The Legacy of Cisco Live
Legacy: Something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past. — Merriam-Webster
Cisco Live 2024 is in the books. I could recap all the announcements but that would take forever. You can find an AI that can summarize them for you much faster. That’s because AI was the largest aspect of what was discussed. Love it or hate it, AI has taken over the IT industry for the time being. More importantly it has also focused companies on the need to integrate AI functions into their product lines to avoid being left behind by upstarts.
That’s what you see in the headlines. Something I noticed while I was there was how the march of time has affected us all. After eighteen years I finally realized the sessions today have less in common with the ones I was attending back in 2010 than ever before. Development and advanced features configuration have replaced the tuning of routing protocols and CallManager deployment tips. It’s a game for younger engineers that have less to unlearn from the legacy technologies I’ve spent my career working on.
Leaving a Legacy
But legacy is a word with more than one definition. It’s Continue reading
Worth Reading: Not Just Scale
Marc Brooker published an interesting blog post arguing that we need distributed systems for more than just scale.
Keep that in mind the next time someone tries to sell you the beauties of a centralized control plane – an idea that should be dead by now regardless of what ONF keeps preaching but will inevitably reappear in some form or other due to RFC 1925 Rule 11.
Worth Reading: Not Just Scale
Marc Brooker published an interesting blog post arguing that we need distributed systems for more than just scale.
Keep that in mind the next time someone tries to sell you the beauties of a centralized control plane – an idea that should be dead by now regardless of what ONF keeps preaching but will inevitably reappear in some form or other due to RFC 1925 Rule 11.
Internet insights on 2024 elections in the Netherlands, South Africa, Iceland, India, and Mexico
2024 is being called by the media “the” year of elections. More voters than ever are going to the polls in at least 60 countries for national elections, plus the 27 member states of the European Union. This includes eight of the world’s 10 most populous nations, impacting around half of the world’s population.
To track and analyze these significant global events, we’ve created the 2024 Election Insights report on Cloudflare Radar, which will be regularly updated as elections take place.
Our data shows that during elections, there is often a decrease in Internet traffic during polling hours, followed by an increase as results are announced. This trend has been observed before in countries like France and Brazil, and more recently in Mexico and India — where elections were held between April 19 and June 1 in seven phases. Some regions, like Comoros and Pakistan, have experienced government-directed Internet disruptions around election time.
Below, you’ll find a review of the trends we saw in elections in South Africa (May 29), to Mexico (June 2), India (April 19 - June 1) and Iceland (June 1). This includes election-related shifts in traffic, as well at attacks. For example, during the Continue reading
Hedge 229: QUIC
What is QUIC? Where did it come from? Why has it been successfully deployed where so many other protocols have either taken forever or flat-out failed? George Michaelson (of APNIC fame) joins Tom Ammon and Russ White on this episode of the Hedge to (quickly) talk about QUIC.
HN737: Greg Ferro: The Exit Interview
Greg Ferro, co-founder of Packet Pushers, is signing off. After years of frustrating health issues, he’s decided to fully step back from podcasting and industry analysis to take care of himself. After 14 years, today is his last appearance on Heavy Networking. In this parting episode, Greg shares his final dose of incisive insights and... Read more »Worth Exploring: Infrahub by Opsmill
A year or two after Damien Garros told me that “he moved to France and is working on something new” we can admire the results: Infrahub, a version-control-based system that includes a data store and a repository of all source code you use in your network automation environment. Or, straight from the GitHub repository,
A central hub to manage the data, templates and playbooks that powers your infrastructure by combining the version control and branch management capabilities of Git with the flexible data model and UI of a graph database.
I’ve seen an early demo, and it looks highly promising and absolutely worth exploring. Have fun ;)
Fun fact: the OpsMill team includes two guest speakers in the ipSpace.net automation course and a netlab contributor.
Worth Exploring: Infrahub by Opsmill
A year or two after Damien Garros told me that “he moved to France and is working on something new” we can admire the results: Infrahub, a version-control-based system that includes a data store and a repository of all source code you use in your network automation environment. Or, straight from the GitHub repository,
A central hub to manage the data, templates and playbooks that powers your infrastructure by combining the version control and branch management capabilities of Git with the flexible data model and UI of a graph database.
I’ve seen an early demo, and it looks highly promising and absolutely worth exploring. Have fun ;)
Fun fact: the OpsMill team includes two guest speakers in the ipSpace.net automation course and a netlab contributor.
Calico monthly roundup: May 2024
Welcome to the Calico monthly roundup: May edition! From open source news to live events, we have exciting updates to share—let’s get into it!
What’s new in Calico
Discover the latest enhancements in Calico for Spring 2024, featuring new security capabilities, improved visualization tools, and an advanced workload-centric WAF to streamline and secure your Kubernetes operations. |
Customer case study: NuraLogix
AI-driven healthtech company, NuraLogix, improves security and compliance on Amazon EKS using Calico Cloud. |
Join us at CloudNative SecurityCon 2024 in Seattle We’re gearing up for CloudNative SecurityCon 2024, on June 26 and 27 in Seattle. Be sure to swing by our booth and learn about exciting container networking updates. Plus, pick up some cool new Calico swag! Stay tuned for details.
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S&P Global 451 Market Insight: Tigera Provides Most Comprehensive CNAPP Learn how Tigera differentiates itself from competitors by focusing on runtime security, aligning with the rapidly growing market category and how it is one of the strong players in this segment. |
Open source news
What’s new in 3.28 – Explore the new features in Calico 3.28, including a Grafana dashboard for Typha performance monitoring, Continue reading
Dutch political websites hit by cyber attacks as EU voting starts
The 2024 European Parliament election started in the Netherlands today, June 6, 2024, and will continue through June 9 in the other 26 countries that are part of the European Union. Cloudflare observed DDoS attacks targeting multiple election or politically-related Internet properties on election day in the Netherlands, as well as the preceding day.
