Video: ASICs 101
Earlier this year, Pete Lumbis returned as an ipSpace.net webinar guest speaker with a great presentation describing data center switching ASICs from the perspective of networking engineers. After a brief intro, he started with ASIC Basics… a topic which generated a 25-minute Q&A session.
All of the above-mentioned videos are available with Free ipSpace.net Subscription.
Taking the ‘hands-on’ out of data center administration
Discussions about networking in a work-from-home world often focus on employees and endpoints, but how can network administrators do more than just keep the lights on if they can’t go to the data center? Maintaining what exists isn’t enough, especially as the entire world is redefining the future of work. Organizations need to be able to adapt to change, so how is that possible when administrators can’t go hands on?
There are any number of remote administration options available today, and any number of ways to compare them. Deciding between them is all about finding the right balance between cost, capability, and the labor intensity of implementation. In other words, they’re subject to all of the same considerations as any other technology implementation.
To dispense with the network administration 101 portion of the discussion*, yes, networking is mostly a matter of remote administration anyway. If you can remote into something that has access to the management network, you can use SSH, HTTPS, or what-have-you to administer networks just as you would if you were in the office. That’s maintenance, not change.
Accomplishing change remotely and at scale requires automation and orchestration. In practice, this is heavily dependent upon virtualization and/or Continue reading
Achieving CI Velocity at Tigera using Semaphore
Tigera serves the networking and policy enforcement needs of more than 150,000 Kubernetes clusters across the globe and supports two product lines: open source Calico, and Calico Enterprise. Our development team is constantly running smoke, system, unit, and functional verification tests, as well as all our E2Es for these products. Our CI pipelines form an extremely important aspect of the overall IT infrastructure and enable us to test our products and catch bugs before release.
We eventually reached a point where we needed to adopt a complete continuous integration and delivery architecture to maintain our development velocity, from code push to Kubernetes. We decided to adopt the hosted CI solution from Semaphore as an integral part of our workflow. Our test rigs on Semaphore ensure that the product is tested on three Kubernetes versions on seven different platforms, including Kubeadm, GKE, EKS, AKS, OpenShift, Rancher, and Kops. As a result, a typical pipeline can have up to 100 jobs distributed over various stages. We also have different pipelines to test our code and build Docker images for it.
Here’s a run for one of the components of our open source offering: All the Continue reading
The Growing Security Priority for DevOps and Cloud Migration
Survey asserts security may be increasingly top of mind, but many organizations are unsatisfied with their current footing on that front.Let World Alzheimer’s Day Remind Us to Take Our Own Brain Health Seriously
In the list of diseases that can affect your brain, Alzheimer’s disease is a critical one. From it not only affects the biology of the brain, it also affects the personality of the person. That is why it is necessary to talk about Alzheimer’s, because talking about this disease helps create awareness about brain health. On World Alzheimer’s Day, Sept. 21, 2020, talking about it will help create a sense of seriousness and importance.
How to Keep Your Brain Healthy
There are some diseases that are inevitable. That means that they cannot be stopped from occurring, but what an individual can do is make sure that you keep your brain health better and active.
Sleep Better
By sleeping better, you are making sure that your brain is getting the right rest. This means that you make sure that you are being provided with a situation where you are resting and your brain is working actively to make sure that it keeps you and your body healthy. That is why a good night’s sleep can help not only elevate your mood but also help keep you healthy and strong.
Eat Well and Healthy
By eating healthy and well, you will Continue reading
Migrating cdnjs to serverless with Workers KV
Cloudflare powers cdnjs, an open-source project that accelerates websites by delivering popular JavaScript libraries and resources via Cloudflare’s network. Since our major update in December, we focused on remodelling cdnjs for scalability and resilience. Today, we are excited to announce how Cloudflare delivers cdnjs—a migration to a serverless infrastructure using Cloudflare Workers and its distributed key-value store Workers KV!
What is cdnjs?
For those unfamiliar, cdnjs is an acronym describing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for JavaScript (JS). A CDN simply refers to a geographically distributed network of servers that provide Internet content, whether it is memes, cat videos, or HTML pages. In our case, the CDN refers to Cloudflare’s ever expanding network of over 200 globally distributed data centers.
