Feedback: Ansible for Networking Engineers

I always love to hear from networking engineers who managed to start their network automation journey. Here’s what one of them wrote after watching Ansible for Networking Engineers webinar (part of paid ipSpace.net subscription, also available as an online course).

This webinar helped me a lot in understanding Ansible and the benefits we can gain. It is a big area to grasp for a non-coder and this webinar was exactly what I needed to get started (in a lab), including a lot of tips and tricks and how to think. It was more fun than I expected so started with Python just to get a better grasp of programing and Jinja.

In early 2019 we made the webinar even better with a series of live sessions covering new features added to recent Ansible releases, from core features (loops) to networking plugins and new declarative intent modules.

A case for managed and model-less inference serving

A case for managed and model-less inference serving Yadwadkar et al., HotOS’19

HotOS’19 is presenting me with something of a problem as there are so many interesting looking papers in the proceedings this year it’s going to be hard to cover them all! As a transition from the SysML papers we’ve been looking at recently, I’ve chosen a HotOS position paper from the Stanford Platform Lab to kick things off. As we saw with the SOAP paper last time out, even with a fixed model variant and hardware there are a lot of different ways to map a training workload over the available hardware. In “A case for managed and model-less inference serving” Yadwadkar et al. look at a similar universe of possibilities for model serving at inference time, and conclude that it’s too much to expect users to navigate this by themselves.

Making queries to an inference engine has many of the same throughput, latency, and cost considerations as making queries to a datastore, and more and more applications are coming to depend on such queries. “For instance, Facebook applications issue tens-of-trillions of inference queries per day with varying performance, accuracy, and cost constraints.”

If Continue reading

VMware Announces Intent to Acquire Avi Networks to Deliver Software-Defined ADC for the Multi-Cloud Era

By Tom Gillis, SVP/GM of Networking and Security BU

Today I’m excited to announce that VMware has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Avi Networks, a leader of software-defined application delivery services for the multicloud era.

Our vision at VMware is to deliver the “public cloud experience” to developers regardless of what underlying infrastructure they are running. What does this mean? Agility. The ability to quickly deploy new workloads, to try new ideas, and to iterate. Modern infrastructure needs to provide this agility wherever it executes – on premises, in hybrid cloud deployments, or in native public clouds, using VM’s, containers or a combination of the two. VMware is uniquely suited to deliver this, with a complete set of software-defined infrastructure that runs on every cloud, even yours.

Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) are a critical pillar of a software-defined data center. Many workloads cannot be deployed without one. For many customers, this means writing their application to bespoke and proprietary APIs that are tied to expensive hardware appliances. The Avi Networks team saw this problem and solved it in the right way. They built a software architecture that is truly scale-out, with a centralized controller. This controller manages not Continue reading

Oracle updates Exadata at long last with AI and machine learning abilities

After a rather long period of silence, Oracle announced an update to its server line, the Oracle Exadata Database Machine X8, which features hardware and software enhancements that include artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities, as well as support for hybrid cloud.Oracle acquired a hardware business nine years ago with the purchase of Sun Microsystems. It steadily whittled down the offerings, getting out of the commodity hardware business in favor of high-end mission-critical hardware. Whereas the Exalogic line is more of a general-purpose appliance running Oracle’s own version of Linux, Exadata is a purpose-built database server, and they really made some upgrades.To read this article in full, please click here

Oracle updates Exadata at long last with AI and machine learning abilities

After a rather long period of silence, Oracle announced an update to its server line, the Oracle Exadata Database Machine X8, which features hardware and software enhancements that include artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities, as well as support for hybrid cloud.Oracle acquired a hardware business nine years ago with the purchase of Sun Microsystems. It steadily whittled down the offerings, getting out of the commodity hardware business in favor of high-end mission-critical hardware. Whereas the Exalogic line is more of a general-purpose appliance running Oracle’s own version of Linux, Exadata is a purpose-built database server, and they really made some upgrades.To read this article in full, please click here

Protecting Project Galileo websites from HTTP attacks

Protecting Project Galileo websites from HTTP attacks

Yesterday, we celebrated the fifth anniversary of Project Galileo. More than 550 websites are part of this program, and they have something in common: each and every one of them has been subject to attacks in the last month. In this blog post, we will look at the security events we observed between the 23 April 2019 and 23 May 2019.

Project Galileo sites are protected by the Cloudflare Firewall and Advanced DDoS Protection which contain a number of features that can be used to detect and mitigate different types of attack and suspicious traffic. The following table shows how each of these features contributed to the protection of sites on Project Galileo.

Firewall Feature

Requests Mitigated

Distinct originating IPs

Sites Affected (approx.)

