Want to Make the Internet Even Better in 2021? Register for Our Special Edition Community Event
Early last year, as people across the world quarantined to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus, the Internet became critical to maintaining a semblance of routine and getting the latest lifesaving information. But there was a stark reality. Those without Internet access would have to grapple without this vital resource amidst a global pandemic.
Internet Society volunteers around the world understood the gravity of the situation. They jumped in to enable secure access.
In North America, NYC Mesh, a community network supported by the Internet Society, rushed to connect as many households as they could. While it was still safe to do so, they crossed rooftops to bring connectivity to some of the city’s most underserved.
In Europe, the Internet Society Italy Chapter launched SOSDigitale to mobilize resources and volunteers to respond to urgent technology gaps. The Portugal Chapter followed with their own SOS Digital campaign to donate computers and digital support to at-risk youth.
And in Latin America, residents of El Cuy, in remote Patagonia, Argentina, were able to reduce their potential exposure to COVID-19 via their newly-established community network, accessing medical prescriptions, education, banking, and government resources online.
No one could have predicted the events of 2020. Continue reading
Holistic web protection: industry recognition for a prolific 2020
I love building products that solve real problems for our customers. These days I don’t get to do so as much directly with our Engineering teams. Instead, about half my time is spent with customers listening to and learning from their security challenges, while the other half of my time is spent with other Cloudflare Product Managers (PMs) helping them solve these customer challenges as simply and elegantly as possible. While I miss the deeply technical engineering discussions, I am proud to have the opportunity to look back every year on all that we’ve shipped across our application security teams.
Taking the time to reflect on what we’ve delivered also helps to reinforce my belief in the Cloudflare approach to shipping product: release early, stay close to customers for feedback, and iterate quickly to deliver incremental value. To borrow a term from the investment world, this approach brings the benefits of compounded returns to our customers: we put new products that solve real-world problems into their hands as quickly as possible, and then reinvest the proceeds of our shared learnings immediately back into the product.
It is these sustained investments that allow us to release a flurry of small improvements Continue reading
Why Multi-Cloud Will Dominate 2021
Added cloud architecture will be needed to support the accelerated shift to remote work as many workers remain at home this year.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