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Docker testbed

The sFlow-RT real-time analytics platform receives a continuous telemetry stream from sFlow Agents embedded in network devices, hosts and applications and converts the raw measurements into actionable metrics, accessible through open APIs, see Writing Applications.

Application development is greatly simplified if you can emulate the infrastructure you want to monitor on your development machine. Mininet flow analytics, Mininet dashboard, and Mininet weathermap describe how to use the open source Mininet network emulator to simulate networks and generate a live stream of standard sFlow telemetry data.

This article describes how to use Docker containers as a development platform. Docker Desktop provides a convenient method of running Docker on Mac and Windows desktops. These instructions assume you have already installed Docker.

Start a Host sFlow agent using the pre-built sflow/host-sflow image:

docker run --rm -d -e "COLLECTOR=host.docker.internal" -e "SAMPLING=10" \
--net=host -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro \
--name=host-sflow sflow/host-sflow

Note: Host, Docker, Swarm and Kubernetes monitoring describes how to deploy Host sFlow agents to monitor large scale container environments.

Start an iperf3 server using the pre-built sflow/iperf3 image:

docker run --rm -d -p 5201:5201 --name iperf3 sflow/iperf3 -s

In a separate terminal window, run the following command to start sFlow-RT:

 Continue reading

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Gartner Cancels A Few Conferences Costing 36MM But Its not Giving Up Yet

Conferences are a BIG part of the revenue model

The post Gartner Cancels A Few Conferences Costing 36MM But Its not Giving Up Yet appeared first on EtherealMind.

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Stateless Taps Intel’s Barefoot Tofino for Interconnection

Tofino’s P4 programmability is what makes it important to Stateless, a startup targeting...

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Now Available: Calico for Windows on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Approximately one year ago, Kubernetes 1.14 made support of Windows containers running on Microsoft Windows Server nodes generally available. This was a declaration that Windows node support was stable, well-tested, and ready for adoption, meaning the vast ecosystem of Windows-based applications could be deployed on the platform.

Collaborating with Microsoft, Tigera leveraged the new Windows platform capabilities to create Calico for Windows, the industry’s first cross-platform Kubernetes solution to manage networking and network policy for Kubernetes deployments on Windows and Linux.

We are excited to announce that Calico for Windows now supports the latest Windows Dev Preview on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP). Built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Kubernetes, OCP v4 provides developers and IT organizations with a hybrid and multi-cloud application platform for deploying both new and existing applications on scalable resources, with minimal configuration and management overhead. OCP enables organizations to meet security, privacy, compliance, and governance requirements.

Calico for Windows is the only Kubernetes networking solution for teams using Windows on OpenShift. The combination of Calico for Windows and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform represents a major leap forward in productivity for organizations that are deploying Windows on Kubernetes. DevOps teams Continue reading

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COVID-19 Trade Show Impact

SDxCentral will be keeping a running list of changes to trade shows and events tied to the COVID-19...

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Helping You and Your Development Team Build and Ship Faster

I remember the first time one of my co-workers told me about Docker. There is a longer story behind it, but it ended with “it was so easy and saved me so much time.” That compelled me to install Docker and try it for myself. Yup, she was right. Easy, simple, efficient. Sometime later, at a conference, while catching up with some friends who are developers, I asked them “how are things going?” The conversation eventually led to the topic of where things are going in the container space. I asked, “what’s the biggest issue you are having right now?” I expected the response to be something Kubernetes related. I was surprised the answer was “managing all the tech that gets my code deployed and running.” 

The above sentiment is echoed by our CEO, Scott Johnston, in this post. Millions of you use Docker today (check out the Docker Index for the latest usage stats), and we are so very thankful for the vibrant Docker Community. We heard from you that easily going from code to cloud is a problem, and Scott outlined the complexities. There are many choices across packaging, inner loop, packaging, registry, Continue reading

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Tech Field Day #TFD21

We are expecting another action packed day and of course it will be streamed live from this blog. Don’t worry if the timings for the live event don’t work for you. We’ll record each session and embed here for easy Ondemand viewing.

The theme for the day is Modernize, Connect and Manage your Network. With representatives from across VMware including Cloud Foundation, vSAN, NSX and vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) we have all our bases covered.

Here is the latest agenda:

 

 

 

 

 

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The post Tech Field Day #TFD21 appeared first on Network Virtualization.

