Tackling the 5Cs of Enterprise Security with the Advent of AI – Spotlight on Cloud and Automation Efficiency

For the traditional enterprise, the last decade has been an ongoing saga in the journey to cloud. This either moving workloads into the public cloud or embracing a cloud-operating model within their private cloud and data center environments. Along the way multi-cloud and hybrid deployments have also become commonplace.

This trend gave birth to many companies that built solutions that were born in the cloud or were highly optimized for deployment there. Organizations big and small embraced the “cloud-first” and subsequently “mobile-first” mentality. While smaller organizations with no legacy infrastructure or applications were able to embrace cloud tenets from Day-1, for larger organizations, the journey has had many pit stops and perhaps several pit falls. A lot of this rolled under the digital transformation umbrella, as CIOs, CISOs and even CEOs became executive sponsors of such initiatives.

 

The shift from agility to efficiency

During the last 10-15 years, the move to cloud has largely been precipitated by the need for agility. The initial developer driven move to cloud, that had precipitated “shadow-IT”, has gradually paved way for dual-mode IT and now become mainstream as enterprise IT organizations proactively took ownership leading to a more pragmatic cloud operating model.

The Continue reading

Podcast: Network Automation Source(s) of Truth

Figuring out how to describe your network (also known as “create a source of truth”) is one of the most challenging tasks you’ll face when building a network automation solution (more). As always, the devil is in the details, starting with “and what exactly is The Truth?”.

We discussed those details in a lively Packet Pushers podcast with Claudia de Luna, David Sinn, Dinesh Dutt, Drew Conry-Murray and Ethan Banks. Have fun!

Listen to the podcast

Podcast: Network Automation Source(s) of Truth

Figuring out how to describe your network (also known as “create a source of truth”) is one of the most challenging tasks you’ll face when building a network automation solution (more). As always, the devil is in the details, starting with “and what exactly is The Truth?”.

We discussed those details in a lively Packet Pushers podcast with Claudia de Luna, David Sinn, Dinesh Dutt, Drew Conry-Murray and Ethan Banks. Have fun!

Listen to the podcast

EVPN Route Type 5

In a previous post, EVPN Deepdive Route Types 2 and 3, I covered route types 2 and 3. In this post I’ll cover route type 5 which is used for advertising IP prefixes. This route type is covered in RFC 9136.

There are two main use cases for advertising IP prefixes in EVPN route type 5:

  • Advertising external prefixes into the VXLAN network.
  • Advertising prefixes for connectivity towards silent hosts.

The first scenario is pretty obvious. There are other places in the network, such as remote offices via a WAN, partners and external parties, as well as the internet. To route towards these destinations, a route type is needed and this is route type 5. Remember, route type 2 only provides host routing which poses the following problems for external connectivity:

  • Advertising everything as /32 and /128 would be highly inefficient.
  • It requires an EVPN speaker to generate the RT2 and the external prefixes are originated from non-EVPN speakers.
  • It would not be possible to advertise a default route.
  • Without RT5, external connectivity would have to be advertised from another protocol than EVPN.

The last bullet may be worth expanding a bit on. If the external prefixes aren’t advertised Continue reading

Tech Bytes: Palo Alto Networks Optimizes Dynamic Content And User Experience With App Acceleration (Sponsored)

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we talk about accelerating dynamic content to improve application performance and the user experience. The increase of remote and hybrid workers, and more applications being delivered from the cloud, can complicate IT’s efforts to measure and improve application performance. Today’s sponsor, Palo Alto Networks, shares its approach to accelerating... Read more »

NB463: Cisco Buys eBPF Startup For Cloud-Native Networking; Garter Forecasts $5 Trillion In IT Spending

This week’s Network Break examines why Cisco bought eBPF startup Isovalent (hint: it’s about cloud-native networking), why Broadcom is cranking up pressure on VMware resellers and customers (hint: it’s about money), and why Google Cloud is sort of dropping fees for customers who want to exit the cloud (hint: it’s about getting out ahead of... Read more »

Using SSH with the Pulumi Docker Provider

In August 2023, Pulumi released a version of the Docker provider that supported SSH-based connections to a Docker daemon. I’ve written about using SSH with Docker before (see here), and I sometimes use AWS-based “Docker build hosts” with my M-series Macs to make it easier/simpler (and sometimes faster) to build x86_64-based Docker images. Naturally, I’m using an SSH connection in those cases. Until this past weekend, however, I hadn’t really made the time to look deeper into how to use SSH with the Pulumi Docker provider. In this post, I’ll share some details that (unfortunately) haven’t yet made it into the documentation about using SSH with the Pulumi Docker provider.

First, let’s talk about some prerequisites to making this work.

