NB460: VMware Ditches Perpetual Licenses; GenAI Is Coming To Network Ops
Broadcom’s VMware has announced an end to perpetual licensing, network automation provider Anuta Networks is adding generative AI capabilities to its Atom platform, and high-end firewall revenues dip but campus switch sales soared in Q3 2023. The Open Networking Foundation, which oversaw open projects around software-defined networking, is closing its doors and folding its projects... Read more »Production Reductions
You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t been writing quite as much this year as I have in years past. I finally hit the wall that comes for all content creators. A combination of my job and the state of the industry meant that I found myself slipping off my self-appointed weekly posting schedule more and more often in 2023. In fact, there were several times I skipped a whole week to get put something out every other week, especially in the latter half of the year.
I’ve always wanted to keep the content level high around here and give my audience things to think about. As the year wore on I found myself running out of those ideas as portions of the industry slowed down. If other people aren’t getting excited about tech why should I? Sure, I could probably write about Wi-Fi 7 or SD-WAN or any number of topics over and over again but it’s harder to repeat yourself for an audience that takes a more critical eye to your writing than it is for someone that just wants to churn out material.
My Bruce Wayne job kept me busy this year. I’m proud of all the content Continue reading
Integrating Turnstile with the Cloudflare WAF to challenge fetch requests
Two months ago, we made Cloudflare Turnstile generally available — giving website owners everywhere an easy way to fend off bots, without ever issuing a CAPTCHA. Turnstile allows any website owner to embed a frustration-free Cloudflare challenge on their website with a simple code snippet, making it easy to help ensure that only human traffic makes it through. In addition to protecting a website’s frontend, Turnstile also empowers web administrators to harden browser-initiated (AJAX) API calls running under the hood. These APIs are commonly used by dynamic single-page web apps, like those created with React, Angular, Vue.js.
Today, we’re excited to announce that we have integrated Turnstile with the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF). This means that web admins can add the Turnstile code snippet to their websites, and then configure the Cloudflare WAF to manage these requests. This is completely customizable using WAF Rules; for instance, you can allow a user authenticated by Turnstile to interact with all of an application’s API endpoints without facing any further challenges, or you can configure certain sensitive endpoints, like Login, to always issue a challenge.
Challenging fetch requests in the Cloudflare WAF
Millions of websites protected by Cloudflare’s WAF leverage our Continue reading
Review: Unnumbered Interfaces in netlab
A while ago, Chris Parker published a nice blog post explaining how to configure unnumbered interfaces with IS-IS in Junos. It’s well worth reading, but like my Unnumbered Ethernet Interfaces blog post, it only covers one network operating system. What if you want to do something similar on another platform?
How about using the collective efforts of the team developing device configuration templates for netlab? As of December 2023 netlab supports:
Review: Unnumbered Interfaces in netlab
A while ago, Chris Parker published a nice blog post explaining how to configure unnumbered interfaces with IS-IS in Junos. It’s well worth reading, but like my Unnumbered Ethernet Interfaces blog post, it only covers one network operating system. What if you want to do something similar on another platform?
How about using the collective efforts of the team developing device configuration templates for netlab? As of December 2023 netlab supports:
Cybersecurity, Cloud and AI: Top-of-mind themes heading into 2024
Recently I had the opportunity to host a group of forward-thinking CISOs, CIOs and other executive decision makers drawn from several enterprise organizations in the United States. The goal was to frame perspectives on trends and priorities emerging within their respective organizations while co-relating to broader industry trends. Specifically, the intent here was not to x-ray the requirements of any single organization, but rather to identify, detect and understand patterns that could, in turn guide priorities over the next few years, benefiting the broader community. The discussions unearthed a lot of commonality in terms of shared pain points and higher order goals, and I thank the leaders that participated in the exercise, as well as the talented members of my team that came together to create a successful forum for discussion.
This multi-part blog series will summarize prominent patterns and insights that emerged from these sessions, that would hopefully serve as guideposts for the next 12-24 months, mostly in the areas of security, cloud infrastructure and deployment models.
Over a few sessions, broadly we had the cohort dive engage along three axis –
- The first was to really examine their top pain points. Issues, that if solved, would help Continue reading
Debian on IPng’s VPP Routers
Introduction
When IPng Networks first built out a european network, I was running the Disaggregated Network Operating System [ref], initially based on AT&T’s “dNOS” software framework. Over time though, the DANOS project slowed down, and the developers with whom I had a pretty good relationship all left for greener pastures.
In 2019, Pierre Pfister (and several others) built a VPP router sandbox [ref], which graduated into a feature called the Linux Control Plane plugin [ref]. Lots of folks put in an effort for the Linux Control Plane, notably Neale Ranns from Cisco (these days Graphiant), and Matt Smith and Jon Loeliger from Netgate (who ship this as TNSR [ref], check it out!). I helped as well, by adding a bunch of Netlink handling and VPP->Linux synchronization code, which I’ve written about a bunch on this blog in the 2021 VPP development series [ref].
