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Category Archives for "Networking"

Insights Platform Now Live! A Deeper, Data-Driven View of the Internet

There are many people, projects, and organizations that are collecting data on various facets of the Internet, but there’s no single site that provides a curated set of insights.

To help address this gap, we’ve launched the Internet Society Insights platform to help everyone gain deeper, data-driven insight into the Internet.

One of the key deliverables of the Measuring the Internet project, we have spent the last few months building the Insights platform together with our valued development partner, Frontwerks AG.

Data and Focus Areas

We’re collating data from several trusted organizations – our data partners – and will examine Internet trends, generate reports, and tell data-driven stories about how the Internet is evolving. Insights launched with two initial focus areas, Internet Shutdowns and Enabling Technologies.

Work is continuing on three additional focus areas – Internet Resilience, the Internet Way of Networking, and Keeping Traffic Local. We aim to add data and insights on these focus areas throughout 2021 and beyond.

TLS Version adoption

Use and Share

Everyone is encouraged to use and share the text, images, and charts presented on Insights under our creative commons license.

If you would like to submit an idea for a guest post for the Continue reading

The Hedge Podcast #62: Jacob Hess and the Importance of History

At first glance, it would seem like the history of a technology would have little to do with teaching that technology. Jacob Hess of NexGenT joins us in this episode of the Hedge to help us understand why he always includes the history of a technology when teaching it—a conversation that broadened out into why learning history is important for all network engineers.

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You can find the history of networking here.

Tech Bytes: ThousandEyes Expands Visibility Into Modern App Architectures (Sponsored)

Today's Tech Bytes peers into cloud visibility with sponsor ThousandEyes. The company is improving its platform with multi-service views, Internet and hybrid cloud visibility, SD-WAN monitoring, and more. The goal is to give you a more comprehensive picture of the dependencies that make up today's applications, services, and networks. Our guests are Angelique Medina and Archana Kesavan.

The post Tech Bytes: ThousandEyes Expands Visibility Into Modern App Architectures (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Tech Bytes: ThousandEyes Expands Visibility Into Modern App Architectures (Sponsored)

Today's Tech Bytes peers into cloud visibility with sponsor ThousandEyes. The company is improving its platform with multi-service views, Internet and hybrid cloud visibility, SD-WAN monitoring, and more. The goal is to give you a more comprehensive picture of the dependencies that make up today's applications, services, and networks. Our guests are Angelique Medina and Archana Kesavan.

What to know about Azure Arc’s hybrid-cloud server management

Azure Arc for servers, a centralized management tool that provides visibility into Azure data services, Kubernetes clusters, and servers running Windows or Linux, has been generally available since September, helping fulfill Microsoft’s stated intent to support enterprise hybrid-cloud architectures.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Day Two Cloud 077: Why Kubernetes Is Wrong For You

Kubernetes seems like a shining paragon of Ops efficiency, but the reality of running it is quite different. Is your organization up to the task? Is Kubernetes the thing you actually want or need? In this Day Two Cloud episode we talk to Cory O’Daniel and Rishi Malik from Container Heroes, and they have some thoughts on why Kubernetes is wrong for you.

Day Two Cloud 077: Why Kubernetes Is Wrong For You

Kubernetes seems like a shining paragon of Ops efficiency, but the reality of running it is quite different. Is your organization up to the task? Is Kubernetes the thing you actually want or need? In this Day Two Cloud episode we talk to Cory O’Daniel and Rishi Malik from Container Heroes, and they have some thoughts on why Kubernetes is wrong for you.

The post Day Two Cloud 077: Why Kubernetes Is Wrong For You appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Remembering Francis Kariuki: Africa’s Tweeting Chief

The African community networks community is sad to learn about the passing of one of its prolific members, Chief Francis Kariuki of Lanet-Umoja, a rural community in Nakuru County, Kenya. He died on on 21 October 2020 after a short illness.

