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Category Archives for "Networking"

Full Stack Journey 052: Scaling Infrastructure As Code Beyond A Single Engineer

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) can work great for a single user, but what happens when lots of people are pushing changes? Scott Lowe and guest Tim Davis talk about the challenges of scaling IaC beyond a single engineer and provide practical insight into ways to address these challenges. Tim is Developer Advocate at Env0.

The post Full Stack Journey 052: Scaling Infrastructure As Code Beyond A Single Engineer appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Automatic Platform Optimization post-launch report

Automatic Platform Optimization post-launch report

Last year during Birthday Week, we announced Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress (APO): smart HTML caching for WordPress sites using Cloudflare. Initial testing across various WordPress sites demonstrated significant improvements in performance metrics like Time to First Byte (TTFB), First Contentful Paint (FCP), and Speed Index. We wanted to measure how APO impacted web performance for our customers since the launch.

In the blog post, we answer the following questions:

  • How fast is Automatic Platform Optimization? Can you demonstrate it with data?

We will show real-world improvements for several performance metrics.

  • Is Automatic Platform Optimization flexible enough to integrate smoothly with my WordPress site?

We have added and improved lots of features since the initial launch.

  • Will Automatic Platform Optimization work when used with other plugins?

We will cover the most common use cases and explain how Automatic Platform Optimization could be fined-tuned.

Measuring performance with WebPageTest

We use WebPageTest as a go-to tool for synthetic testing at Cloudflare. It measures web performance metrics in real browsers, is highly programmable, and could scale to test millions of sites per day. Among the benefits of synthetic testing are easy to produce results and their relatively high reproducibility.

Automatic Platform Optimization Continue reading

Ransomware: How to make sure backups are ready for a real attack

The best way to avoid paying ransom to attackers who have infected your systems with ransomware is to have those systems adequately backed up so you can wipe them and restore them from safe backups. Here are several options for making sure those backups are up to the task.In this article, backup refers to any system that you're going to use to respond to a ransomware attack, including old-school backup systems, replication systems, and modern hybrid systems that support backup and disaster recover. For simplicity’s sake, they’ll all be referred to as backup here. More about backup and recovery:To read this article in full, please click here

Ransomware: How to make sure backups are ready for a real attack

The best way to avoid paying ransom to attackers who have infected your systems with ransomware is to have those systems adequately backed up so you can wipe them and restore them from safe backups. Here are several options for making sure those backups are up to the task.In this article, backup refers to any system that you're going to use to respond to a ransomware attack, including old-school backup systems, replication systems, and modern hybrid systems that support backup and disaster recover. For simplicity’s sake, they’ll all be referred to as backup here. More about backup and recovery:To read this article in full, please click here

Ransomware: How to make sure backups are ready for a real attack

The best way to avoid paying ransom to attackers who have infected your systems with ransomware is to have those systems adequately backed up so you can wipe them and restore them from safe backups. Here are several options for making sure those backups are up to the task.In this article, backup refers to any system that you're going to use to respond to a ransomware attack, including old-school backup systems, replication systems, and modern hybrid systems that support backup and disaster recover. For simplicity’s sake, they’ll all be referred to as backup here. More about backup and recovery:To read this article in full, please click here

Using YAML Instead of Excel in Network Automation Solutions

One of the attendees of our network automation course asked a question along these lines:

In a previous Ansible-based project I used Excel sheet to contain all relevant customer data. I converted this spreadsheet using python (xls_to_fact) and pushed the configurations to network devices accordingly. I know some people use YAML to define the variables in Git. What would be the advantages of doing that over Excel/xsl_to_fact?

Whenever you’re choosing a data store for your network automation solution you have to consider a number of aspects including:

Read more …

Using YAML Instead of Excel in Network Automation Solutions

One of the attendees of our network automation course asked a question along these lines:

In a previous Ansible-based project I used Excel sheet to contain all relevant customer data. I converted this spreadsheet using python (xls_to_fact) and pushed the configurations to network devices accordingly. I know some people use YAML to define the variables in Git. What would be the advantages of doing that over Excel/xsl_to_fact?

