The Hedge 85: Terry Slattery and the ROI of Automation
It’s easy to assume automation can solve anything and that it’s cheap to deploy—that there are a lot of upsides to automation, and no downsides. In this episode of the Hedge, Terry Slattery joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss something we don’t often talk about, the Return on Investment (ROI) of automation.
IXP.GT Improves Speed, Lowers Costs, and Increases Resilience and Security of Guatemala’s Internet
Of the four new Internet traffic exchange points in Latin America, the most advanced is IXP.GT in Guatemala. It started in November 2019 with three participants. A little over a year later it already had 10. Most are Internet service providers (ISPs), plus the university network. “The IXP is the best thing that happened to […]
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Day Two Cloud 099: Can Cloud Computing Get Simpler?
We're a good ten years into public cloud as an industry, and cloud operations don't seem to be getting any simpler. Why is that? Is it a problem? If so, can clouds become simpler? Guest Brian Gracely stops by the Day Two Cloud podcast to wrestle with these questions.
The post Day Two Cloud 099: Can Cloud Computing Get Simpler? appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Day Two Cloud 099: Can Cloud Computing Get Simpler?
We're a good ten years into public cloud as an industry, and cloud operations don't seem to be getting any simpler. Why is that? Is it a problem? If so, can clouds become simpler? Guest Brian Gracely stops by the Day Two Cloud podcast to wrestle with these questions.Building real-time games using Workers, Durable Objects, and Unity
Durable Objects are an awesome addition to the Workers developer ecosystem, allowing you to address and work inside a specific Worker to provide consistency in your applications. That sounds exciting at a high-level, but if you're like me, you might be wondering "Okay, so what can I build with that?"
There’s nothing like building something real with a technology to truly understand it.
To better understand why Durable Objects matter, and how newer announcements in the Workers ecosystem like WebSockets play with Durable Objects, I turned to a category of software that I've been building in my spare time for a few months now: video games.
The technical aspects of games have changed drastically in the last decade. Many games are online-by-default, and the ubiquity of tools like Unity have made it so anyone can begin experimenting with developing games.
I've heard a lot about the ability of Durable Objects and WebSockets to provide real-time consistency in applications, and to test that use case out, I've built Durable World: a simple 3D multiplayer world that is deployed entirely on our Cloudflare stack: Pages for serving the client-side game, which runs in Unity and WebGL, and Workers as the Continue reading
Packet Forwarding and Routing over Unnumbered Interfaces
In the previous blog posts in this series, we explored whether we need addresses on point-to-point links (TL&DR: no), whether it’s better to have interface or node addresses (TL&DR: it depends), and why we got unnumbered IPv4 interfaces. Now let’s see how IP routing works over unnumbered interfaces.
The Challenge
A cursory look at an IP routing table (or at CCNA-level materials) tells you that the IP routing table contains prefixes and next hops, and that the next hops are IP addresses. How should that work over unnumbered interfaces, and what should we use for the next-hop IP address in that case?
Packet Forwarding and Routing over Unnumbered Interfaces
In the previous blog posts in this series, we explored whether we need addresses on point-to-point links (TL&DR: no), whether it’s better to have interface or node addresses (TL&DR: it depends), and why we got unnumbered IPv4 interfaces. Now let’s see how IP routing works over unnumbered interfaces.
The Challenge
A cursory look at an IP routing table (or at CCNA-level materials) tells you that the IP routing table contains prefixes and next hops, and that the next hops are IP addresses. How should that work over unnumbered interfaces, and what should we use for the next-hop IP address in that case?
Closing the Loop on Testing Network Changes
“..the best way to guard against error is to design systems with layered and overlapping defenses…like slices of Swiss cheese being layered on top of one another until there were no holes you could see through” - from The Premonition, Michael Lewis Network changes, such as adding a rack, adding...Cloudflare’s SOC as a Service
When Cloudflare started, sophisticated online security was beyond the reach of all but the largest organizations. If your pockets were deep enough, you could buy the necessary services — and the support that was required to operate them — to keep your online operations secure, fast, and reliable. For everyone else? You were out of luck.
