Ansible – Don’t be Afraid of a Little Python

This year I’ve written several Ansible modules. It wasn’t that hard, yet some people claimed they had been waiting “years” for those modules. There was nothing stopping anyone else doing it, yet they hadn’t. There’s a weird reticence amongst network engineers to learn or write any code, even when it could make a large difference to their job. People either do nothing, or they create complex Ansible playbooks to work around their reluctance to write Python. It’s not that scary. Why don’t people put in a bit of effort?

Don’t be Afraid of a Little Python

Ansible playbooks use YAML, a somewhat human-readable markup language. These are instructions for “what” Ansible should do - e.g. “Use the Cisco ios_config module to ensure that this configuration line is present."

The underlying modules use Python. These are the “how” - they take the instructions from the playbooks, and turn those into device connections to devices, making configuration changes, checking state, etc.

Some people look at these modules as a mystery black box that only the vendor can write. They think that the only way they can interact with Ansible is via playbooks.

This leads to two situations:

1/ Twiddling thumbs Continue reading

EVPN on the host for multi-tenancy

As an SE at Cumulus, I’m involved in designing and implementing data center networks for MSPs and enterprises. While doing so, I have to be aware of how Cumulus can integrate our solution with solutions from multiple other vendors depending on the solution that is needed. While I’m not a software engineer or protocol developer myself, I’m interested in deploying these solutions in real world environments. Cumulus Linux is a standard Linux environment, and as a company, we use and develop on open-source tools and solutions. In this blog, I would like to address a common requirement in data center networks: multi tenancy, and how this can be achieved in the Linux ecosystem, open-source software and various other tools, specifically with EVPN on the host.

Multi tenancy use-cases

There are two major ones that are often deployed:

• Virtual machines
• Container environments

Virtual machines in the Linux ecosystem are mostly KVM deployments and in many cases deployed in combination with Openstack. There are different multi tenant architectures, but the most common one is to build an overlay network with VXLAN between the hypervisors. To reach resources outside the specific tenant environment, dedicated network nodes are being used.

 

While this architecture is Continue reading

How to save costs on your API Gateway solution using Cloudflare Workers

How to save costs on your API Gateway solution using Cloudflare Workers
How to save costs on your API Gateway solution using Cloudflare Workers


The following is a guest post by Janusz Jezowicz, CEO of Speedchecker. The Speedchecker team runs a global distributed measurement network and offer speed test solutions using the Cloudflare platform.

Software companies contemplating offering a public API to 3rd party developers have many options to choose from for how to offer their API securely with high reliability and with fast performance. When it comes to cost though, commercial solutions are expensive and open-source solutions require a lot of time managing servers and the synchronization between them. This blog post describes how we successfully moved our API gateway to Cloudflare Workers and slashed our costs by a factor of 10.

Our original solution based on the Kong open-source API gateway

When we built our measurement network API  for cost reasons we opted for open-source solution Kong. Kong is a great solution which has a vibrant community of users and plug-in developers who extend and maintain the platform. Kong is a good alternative to commercial solutions from companies such as Apigee or Mulesoft whose solutions are really catering for larger businesses who can afford them. Kong is free and it works. On the other hand, if your business has complex needs Continue reading

Statement concerning events at Glowbeam Technologies

All of Cloudflare's staff were shocked at the events depicted in NCIS Season 16 Episode 1 where incorrect use of random numbers for encryption resulted in the insertion of multiple trojan horses that brought a nuclear reactor within seconds of a meltdown.

Although Cloudflare has long been a competitor of the company responsible, Glowbeam Technologies, and uses similar random number generation technology, we would like to emphasize that there are significant differences between the two companies.

Firstly, Cloudflare's Lava Lamps are not an "encryption engine" and thus they are not susceptible to tampering by the janitor.

Secondly, all Cloudflare staff undergo extensive background checks.

Thirdly, we were shocked that Glowbeam Technologies' wall of Lava Lamps was a single point of failure. In contrast, Cloudflare uses multiple sources of randomness.

Lastly, Glowbeam Technologies' CEO confirmed that the company did not use "AES" or "key block ciphers", but instead relied solely on their Lava Lamp "encryption engine". Cloudflare strongly advocates for never writing or inventing encryption algorithms and works closely with groups like the IETF to use standard, well understood encryption.

As a result of these events Cloudflare has acquired the assets of Glowbeam Technologies, please visit glowbeamtechnologies.com for more information.

John Graham-Cumming
Chief Technology Officer
Cloudflare, Inc.

Mini pwning with GL-iNet AR150

Seven years ago, before the $35 Raspberry Pi, hackers used commercial WiFi routers for their projects. They'd replace the stock firmware with Linux. The $22 TP-Link WR703N was extremely popular for these projects, being half the price and half the size of the Raspberry Pi.


Unfortunately, these devices had extraordinarily limited memory (16-megabytes) and even more limited storage (4-megabyte). That's megabytes -- the typical size of an SD card in an RPi is a thousand times larger.

I'm interested in that device for the simple reason that it has a big-endian CPU.