  1. You’ll need Docker installed locally. I fairly certain this is only the docker CLI (much in the same way the Pulumi Kubernetes provider requires kubectl to be installed locally), but I haven’t verified this for certain yet. I tested this from a Linux system running Docker 24.0.7; I think the earliest version that is supported is 18.09.
  2. You’ll need Docker installed on the remote SSH host (obviously). I used Flatcar Container Linux (stable channel) on AWS.
  3. Continue reading

Q4 2023 Internet disruption summary

Cloudflare’s network spans more than 310 cities in over 120 countries, where we interconnect with over 13,000 network providers in order to provide a broad range of services to millions of customers. The breadth of both our network and our customer base provides us with a unique perspective on Internet resilience, enabling us to observe the impact of Internet disruptions.

During previous quarters, we tracked a number of government directed Internet shutdowns in Iraq, intended to prevent cheating on academic exams. We expected to do so again during the fourth quarter, but there turned out to be no need to, as discussed below. While we didn’t see that set of expected shutdowns, we did observe a number of other Internet outages and disruptions due to a number of commonly seen causes, including fiber/cable issues, power outages, extreme weather, infrastructure maintenance, general technical problems, cyberattacks, and unfortunately, military action. As we have noted in the past, this post is intended as a summary overview of observed disruptions, and is not an exhaustive or complete list of issues that have occurred during the quarter.

Government directed

Iraq

In a slight departure from the usual subject of Continue reading

Simulate a Silent Host in a VXLAN Network

I’m working on a blog post explaining route type 5 in EVPN. To demonstrate a scenario with a silent host, I want to simulate this behavior. Normally, hosts can be quite chatty and ARP for their GW, for example. In this post I will show how arptables on Linux can be used to simulate a silent host.

Currently the leaf switch has an ARP entry for the host:

Leaf4# show ip arp vrf Tenant1

Flags: * - Adjacencies learnt on non-active FHRP router
       + - Adjacencies synced via CFSoE
       # - Adjacencies Throttled for Glean
       CP - Added via L2RIB, Control plane Adjacencies
       PS - Added via L2RIB, Peer Sync
       RO - Re-Originated Peer Sync Entry
       D - Static Adjacencies attached to down interface

IP ARP Table for context Tenant1
Total number of entries: 1
Address         Age       MAC Address     Interface       Flags
198.51.100.44   00:15:20  0050.56ad.7d68  Vlan10

It is possible to ping the host from the leaf switch:

Leaf4# ping 198.51.100.44 vrf Tenant1
PING 198.51.100.44 (198.51.100.44): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 198.51.100.44: icmp_seq=0 ttl=63 time=1.355 ms
64 bytes from 198.51.100.44:  Continue reading

Weekend Reads 011924


Pressure to resolve incidents quickly that often comes from peers, leadership, and members of affected teams only adds to the chaos of incident management, causing more human errors. Coordinating incidents such as this through the process of having an Incident Commander role has shown more controllable outcomes for organizations around the world.


The Kimsuky Group, believed to be a North Korea-based advanced persistent threat (APT) group active since 2013, struck again several times this year.


QUIC supports connection migration, allowing the client to migrate an established QUIC connection from one path to the other. QUIC’s path validation mechanism can be used to attack the peer and make it consume an unbounded amount of memory.


The NVM Express consortium has updated its specifications by adding a Computational Storage Feature, creating a standardized way for applications to talk to storage devices that include some processing capability.


Post Office chief exec Nick Read left British politicians shocked with his evidence before a Parliamentary committee yesterday after he admitted he could not say when the public body at the center of the historic miscarriage of justice knew when its system was at fault.


We’re only a few weeks into 2024, and violations of people’s Continue reading

BGP EVPN Part III: BGP EVPN Local Learning Fundamentals

Multi-Protocol BGP (MP-BGP) is a BGP-4 extension that enables BGP speakers to encode Network Layer Reachability Information (NLRI) of various address types, such as IPv4/6, VPNv4, and MAC addresses, into BGP Update messages. MP-BGP features an MP_REACH_NLRI Path-Attribute (PA), which utilizes an Address Family Identifier (AFI) to describe service categories. Subsequent Address Family Identifier (SAFI), in turn, defines the solution used for providing the service. For example, L2VPN (AFI 25) is a primary category for Layer-2 VPN services, and the Ethernet Virtual Private Network (EVPN: SAFI 70) provides the service. Another L2VPN service is Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS: SAFI 65). The main differences between these two L2VPN services are that only EVPN supports active/active multihoming, has a control-plane-based MAC address learning mechanism, and operates over an IP-routed infrastructure.

EVPN utilizes various Route Types (EVPN RT) to describe the Network Layer Reachability Information (NLRI) associated with Unicast, BUM (Broadcast, Unknown unicast, and Multicast) traffic, as well as ESI Multihoming. The following sections explain how EVPN RT 2 (MAC Advertisement Route) is employed to distribute MAC and IP address information of Tenant Systems enabling the expansion of VLAN over routed infrastructure. 

The Tenant System refers to a host, virtual machine, Continue reading

Technology Short Take 173

Welcome to Technology Short Take #173! After a lull in links to share last time around, it looks like things have rebounded and folks are in full swing writing new content for me to share with you. I think I have a decent round-up of links for you; hopefully you can find something useful here. Enjoy!

Networking

Servers/Hardware

Security

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

1 … 132 133 134 135 136 … 3,796