Today's Heavy Networking explores what it's like to get deeply into programming while still being attached to the world of networking. We discuss the transition from day-to-day networking tasks to spending more time with code, the role of programming in automation, and more. Our guests are Matt Stone, Brent Salisbury, Dave Tucker, and Daryn Johnson.
The post Heavy Networking 508: Should Network Engineers Learn Advanced Programming Languages? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Cloudflare’s network processes more than fourteen million HTTP requests per second at peak for Internet users around the world. We spend a lot of time thinking about the tools we use to make those requests faster and more secure, but a secret-sauce which makes all of this possible is how we distribute configuration globally. Every time a user makes a change to their DNS, adds a Worker, or makes any of hundreds of other changes to their configuration, we distribute that change to 200 cities in 90 countries where we operate hardware. And we do that within seconds. The system that does this needs to not only be fast, but also impeccably reliable: more than 26 million Internet properties are depending on it. It also has had to scale dramatically as Cloudflare has grown over the past decade.
Historically, we built this system on top of the Kyoto Tycoon (KT) datastore. In the early days, it served us incredibly well. We contributed support for encrypted replication and wrote a foreign data wrapper for PostgreSQL. However, what worked for the first 25 cities was starting to show its age as we passed 100. In the summer of 2015 we decided to Continue reading

Random and hard to know
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With webinars being the only way to deliver training content these days, we’ll run one every week in April 2020:
Starting on April 2nd I’ll talk about one of my favorite topics: switching, bridging and routing, covering almost everything ever invented from virtual circuits and source route bridging to so-called routing at layer-2 and IP forwarding based on host routes;
I was planning to update the Introduction to Containers and Docker material for ages… but then had to move the December 2019 workshop to March 2020, only to cancel it a week before the coronavirus exploded for real in Switzerland. I hope I’ll manage to deliver the online version on April 9th ;)
Dinesh Dutt is back on April 16th with an update of Network Automation Tools webinar, in which he’ll cover (among other things) the new network automation tools launched since we did the original webinar in 2016.
On April 23rd Pete Lumbis plans to dive as deep into the intricacies of switching ASICs as he can without violating an NDA ;)
“Everyone wants to forget the radios, and the radios are what makes wireless wireless," Steve...
Hello my friend,
So far you have learned about the for loop and if conditional. Both of these tools are very useful and have a wide area of the applicability inside the network automation filed. But what if we need to do some activities in your Python code continuously until a certain condition becomes False? The answer you will find in this blogpost.
Don’t wait to be kicked out of IT business. Join our network automation training to secure your job in future. Come to NetDevOps side.

How does the training differ from this blog post series? Here you get the basics and learn some programming concepts in general, whereas in the training you get comprehensive set of knowledge with the detailed examples how to use Python for the network and IT automation. You need both.
While loop is a specific type of the loop in Python, which is being executed infinitely while the associated condition is True. All the knowledge you got about the if conditionals are applicable here as well.
Read the if conditional blogpost for more details.
Therefore, while instruction requires careful planing Continue reading
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It’s never been more crucial to help remote workforces stay fully operational — for the sake of countless individuals, businesses, and the economy at large. In light of this, Cloudflare recently launched a program that offers our Cloudflare for Teams suite for free to any company, of any size, through September 1. Some of these firms have been curious about how Cloudflare itself uses these tools.
Here’s how Cloudflare’s next-generation VPN alternative, Cloudflare Access, came to be.
Rewind to 2015. Back then, as with many other companies, all of Cloudflare’s internally-hosted applications were reached via a hardware-based VPN. When one of our on-call engineers received a notification (usually on their phone), they would fire up a clunky client on their laptop, connect to the VPN, and log on to Grafana.
It felt a bit like solving a combination lock with a fire alarm blaring overhead.

But for three of our engineers enough was enough. Why was a cloud network security company relying on clunky on-premise hardware?
And thus, Cloudflare Access was born.
Many of the products Cloudflare builds are a direct result of the challenges our own team is looking to address, and Access is a Continue reading


With so many people at Cloudflare now working remotely, it's worth stepping back and looking at the systems we use to get work done and how we protect them. Over the years we've migrated from a traditional "put it behind the VPN!" company to a modern zero-trust architecture. Cloudflare hasn’t completed its journey yet, but we're pretty darn close. Our general strategy: protect every internal app we can with Access (our zero-trust access proxy), and simultaneously beef up our VPN’s security with Spectrum (a product allowing the proxying of arbitrary TCP and UDP traffic, protecting it from DDoS).
Before Access, we had many services behind VPN (Cisco ASA running AnyConnect) to enforce strict authentication and authorization. But VPN always felt clunky: it's difficult to set up, maintain (securely), and scale on the server side. Each new employee we onboarded needed to learn how to configure their client. But migration takes time and involves many different teams. While we migrated services one by one, we focused on the high priority services first and worked our way down. Until the last service is moved to Access, we still maintain our VPN, keeping it protected with Spectrum.
Some of our services didn't Continue reading
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Ready, set, launch: An Internet Society Chapter launched recently in Ethiopia, with a goal of advocating for the development and expansion of open, secure, trustworthy, and affordable Internet access to everyone in the country. The idea of starting an Internet Society Chapter came from a workshop, “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,” wrote Adugna Necho, a networking professor at Bahir Dar University. “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.”
More Internet, please: The Internet will keep people connected while the world deals with the coronavirus pandemic, the India Chennai Chapter notes. Governments should resist urges to shut down service, the Chapter says. “With factories, offices, public places, transportation, schools are colleges shut down, and no clear picture of whether normal life would resume in 4 weeks or 4 months, it is the Internet that could make life go on,” the Chapter writes. “While it is Continue reading
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I’m a huge fan of video games. I love playing them, especially on my old consoles from my formative years. The original Nintendo consoles were my childhood friends as much as anything else. By the time I graduated from high school, everyone had started moving toward the Sony Playstation. I didn’t end up buying into that ecosystem as I started college. Instead, I just waited for my brother to pick up a new console and give me his old one.
This meant I was always behind the curve on getting to play the latest games. I was fine with that, since the games I wanted to play were on the old console. The new one didn’t have anything that interested me. And by the time the games that I wanted to play did come out it wouldn’t be long until my brother got a new one anyway. But one thing I kept hearing was that the Playstation was backwards compatible with the old generation of games. I could buy a current console and play most of the older games on it. I wondered how they managed to pull that off since Nintendo never did.
When I was older, I did Continue reading
As a leading supplier of cloud networking equipment globally, Arista plays a critical role in supporting the cloud communications and computing infrastructure that will keep the world running during these difficult times. The rapid acceleration of Covid-19 developments across the world has been sudden and shocking. It has forced us to take a new perspective on gratitude for what we have, including our families, health and an opportunity to rethink our goals.