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New tools to monitor your server and avoid downtime

When your server goes down, it’s a big problem. Today, Cloudflare is introducing two new tools to help you understand and respond faster to origin downtime — plus, a new service to automatically avoid downtime.

The new features are:

• Standalone Health Checks, which notify you as soon as we detect problems at your origin server, without needing a Cloudflare Load Balancer.
• Passive Origin Monitoring, which lets you know when your origin cannot be reached, with no configuration required.
• Zero-Downtime Failover, which can automatically avert failures by retrying requests to origin.

Standalone Health Checks

Our first new tool is Standalone Health Checks, which will notify you as soon as we detect problems at your origin server -- without needing a Cloudflare Load Balancer.

A Health Check is a service that runs on our edge network to monitor whether your origin server is online. Health Checks are a key part of our load balancing service because they allow us to quickly and actively route traffic to origin servers that are live and ready to serve requests. Standalone Health Checks allow you to monitor the health of your origin even if you only have one origin or do not yet Continue reading

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Practice Your Public Cloud Networking with Hands-On Exercises

Design assignments and hands-on exercises were always a big part of ipSpace.net online courses, and our new Networking in Public Cloud Deployments course is no different.

You’ll start with a simple scenario: deploy a virtual machine running a web server. Don’t worry about your Linux skills, you’ll get the necessary (CCIE-level) instructions and the source code for the web server. Building on that, you’ll create another subnet and deploy another virtual machine acting as a back-end application server.

And then we’ll get to the fun part:

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A tale of two abstractions: the case for object space

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Open Source Flow Monitoring and Visualization

At the heart of any reasonably sized network, should be a solid strategy around flow collection, querying and visualization. Proper use of flow logs are crucial to SecOps/NetOps from triaging attacks to capacity planning and traffic trending. I remember some 20 years ago, the first time I saw flow logs being visualized in rrdtools it was pretty close to magic. ... The post Open Source Flow Monitoring and Visualization appeared first on NetworkStatic | Brent Salisbury's Blog.

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Kubernetes Integrates Interoperability, Storage, Waits on Sidecars

A recent Datadog report found that 45% of its customers were running containers on Kubernetes and...

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IoT roundup: Quantifying growth, medical imaging and 5G (have you heard of it?)

As 2020 approaches, we look at quantifying trends and ROI around the internet of things, an advance in medical imaging tech and bringing another type of network to the IoT game.

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HashiCorp’s Consul Brings Namespace Management to the Service Mesh

Consul services networking platform with the capability to manage service namespaces at an organization-wide level. Released Tuesday, Consul 1.7 also comes with additional plugins to support a number of application monitoring and management tools, including AppDynamics, Datadog and the NGINX proxy. HashiCorp presents Consul as a network automation tool for enterprises to connect and secure application services across multiple clouds and on-prem environments, putting all the services on a single communication plane with a shared registry. The thinking behind Consul is that “you need a namespace service registry for the new, dynamic environment,” noted on the HashiCorp blog. HashiCorp is a sponsor of The New Stack. Feature image

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Aryaka SD-WAN Joins Azure App Gallery, Pens Energy Deal

The MyAryaka cloud portal is now available in the Microsoft Azure Active Directory Application...

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Network inventory: what do you have, and should it be there?

How do you defend what you don’t know exists? In IT, this is more than just an existential question, or fuel for a philosophical debate. The existence of a complete network inventory—or the lack thereof—has a real-world impact on an organization’s ability to secure their network. Establishing and maintaining a network inventory is both a technological and a business process problem, and serves as an excellent example of the importance of open standards to a modern organization.

Consider for a moment NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). In April 2018 the JPL experienced a cybersecurity event. Upon investigation, it was determined that this was caused by someone smuggling an unauthorized Raspberry Pi onto the premises and connecting it to the network.

This incident triggered a security audit, and the results of that June 2019 report were, though not unexpected, still rather disappointing. The auditors’ biggest concern was that the JPL didn’t have a comprehensive, accurate picture of what devices were on its networks, nor did it know whether or not those devices were authorized to be there.