All these IoT-style devices these days run ARM and MIPS processors, with a smattering of others like x86, PowerPC, ARC, and AVR32. ARM and MIPS CPUs can run in either mode, big-endian or little-endian. Linux can be compiled for either mode. Little-endian is by far the most popular mode, because of Intel's popularity. Code developed on little-endian computers sometimes has subtle bugs when recompiled for big-endian, so it's best just to maintain the same byte-order as Intel. On the other hand, popular file-formats and crypto-algorithms use big-endian, so there's some efficiency to be gained with going with that choice.

I'd like to have a big-endian computer around to Continue reading

Birthday Week Wrap-Up: Every day is launch day at Cloudflare

Birthday Week Wrap-Up: Every day is launch day at Cloudflare

Our customers are accustomed to us launching new services, features, and functionality at a feverish pace, but recently, we’ve been especially active. This week we celebrated our 8th Birthday Week by announcing new offerings that benefit our customers and the global Internet community. Our mission is to help build a better Internet, and we’re convinced that launching new capabilities that benefit not only our customers, but also the broader Internet overall, is the best way to fulfill our mission.


Birthday Week Wrap-Up: Every day is launch day at Cloudflare

Helping build a better Internet, one launch at a time

As an organization, we could choose to celebrate Cloudflare’s birthday in lots of different ways (a press release, a company party, or fun gifts for all our employees). But at Cloudflare, we have a unique birthday tradition: we roll up our sleeves and give our customers and the Internet community a new capability (i.e. a gift) every day of our birthday week.

Some of this past week’s launches have been entirely new offerings, like providing key-value storage across Cloudflare’s global cloud network with Cloudflare Workers KV.  Other birthday week launches help improve the overall Internet ecosystem: the Bandwidth Alliance reduces data transfer charges from major cloud hosts and Cloudflare Registrar Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For September 28th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

@danielbryantuk: "A LAMP stack is a good thing. Never inflict a distributed system on yourself unless you have too..." @mipsytipsy #CloudNativeLondon

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please support me on Patreon and you'll get 100 free cloud credits in heaven. Know anyone looking for a simple book explaining the cloud? Then please recommend my well reviewed book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love it and you'll be their hero forever.

 

  • $2 billion: Pokémon GO revenue since launch; 10: say happy birthday to StackOverflow; $148 million: Uber data breach fine; 75%: streaming music industry revenue in the US;  5.2 TB: Fastly peak per second traffic; 10 billion: Ethereum requests per day; 01%: DNS resolution issues when the KSK rolls; 15B: projected gaming community views on Reddit; £4.1bn: saved by UK Government's Digital Transformation Journey; 10X: Core ML model runs  faster on the A12 processor; 4 million: cores managed by Open Stack at Yahoo; 1PB: Azure's data box; 21 million: US Apple music subscribers; .675: Curry's league leading true shooting percentage;  $3 trillion: taxes collected Continue reading

Weekend Reads 092818

Windows and Linux users need to beware, as an all-in-one, destructive malware strain has been discovered in the wild that features multiple malware capabilities including ransomware, cryptocurrency miner, botnet, and self-propagating worm targeting Linux and Windows systems. —Swati Khandelwal @The Hacker News

According to IDC Research’s recent US DDoS Prevention Survey, more than 50% of IT security decision makers said that their organization had been the victim of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack as many as 10 times in the past year. For those who experienced an attack, more than 40% lasted longer than 10 hours. This statistic correlates with our ATLAS findings, which show there were 7.5 million DDoS attacks in 2017 — a rate, says Cisco, that is increasing at roughly the same rate as Internet traffic. —Carlos Morales @Dark Reading

As the topic of hacking back continues to resurface among elected officials, those of us in the cybersecurity community are scratching our heads over why this concept refuses to die. After digging deeper, one can see that there are many misperceptions regarding what the terms “hacking back” and “active cyber defense” (ACD) actually mean. General frustration and misinformation are driving the interest, but the mixing of Continue reading

Make your Ansible Playbooks flexible, maintainable, and scalable

Extending-Ansible-PlaybookSince starting my journey using Ansible in 2013, I've built Ansible Playbooks to automate many things: SaaS products, a cluster of Raspberry Pi's, a home automation system, even my own computers!

In the years since, I've learned a lot of tricks to help ease the maintenance burden for my work. It's important to me to have maintainable projects, because many of my projects—like Hosted Apache Solr—have been in operation for over a decade! If it's hard to maintain the project or it's hard to make major architecture changes, then I can lose customers to more nimble competitors, I can lose money, and—most importantly—I can lose my sanity!

I'm presenting a session at AnsibleFest Austin this year, Make your Ansible Playbooks flexible, maintainable, and scalable, and I thought I'd summarize some of the major themes here.

Stay Organized

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I love photography and automation, and so I spend a lot of time building electronics projects that involve Raspberry Pis and cameras. Without the organization system I use (part of it pictured above), it would be very frustrating putting together the right components for my project.

Similarly, in Ansible, I like to have my tasks organized so I can compose them more Continue reading

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