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Day Two Cloud 113: Multi-Cloud Network Visibility And Automation With Aviatrix (Sponsored)

Today's Day Two Cloud episode dives into multi-cloud networking with sponsor Aviatrix. Aviatrix offers a cloud network platform with a common data plane and operational model that works across public clouds and supports visibility and automation. We dig into the product with Aviatrix guests and a customer.

The post Day Two Cloud 113: Multi-Cloud Network Visibility And Automation With Aviatrix (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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The API Gateway: Networking at Layer 8

As the network stack expands to support the API economy, network architecture must expand its domain to include APIs.

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Wi-Fi 7 is coming, and Intel makes it sound great

Wi-Fi has been with us since 1997, predating Google, the iPhone, and robotic vacuum cleaners. It’s basically a legacy technology! Wi-Fi resources Test and review of 4 Wi-Fi 6 routers: Who’s the fastest? How to determine if Wi-Fi 6 is right for you Five questions to answer before deploying Wi-Fi 6 Wi-Fi 6E: When it’s coming and what it’s good for Despite its maturity, Wi-Fi is always evolving to meet the needs of consumers and enterprises. There have been eight versions of the Wi-Fi network protocol, with the latest (Wi-Fi 6 or, to use its “street name,” 802.11ax) being released in 2019. Each iteration has been faster and more reliable than its predecessor, a comforting trend. Three-and-a-half generations (Wi-Fi 4, Wi-Fi 5, and Wi-Fi 6 and 6E) currently are in use.To read this article in full, please click here

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Will Intel’s new desktop-CPU design come to its Xeon server chips?

As part of its Architecture Day, Intel spent a lot of time discussing its next generation PC microprocessor microarchitecture, Alder Lake, which marks a radical change for Intel. The question for us in the data center is will the design make its way to the server? If past is prologue, then yes, in time.Alder Lake is due later this fall in three versions: desktop, mobile, and ultra portable. It will come with up to 16 cores and 24 threads and support for PCI Express 5 and DDR5 memory plus other features.Now see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI" Here’s where it gets interesting. The desktop part with 16 cores is actually a split between eight performance cores—P-Cores—and eight efficiency cores—E-Cores. The mobile and ultra-mobile parts also use this dual-core design but with fewer cores. The P-Core is for compute tasks, while the E-Core is assigned background tasks like email syncing and antivirus checks. This is hardly a new idea. Arm has done this for years with its big.LITTLE core designs.To read this article in full, please click here

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Will Intel’s new desktop-CPU design come to its Xeon server chips?

As part of its Architecture Day, Intel spent a lot of time discussing its next generation PC microprocessor microarchitecture, Alder Lake, which marks a radical change for Intel. The question for us in the data center is will the design make its way to the server? If past is prologue, then yes, in time.Alder Lake is due later this fall in three versions: desktop, mobile, and ultra portable. It will come with up to 16 cores and 24 threads and support for PCI Express 5 and DDR5 memory plus other features.Now see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI" Here’s where it gets interesting. The desktop part with 16 cores is actually a split between eight performance cores—P-Cores—and eight efficiency cores—E-Cores. The mobile and ultra-mobile parts also use this dual-core design but with fewer cores. The P-Core is for compute tasks, while the E-Core is assigned background tasks like email syncing and antivirus checks. This is hardly a new idea. Arm has done this for years with its big.LITTLE core designs.To read this article in full, please click here

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MikroTik RouterOS Advanced Configuration

In the previous tutorial, we installed and configured a brand new MikroTik hAP ac³ router for connection to the Internet. We also improved the overall security of the router by implementing simple steps to harden it. These include things like disabling unused services, enabling HTTPS for device management, updating RouterOS, and reconfiguring the firewall rules. […]
Continue reading...

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netsim-tools: Python Package and Unified CLI

One of the major challenges of using netsim-tools was the installation process – pull the code from GitHub, install the prerequisites, set up search paths… I knew how to fix it (turn the whole thing into a Python package) but I was always too busy to open that enormous can of worms.

That omission got fixed in summer 2021; netsim-tools is now available on PyPI and installed with pip3 install netsim-tools.

