Starting a WISP: guide to selecting a routing architecture
Understanding the choices – why is routing design so important?
Routing is the foundation of every IP network. Even a router as small as the one in your home has a routing table and makes routing decisions.
Selecting a routing architecture is a critical but often overlooked step to ensure that a startup WISP can provide the necessary performance, scalability and resiliency to its subscribers.
This post will go through each the major design types and highlight pros/cons and when it is appropriate to use a particular routing architecture.
A note on IPv6
Dual stack is assumed in all of the designs presented. The cost of IPv4 public will continue to climb.
It’s no longer a scalable option in 2020 to build an ISP network without at least a plan for IPv6 and ideally a production implementation.
1. Flat network (aka bridged network)
“Behind the L3 boundary, there be L2 dragons”
-ancient network proverb
Unfortunately, this is often the worst choice for all but the smallest WISPs that don’t have any plans to scale beyond 1 to 100 subscribers.
Bridged networks with one or more subnets in the same L2 broadcast domain are the most commonly deployed routing design that Continue reading
Extend Fortinet FortiGate to Kubernetes with Calico Enterprise 2.7
We are excited to announce the general availability of Calico Enterprise 2.7. With this release, Fortinet’s 400,000 customers can use FortiGate to enforce network security policies into and out of the Kubernetes cluster as well as traffic between pods within the cluster.
- Kubernetes workloads populate the Fortigate GUI
- The network team can then create and enforce policies in Fortigate and have them enforced as Calico Policy
- Saves time and money and lets the network team retain the firewall responsibility (which also frees up time for ITOps)
We have also added many new exciting capabilities that help platform engineers blow through barriers blocking their path to production, and advanced cybersecurity capabilities for those already running production workloads.
- Manage Network Security Across Multiple Kubernetes Clusters
- Enforce a Common Set of Security Controls Across Multiple Clusters
- Detect and Alert on Unauthorized Changes and Other Attack Vectors
- Self-Service Troubleshooting for End Users
- Detect and Prevent Malicious Data Exfiltration
Manage Network Security Across Multiple Kubernetes Clusters
As the adoption of Kubernetes continues to accelerate, our customers are seeing the number of clusters in their environments rapidly multiplying. This has created a management challenge for IT Ops teams who are constantly pushed to find ways Continue reading
Why I’m Excited to Join Cloudflare as its First CIO
I am delighted to share that I have joined Cloudflare as its first Chief Information Officer to help scale the company in this new phase of its business. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be joining Cloudflare, and I am grateful for the opportunity to do my part to help build a better Internet.
At one of my previous companies, I made a bet on Cloudflare to equip us with security and performance solutions across a very decentralized global set of products and services. This is something that would have been very difficult without a cloud solution like Cloudflare’s. Since then I’ve been watching Cloudflare grow, and have always been very impressed by the speed of innovation and transparency, but also how Cloudflare operates: doing the right thing, with integrity, and above all building trust with customers and partners. The “do the right thing, even if it’s hard” mentality that I saw from Cloudflare since I started doing business with them as a customer, was key for me. When I heard that Cloudflare was looking for its first CIO I was excited to have a discussion to see if I could help.
During the interview process I got a sense Continue reading
Getting Rusty
Early this year I wrote about returning to first principles. I think this desire to dive deeper is a natural continuation of my goal of becoming a more well-rounded technologist. While it’s good to know and exploit your strengths, I think it’s also healthy to try and fill gaps where you see them, and I feel this is an area that warrants some focus for me. One way that I’ll be working towards this focus in 2020 is learning Rust.Daily Roundup: Coronavirus Cancels More Tech Events
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RPKI and the RTR protocol
Today’s Internet requires stronger protection within its core routing system and as we have already said: it's high time to stop BGP route leaks and hijacks by deploying operationally-excellent RPKI!
Luckily, over the last year plus a lot of good work has happened in this arena. If you’ve been following the growth of RPKI’s validation data, then you’ll know that more and more networks are signing their routes and creating ROA’s or Route Origin Authorizations. These are cryptographically-signed assertions of the validity of an announced IP block and contribute to the further securing of the global routing table that makes for a safer Internet.
The protocol that we have not written much about is RTR. The Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) to Router Protocol - or RTR Protocol for short. Today we’re fixing that.
RPKI rewind
We have written a few times about RPKI (here and here). We have written about how Cloudflare both signs its announced routes and filters its routing inbound from other networks (both transits and peers) using RPKI data. We also added our efforts in the open-source software space with the release of the Cloudflare RPKI Toolkit.
The primary part of the RPKI (Resource Continue reading
Addressing the Web’s Client-Side Security Challenge
Modern web architecture relies heavily on JavaScript and enabling third-party code to make client-side network requests. These innovations are built on client-heavy frameworks such as Angular, Ember, React, and Backbone that leverage the processing power of the browser to enable the execution of code directly on the client interface/web browser. These third-party integrations provide richness (chat tools, images, fonts) or extract analytics (Google Analytics). Today, up to 70% of the code executing and rendering on your customer’s browser comes from these integrations. All of these software integrations provide avenues for potential vulnerabilities.
