Retirement obviously does not sit well with my friend Tiziano Tofoni; the English version of his IPv6 book just came out.
It is a bit sad, though, that we still need “how to use IPv6” books when the protocol is old enough to enjoy a nice glass of whiskey (in the US) trying to drown its sorrow at its slow adoption.
A few years ago, I used a simple application called 'TypeItIn'. It kept a small GUI window open with some buttons and labels. You could configure each label with your own text. If you wanted to type one of these texts into a window, all you needed to do was click on the label, and it would start typing the text into whatever window you opened. It was such a time-saver, especially if you had multiple texts that you often used.
Fast forward a few years, I really needed such a tool and then realized I knew a bit of Python, so I should be able to create the same functionality using Python. So, in this blog post, let's go through how you can create a simple GUI application with just a few lines of code.
Tkinter is the standard GUI toolkit for Python, providing a fast and easy way to create simple GUI applications. It is built into Python, so there’s no need to install anything separately if you already have Python.
Tkinter is widely used due to its simplicity and the vast availability of widgets like buttons, menus, and text fields, which help Continue reading
When you need to provide electricity to power and cool 100,000 accelerators, or maybe even 1 million of them in a few years, in a single location to run an AI model, you have to start thinking about the unthinkable if you also want to use carbon-free juice to power your AI ambitions. …
AI Powerhouses Choose The Nuclear Option was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
What are the requirements for running AI workloads over a data center fabric? Why is InfiniBand so popular for building AI networks? What about Ethernet for AI? Jeff Tantsura joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss networks for AI workloads.
Infrastructure planning for a network serving more than 81 million requests at peak and which is globally distributed across more than 330 cities in 120+ countries is complex. The capacity planning team at Cloudflare ensures there is enough capacity in place all over the world so that our customers have one less thing to worry about - our infrastructure, which should just work. Through our processes, the team puts careful consideration into “what-ifs”. What if something unexpected happens and one of our data centers fails? What if one of our largest customers triples, or quadruples their request count? Across a gamut of scenarios like these, the team works to understand where traffic will be served from and how the Cloudflare customer experience may change.
This blog post gives a look behind the curtain of how these scenarios are modeled at Cloudflare, and why it's so critical for our customers.
Cloudflare customers rely on the data centers that Cloudflare has deployed all over the world, placing us within 50 ms of approximately 95% of the Internet-connected population globally. But round-trip time to our end users means little if those data centers don’t have the capacity Continue reading
On September 17, 2024, during routine maintenance, Cloudflare inadvertently stopped announcing fifteen IPv4 prefixes, affecting some Business plan websites for approximately one hour. During this time, IPv4 traffic for these customers would not have reached Cloudflare, and users attempting to connect to websites assigned addresses within those prefixes would have received errors.
We’re very sorry for this outage.
This outage was the result of an internal software error and not the result of an attack. In this blog post, we’re going to talk about what the failure was, why it occurred, and what we’re doing to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
Cloudflare assembled a dedicated Addressing team in 2019 to simplify the ways that IP addresses are used across Cloudflare products and services. The team builds and maintains systems that help Cloudflare conserve and manage its own network resources. The Addressing team also manages periodic changes to the assignment of IP addresses across infrastructure and services at Cloudflare. In this case, our goal was to reduce the number of IPv4 addresses used for customer websites, allowing us to free up addresses for other purposes, like deploying infrastructure in new locations. Since IPv4 addresses are a finite Continue reading
In early August, I published step-by-step instructions for a lab you can use to explore how to implement pure L3VPN with an EVPN control plane.
Chrome and Mozilla announced that they will stop trusting Entrust’s public TLS certificates issued after November 12, 2024 and December 1, 2024, respectively. This decision stems from concerns related to Entrust’s ability to meet the CA/Browser Forum’s requirements for a publicly trusted certificate authority (CA). To prevent Entrust customers from being impacted by this change, Entrust has announced that they are partnering with SSL.com, a publicly trusted CA, and will be issuing certs from SSL.com’s roots to ensure that they can continue to provide their customers with certificates that are trusted by Chrome and Mozilla.
We’re excited to announce that we’re going to be adding SSL.com as a certificate authority that Cloudflare customers can use. This means that Cloudflare customers that are currently relying on Entrust as a CA and uploading their certificate manually to Cloudflare will now be able to rely on Cloudflare’s certificate management pipeline for automatic issuance and renewal of SSL.com certificates.
With great power comes great responsibility Every publicly trusted certificate authority (CA) is responsible for maintaining a high standard of security and compliance to ensure that the certificates they issue are trustworthy. Continue reading
UPDATED With its Graviton 4 homegrown Graviton 4 Arm server processors, Amazon Web Services has put into the field a CPU that can compete with all but the toppest of bin parts from AMD for X86 CPUs and Ampere Computing and Nvidia for Arm CPUs, and it is driving price/performance that will in turn drive their adoption for Amazon’s various business units and for its IT infrastructure rental customers on AWS. …
AWS Boosts Memory Capacity On Graviton 4 Compute was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
A previous blog post described how you can use the netlab report functionality to generate addressing, wiring, BGP, and OSPF reports from a running lab. But what could you do if you need a report that doesn’t exist yet? It’s straightforward to define one (what else did you expect?).
Let’s create the report I used in the EVPN Hub-and-Spoke Layer-3 VPN blog post to create the VRF table.
Now that we figured out how to implement a hub-and-spoke VPN design on a single PE-router, let’s do the same thing with EVPN. It turns out to be trivial:
As we want to use EVPN and have a larger core network, we’ll also have to enable VLANs, VXLAN, BGP, and OSPF on the PE devices.
This is the topology of our expanded lab:
Intel needs a whole lot of big wins for both its chip design and selling business and its increasingly arm’s length foundry business if it is going to turn itself around and be competitive with AMD and Nvidia on the left hand and with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co on its right. …
The Irony Of AWS Being Intel’s Latest Savior was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Yesterday’s blog post discussed the traffic flow and the routing information flow in a hub-and-spoke VPN design (a design in which all traffic between spokes flows through the hub site). It’s time to implement and test it, starting with the simplest possible scenario: a single PE router using inter-VRF route leaking to connect the VRFs.
I know what you're thinking, we usually manage our Python code via Git to track changes, but what do I mean by using GitPython to manage Git repositories? I recently faced a situation where I needed to automate a Git workflow. This includes pulling the latest changes from a Git repository, creating a branch, making some changes, viewing the diff, committing, and then pushing my branch back to the remote repository.
Doing this repeatedly was time-consuming, and I figured there must be a way to automate this. With Python, virtually anything is possible. I found a Python library called 'GitPython' that does exactly this. So, let's get to it.
GitPython is a Python library that lets you work with Git repositories. It allows you to manage Git tasks using Python code, making it easy to automate things like commits, branches, and pushes without using the command line. This is useful for automating repetitive Git tasks directly from Python.
For example, you can use it to pull the latest updates from a repository, create new branches, and commit to your changes. It also provides a way to view diffs, so you can see what has changed Continue reading