These elections are highly anticipated. It’s also the first European election without the UK after Brexit.
According to news reports, several websites of political parties in the Netherlands suffered cyberattacks on Thursday, with a pro-Russian hacker group called HackNeT claiming responsibility.
On June 5 and 6, 2024, Cloudflare systems automatically detected and mitigated DDoS attacks that targeted at least three politically-related Dutch websites. Significant attack activity targeted two of them, and is described below.
A DDoS attack, short for Distributed Denial of Service attack, is a type of cyber attack that aims to take down or disrupt Internet services such as websites or mobile apps and make them unavailable for users. DDoS attacks are usually done by flooding the victim's server with more traffic than it can handle. To learn more about DDoS attacks and other types of attacks, visit our Learning Center.
Attackers Continue reading
KU057: Packing Up Kubernetes Unpacked
All good things must come to an end, and in this case that means saying farewell to Kubernetes Unpacked. In this final episode, Michael and Kristina pack up the Kubernetes Unpacked podcast. They look back on covering issues including sustainability, security, open source projects, and certifications. They thank the professionals who joined the show as... Read more »Protecting vulnerable communities for 10 years with Project Galileo
In celebration of Project Galileo's 10th anniversary, we want to give you a snapshot of what organizations that work in the public interest experience on an everyday basis when it comes to keeping their websites online. With this, we are publishing the Project Galileo 10th anniversary Radar dashboard with the aim of providing valuable insights to researchers, civil society members, and targeted organizations, equipping them with effective strategies for protecting both internal information and their public online presence.
Key Statistics
- Under Project Galileo, we protect more than 2,600 Internet properties in 111 countries.
- Between May 1, 2023, and March 31, 2024, Cloudflare blocked 31.93 billion cyber threats against organizations protected under Project Galileo. This is an average of nearly 95.89 million cyber attacks per day over the 11-month period.
- When looking at the different organizational categories, journalism and media organizations were the most attacked, accounting for 34% of all attacks targeting the Internet properties protected under the Project in the last year, followed by human rights organizations at 17%.
- On October 11, 2023, Cloudflare detected one of the largest attacks we’ve seen against an organization under Project Galileo, targeting a prominent independent journalism website covering stories in Russia Continue reading
DNS Topics at RIPE 88
RIPE 88 was held in May 2024 at Krakow, Poland. Here’s as summary of some of the DNS topics that were presented at that meeting that I found to be of interest.Day Two Cloud Crossover: When the Cloud was Born
Welcome to a crossover episode with the Day Two Cloud podcast! Eric Chou was there for the birth of the public cloud. Before DevOps or SREs were a thing, before Azure was Azure, Eric was a network engineer for Amazon, helping them build out their retail technology platform. Of course, that platform evolved into the... Read more »D2C244: When the Cloud was Born
Eric Chou was there for the birth of the public cloud. Before DevOps or SREs were a thing, before Azure was Azure, Eric was a network engineer for Amazon, helping them build out their retail technology platform. Of course, that platform evolved into the world’s leading public cloud–AWS. Eric joins the show today to tell... Read more »European Union elections 2024: securing democratic processes in light of new threats
Between June 6-9 2024, hundreds of millions of European Union (EU) citizens will be voting to elect their members of the European Parliament (MEPs). The European elections, held every five years, are one of the biggest democratic exercises in the world. Voters in each of the 27 EU countries will elect a different number of MEPs according to population size and based on a proportional system, and the 720 newly elected MEPs will take their seats in July. All EU member states have different election processes, institutions, and methods, and the security risks are significant, both in terms of cyber attacks but also with regard to influencing voters through disinformation. This makes the task of securing the European elections a particularly complex one, which requires collaboration between many different institutions and stakeholders, including the private sector. Cloudflare is well positioned to support governments and political campaigns in managing large-scale cyber attacks. We have also helped election entities around the world by providing tools and expertise to protect them from attack. Moreover, through the Athenian Project, Cloudflare works with state and local governments in the United States, as well as governments around the world through international nonprofit partners, to provide Continue reading
Energy Independence, at least for gadgets and electronics; what’s the point of growing spinach and Mint?
This post is a bit different from my usual networking content. I won’t be discussing power grid inefficiencies or pollution. After learning some principles from permaculture, an ethical design science focused on life, it’s more of a personal reflection. I’m concerned about our society’s reliance on non-producing, ever-consuming and our mindset to depend on external producers. Even simple things that can be eliminated or produced without much effort have become needlessly complex, creating unnecessary consumption, erasing the human spark to make or say no to mindless consumerism, and creating vast dump yards. We used to be producers but have become ultimate consumers of life’s simple things.
TLDR: It’s not about affordability or money; I think everyone here can afford spinach or charge their devices happily, paying a service provider; the question is, why are we dependent on external grids and super-stores for simple things in life that were free at one point of time in our society, over consumerism, isolated and end up creating our own silo kingdoms?
Why did it make sense to me?
At a very high level, we all know that the climatic changes and food production, in general, have affected the topsoil so much that Continue reading
HS074: Geek Speak to Biz Talk
To be an effective technologist in a corporation, your efforts need to be aligned with the business strategy of your organization. In today’s episode, Johna and Greg show you how to do this, even if your organization has no written business strategy. They explain how to “read the tea leaves” to tell if your organization... Read more »