking on a Cloud Journey? Don’t Forget to add an SD-WAN Multicloud Strategy!
When selecting a SD-WAN provider for their multicloud strategy, organizations must ensure it offers simplified connectivity to different cloud providers with automation, all while delivering the best user experience from anywhere.Ridiculously easy to use Tunnels
A little over a decade ago, Cloudflare launched at TechCrunch Disrupt. At the time, we talked about three core principles that differentiated Cloudflare from traditional security vendors: be more secure, more performant, and ridiculously easy to use. Ease of use is at the heart of every decision we make, and this is no different for Cloudflare Tunnel.
That’s why we’re thrilled to announce today that creating tunnels, which previously required up to 14 commands in the terminal, can now be accomplished in just three simple steps directly from the Zero Trust dashboard.
If you’ve heard enough, jump over to sign-up/teams to unplug your VPN and start building your private network with Cloudflare. If you’re interested in learning more about our motivations for this release and what we’re building next, keep scrolling.
Our connector
Cloudflare Tunnel is the easiest way to connect your infrastructure to Cloudflare, whether that be a local HTTP server, web services served by a Kubernetes cluster, or a private network segment. This connectivity is made possible through our lightweight, open-source connector, cloudflared. Our connector offers high-availability by design, creating four long-lived connections to two distinct data centers within Cloudflare’s network. This means that whether an individual Continue reading
Video: Managed SD-WAN Services
Should service providers offer managed SD-WAN services? According to Betteridge’s law of headlines, the answer is NO, and that’s exactly what I explained in a short video with the same name.
Turns out there’s not much to explain; even with my usual verbosity I was done in five minutes, so you might want to watch SD-WAN Technical Challenges as well.
Both videos are accessible with the free ipSpace.net subscription
Video: Managed SD-WAN Services
Should service providers offer managed SD-WAN services? According to Betteridge’s law of headlines, the answer is NO, and that’s exactly what I explained in a short video with the same name.
Turns out there’s not much to explain; even with my usual verbosity I was done in five minutes, so you might want to watch SD-WAN Technical Challenges as well.
Both videos are accessible with the free ipSpace.net subscription
How to secure Kubernetes at the infrastructure level: 10 best practices
Infrastructure security is something that is important to get right so that attacks can be prevented—or, in the case of a successful attack—damage can be minimized. It is especially important in a Kubernetes environment because, by default, a large number of Kubernetes configurations are not secure.
Securing Kubernetes at the infrastructure level requires a combination of host hardening, cluster hardening, and network security.
- Host hardening – Secures the servers or virtual machines on which Kubernetes is hosted
- Cluster hardening – Secures Kubernetes’s control plane components
- Network security – Ensures secure integration of the cluster with surrounding infrastructure
Let’s dive into each of these and look at best practices for securing both self-hosted and managed Kubernetes clusters.
Host hardening
There are many techniques that can be used to ensure a secure host. Here are three best practices for host hardening.
Use a modern immutable Linux distribution
If you have the flexibility to choose an operating system (i.e. your organization doesn’t standardize on one operating system across all infrastructure), use a modern immutable Linux distribution, such as Flatcar Container Linux or Bottlerocket. This type of operating system is specifically designed for containers and offers several benefits, including:
- Immutability – This type Continue reading
Hedge 123: Geoff Huston and the State of BGP
Another year of massive growth in the number and speed of connections to the global Internet—what is the impact on the global routing table? Goeff Huston joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the current state of the BGP table, the changes in the last several years, where things might go, and what all of this means. This is part 1 of a two part episode.
IPv6 Buzz 097: Selling An IPv6 Project To Your Organization
Today's IPv6 Buzz discusses how to sell IPv6 as a project. That is, doing the advocacy work in your organization to drive IPv6 adoption. We examine the business and technical arguments you can make, including tying IPv6 to initiatives around cloud, containers, and zero trust.
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IPv6 Buzz 097: Selling An IPv6 Project To Your Organization
Today's IPv6 Buzz discusses how to sell IPv6 as a project. That is, doing the advocacy work in your organization to drive IPv6 adoption. We examine the business and technical arguments you can make, including tying IPv6 to initiatives around cloud, containers, and zero trust.Cloudflare Radar’s new ASN pages
An AS, or Autonomous System, is a group of routable IP prefixes belonging to a single entity, and is one of the key building blocks of the Internet. Internet providers, public clouds, governments, and other organizations have one or more ASes that they use to connect their users or systems to the rest of the Internet by advertising how to reach them.
Per AS traffic statistics and trends help when we need insight into unusual events, like Internet outages, infrastructure anomalies, targeted attacks, or any other changes from service providers.
Today, we are opening more of our data and launching the Cloudflare Radar pages for Autonomous Systems. When navigating to a country or region page on Cloudflare Radar you will see a list of five selected ASes for that country or region. But you shouldn’t feel limited to those, as you can deep dive into any AS by plugging its ASN (Autonomous System Number) into the Radar URL (https://radar.cloudflare.com/asn/<number>). We have excluded some statistical trends from ASes with small amounts of traffic as that data would be difficult to interpret.
The AS page is similar to the country page on Cloudflare Radar. You can find traffic levels, protocol Continue reading
The Cure to Multi-cloud Madness Is Modernizing Ops
Modernizing ops is one of the best ways to move forward, operate successfully, and avoid succumbing to multi-cloud madness.Understanding Data Center Fabrics 04: Clos Scaling – Video
In the fourth installment of this 9-video series, Russ White describes methods for scaling data center fabrics. He reviews how to calculate port density in a leaf-spine design, discusses physical restraints on the scale of a fabric based on the spines, fabric types in chassis switches, and the pros and cons of chassis vs. single […]
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HOW TO FORGET A WIFI NETWORK ON MAC.
Once your Mac computer gets connected to a source of wifi and the password has been saved, its unique features enable it to automatically reconnects once in range with the wifi network.. At first, this might be okay not until for some reason, you don’t want it to be connected anymore.
Sometimes, when there are various networks in range that had been previously connected and saved to your Mac, it becomes difficult for your system to choose which one to connect to as they are all saved and could easily be connected. In situations like this, you may want to connect to one particular network but it probably connects to the wrong one. In this scenario, you would want to disconnect with the unwanted wifi network, and to do that means you would need to forget the wifi.
There are other various reasons why you may need to forget your wifi network. Probably you’ve got lots of already connected networks and you would like to reduce them or you no longer really use the network anymore and don’t want it always connected or you probably have more than one wifi and would no longer want to use one but the Continue reading
Beware: Ansible Reorders List Values in Loops
TL&DR: Ansible might decide to reorder list values in a loop parameter, resulting in unexpected order of execution and (in my case) totally borked device configuration.
A bit of a background first: I’m using an Ansible playbook within netsim-tools to deploy initial device configurations. Among other things, that playbook deploys configuration snippets for numerous configuration modules, and the order of deployment is absolutely crucial. For example, you cannot activate BGP neighbors in Labeled Unicast (BGP-LU) address family (mpls module) before configuring BGP neighbors (bgp module).
Beware: Ansible Reorders List Values in Loops
TL&DR: Ansible might decide to reorder list values in a loop parameter, resulting in unexpected order of execution and (in my case) totally borked device configuration.
A bit of a background first: I’m using an Ansible playbook within netlab to deploy initial device configurations. Among other things, that playbook deploys configuration snippets for numerous configuration modules, and the order of deployment is absolutely crucial. For example, you cannot activate BGP neighbors in Labeled Unicast (BGP-LU) address family (mpls module) before configuring BGP neighbors (bgp module).