We wanted to change that: to help build a better Internet. To build a set of services that weren’t just technically sophisticated, but easy to use. Accessible. Affordable. Part of this meant that we were always looking to build and equip our customers with all the tools they needed in order to do this for themselves.
Of course, a lot has changed since we started. The Internet has only increased in importance, fast becoming the most important channel for many businesses. Cybersecurity threats have only become more prevalent — and more sophisticated. And the products that Cloudflare offers to keep you safe on the Internet have attracted some of the largest and most recognizable organizations in the world.
Ask some of these larger organizations about cybersecurity, and they’ll tell you a few things: first, they love our products. But, second, that when something happens Continue reading
The Pros and Cons of Hyperconverged Infrastructure
The positives of a hyperconverged solution typically far outweigh the negatives when it comes to streamlining your overall operational capabilities and productivity.Full Stack Journey 054: Changes Big And Small
On today's Full Stack Journey podcast, host Scott Lowe shares some personal changes in his life, including leaving VMware for a startup called Kong, selling a house and moving, and buying and using an M1-based MacBook Pro. He shares his reflections on career changes, his decision-making process, and more.
Full Stack Journey 054: Changes Big And Small
On today's Full Stack Journey podcast, host Scott Lowe shares some personal changes in his life, including leaving VMware for a startup called Kong, selling a house and moving, and buying and using an M1-based MacBook Pro. He shares his reflections on career changes, his decision-making process, and more.
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Jerikan: a configuration management system for network teams
There are many resources for network automation with Ansible. Most of them only expose the first steps or limit themselves to a narrow scope. They give no clue on how to expand from that. Real network environments may be large, versatile, heterogeneous, and filled with exceptions. The lack of real-world examples for Ansible deployments, unlike Puppet and SaltStack, leads many teams to build brittle and incomplete automation solutions.
We have released under an open-source license our attempt to tackle this problem:
- Jerikan, a tool to build configuration files from a single source of truth and Jinja2 templates, along with its integration into the GitLab CI system,
- an Ansible playbook to deploy these configuration files on network devices, and
- a redacted version of the configuration data and the templates for our, now defunct, datacenters in San Francisco and South Korea, covering many vendors (Facebook Wedge 100, Dell S4048 and S6010, Juniper QFX 5110, Juniper QFX 10002, Cisco ASR 9001, Cisco Catalyst 2960, Opengear console servers, and Linux), and many functionalities (provisioning, BGP-to-the-host routing, edge routing, out-of-band network, DNS configuration, integration with NetBox and IRRs).
Here is a quick demo to configure a new peering:
This work is the collective effort of Continue reading
Nominations Open! Jonathan B. Postel Service Award 2021
Do you know someone who has made an outstanding and sustained contribution in service to the Internet community? Nominate them.
The post Nominations Open! Jonathan B. Postel Service Award 2021 appeared first on Internet Society.
Mythbusting: NFV Data Center Fabric Buffering Requirements
Every now and then I stumble upon an article or a comment explaining how Network Function Virtualization (NFV) introduces new data center fabric buffering requirements. Here’s a recent example:
For Telco/carrier Cloud environments, where NFVs (which are much slower than hardware SGW) get used a lot, latency is higher with a lot of jitter due to the nature of software and the varying link speeds, so DC-level near-zero buffer is not applicable.
It seems to me we’re dealing with another myth. Starting with the basics:
Mythbusting: NFV Data Center Fabric Buffering Requirements
Every now and then I stumble upon an article or a comment explaining how Network Function Virtualization (NFV) introduces new data center fabric buffering requirements. Here’s a recent example:
For Telco/carrier Cloud environments, where NFVs (which are much slower than hardware SGW) get used a lot, latency is higher with a lot of jitter due to the nature of software and the varying link speeds, so DC-level near-zero buffer is not applicable.
It seems to me we’re dealing with another myth. Starting with the basics: