Soar: Simulation for Observability, reliAbility, and secuRity
Serving more than approximately 25 million Internet properties is not an easy thing, and neither is serving 20 million requests per second on average. At Cloudflare, we achieve this by running a homogeneous edge environment: almost every Cloudflare server runs all Cloudflare products.
As we offer more and more products and enjoy the benefit of horizontal scalability, our edge stack continues to grow in complexity. Originally, we only operated at the application layer with our CDN service and DoS protection. Then we launched transport layer products, such as Spectrum and Argo. Now we have further expanded our footprint into the IP layer and physical link with Magic Transit. They all run on every machine we have. The work of our engineers enables our products to evolve at a fast pace, and to serve our customers better.
However, such software complexity presents a sheer challenge to operation: the more changes you make, the more likely it is that something is going to break. Continue reading
Tier 1 Carriers Performance Report: December, 2020
The post Tier 1 Carriers Performance Report: December, 2020 appeared first on Noction.
Beware XML-to-JSON Information Loss (Junos with Ansible)
When you want to transport a complex data structure between components of a distributed system you’re usually using a platform-independent data encoding format like XML, YAML, or JSON.
XML was the hip encoding format in days when Junos and Cisco Nexus OS was designed and lost most of its popularity in the meantime due to its complexity (attributes, namespaces…) that makes it hard to deal with XML documents in most programming languages.
JSON is the new cool kid on the block. It’s less complex than XML, maps better into data structures supported by modern programming languages, and has decently fast parser implementations.
Beware XML-to-JSON Information Loss (Junos with Ansible)
When you want to transport a complex data structure between components of a distributed system you’re usually using a platform-independent data encoding format like XML, YAML, or JSON.
XML was the hip encoding format in days when Junos and Cisco Nexus OS was designed and lost most of its popularity in the meantime due to its complexity (attributes, namespaces…) that makes it hard to deal with XML documents in most programming languages.
JSON is the new cool kid on the block. It’s less complex than XML, maps better into data structures supported by modern programming languages, and has decently fast parser implementations.
Networking and Security are Converging. Are You Ready?
Once you've built a networking solution built on the foundation of security-driven networking—one that weaves security and networking functionality into a single system—you're ready for anything.Cisco adds to its Nexus data-center-management software
Cisco has added support for traditional network environments to the company’s recently available data center-management console.
Introduced in October, Cisco’s Nexus Dashboard melds a number of Cisco’s on-premises, cloud and hybrid fabric-management tools into a single interface to administer application lifecycles from provisioning to maintenance and optimization.
The idea is that the dashboard provides a central platform for data center-operation applications to simplify the operation and management of the applications while reducing the infrastructure overhead to run them, according to Cisco.
Managers Must Prep Their Teams For Kubernetes – Video
If the boss demands a Kubernetes deployment, and flies in a team of consultants to get the project off the ground, what should the IT staff be prepared for once the consultants depart? That’s the question in this excerpt of Day Two Cloud podcast “Why Kubernetes Is Wrong For You.” You can listen to the […]
The post Managers Must Prep Their Teams For Kubernetes – Video appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Day Two Cloud 080: Multi-Cloud Isn’t A Myth – We Have Proof
Is multi-cloud real? Some say no, but others know the reality of multi-cloud because they are living it every day. One such human is William Collins, and he joins us to talk through some actual multi-cloud use cases.
The post Day Two Cloud 080: Multi-Cloud Isn’t A Myth – We Have Proof appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Day Two Cloud 080: Multi-Cloud Isn’t A Myth – We Have Proof
Is multi-cloud real? Some say no, but others know the reality of multi-cloud because they are living it every day. One such human is William Collins, and he joins us to talk through some actual multi-cloud use cases.A Name Resolver for the Distributed Web
The Domain Name System (DNS) matches names to resources. Instead of typing 104.18.26.46 to access the Cloudflare Blog, you type blog.cloudflare.com and, using DNS, the domain name resolves to 104.18.26.46, the Cloudflare Blog IP address.