Firewall Rules

78.7M

396.5K

~ 30

Security Level

41.7M

1.8M

~ 520

Access Rules

24.0M

386.9K

~ 200

Browser Integrity Check

9.4M

32.2K

~ 500

WAF

4.5M

163.8K

~ 200

User-Agent Blocking

2.3M

1.3K

~ 15

Hotlink Protection

2.0M

686.7K

~ 40

HTTP DoS

1.6M

360

1

Rate Limit

623.5K

6.6K

~ 15

Zone Lockdown

9.7K

2.8K

Continue reading

Data centers should sell spare UPS capacity to the grid

The energy storage capacity in uninterruptable power supply (UPS) batteries, languishing often dormant in data centers, could provide new revenue streams for those data centers, says Eaton, a major electrical power management company.Excess, grid-generated power, created during times of low demand, should be stored on the now-proliferating lithium-backup power systems strewn worldwide in data centers, Eaton says. Then, using an algorithm tied to grid-demand, electricity should be withdrawn as necessary for grid use. It would then be slid back onto the backup batteries when not needed.[ Read also: How server disaggregation can boost data center efficiency | Get regularly scheduled insights: Sign up for Network World newsletters ] The concept is called Distributed Energy and has been gaining traction in part because electrical generation is changing—emerging green power, such as wind and solar, being used now at the grid-level have considerations that differ from the now-retiring, fossil-fuel power generation. You can generate solar only in daylight, yet much demand takes place on dark evenings, for example.To read this article in full, please click here

Data centers should sell spare UPS capacity to the grid

The energy storage capacity in uninterruptable power supply (UPS) batteries, languishing often dormant in data centers, could provide new revenue streams for those data centers, says Eaton, a major electrical power management company.Excess, grid-generated power, created during times of low demand, should be stored on the now-proliferating lithium-backup power systems strewn worldwide in data centers, Eaton says. Then, using an algorithm tied to grid-demand, electricity should be withdrawn as necessary for grid use. It would then be slid back onto the backup batteries when not needed.[ Read also: How server disaggregation can boost data center efficiency | Get regularly scheduled insights: Sign up for Network World newsletters ] The concept is called Distributed Energy and has been gaining traction in part because electrical generation is changing—emerging green power, such as wind and solar, being used now at the grid-level have considerations that differ from the now-retiring, fossil-fuel power generation. You can generate solar only in daylight, yet much demand takes place on dark evenings, for example.To read this article in full, please click here

A10 Networks ACOS Root Privilege Escalation

The following summarizes a root privilege escalation vulnerability that I identified in A10 ACOS ADC software. This was disclosed to A10 Networks in June 2016 and mitigations have been put in place to limit exposure to the vulnerability.

A10 Networks Cookie Vulnerability

SUMMARY OF VULNERABILITY

Any user assigned sufficient privilege to upload an external health monitor (i.e a script) and reference it from a health monitor can gain root shell access to ACOS.

At this point, I respectfully acknowledge Raymond Chen’s wise words about being on the other side of an airtight hatch; if the malicious user is already a system administrator or has broad permissions, then one could argue that they could already do huge damage to the ADC in other ways. However, root access could allow that user to install persistent backdoors or monitoring threats in the underlying OS where other users can neither see nor access them. It could also allow a partition-level administrator to escalate effectively to a global admin, by way of being able to see the files in every partition on the ADC.

SOFTWARE VERSIONS TESTED:

This vulnerability was originally discovered and validated initially in ACOS 2.7.2-P4-SP2 and is present in 4.x as Continue reading

Running OSPF in a Single Non-Backbone Area

One of my subscribers sent me an interesting puzzle:

>One of my colleagues configured a single-area OSPF process in a customer VRF customer, but instead of using area 0, he used area 123 nssa. Obviously it works, but I was thinking: “What the heck, a single OSPF area MUST be in Area 0”

Not really. OSPF behaves identically within an area (modulo stub/NSSA behavior) regardless of the area number…

Read more ...

When to use 5G, when to use Wi-Fi 6

We have seen hype about whether 5G cellular or Wi-Fi 6 will win in the enterprise, but the reality is that the two are largely complementary with an overlap for some use cases, which will make for an interesting competitive environment through the early 2020s.The potential for 5G in enterprises The promise of 5G for enterprise users is higher speed connectivity with lower latency. Cellular technology uses licensed spectrum which largely eliminates potential interference that may occur with unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum.  Like current 4G LTE technologies, 5G can be supplied by cellular wireless carriers or built as a private network . To read this article in full, please click here

Network-as-a-Service Part 1 – Frameworkless automation

Recently I’ve been pondering the idea of cloud-like method of consumption of traditional (physical) networks. My main premise for this was that users of a network don’t have to wait hours or days for their services to be provisioned when all that’s required is a simple change of an access port. Let me reinforce it by an example. In a typical data center network, the configuration of the core (fabric) is fairly static, while the config at the edge can change constantly as servers get added, moved or reconfigured. Things get even worse when using infrastructure-as-code with CI/CD pipelines to generate and test the configuration since it’s hard to expose only a subset of it all to the end users and it certainly wouldn’t make sense to trigger a pipeline every time a vlan is changed on an edge port.

This is where Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) platform fits in. The idea is that it would expose the required subset of configuration to the end user and will take care of applying it to the devices in a fast and safe way. In this series of blogposts I will describe and demonstrate a prototype of such a platform, implemented on top of Continue reading

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