Chief Kariuki was a renowned Kenyan administrator who pioneered the use of technology to foster development, justice, trust, peace, and inclusion in his community. His struggle for digital inclusion earned him several nicknames, including “The Digital Champion” and “The Tweeting Chief,” for being the first African local administrator to use social media channels to promote community development. His passion and drive for adopting technologies in service delivery at the local level earned him national and global recognition.

Chief Kariuki was a strong advocate for community networks in Africa. He successfully championed for a community network in Lanet-Umoja and worked with his community members to coordinate its installation, operation, and management.

Beyond Kenya, Chief Kariuki engaged in the Africa Summits on Community Networks, a platform where community network operators in Africa gather to foster learning, networking, knowledge, and experience sharing. At the Summits, Chief Kariuki shared key insights on community networks and inspired many young people to adopt digital Continue reading

KubeCon+CloudNativeCon: Service Mesh Battle Stories and Fixes

KubeCon+CloudNativeCon. “There’s a lot to say about each of these service meshes and how they work: their architecture, why they’re made, what they’re focused on, what they do when they came about and why some of them aren’t here anymore and why we’re still seeing new ones,” Layer5, explained during his talk with “Service Mesh Specifications and Why They Matter in Your Deployment.” Service mesh is increasingly seen as a requirement to manage microservices in Kubernetes environments, offering a central control plane to manage microservices access, testing, metrics and other functionalities. One-third of the respondents in The New Stack survey of our readers said their organizations already use service mesh. Among the numerous service mesh options available; Envoy, Linkerd and

Schneider Electric plans U.S. expansion, announces new micro data centers

Schneider Electric is better known in its native Europe than in the U.S., but it's looking to change that with a $40 million project to upgrade its U.S. manufacturing resources. The company, which specializes in energy management and automation technologies for data centers, shared its plans for U.S. expansion at its Innovation Summit North America 2020, held virtually this year.Schneider also unveiled a new set of ruggedized data-center enclosures targeting the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Designed for indoor industrial environments, the EcoStruxure Micro Data Center R-Series offers a fast and simple way to deploy and manage edge computing infrastructure in a place like a factory floor.To read this article in full, please click here

Next Pathway launches an automated cloud migration tool

Next Pathway has announced the next-generation of its cloud-migration-planning technology, called Crawler360, which helps enterprises shift legacy data warehouses and data lakes to the cloud by telling them exactly how to cost, size, and start the journey.Data warehouses and especially data lakes can get out of control with poorly managed, siloed data and different forms of structured and unstructured data turning the warehouse and lake into a swamp.Crawler360 addresses this problem by scanning data pipelines, database applications, and business-intelligence tools to automatically capture the end-to-end data lineage of the legacy environment. By doing so, Crawler360 defines relationships across siloed applications to understand their interdependencies, identifies redundant data sets that have swelled over time that can be consolidated, and pinpoints “hot and cold spots” to define which workloads to prioritize for migration.To read this article in full, please click here

Schneider Electric plans U.S. expansion, announces new micro data centers

Schneider Electric is better known in its native Europe than in the U.S., but it's looking to change that with a $40 million project to upgrade its U.S. manufacturing resources. The company, which specializes in energy management and automation technologies for data centers, shared its plans for U.S. expansion at its Innovation Summit North America 2020, held virtually this year.Schneider also unveiled a new set of ruggedized data-center enclosures targeting the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Designed for indoor industrial environments, the EcoStruxure Micro Data Center R-Series offers a fast and simple way to deploy and manage edge computing infrastructure in a place like a factory floor.To read this article in full, please click here

Chasing CRC Errors in a Data Center Fabric

One of my readers encountered an interesting problem when upgrading a data center fabric to 100 Gbps leaf-to-spine links:

  • They installed new fiber cables and SFPs;
  • Everything looked great… until someone started complaining about application performance problems.
  • Nothing else has changed, so the culprit must have been the network upgrade.
  • A closer look at monitoring data revealed CRC errors on every leaf switch. Obviously something was badly wrong with the whole batch of SFPs.

