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Category Archives for "Networking"

Are enterprises loving managed services?

There's a lot in networking that never measures up to the hype, so maybe it's good that this is balanced sometimes by areas where the hype falls far short of reality. Managed services is one of those things.It always seems to be bubbling just below the surface of attention, and yet it may be the most important topic in networking today. I had a chance to chat with 59 enterprises that were involved with or launching managed-service projects and another 118 who had no current managed-service projects. I'll summarize what I found here.SD-WAN buyers guide: Key questions to ask vendors All of these enterprises had been aware of managed services for at least 20 years, and all but 31 had considered them at one point or another. Interestingly, 141 of the 177 total enterprises believe that MPLS VPNs are a form of managed service, and when I dug into this, the response was that “managed services” are about reducing the user's management burden. VPNs do that, so they're a sort-of-managed service.To read this article in full, please click here

Introducing Shadow IT Discovery

Introducing Shadow IT Discovery
Introducing Shadow IT Discovery

Your team likely uses more SaaS applications than you realize. The time your administrators spend vetting and approving applications sanctioned for use can suddenly be wasted when users sign up for alternative services and store data in new places. Starting today, you can use Cloudflare for Teams to detect and block unapproved SaaS applications with just two clicks.

Increasing Shadow IT usage

SaaS applications save time and budget for IT departments. Instead of paying for servers to host tools — and having staff ready to monitor, upgrade, and troubleshoot those tools — organizations can sign up for a SaaS equivalent with just a credit card and never worry about hosting or maintenance again.

That same convenience causes a data control problem. Those SaaS applications sit outside any environment that you control; the same reason they are easy for your team is also a potential liability now that your sensitive data is kept by third parties. Most organizations keep this in check through careful audits of the SaaS applications being used. Depending on industry and regulatory impact, IT departments evaluate, approve, and catalog the applications they use.

However, users can intentionally or accidentally bypass those approvals. For example, if your organization Continue reading

MUST Read: Operational Security Considerations for IPv6 Networks (RFC 9099)

After almost a decade of bickering and haggling (trust me, I got my scars to prove how the consensus building works), the authors of Operational Security Considerations for IPv6 Networks (many of them dear old friends I haven’t seen for way too long) finally managed to turn a brilliant document into an Informational RFC.

Regardless of whether you already implemented IPv6 in your network or believe it will never be production-ready (alongside other crazy stuff like vaccines) I’d consider this RFC a mandatory reading.

MUST Read: Operational Security Considerations for IPv6 Networks (RFC 9099)

After almost a decade of bickering and haggling (trust me, I got my scars to prove how the consensus building works), the authors of Operational Security Considerations for IPv6 Networks (many of them dear old friends I haven’t seen for way too long) finally managed to turn a brilliant document into an Informational RFC.

Regardless of whether you already implemented IPv6 in your network or believe it will never be production-ready (alongside other crazy stuff like vaccines) I’d consider this RFC a mandatory reading.

Infrastructure 2. Building Multi Server Cloud with Proxmox (Debian Linux) and Local Storage

Hello my friend,

In the previous blogpost we covered the installation of Proxmox as a core platform for building open source virtualisation environment. Today we’ll continue this discussion and will show how to create a multi server cloud in order to better spread the load and provide resiliency for your applications.



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means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission of the author.

How to Automate Infrastructure?

In many cases, Linux is a major driving power behind modern clouds. In fact, if you look across all current big clouds, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, you will see Linux everywhere: on servers and on network devices (e.g., data centre switches). Therefore, knowledge how to deal with Linux and how to automate it is crucial to be successful in automation current IT systems.

At our trainings, advanced network automation and automation with Nornir (2nd step after advanced network automation), we give you detailed knowledge of all the technologies relevant:

Controversial Reads 081421


However, in the last 5-10 years it has felt that technology is actually running the other way. We aren’t getting more productive with our technology — we’re getting less productive. Even as technology grows, it is not providing significant gains, and in fact is giving us problems.


Here’s a paper worth revisiting, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” (March 3, 2021), if only for the principal author’s trouble associated with publishing it.


Silicon Valley was created in the Second World War to help the U.S. Army win the war. The government funded companies such as Fairchild Semiconductor.


How many messaging services do you use? Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Apple iMessage, Signal, Facebook Messenger, Microsoft Teams, Instagram, TikTok, Google Hangouts, Twitter Direct Messages, Skype?


There’s uncertainty among executives and managers who must ensure that individual and team productivity remains high, customer demands are met, and employees are engaged. How can they meet these requirements when their workers aren’t corralled in offices?


Why should you care about data brokers? Reporting this week about a Substack publication outing a priest with location data from Grindr shows once again how easy it is for anyone to take Continue reading

Member News: Israel Chapter Pushes for Better Internet Access

More broadband, please: The Internet Society’s Israel Chapter has reached out to the Israeli government about a number of issues affecting the country’s broadband service. Commenting on a plan by telecom provider Bezeq to roll out fiber broadband to 80 percent of households in the country within six years, it said the Ministry of Communications should […]

The post Member News: Israel Chapter Pushes for Better Internet Access appeared first on Internet Society.

Weekend Reads 081321


The US military’s AI experiments are growing particularly ambitious. The Drive reports that US Northern Command recently completed a string of tests for Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE) …


This whitepaper puts particular focus on cloud-native security controls offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the most common public cloud infrastructure providers used by organizations today. The controls in Network Security and Endpoint as well as Services Security can help security engineers to protect the AWS infrastructure and ensure that they function effectively.


People make up an important part of an organization’s security posture. That’s because some employees have the rights necessary for accessing sensitive data as well as the privileges for viewing and/or editing critical systems.


The more interesting and nerdy news is how Intel is achieving double bandwidth. It’s using Pulse Amplitude Modulation (PAM), which uses a combination of two numbers in the binary to transmit two bits of data in each cycle, unlike traditional transmission methods that only carry a single bit of data.


PolarProxy is a transparent TLS proxy that outputs decrypted TLS traffic as PCAP files. PolarProxy doesn’t interfere with the tunnelled data in any way, it simply takes the incoming TLS stream, decrypts Continue reading

Cisco to buy Epsagon for application, microservice management

Cisco is looking to bolster its enterprise application management suite by buying cloud-based application-performance firm Epsagon for $500M.Founded in 2017, the Israel-based Epsagon develops cloud-based application monitoring software focused on scrutinizing cloud microservices and applications.The benefits of converged network and application performance management Businesses are adopting cloud-native technologies, microservices, and containerized components on a large scale while leveraging an extensive web of traditional components, third-party services and application programming interfaces, wrote Liz Centoni, Cisco’s chief strategy officer and general manager, applications, in a blog about the acquisition.   To read this article in full, please click here

Heavy Networking 593: Network Observability With VMware vRealize Network Insight (Sponsored)

On today’s Heavy Networking, we drill into VMware’s vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) to learn how it provides end-to-end monitoring, how it uses flow records and other data sources, and its architecture. We’ll also discuss modeling/digital twin capabilities, and applying vRNI to security, troubleshooting, and other use cases. VMware is our sponsor.

The post Heavy Networking 593: Network Observability With VMware vRealize Network Insight (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Heavy Networking 593: Network Observability With VMware vRealize Network Insight (Sponsored)

On today’s Heavy Networking, we drill into VMware’s vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) to learn how it provides end-to-end monitoring, how it uses flow records and other data sources, and its architecture. We’ll also discuss modeling/digital twin capabilities, and applying vRNI to security, troubleshooting, and other use cases. VMware is our sponsor.

Slow and Steady and Complete

StepTiles

I was saddened to learn last week that one of my former coworkers passed away unexpectedly. Duane Mersman started at the same time I did at United Systems and we both spent most of our time in the engineering area working on projects. We worked together on so many things that I honestly couldn’t keep count of them if I tried. He’s going to be missed by so many people.

A Hare’s Breadth

Duane was, in many ways, my polar opposite at work. I was the hard-charging young buck that wanted to learn everything there was to know about stuff in about a week and just get my hands dirty trying to break it and learn from my mistakes. If you needed someone to install a phone system next week with zero formal training or learn how iSCSI was supposed to operate based on notes sketched on the back of a cocktail napkin I was your nerd. That meant we could often get things running quickly. It also meant I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why things weren’t working. I left quite a few forehead-shaped dents in data center walls.

Duane was not any of those Continue reading

Cloudflare Developer Summer Challenge

Cloudflare Developer Summer Challenge
Cloudflare Developer Summer Challenge

There are a lot of experiences we have all grown to miss over the last year and a half. After hearing from our community, two of the top experiences they miss are collaborating with peers, and getting Cloudflare swag. Perhaps even in the reverse order! In-person events like conferences were once a key channel to satisfy both these interests, however today’s remote world makes that much harder. But does it have to?

Today, we are excited to introduce the Cloudflare Developer Summer Challenge. We will be rewarding 300 participants with boxes of our most popular swag, while enabling collaboration with other participants through our Workers Discord channel.

To participate, you have to build a project that uses Cloudflare Workers and at least one other product in our rapidly expanding developer platform. We will judge submissions and award swag boxes to those with the most innovative projects, limited to one box per person. The Challenge will be open for submissions between today, and closing November 1, 2021. See a full list of terms and conditions here.

Cloudflare Developer Summer Challenge

What are the details?

Cloudflare’s developer platform offers all the building blocks to create end-to-end applications with products across compute, storage, and frontend services. To Continue reading

Building the Cloudflare Summer Challenge Application

Building the Cloudflare Summer Challenge Application
Building the Cloudflare Summer Challenge Application

If you haven’t already heard, we’re hosting the Cloudflare Summer Developer Challenge, a contest for the Cloudflare community at large. Anybody – yes, including you – can sign up for free and compete for a chance to win one of 300 available prizes. To submit you need to use  at least two products from the Cloudflare developer platform — which makes this contest a great opportunity to give them a try if you haven’t already! The top 300 submissions will receive a box of our most popular swag, so you should give it a go!

Coincidentally, the Cloudflare Summer Developer Challenge’s landing page and signup workflow qualifies as a valid project submission (so meta), so if you’re looking for some inspiration, this walkthrough will shed some light on how it was built.

Overview

At its core, the application is a series of static HTML pages, most of which have a form to submit, with a backend API to handle those submissions, and a storage layer to persist the data. In a Cloudflare lens, this would point towards using Pages, a Worker, and Workers KV. And while this should be the preferred stack for a project like this, truthfully, this Continue reading

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