Unfortunately, these unmanaged, unmonitored integrations operate without security consideration, providing an expansive attack surface that attackers have routinely exploited to compromise websites. Today, only 2% of the Alexa 1000 global websites were found to deploy client-side security measures to protect websites and web applications against attacks such as Magecart, XSS, credit card skimming, session redirects and website defacement.
Improving website security and ensuring performance with Cloudflare Workers
In this post, we focus on how Cloudflare Workers can be used to improve security and ensure the high performance of web applications. Tala has joined Cloudflare’s marketplace to further our common goals of ensuring website security, preserving data privacy and Continue reading
The Myth of Lossless vMotion
As a response to my Live vMotion into VMware-on-AWS Cloud blog post Nico Vilbert pointed me to his blog post explaining the details of cross-Atlantic vMotion into AWS.
Today I will not go into yet another rant pointing out all the things that can go wrong, but focus on a minor detail: “no ping was dropped in the process.”
The vMotion is instantaneous and lossless myth has been propagated since the early days of vMotion when sysadmins proudly demonstrated what seemed to be pure magic to amazed audiences… including the now-traditional terminal window running ping and not losing a single packet.
Read more ...The Myth of Lossless vMotion
As a response to my Live vMotion into VMware-on-AWS Cloud blog post Nico Vilbert pointed me to his blog post explaining the details of cross-Atlantic vMotion into AWS.
Today I will not go into yet another rant pointing out all the things that can go wrong, but focus on a minor detail: “no ping was dropped in the process.”
The vMotion is instantaneous and lossless myth has been propagated since the early days of vMotion when sysadmins proudly demonstrated what seemed to be pure magic to amazed audiences… including the now-traditional terminal window running ping and not losing a single packet.
Virtual Conferences – Nice In Theory
As COVID-19 (Corona) has spread around the world, and while we can argue how serious that is, a lot of tech conferences have been cancelled, and rightfully so. Safety always comes first.
People have suggested that virtual conferences could be a replacement, but as I’ll explain in this blog, they can never really replace a standard conference, rather just be a complement.
First, let me just clear a couple of things:
- Safety comes first, if the prize of safety is to cancel a tech conference, that’s a small prize to pay
- We should generally try to travel less and replace some of the travel with the use of collaboration apps such as Webex, Zoom etc
- There are virtual conferences, such as the PacketPushers VDC, that do work in a virtual format
The first challenge is that we are all in different time zones. When I go to Cisco Live in the US, I adjust to the US time. If I’m staying here in Sweden, I’m not going to stay up late to watch a stream coming from the US.
When you travel to a conference, you are away from work and family, you have dedicated that time to make the Continue reading
The First Ethiopia Internet Development Conference: Meeting Challenge and Opportunity Head On
When it comes to Ethiopia’s future online, there are many reasons to feel optimistic.
The country has one of the fastest-growing economies in the region, is strategically placed, and has a population of over 105 million, 60% of whom are under the age of 30. All of these are assets to make it a regional digital giant.
But this won’t happen unless Ethiopia takes some strategic moves. Internet penetration is still very low compared to its peers in Africa. The rural areas are still largely unconnected to the Internet. Only cities enjoy 3G access and 4G is only available in the capital. In spite of successive price cuts by Ethio telecom in the last year, the Internet is not affordable for the majority of Ethiopians.
It’s not that the government has not wanted to connect the rural areas. In fact, the rationale that the Ethiopian government had to keep the monopoly was to use the money generated from cities to invest in the rural areas. However, this strategy has clearly not worked since Ethiopia’s rural areas are not better connected than those in countries that have not had a government monopoly on the sector, such as Kenya.
It is Continue reading
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Internet Society Ethiopia Chapter Launched Today!
We are excited about the momentum behind Ethiopia.
It is a rare moment in any country’s history to undergo such a positive transformation. It’s a time of immense optimism and investment potential. It’s not a surprise as the country also has one of the fastest-growing economies in the region, is strategically placed, and has a young population of over 105 million – half of whom are under the age of 18.
While we’ve been active in the Internet world for many years, the time to start a Chapter in Ethiopia is absolutely now. With that, let me share our “why” and introduce ourselves.
We are the Internet Society Ethiopia Chapter.
The idea of starting an Internet Society Chapter came to us during a workshop in the city of Bahir Dar, where we became conscious of the fact that more than 85% of the Ethiopia population is losing countless opportunities every day because they don’t have access to the Internet. We believe the Internet is for everyone and we are here to work with all people – from communities to businesses to governments and ordinary people to connect the unconnected and create a bigger and stronger Internet in Ethiopia. What drives Continue reading