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Cloudflare Dashboard and API Outage on April 15, 2020

Starting at 1531 UTC and lasting until 1952 UTC, the Cloudflare Dashboard and API were unavailable because of the disconnection of multiple, redundant fibre connections from one of our two core data centers.

This outage was not caused by a DDoS attack, or related to traffic increases caused by the COVID-19 crisis. Nor was it caused by any malfunction of software or hardware, or any misconfiguration.

What happened

As part of planned maintenance at one of our core data centers, we instructed technicians to remove all the equipment in one of our cabinets. That cabinet contained old inactive equipment we were going to retire and had no active traffic or data on any of the servers in the cabinet. The cabinet also contained a patch panel (switchboard of cables) providing all external connectivity to other Cloudflare data centers. Over the space of three minutes, the technician decommissioning our unused hardware also disconnected the cables in this patch panel.

This data center houses Cloudflare’s main control plane and database and as such, when we lost connectivity, the Dashboard and API became unavailable immediately. The Cloudflare network itself continued to operate normally and proxied customer websites and applications continued to operate. As Continue reading

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Samsung Taps Xilinx for 5G Beamforming

Xilinx announced the Versal adaptive compute acceleration platform platform in September 2019 and...

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Kernel of Truth season 3 episode 4: Production Ready Automation

Subscribe to Kernel of Truth on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Cast Box and Sticher!

Click here for our previous episode.

In this episode hosts Roopa Prabhu and Brian O’Sullivan chat with Justin Betz about production grade automation and CI/CD workflows for continuous maintenance and deployment of your “infrastructure as code.” They also discuss how like any other software code, code to manage and automate your infrastructure (IAC) has to be maintained, fixed, withstand hardware and software upgrades — so how do you do that? Finally, the group talks about Open Source production quality automation code. Enjoy!

Guest Bios

Roopa Prabhu: Roopa Prabhu is Chief Linux Architect at Cumulus Networks. At Cumulus she and her team work on all things kernel networking and Linux system infrastructure areas. Her primary focus areas in the Linux kernel are Linux bridge, Netlink, VxLAN, Lightweight tunnels. She is currently focused on building Linux kernel dataplane for E-VPN. She loves working at Cumulus and with the Linux kernel networking and debian communities. Her past experience includes Linux clusters, ethernet drivers and Linux KVM virtualization platforms. She has a BS and MS in Computer Science. You can find her on Twitter at @__roopa.

Continue reading

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Daily Roundup: Awake Security Displaces Cisco

Awake Security displaced Cisco; Ericsson beat out 5G rivals; and Viptela CEO launched multi-cloud...

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Cisco says to patch critical UCS security holes now

Cisco has posted a package of 17 critical security warnings about authentication vulnerabilities in its Unified Computing System that could let attackers break into systems or cause denial of service troubles.Specifically the problems are with Cisco’s UCS Director and Express which let customers build private-cloud systems and support automated provisioning processes and orchestration to optimize and simplify delivery of data-center resources, the company said.To read this article in full, please click here

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How Secure SD-WAN is the Foundation for Retail SD-Branch

Retail SD-branch needs a secure connection to ensure that customer data is kept safe. Secure SD-WAN...

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Harvesting ambient energy will power IoT, scientists say

Stray, ambient magnetic fields that are naturally created from electricity usage should be captured, diverted, and converted into power for Internet of Things sensors, researchers say."Just like sunlight is a free source of energy we try to harvest, so are magnetic fields," said Shashank Priya, professor of materials science and engineering and associate vice president for research at Penn State, in a statement published on the university's web site. "We have this ubiquitous energy present in our homes, office spaces, work spaces and cars. It's everywhere, and we have an opportunity to harvest this background noise and convert it to useable electricity."To read this article in full, please click here

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Nuage Tags Asavie for SD-WAN Extension

The deal will see Nuage pair its SD-WAN 2.0 offering with Asavie’s SD Edge platform announced...

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Ericsson Beats Out 5G Rivals to Replace BT’s Huawei Gear

The U.K. government is requiring operators to limit the use of Huawei equipment in the core of 5G...