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Cisco Live US 2020: To CLUS or not to CLUS? [updated]

Update March 16, 2020: The in-person event is “relaunched” as an online event. Here is a copy of the information email I just received: The health and well-being of our customers, partners, employees and communities is of utmost importance to us. As a result, during this unprecedented time of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cisco Live, our premier in-person customer and partner experience of the year, is being relaunched as a complimentary, full-scale digital event, enabling remote participation from anywhere in the world. We’re dedicated to making sure that the experience at…

The post Cisco Live US 2020: To CLUS or not to CLUS? [updated] appeared first on AboutNetworks.net.

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I Hate Excellent Questions

I was listening to a recent episode of the Packet Pushers Podcast about SD-WAN and some other stuff. At one point, my good friend Greg Ferro (@EtherealMind) asked the guest something, and the guest replied with, “That’s an excellent question!” Greg replied with, “Of course it was. I only ask excellent questions.” I was walking and laughed out loud harder than I’ve laughed in a long time.

This was also a common theme during Networking Field Day. Everyone was asking “great” or “excellent” questions. I chuckled and told the delegates that it was a canned response that most presenters give today. But then I wondered why all our questions are excellent. And why I hated that response so much.

Can You Define “Excellent”?

The first reason why I think people tend to counter with “excellent” praise is because they are stalling for an answer. It’s a time-honored tradition from spelling bees when you don’t know how to spell the word and you need a few more seconds to figure out if this is one of those “i before e” words or not. I get the purpose of defining something of non-native speaker origin. But defining a Continue reading

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How Replicated Developers Develop Remotely

This is a guest post by Marc Campbell and Grant Miller, co-founders of Replicated.

Replicated is a 5-year old infrastructure software company working to make it easy for businesses to install and operate third party software. We don’t want you to have to send your data to a multi-tenant SaaS provider just to use their services. Our team is made up of twenty-two people distributed throughout the US. One thing that’s different about Replicated is our developers don’t actually store or execute code on their laptops; all of our development happens on remote instances in the cloud.

Our product, KOTS, runs in Kubernetes and manages the lifecycle of 3rd-party applications in the Kubernetes cluster. Building and validating the product requires a developer to have access to a cluster. But as we started to hire more and more engineers it became ridiculous to ask everyone to run their own local Kubernetes cluster. We needed to both simplify and secure our setup to allow every engineer to run their environment in the cloud, and we needed to do it in a way which was seamless and secure.

Previous Dev Environments with Docker for Mac

We started with each developer building Continue reading

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VMware Rejuvenates Once Again With Kubernetes Injection

The American landscape is littered with dead malls – once-thriving shopping centers now abandoned, filled with rubble, with empty department stores and food courts echoing with the ghostly shouts of 1980s teenagers in acid-washed jeans and big hair. …

VMware Rejuvenates Once Again With Kubernetes Injection was written by Mitch Wagner at The Next Platform.

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The Stupidity of Trying to Be Like Google

Someone recommended me a fantastic book on corporate stupidity. Here’s just one of the million small gems it contains:

For instance, many companies conclude that they need to be more innovative. To increase their rates of innovation, they look at firms well known for being innovative, such as Google, then dispatch their executives to Silicon Valley to visit tech companies’ corporate campuses in the hope that they will learn something.

Not surprisingly, the book authors observed the same behavior in those companies as I did a while ago when I was still teaching SDN workshops:

They often ignore the fact that Google is an entirely different sector to them, and the lessons in view probably of limited value. They also overlook that even if they do learn something, actually implementing it within their organization is likely to be difficult, if not impossible.

Finally a warning: that book will make you laugh or cry hysterically (or both), so take it in small daily doses.

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The Stupidity of Trying to Be Like Google

Someone recommended me a fantastic book on corporate stupidity. Here’s just one of the million small gems it contains:

For instance, many companies conclude that they need to be more innovative. To increase their rates of innovation, they look at firms well known for being innovative, such as Google, then dispatch their executives to Silicon Valley to visit tech companies’ corporate campuses in the hope that they will learn something.

Not surprisingly, the book authors observed the same behavior in those companies as I did a while ago when I was still teaching SDN workshops:

They often ignore the fact that Google is an entirely different sector to them, and the lessons in view probably of limited value. They also overlook that even if they do learn something, actually implementing it within their organization is likely to be difficult, if not impossible.

Finally a warning: that book will make you laugh or cry hysterically (or both), so take it in small daily doses.

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Remote workers – rapid and cost-effective VPN scale with ZeroTier, OPNSense and FRRouting.

Overview

This would probably be a relevant topic on any given day in the world of IT, but given the current global pandemic due to COVID-19 (aka coronavirus), it’s become especially important.