This lack of an up-to-date and automated network inventory led to a successful hack of the JPL via the unauthorized Raspberry Pi. Some Continue reading

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F5 and NGINX: Going Forward with Kubernetes

As NGINX, it has pledged published in the second half of 2018 found NGINX to be the most widely used ingress provider for Kubernetes. For the Seattle-based application controller delivery software provider, a $670 million acquisition provides an established user base and mature technology that puts it at the center of microservice architectures. Earlier this year, when it purchased NGINX, F5 said it planned to augment the open source web server/load balancer and reverse proxy software with F5’s own security technologies as well as with a set of “cloud native innovations” to enhance load balancing. At François Locoh-Donou, president and CEO of F5 Networks pointed out that the technology acquisitions that have paid off for customers have been those in which the acquired company’s technology was core to the strategy of the acquiring company. “NGINX is core to the strategy of F5 Networks,” he said. “Combined with the reach and breadth of the F5 application security portfolio, we Continue reading

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Looking Ahead To Marvell’s Future ThunderX Processors

If you are going to take on Intel in server processors, you have to play the same kind of long game that Intel itself played as it jumped from the desktop to the datacenter. …

Looking Ahead To Marvell’s Future ThunderX Processors was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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Passive optical LAN: Its day is dawning

The concept of using passive optical LANs in enterprise campuses has been around for years, but hasn’t taken off because most businesses consider all-fiber networks to be overkill for their needs. I’ve followed this market for the better part of two decades, and now I believe we’re on the cusp of seeing POL go mainstream, starting in certain verticals.The primary driver of change from copper to optical is that the demands on the network have evolved. Every company now considers its network to be business critical where just a few years ago, it was considered best effort in nature.  Downtime or a congested network meant inconvenienced users, but today they mean the business is likely losing big money.To read this article in full, please click here

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Passive optical networking: Its day is dawning

The concept of using passive optical LANs in enterprise campuses has been around for years, but hasn’t taken off taken off because most businesses consider all-fiber networks to be overkill for their needs. I’ve followed this market for the better part of two decades, and now I believe we’re on the cusp of seeing POL go mainstream, starting in certain verticals.The primary driver of change from copper to optical is that the demands on the network have evolved. Every company now considers its network to be business critical where just a few years ago, it was considered best effort in nature.  Downtime or a congested network meant inconvenienced users, but today they mean the business is likely losing big money.To read this article in full, please click here

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Nutanix and HPE Deliver Integrated Hyperconverged Infrastructure Appliance

In April 2019, Nutanix and HPE announced a new global partnership to bring to market an...

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Eclipse Foundation Warns Operators: Don’t Be a ‘Dumb Pipe’ for AWS

"This is the opportunity for the carriers to step away from just being data pipes and actually...

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Microsoft, NTT Tap Azure, AI to Target Enterprises

The alliance also makes Microsoft’s Azure NTT’s preferred cloud platform for modernizing its...

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IBM Security Gives Cloud Identity an AI Boost

IBM Cloud Identity now uses adaptive access capabilities to continually assess employee or consumer...

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Heavy Networking 493: Taming Service Provider Complexity In 5G Networks (Sponsored)

5G presents a new set of challenges for service provider networks. As networks become increasingly dynamic and distributed to deliver an ever-evolving set of services, providers have to contend with increased complexity. Juniper Networks joins the Packet Pushers to discuss how its automation capabilities and tools can help tame the complexity beast. Our guest is Amit Bhardwaj, Director of Product Management at Juniper Networks.

The post Heavy Networking 493: Taming Service Provider Complexity In 5G Networks (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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The Two-Year Anniversary of The Athenian Project: Preparing for the 2020 Elections.

Two years ago, Cloudflare launched its Athenian Project, an effort to protect state and local government election websites from cyber attacks. With the two-year anniversary and many 2020 elections approaching, we are renewing our commitment to provide Cloudflare’s highest level of services for free to protect election websites and ensure the preservation of these critical infrastructure sites. We started the project at Cloudflare as it directly aligns with our mission: to help build a better Internet. We believe the Internet plays a helpful role in democracy and ensuring constituents’ right to information. By helping state and local government election websites, we ensure the protection of voters’ voices, preserve citizens’ confidence in the democratic process, and enhance voter participation.

We are currently helping 156 local or state websites in 26 states to combat DDoS attacks, SQL injections, and many other hostile attempts to threaten their operations. This is an additional 34 domains in states like Ohio, Florida, Kansas, South Carolina and Wisconsin since we reported statistics after last year’s election.

The need for security protection of critical election infrastructure is not new, but it is in the spotlight again as the 2020 U.S. elections approach, with the President, 435 seats Continue reading

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Sizing the Buffer

The topic of buffer sizing was the subject of a workshop at Stanford University in early December 2019. The workshop drew together academics, researchers, vendors and operators to look at this topic from their perspectives. The following are my notes from this workshop.