Similarly, distributed systems such as Ethereum and IPFS rely on a naming system to be usable. DNS could be used, but its resolvers’ attributes run contrary to properties valued in distributed Web (dWeb) systems. Namely, dWeb resolvers ideally provide (i) locally verifiable data, (ii) built-in history, and (iii) have no single trust anchor.
At Cloudflare Research, we have been exploring alternative ways to resolve queries to responses that align with these attributes. We are proud to announce a new resolver for the Distributed Web, where IPFS content indexed by the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) can be accessed.
To discover how it has been built, and how you can use it today, read on.
Welcome to the Distributed Web
IPFS and its addressing system
The InterPlanetary FileSystem (IPFS) is a peer-to-peer network for storing content on a distributed file system. It is composed of a set of computers called nodes that store and relay content using a common Continue reading
Developing NetBox Plugin – Part 3 – Adding search panel
Welcome to part 3 of my tutorial walking you through process of developing NetBox plugin. In part 2 we added basic web UI views to our BgpPeering plugin. In this post we'll add search panel to list view to allow us to search/filter Bgp Peering objects.
Developing NetBox Plugin tutorial series
- Developing NetBox Plugin - Part 1 - Setup and initial build
- Developing NetBox Plugin - Part 2 - Adding web UI pages
- Developing NetBox Plugin - Part 3 - Adding search panel
- Developing NetBox Plugin - Part 4 - Small improvements
- Developing NetBox Plugin - Part 5 - Permissions and API
Contents
- Introduction
- Filter class
- Search form class
- Adding form to list view template
- Adding filtering to list view class
- Conclusion
- Resources
- BGP Peering Plugin GitHub repository
Introduction
List view we created for displaying all Bgp Peering objects in one place is very useful. However it will become difficult to find items of interest once we have more than 30-50 objects. For that purpose we should add means of filtering objects to the ones that meet certain criteria.
Other objects in NetBox already have filtering functionality and use search panel located to the right of object tables. Continue reading
Imperative and Declarative API: Another Pile of Marketing Deja-Moo
Looks like some vendor marketers (you know, the same group of people who brought us the switching/routing/bridging stupidity) felt the need to go beyond the usual SDN and intent-based hype and started misusing the imperative versus declarative concepts. Unfortunately some networking engineers fell for the ploy; here’s a typical feedback along these lines I got from one of my readers:
I am frustrated by most people’s shallow understanding API’s, especially the differences between declarative (“what”) and imperative (“how”) API’s, and how that impacts one’s operations. Declarative APIs are the key pillar of what many vendors call “policy” or “intent-based” networking.
Let’s try to unravel that.
Imperative and Declarative API: Another Pile of Marketing Deja-Moo
Looks like some vendor marketers (you know, the same group of people who brought us the switching/routing/bridging stupidity) felt the need to go beyond the usual SDN and intent-based hype and started misusing the imperative versus declarative concepts. Unfortunately some networking engineers fell for the ploy; here’s a typical feedback along these lines I got from one of my readers:
I am frustrated by most people’s shallow understanding API’s, especially the differences between declarative (“what”) and imperative (“how”) API’s, and how that impacts one’s operations. Declarative APIs are the key pillar of what many vendors call “policy” or “intent-based” networking.
Let’s try to unravel that.
Finding Ways of Teaching
Some days ago I tweeted about that when you are trying to master a topic, you should both find different sources to learn from, as well as different mediums, such as reading, listening, watching videos, but also not to forget labbing. I also wrote that teaching someone else is a great way of learning and retaining information yourself. You might be familiar with the saying that “You remember 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 30% of what we see, 80% of what we personally experience, and 95% of what we teach others”. How truthful this statement is, is up for debate, but I think we can all agree that you will recall more of what you have learned if you are teaching the topic to someone, as opposed to just reading about something.
How do you find a place to teach, though?
Thankfully, there are a lot of options today to teach, even some that may not seem obvious at first. Let’s go through a few of them.
Blogging – As you’re reading this blog, hopefully you are learning something. It may not seem like teaching, considering that it’s not a realtime event, but it is Continue reading