And here’s why this is relevant to you: it makes page load times lightning-fast. Virtually every website you visit needs to fetch JS libraries in order to load, including this one. Let’s say you visit a Sydney-based website that contains a local file from jQuery, a popular library found in 76.2% of websites. If you are located in New York, you may notice a delay, as it can easily exceed 300ms to fetch the file—not to mention Continue reading
Disaster Recovery: a Vendor Marketing Tale
Several engineers formerly working for a large virtualization vendor were pretty upset with me when I claimed that the virtualization consultants promote “disaster recovery using stretched VLANs” designs instead of alternatives that would implement proper separation of failure domains.
Guess what… it’s even worse than I thought.
Here’s a sequence of comments I received after reposting one of my “disaster recovery doesn’t need stretched VLANs” blog posts on LinkedIn sometime in late 2019:
DNS Query Privacy Revisited
A year has passed since we first looked at the level of use of Query Name Minimisation in the DNS and at the time the results were not impressive. It's time to relook at this topic and see what has changed in the DNS resolution environment over the past 12 months.A smarter emacs
I’ve been running Emacs for like 25 years. But I’ve never really configured it with anything fancy.
Sure, I’ve set some shortcut keys, and enabled global-font-lock-mode
and set indent size, but that’s almost it.
All my coding is done in tmux&Emacs. One project gets exactly one tmux
session. Window 0 is emacs. Window 1 is make && ./a.out (sometimes
split panes to tail logs or run both server and client), and to run
git commands. The remaining windows are used for various things like
reading manpages etc….
I have that same workflow whether I’m editing a blog post or doing kernel programming.
This way I can work at my desk with large and plentiful screens, and then move to my laptop and everything continues working exactly the same.
tmux I’ve customized, but not that much with Emacs.
So, step one to get my coding environment to be less 1995, and more 2020: make my editor understand my code, and show me stuff about it.
I’m learning as I’m going, and writing what I’m learning. As always if you see something wrong then please leave a comment.
Code annotations and other semantic understanding
The way to do this is Continue reading
Spotlight on NSX Performance at VMworld 2020
As we ramp up towards one of the premiere online tech events — in one of the most extraordinary years of a lifetime — I would like to shine a spotlight on what is being planned around NSX performance during this year’s virtual conference to help you get the most out of the event. VMWorld 2020 is right around the corner — and for the first time in two decades, it’s free! So, Register Now if you haven’t done so already!
NSX Performance Thus Far
Over the years, we’ve looked at the NSX performance numbers with and without hardware-level features, such as Geneve Offload and Geneve Rx Filters, that are key to optimal performance. If these topics are new to you, I would encourage reading up on the performance section of the NSX-T Reference Design Guide for a working knowledge of NSX-T performance before attending this year’s NSX-T Performance Session at VMworld.
NSX-T Performance Session at VMworld 2020
Given the virtual format of this year’s NSX-T Performance Session, I’ve decided to take a slightly different approach. Not only will I share performance numbers, but I’ll also demonstrate how different hardware-level features influence performance, and I’ll discuss feature and tuning Continue reading
My Thoughts on LinkedIn in 2020
LinkedIn originated with a focus on connecting professionals and contacts were supposed to be people that you know or worked with. The early team worked hard to build a monopoly/network effect around business connections. Much of LinkedIn’s interface usability stems from that design intention. Now there is tension between what was LinkedIn was 10 years […]
The Hedge Podcast 51: Tim Fiola and pyNTM
Have you ever looked at your wide area network and wondered … what would the traffic flows look like if this link or that router failed? Traffic modeling of this kind is widely available in commercial tools, which means it’s been hard to play with these kinds of tools, learn how they work, and understand how they can be effective. There is, however, an open source alternative—pyNTM. While this tool won’t replace a commercial tool, it can give you “enough to go on” for many network operators, and give you the experience and understanding needed to justify springing for a commercial product.
Day Two Cloud 065: Building Your Cloud On-Ramp With SD-WAN
SD-WAN vendors offer a variety of mechanisms to connect end users to cloud applications while incorporating policy and performance requirements. Day Two Cloud co-host Ethan Banks interviewed many of these vendors to understand the architectural nitty-gritty of different approaches. In this episode, he shares the fruits of his research.
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