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Pushing BGP Flowspec rules to multiple routers

Real-time DDoS mitigation using BGP RTBH and Flowspec describes the open source DDoS Protect application. The software runs on the sFlow-RT real-time analytics engine, which receives industry standard sFlow telemetry from routers and pushes controls using BGP. A recent enhancement to the application pushes controls to multiple routers in order to protect networks with redundant edge routers.

ddos_protect.router=10.0.0.96,10.0.0.97

Configuring multiple BGP connections is simple, the ddos_protect.router configuration option has been extended to accept a comma separated list of IP addresses for the routers that will be connecting to the controller.
Alternatively, a BGP Flowspec/RTBH reflector can be used to propagate the controls. Flowspec is a recent addition to open source BGP software, FRR and Bird, and it should be possible to use this software to reflect Flowspec controls. A reflector can be a useful place to implement policies that direct controls to specific enforcement devices.

Support for multiple BGP connections in the DDoS Protect application reduces the complexity of simple deployments by removing the requirement for a reflector. Controls are pushed to all devices, but differentiated policies can still be implemented by configuring each device's response to controls.

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Awake Security Scores $36M, Displaces Cisco, RSA, and Darktrace

Earlier this year Awake partnered with Google Cloud, which extended its network traffic analysis...

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Test Lab Automation for Business Continuity in the Time of COVID-19

With COVID-19-related shelter-in-place orders in effect in nearly every corner of the world, the high-tech industry is coming to grips...

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Offer of Assistance to Governments During COVID-19

As the COVID-19 emergency continues to affect countries and territories around the world, the Internet has been a key factor in providing information to the public. As businesses, organizations and government agencies adjust to this new normal, we recognize the strain that this pandemic has put on the groups working to assist in virus mitigation and provide accurate information to the general public on the state of the pandemic.

At Cloudflare, this means ensuring that these entities have the necessary tools and resources available to them in these extenuating circumstances. On March 13, we announced our Cloudflare for Teams products will be free until September 1, 2020, to ensure Cloudflare users and prospective users have the tools they need to support secure and efficient remote work. Additionally, we have removed usage caps for existing Cloudflare for Teams users and are also providing onboarding sessions so these groups can continue business in this new normal.

As a company, we believe we can do more and have been thinking about ways we can support organizations and businesses that are at the forefront of the pandemic such as health officials and those providing relief to the public. Many organizations have reached out to Continue reading

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Day Two Cloud 044: Dev+Ops, Ops+Dev

Derek Campbell joins Day Two Cloud for a discussion about DevOps. Of course, DevOps has been discussed to death across the IT landscape, so we drill into specifics with Derek to get his unique take, which he delivers with a Scottish accent. Even if you can't make out what he's saying, you've love listening to him.

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Day Two Cloud 044: Dev+Ops, Ops+Dev

Derek Campbell joins Day Two Cloud for a discussion about DevOps. Of course, DevOps has been discussed to death across the IT landscape, so we drill into specifics with Derek to get his unique take, which he delivers with a Scottish accent. Even if you can't make out what he's saying, you've love listening to him.

The post Day Two Cloud 044: Dev+Ops, Ops+Dev appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Q&A with Devo: COVID-19 Is Changing the Cloud Conversation

How do companies manage the security implications of working from home, in a country where remote work has generally been frowned on? Devo, a data analytics and security platform with headquarters in Madrid, helps companies get visibility into their networks — something that has become even more critical as more companies rely on virtual private network (VPNs) to security connect team members working from home.  We spoke with Devo, and carloyuen from 

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When All You Have Are Stretched VLANs…

Let’s agree for a millisecond that you can’t find any other way to migrate your workload into a public cloud than to move the existing VMs one-by-one without renumbering them. Doing a clumsy cloud migration like this will get you the headaches and the cloud bill you deserve, but that’s a different story. Today we’ll talk about being clumsy the right and the wrong way.

There are two ways of solving today’s challenge:

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Alkira Claims Multi-Cloud Cure, $30M in Funding

Founded by brothers Atif Khan and Amir Khan, former Viptela CEO, Alkira Cloud Services Exchange...

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5G, Edge (Mostly) Unencumbered by Pandemic

Capex spending on 5G network deployments will decline 10% globally this year, but those activities...

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IBM extends z15 mainframe family, intensifies Linux security

IBM continued to reshape the mainframe with an eye toward further integrating it within hybrid clouds and securing Linux-based workloads.On the hardware side, IBM rolled out two entry-level, 19” single-frame, air-cooled platforms, the  z15 Model T02 and LinuxONE III Model LT2. The new machines are extensions of the IBM z15 family that Big Blue rolled out in September of last year. To read this article in full, please click here