Whenever you’re choosing a data store for your network automation solution you have to consider a number of aspects including:

Read more …

Network Validation

What does Network Validation mean practically? Of course, there’s no official description of what it means, but we can talk about what we would like it to mean so that it can be useful. What we are trying to get to is a network that is trustworthy. If the business...

Cisco SD-WAN: vManage, vBond, and vMSmart On-Prem Installation Process.

 



Introduction

This section explains the process how to build an on-prem Cisco Viptela based SD-WAN control plane system. It starts by setting up an enterprise Certificate Server using the Cisco CSR1000V cloud router. Next, it goes through the process of root certificate generation. The rest of the chapter explains the initial configuration and certification installation processes from vManage, vBond, and vSmart viewpoints.

Figure 1-1: Control-Plane Components Topology.

Continue reading

Cisco grows UCS server family with high-powered AMD processor

Cisco has bulked-up its rack server offering with new models that promise to deliver low latency and high-speed computing needed for hybrid-cloud and financial workloads.The new servers are part of Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) family and are built with AMD’s new EPYC 7003 processors, which feature up to 64 Zen 3 cores per processor and a variety of performance and security features.Still not dead: The mainframe hangs on sustained by Linux and hybrid cloud Cisco and AMD have worked together on server offerings since 2018 when Cisco first  partnered with AMD to better contend with competitors such as Dell and HP. To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco grows UCS server family with high-powered AMD processor

Cisco has bulked-up its rack server offering with new models that promise to deliver low latency and high-speed computing needed for hybrid-cloud and financial workloads.The new servers are part of Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) family and are built with AMD’s new EPYC 7003 processors, which feature up to 64 Zen 3 cores per processor and a variety of performance and security features.Still not dead: The mainframe hangs on sustained by Linux and hybrid cloud Cisco and AMD have worked together on server offerings since 2018 when Cisco first  partnered with AMD to better contend with competitors such as Dell and HP. To read this article in full, please click here

Complexity Bites Back

What percentage of business-impacting application outages are caused by networks? According to a recent survey by the Uptime Institute, about 30% of the 300 operators they surveyed, 29% have experienced network related outages in the last three years—the highest percentage of causes for IT failures across the period.

A secondary question on the survey attempted to “dig a little deeper” to understand the reasons for network failure; the chart below shows the result.

We can be almost certain the third-party failures, if the providers were queried, would break down along the same lines. Is there a pattern among the reasons for failure?

Configuration change—while this could be somewhat managed through automation, these kinds of failures are more generally the result of complexity. Firmware and software failures? The more complex the pieces of software, the more likely it is to have mission-impacting errors of some kind—so again, complexity related. Corrupted policies and routing tables are also complexity related. The only item among the top preventable causes that does not seem, at first, to relate directly to complexity is network overload and/or congestion problems. Many of these cases, however, might also be complexity related.

The Uptime Institute draws this same lesson, though Continue reading

Tech Bytes: How Palo Alto Networks Differentiates Prisma SD-WAN (Sponsored)

Palo Alto Networks sponsors today's Tech Bytes. We drill into key differentiators of the Prisma SD-WAN platform including its use of machine learning, the unique CloudBlades offering, and its app-defined approach to path selection and policy enforcement. Our guest from Palo Alto Networks is Rohan Grover, Senior Director of Product Management.

The post Tech Bytes: How Palo Alto Networks Differentiates Prisma SD-WAN (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Network Break 324: Cisco ASIC Hits 25.6Tbps; AWS Extends VPC Flow Logs For Better Visibility

This week's Network Break discusses new ASICs from Cisco, new metadata fields in AWS VPC flow logs, a cloud visibility fabric from packet broker specialist Gigamon, lessons from a data center fire, and more tech news.

The post Network Break 324: Cisco ASIC Hits 25.6Tbps; AWS Extends VPC Flow Logs For Better Visibility appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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