Survey: Cloud monitoring, management tools come up short

(Editor’s note: Recent research by Enterprise Management Associates takes a look at how enterprises regard cloud management tools. This article by Shamus McGillicuddy, EMA’s research director for network management, details highlights of “Network Engineering and Operations in the Multi-Cloud Era,” a report based on EMA’s survey of 250 IT professionals and telephone interviews with a half dozen IT leaders.) Three-out-of-four network managers say that at least one of their network monitoring tools has failed to address their requirements for monitoring the public cloud environments – perilous, given the extent of public-cloud adoption today.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: How IPsec UDP Helps Scale and Secure SD-WAN Fabrics

IPsec is a critical element in building a scalable and secure SD-WAN fabric. The right IPsec is key to making it happen.Robert Sturt published an article title “SD-WAN vs. VPN: How do they compare?” While Robert tried to illustrate when and how to use SD-WAN vs. VPN, the objective of this blog is to look deeper into existing IPsec approaches and challenges in building and securing an SD-WAN fabric, and how IPsec UDP can help address these challenges. At the end of this blog, I have included a link to a Silver Peak white paper that provides a detailed explanation of IPsec options.To read this article in full, please click here

Last Week on ipSpace.net (2019W10)

The Spring 2019 Building Network Automation Solutions course continued with an awesome presentation by David Gee. He started with what you should do before writing a single line of code (identify processes and document them in workflows and sequence diagrams) and covered tons of boring stuff nobody ever wants to talk about.

On Thursday Rachel Traylor continued exploring graphs and their relevance in networking, this time focusing on trees and spanning trees.

The Network Connectivity, Graph Theory, and Reliable Network Design webinar is part of standard ipSpace.net subscription You can access David’s presentation and all other materials of the Building Network Automation Solutions online course with Expert Subscription (assuming you choose this course as part of your subscription).

Efficient synchronisation of state-based CRDTs

Efficient synchronisation of state-based CRDTs Enes et al., arXiv’18

CRDTs are a great example of consistency as logical monotonicity. They come in two main variations:

  • operation-based CRDTs send operations to remote replicas using a reliable dissemination layer with exactly-once causal delivery. (If operations are idempotent then at-least-once is ok too).
  • state-based CRDTs exchange information about the resulting state of the data structure (not the operations that led to the state being what it is). In the original form the full-state is sent each time. State-based CRDTs can tolerate dropped, duplicated, and re-ordered messages.

State-based CRDTs look attractive therefore, but over time as the state grows sending the full state every time quickly becomes expensive. That’s where Delta-based CRDTs come in. These send only the delta to the state needed to reconstruct the full state.

Delta-based CRDTs… define delta-mutators that return a delta ( \delta ), typically much smaller than the full state of the replica, to be merged with the local state. The same \delta is also added to an outbound \delta-buffer, to be periodically propagated to remote replicas. Delta-based CRDTs have been adopted in industry as part of the Akka Distributed Data framework and IPFS.

So far so good, but Continue reading

How IPv6 SLAAC responds to Renumbering Events

If you follow the IPv6 Maintenance (6man) Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), you may have noticed the 300+ message email thread on an Internet Draft that was recently published on the “Reaction of Stateless Address Autoconfiguration (SLAAC) to Renumbering Events”. This was prompted by the experiences of developing Best Current Operational Practice on IPv6 prefix assignment for end-users, an activity led by ISOC’s Jan Žorž and published as ripe-690.

SLAAC is used to automatically assign an IPv6 address to a host, but there are a number of scenario where hosts may end up using stale configuration information and thereby leading to interoperability problems.

For example, a typical IPv6 deployment scenario is when a CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) router requests an IPv6 prefix to an ISP via DHCPv6-PD, and advertises a sub-prefix of the leased prefix on the LAN-side via SLAAC.

In such scenarios, if the CPE router crashes and reboots, it may lose all information about the previously leased prefix. Upon reboot, the CPE router may be leased a new prefix that will result in a new sub-prefix being advertised on the LAN-side of the CPE router. As a result, hosts will normally configure addresses for the newly-advertised prefix, Continue reading

A quick lesson in confirmation bias

In my experience, hacking investigations are driven by ignorance and confirmation bias. We regularly see things we cannot explain. We respond by coming up with a story where our pet theory explains it. Since there is no alternative explanation, this then becomes evidence of our theory, where this otherwise inexplicable thing becomes proof.