At the time, Ubuntu and CentOS were the supported platforms, so I installed a bunch of Ubuntu machines when doing the deploy with my buddy Fred from IP-Max [ref]. But as time went by, I fell back to my old habit of running Debian Continue reading
Worth Reading: The AI Supply Paradox
Eric Hoel published a spot-on analysis of AI disruptiveness, including this gem:
The easier it is to train an AI to do something, the less economically valuable that thing is. After all, the huge supply of the thing is how the AI got so good in the first place.
TL&DR: AI can easily disrupt things that are easy to generate and thus have little value. Seeing investors trying to recoup the billions pouring into the latest fad will be fun.
Worth Reading: The AI Supply Paradox
Eric Hoel published a spot-on analysis of AI disruptiveness, including this gem:
The easier it is to train an AI to do something, the less economically valuable that thing is. After all, the huge supply of the thing is how the AI got so good in the first place.
TL&DR: AI can easily disrupt things that are easy to generate and thus have little value. Seeing investors trying to recoup the billions pouring into the latest fad will be fun.
Worth Reading: State-of-the-Art AI
Gerben Wierda published another AI-buster article describing what exactly “state-of-the-art” means in AI benchmarks.
Hint: you give an AI model 32 step-by-step examples before asking a question, and it still gets it wrong 10% of the time.
Worth Reading: State-of-the-Art AI
Gerben Wierda published another AI-buster article describing what exactly “state-of-the-art” means in AI benchmarks.
Hint: you give an AI model 32 step-by-step examples before asking a question, and it still gets it wrong 10% of the time.
HN714: Building The Branch Of The Future With SASE Powered By AI (Sponsored)
SD-WAN and SASE are evolving to encompass more features and capabilities around security, application performance, network visibility, and more. On today's Heavy Networking, sponsored by Palo Alto Networks, we look at how AI is transforming SD-WAN and SASE to help build the branch of the future.
The post HN714: Building The Branch Of The Future With SASE Powered By AI (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.
HN714: Building The Branch Of The Future With SASE Powered By AI (Sponsored)
SD-WAN is evolving to encompass more features and capabilities around security, application performance, network visibility, and more. On today’s Heavy Networking, sponsored by Palo Alto Networks, we look at how SD-WAN has transformed from a simple network connectivity solution to a comprehensive networking and security system. We discuss the limitations of legacy branch routers and... Read more »D2C225: Security KubeConversations Part 2 – Cloud-Native Security Challenges
This is part two of a special edition of Day Two Cloud with conversations recorded at KubeCon 2023 in Chicago. These conversations cover the state of cloud-native security, getting a holistic view of your cloud-native environment, security challenges for Kubernetes, and the state of the software supply chain.
The post D2C225: Security KubeConversations Part 2 – Cloud-Native Security Challenges appeared first on Packet Pushers.
D2C225: Security KubeConversations Part 2 – Cloud-Native Security Challenges
This is part two of a special edition of Day Two Cloud we’re calling Security KubeConversations. I spent two days in the Windy City, attending KubeCon Cloud Native Con Chicago 2023. I had the opportunity to speak to a wide array of vendors and open source maintainers about what’s happening on the security front in... Read more »Video: Language Model Basics
After a brief introduction of how the language models fit into the AI/ML landscape, Javier Antich explained the language model basics, including auto-regression, types of language models, the specifics of large language models, and potential use cases,
You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to access this webinar.
Video: Language Model Basics
After a brief introduction of how the language models fit into the AI/ML landscape, Javier Antich explained the language model basics, including auto-regression, types of language models, the specifics of large language models, and potential use cases,
You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to access this webinar.
Fortinet Releases Advisor, Its GenAI Assistant Focused on Threat Investigation and Remediation
The Fortinet Advisor benefits from data the company has gathered over the past 23-plus years that can be used for training.Optimizing NSX Performance Based on Workload and ROI
Optimizing NSX Performance Based on Workload
Overview
Performance tuning, in general, requires a holistic view of the application traffic profiles, features leveraged and the criteria for performance from the application perspective. In this blog, we will take a look at some of the factors to consider when optimizing NSX for performance.
Applications
In a typical data center, applications may have different requirements based on their traffic profile. Some applications such as backup services, log files and certain types of web traffic etc., may be able to leverage all the available bandwidth. These long traffic flows with large packets are called elephant flows. These applications with elephant flows, in general, are not sensitive to latency.
In contrast, in-memory databases, message queuing services such as Kafka, and certain Telco applications may be sensitive to latency. These traffic flows, which are short lived and use smaller packets are generally called mice flows. Applications with mice flows are not generally bandwidth hungry.
While in general, virtual datacenters may be running a mixed set of workloads which should run as is without much tuning, there may be instances where one may have to tune to optimize performance for specific applications. For example, applications Continue reading