IT departments are scrambling to figure out how to react with capacity to connect entire companies remotely for extended periods of time.

With a traditional vendor solution that centers around a router or firewall that’s racked in a data center somewhere, this can be difficult to solve for a few reasons.

Challenges:

• Hardware capacity – most firewalls or routers have a fixed capacity for VPN sessions that must be deployed into a cluster to scale.
• Software licensing – taking a company of thousands and suddenly extending licensing to account for the entire company is a financial hurdle for most companies.
• Time to deploy – assuming both hardware and software licensing challenges can be dealt with in a timely manner, it may take weeks or months to deploy the additional capacity.

Luckily, IT is much more focused on software and cloud solutions these days then putting out boxes for everything.

Open source and cloud solutions when used together can provide an incredible amount of scale and performance without a Continue reading

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Production-ready automation — the how and why

Last week Cumulus announced the launch of our exciting production-ready solution. This suite of automation scripts provides customers with a quick and validated way to leverage automation for day 1 deployment and day 2 operations. Plus, it’s open source. So it’s completely free to access and use, and it will only expand and improve over time.

Amidst all of the excitement, I wanted to take an opportunity to dive into some of the details of why and how we ended up with such a unique solution. So here we go.

Let’s start with what brought us here

Like most good technology solutions, production-ready automation started with an evaluation of customer challenges.

Challenge #1: First and foremost, we want to produce features and products that help our customers build better networks — networks that are scalable, agile, flexible and efficient. Automation is a huge part of the story and we believe having a feature-rich, Linux-based operating system makes automation even better.

That said, no matter what type of operating system you’re running, most engineers have to piece together scripts and playbooks to build something custom that will hopefully (fingers crossed!) work with their new operating system. This is tedious at Continue reading

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Building Your Own Junos Router With cRPD and LinuxKit

Lately I’ve been looking at some tools to make it easier to package containerized applications as lightweight virtual machines, to get the best of both worlds: the developer experience of a Dockerfile with the added protection of a hypervisor. As part of this process, I’ve been digging into Juniper’s containerized routing stack called cRPD, and trying to get that into a virtual form factor, so that I can effectively have a Linux router that happens to use the Junos routing stack.

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An Update on the Tokyo Assignment

Right at the end of 2019 I announced that in early 2020 I was temporarily relocating to Tokyo, Japan, for a six month work assignment. It’s now March, and I’m still in Colorado. So what’s up with that Tokyo assignment, anyway? Since I’ve had several folks ask, I figured it’s probably best to post something here.

First, based on all the information available to me, it looks like Tokyo is still going to happen. It will just be delayed a bit—although the exact extent of the delay is still unclear.

Why the delays? A few things have affected the timing:

1. As part of an acquisition at work, some new folks got involved that hadn’t been previously involved, and it took them some time to understand what this assignment was all about. This is totally understandable, but we hadn’t accounted for the extra time to bring the new stakeholders up to speed.
2. The finance folks got involved and made everyone do some necessary legwork that hadn’t previously been done in properly allocating costs to the appropriate budgets. So, that took some time.
3. Finally, there’s this virus thing going around…

It looks like #1 and #2 have been sorted, but it’ll still Continue reading

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Daily Roundup: Coronavirus Cancels Dell, Other Events

Coronavirus cancelled Dell and other events; Cisco won big in Telia SD-WAN deal; and HPE delivered...

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How to Build a Highly Productive Remote Team (or Team of Contractors) with Cloudflare for Teams

Much of IT has been built on two outdated assumptions about how work is done. First, that employees all sit in the same building or branch offices. Second, that those employees will work full-time at the same company for years.

Both of these assumptions are no longer true.

Employees now work from anywhere. In the course of writing this blog post, I opened review tickets in our internal JIRA from my dining table at home. I reviewed internal wiki pages on my phone during my commute on the train. And I spent time reviewing some marketing materials in staging in our CMS.

In a past job, I would have suffered trying to connect to these tools through a VPN. That would have slowed down my work on a laptop and made it nearly impossible to use a phone to catch up on my commute.

The second challenge is ramp-up. I joined Cloudflare a few months ago. As a member of the marketing team, I work closely with our product organization and there are several dozen tools that I need to do that.

I’m hardly alone. The rise of SaaS and custom internal applications means that employees need access to all Continue reading

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The Metronomic Cadence Of Chippery From AMD

Companies invest in platforms over a decade or more, and that is why architectures persist longer than we might think given technological differences and economic forces. …

The Metronomic Cadence Of Chippery From AMD was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.