For example, take that "Trump-AlfaBank" theory. One of the oddities noted by researchers is lookups for "trump-email.com.moscow.alfaintra.net". One of the conspiracy theorists explains has proof of human error, somebody "fat fingered" the wrong name when typing it in, thus proving humans were involved in trying to communicate between the two entities, as opposed to simple automated systems.

But that's because this "expert" doesn't know how DNS works. Your computer is configured to automatically put local suffices on the end of names, so that you only have to lookup "2ndfloorprinter" instead of a full name like "2ndfloorprinter.engineering.example.com".

When looking up a DNS name, your computer may try to lookup the name both with and without the suffix. Thus, sometimes your computer looks up "www.google.com.engineering.exmaple.com" when it wants simply "www.google.com".

Apparently, Alfabank configures Continue reading

A Node to Workers Story

A Node to Workers Story

Node.js allows developers to build web services with JavaScript. However, you're on your own when it comes to registering a domain, setting up DNS, managing the server processes, and setting up builds.

There's no reason to manage all these layers on separate platforms. For a site on Cloudflare, these layers can be on a single platform. Serverless technology simplifies developers' lives and reframes our current definition of backend.

In this article I will breeze through a simple example of how converting a former Node server into a Worker untangled a part of my teams’ code base. The conversion to Workers for this example can be found at this PR on Github.

Background

Cloudflare Marketplace hosts a variety of apps, most of which are produced by third party developers, but some are produced by Cloudflare employees.

The Spotify app is one of those apps that was written by the Cloudflare apps team. This app requires an OAuth flow with Spotify to retrieve the user’s token and gather the playlist, artists, other Spotify profile specific information. While Cloudflare manages the OAuth authentication portion, the app owner - in this case Cloudflare Apps - manages the small integration service that uses the Continue reading

VMware firewall takes aim at defending apps in data center, cloud

VMware has taken the wraps off a firewall it says protects enterprise applications and data inside data centers or clouds.Unlike perimeter firewalls that filter traffic from an unlimited number of unknown hosts, VMware says its new Service-defined Firewall gains deep visibility into the hosts and services that generate network traffic by tapping into into its NSX network management software, vSphere hypervisors and AppDefense threat-detection system.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware firewall takes aim at defending apps in data center, cloud

VMware has taken the wraps off a firewall it says protects enterprise applications and data inside data centers or clouds.Unlike perimeter firewalls that filter traffic from an unlimited number of unknown hosts, VMware says its new Service-defined Firewall gains deep visibility into the hosts and services that generate network traffic by tapping into into its NSX network management software, vSphere hypervisors and AppDefense threat-detection system.To read this article in full, please click here

Day Two Cloud 004: How To Optimize Cloud For Cost And Performance Without Going Insane

Your monthly cloud bill can be shocking. On today's Day Two Cloud we talk with Iris Classon about how to optimize your cloud deployment for cost without killing performance--i.e., how to keep customers and finance happy without going insane.

The post Day Two Cloud 004: How To Optimize Cloud For Cost And Performance Without Going Insane appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Seven Women Using the Internet to Make a Difference

We’re celebrating International Women’s Day this year with great news: The Internet Society welcomes a new Chapter in Lesotho – and the Chapter’s president, vice president, treasurer, secretary, as well as a board member are all talented tech women.

Lesotho is a small landlocked country within South Africa, where less than a third of its population is connected to the Internet. One of the Lesotho Chapter’s key priorities this year is to start an “Internet for Education” project, which aims to encourage five schools to use the Internet to support teaching and to improve the quality of education.

Please join us in welcoming the Lesotho Chapter, then learn about its President Ithabeleng Moreke and other women around the world who are using the Internet to make a difference in their communities!

Ithabeleng Moreke

Ithabeleng Moreke enjoys the world of the Internet and all things networks, the technology behind it, and Internet security – and how they affect our everyday lives. She’s worked as network engineer for the government of Lesotho and is now with Vodacom Lesotho.

Jazmin Fallas Kerr

In Jazmin Fallas Kerr’s hometown, Desamparados, Costa Rica, nearly half of all families with women as head of household are in Continue reading

Heavy Networking 434: Solving Network Performance And Security Problems With VIAVI Solutions (Sponsored)

On today's sponsored Heavy Networking, VIAVI Solutions joins the Packet Pushers to discuss the intersection of network performance management (NPM) and security. We discuss how network and security teams can leverage VIAVI's packet capture capabilities, how it enriches flow records with additional data to provide valuable context, and how the concept of end user experience informs VIAVI's approach to NPM.

The post Heavy Networking 434: Solving Network Performance And Security Problems With VIAVI Solutions (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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