Fortunately my reader took a closer look at the data before they requested a wholesale replacement… and spotted an interesting pattern:

Tigera to Support Amazon EKS-Distro

Today, we are excited to announce our commitment to support Calico and Calico Enterprise for the Amazon EKS-Distro, a Kubernetes distribution based on and used by Amazon EKS. EKS-D enables you to create reliable and secure Kubernetes clusters using the same versions of Kubernetes and its dependencies deployed by Amazon EKS.
We view EKS-D as further confirmation of the central role that Kubernetes plays in today’s IT infrastructure. We are excited to work with Amazon on this initiative to enable EKS-D users with the same robust enterprise networking and network security functionality that you rely on today to secure your EKS cluster deployments.

Tigera’s commitment to supporting EKS-D highlights our fundamental design principle of “choice”. Our customers can choose to use Calico and Calico Enterprise with their preferred Kubernetes distribution and use the same solution to operate seamlessly across different Kubernetes distributions, including multi-cloud multi-cluster and hybrid environments. Calico Enterprise, for example, allows you to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters to define, apply, and enforce consistent networking and security policy across all your clusters from a single master cluster. Adding EKS-D clusters, which use the same underlying versions of Kubernetes deployed by Amazon EKS, as an option for our customers Continue reading

Data Center Master Classes

I’m doing a series of three master classes through Juniper on various DC fabric topics—

Join Juniper’s Russ White, a widely published 30-year network engineering veteran, in a three-part masterclass exploring the data center. Choose from classes on data center fabric, physical topologies, or data center security.

You can register here.

From the schedule—

  • Class 1: Data Center Fabric, December 2, 12 PM EST
  • Class 2: Physical Topologies, January 13, 12 PM EST
  • Class 3: Security in the Data Center, February 10, 12 PM EST

The EXPERIENCE HAS SHOWN THAT Keyword (RFC2915, Rule 4)

The world of information technology is filled, often to overflowing, with those who “know better.” For instance, I was recently reading an introduction to networking in a very popular orchestration system that began with the declaration that routing was hard, and therefore this system avoided routing. The document then went on to describe a system of moving packets around using multiple levels of Network Address Translation (NAT) and centrally configured policy-based routing (or filter-based forwarding) that was clearly simpler than the distributed protocols used to run large-scale networks. I thought, for a moment, of writing the author and pointing out the system in question had merely reinvented routing in a rather inefficient and probably broken way, but I relented. Why? Because I know RFC2915, rule 4, by heart:

Some things in life can never be fully appreciated nor understood unless experienced firsthand. Some things in networking can never be fully understood by someone who neither builds commercial networking equipment nor runs an operational network.

Ultimately, the people who built this system will likely not listen to me; rather, they are going to have to experience the pain caused by large-scale failures for themselves before they will listen. Many network Continue reading

NSX-T Data Center Migration Coordinator – Modular Migration

NSX-T 3.1

For a point release, VMware NSX-T 3.1 is packed with a bunch of major features. One of these is modular migration, which is making its debut with this release. Customers had asked for an automated way to migrate just firewall rules and groups; modular migration, a new feature of Migration Coordinator, addresses exactly that request. 

What’s Migration Coordinator?  

Taking a step back, Migration Coordinator is a tool that was introduced almost 18 months ago, with NSX-T 2.4, to enable customers to migrate from NSX for vSphere to NSX-T Data Center. It’s a free tool built into NSX-T Data Center that enables customers to migrate everything — from edges, to compute, to workloads — in an automated fashion and with a workflow that is similar to an in-place upgrade on existing hardware. This model of migration is called “in-place. 

From a resource perspective, in-place migration only needs enough resources to host NSX-T manager appliances and edges along with enough capacity per cluster to be Continue reading