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netlab Python Package and Unified CLI

One of the major challenges of using netsim-tools (now renamed to netlab) was the installation process – pull the code from GitHub, install the prerequisites, set up search paths… I knew how to fix it (turn the whole thing into a Python package) but I was always too busy to open that enormous can of worms.

That omission got fixed; netlab is now available on PyPI and installed with pip3 install networklab.

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Outdated Data Center Risks: How Organizational Mandates Help

Organizations should create mandates requiring upgrades to their outdated data centers at a regular cadence to avoid risks.

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Lucky Webapp Add Pagination

In this post I will show you how to add pagination to a Lucky webapp and also style the pagination links with Bootrap and Font Awesome Icons. Software The following software versions were used in this post. Lucky - 0.28.0 Font Awesome (Free) - 5.15.4 Bootstrap - 5.1.0 Enable...continue reading

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Calico integration with WireGuard using kOps

It has been a while since I have been excited to write about encrypted tunnels. It might be the sheer pain of troubleshooting old technologies, or countless hours of falling down the rabbit hole of a project’s source code, that always motivated me to pursue a better alternative (without much luck). However, I believe luck is finally on my side.

In this blog post we will explore using open-source WireGuard, a new technology that offers encrypted tunnels with remarkable performance and an effortless implementation, to establish secure encrypted tunnels between workloads in K8s clusters.

 

Introduction: WireGuard

With the release of open-source Calico 3.14 back in June of 2020, Tigera announced a tech preview of its WireGuard integration, which allows node-to-node traffic to be encrypted using WireGuard.

Other encryption methods (e.g. TLS) were available to encrypt workloads’ traffic at higher TCP/IP layers (in this case, the Application Layer). However, WireGuard targets traffic at a lower layer (the Transport Layer), which makes it effective for a wider range of applications, and also reduces complexity for the user.

WireGuard is an open-source project that implements virtual private network (VPN) techniques to establish secure point-to-point connections leveraging Linux Continue reading

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Netdev 0x15

The recent Netdev 0x15 conference included a number of papers diving into the technology behind Linux as a network operating system. Slides and videos are now available on the conference web site.

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gRPC: A Deep Dive into the Communication Pattern

Danesh Kuruppu is a technical lead at WSO2, with expertise in microservices, messaging protocols and service governance. Danesh has spearheaded development of Ballerina’s standard libraries including gRPC, data and microservices framework. He has co-authored 'gRPC Up and Running' published by O’Reilly media. If you have built gRPC applications and know about the communication fundamentals, you may already know there are four fundamental communication patterns used in gRPC-based applications: simple RPC, server-side streaming, client-side streaming and bidirectional streaming. In this article, I dive deeper into these communication patterns and discuss the importance of each pattern as well as how to pick the right one, according to the use case. Before I discuss each pattern, I’ll discuss what they have in common, such as how gRPC sends messages between clients and servers over the network and how request/response messages are structured. gRPC over HTTP/2 According to official documentation, the gRPC core supports different transport protocols; however, HTTP/2 is the most common among them. In HTTP/2, communication between a client and a server happens through a single TCP connection. Within the connection, there can be multiple bidirectional flows of bytes, which are called streams. In gRPC terms, one RPC call is mapped to Continue reading

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The Best Technologists First Try To Solve Their Own Problems

Every once in a while, I get questions from random internet folks who want me to do their homework for them. They want me to provide them with detailed technical information, solve their complex design problem, or curate content on a difficult topic so that they don’t have to do the sifting.

While I like to help folks out as much as anyone (and often do), I usually ignore these sorts of questions. Why? Partly, I don’t have enough time to fix the internet. Partly, I like to get paid for consulting. But more importantly, the best technologists first try to solve their own problems.

A Manager’s Perspective

When interviewing candidates for technical positions, one of my questions is, “If you run into a problem you’ve never faced before, how do you solve it?” There are two typical answers.

1. “I’ll ask someone else for help. Probably you.”
2. “I’ll search the internet, company wiki, and product documentation. I’ll set up a lab. If I’m still stuck, I’ll ask for help.”

I prefer to hire a person who first tries to figure things out. While I want neither a cowboy nor science experiments making their way into production, I Continue reading

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The EPYC journey continues to Milan in Cloudflare’s 11th generation Edge Server

When I was interviewing to join Cloudflare in 2014 as a member of the SRE team, we had just introduced our generation 4 server, and I was excited about the prospects. Since then, Cloudflare, the industry and I have all changed dramatically. The best thing about working for a rapidly growing company like Cloudflare is that as the company grows, new roles open up to enable career development. And so, having left the SRE team last year, I joined the recently formed hardware engineering team, a team that simply didn’t exist in 2014.

We aim to introduce a new server platform to our edge network every 12 to 18 months or so, to ensure that we keep up with the latest industry technologies and developments. We announced the generation 9 server in October 2018 and we announced the generation 10 server in February 2020. We consider this length of cycle optimal: short enough to stay nimble and take advantage of the latest technologies, but long enough to offset the time taken by our hardware engineers to test and validate the entire platform. When we are shipping servers to over 200 cities around the world with a variety of regulatory Continue reading

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Are ISPs Better Bets to Offer Cloud Computing for the Edge?

Edge computing is getting more attention of late — because there are advantages to having computing power and data storage near the location where it’s needed. As Edge computing needs grow, users are likely to take a hard look at whether public cloud giants like AWS, Google are their best choice, or whether their local ISP is best suited for the job. ISPs — including cable, DSL and mobile providers — claim to offer benefits when delivering SaaS and other services compared to public cloud providers: low latency, high-bandwidth connections, fewer security vulnerabilities, regional regulation compliance, and greater data sovereignty. While they must also demonstrate that they can deliver services robust enough to meet DevOps needs, ISPs can offer tremendous benefits and fill gaps in current cloud computing offerings. “A key concern cloud customers have when leveraging their microservices architecture for the applications they offer or rely on is how to achieve and maintain ultra-low latency,” said

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Getting more than expected from a virtual-server training exercise

During a recent training exercise in a non-production environment, I built a Cisco ISE virtual server using VMware vSphere and succeeded troubleshooting an issue, which demonstrates the value of this type of exercise. It also shows how important it is for network engineers to have clear priorities and keep their eye on the goals set for the task at hand.In this exercise, the build of the virtual server gave me the option of using one of two datastores that we’ll call Datastore One and Datastore Two. It also provided the option of choosing from multiple ESXI host machines to launch the virtual server on, and we’ll designate them with letters such as Host A, Host B, etc. Some of the hosts could associate only with Datastore One, and the rest could associate only with Datastore Two.To read this article in full, please click here

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Western Digital, Kioxia could be talking merger

Hard disk giant Western Digital and Japan-based Kioxia Holdings are said to be in advanced talks to merge in a deal that could be valued at over $20 billion.Citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal said a deal could be reached as soon as mid-September. It would be a stock transaction and current WD CEO David Goeckeler would be CEO of the combined company.Chip shortage will hit hardware buyers for months to years This is not the first time there has been talk of a potential merger for Kioxia. In March, the Journal reported that both Western Digital and memory manufacturer Micron were looking at a possible acquisition of Kioxia in a deal that might have been valued at about $30 billion.To read this article in full, please click here

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Getting more than expected from a virtual-server training exercise

During a recent training exercise in a non-production environment, I built a Cisco ISE virtual server using VMware vSphere and succeeded troubleshooting an issue, which demonstrates the value of this type of exercise. It also shows how important it is for network engineers to have clear priorities and keep their eye on the goals set for the task at hand.In this exercise, the build of the virtual server gave me the option of using one of two datastores that we’ll call Datastore One and Datastore Two. It also provided the option of choosing from multiple ESXI host machines to launch the virtual server on, and we’ll designate them with letters such as Host A, Host B, etc. Some of the hosts could associate only with Datastore One, and the rest could associate only with Datastore Two.To read this article in full, please click here

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Western Digital, Kioxia could be talking merger

Hard disk giant Western Digital and Japan-based Kioxia Holdings are said to be in advanced talks to merge in a deal that could be valued at over $20 billion.Citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal said a deal could be reached as soon as mid-September. It would be a stock transaction and current WD CEO David Goeckeler would be CEO of the combined company.Chip shortage will hit hardware buyers for months to years This is not the first time there has been talk of a potential merger for Kioxia. In March, the Journal reported that both Western Digital and memory manufacturer Micron were looking at a possible acquisition of Kioxia in a deal that might have been valued at about $30 billion.To read this article in full, please click here