FreeIX – Remote

Introduction

OpenART

Tier1 and aspiring Tier2 providers interconnect only in large metropolitan areas, due to commercial incentives and politics. They won’t often peer with smaller providers, because why peer with a potential customer? Due to this, it’s entirely likely that traffic between two parties in Thessaloniki is sent to Frankfurt or Milan and back.

One possible antidote to this is to connect to a local Internet Exchange point. Not all ISPs have access to large metropolitan datacenters where larger internet exchanges have a point of presence, and it doesn’t help that the datacenter operator is happy to charge a substantial amount of money each month, just for the privilege of having a passive fiber cross connect to the exchange. Many Internet Exchanges these days ask for per-month port costs and meter the traffic with policers and rate limiters, such that the total cost of peering starts to exceed what one might pay for transit, especially at low volumes, which further exacerbates the problem. Bah.

This is an unfortunate market effect (the race to the bottom), where transit providers are continuously lowering their prices to compete. And while transit providers can make up to some extent due to economies of scale, at Continue reading

Rust is faster than C, even before I added SIMD

I found some old C code of mine from around 2001 or so. I vaguely remember trying to make it as optimized as possible. Sure, I was still a teenager, so it’s not state of the art. But it’s not half bad. I vaguely suspect I could do better with better optimization for cache lines, but it’s pretty good.

On my current laptop it does about 12 million passwords per second, single threaded.

Because I’m learning Rust, I decided to port it, and see how fast rust is.

Imagine my surprise when even the first version in Rust was faster. (Yes, I rebuilt the old C code with a modern compiler and its optimizations)

The first Rust version was about 13 million passwords per second.

Why is that? It’s basically the same as the C code. Maybe Rust can take advantage of knowing there’s no pointer aliasing (the reason usually quoted for why Fortran can be faster than C)? Or maybe the memory layout just happened to become more cache friendly?

In any case, I think we can already say that Rust is at least as fast as C.

The code is on github.

SIMD (with Rust)

I realized, of Continue reading

On Open Source and Volunteering

I saw a recent post on LinkedIn from Alex Henthorn-Iwane that gave me pause. He was talking about how nearly 2/3rds of Github projects are maintained by one or two people. He also quoted some statistics around how projects are maintained by volunteers and unpaid members as opposed to more institutional support from people getting paid to do the work. It made me reflect on my own volunteering journey and how the parallels between open source and other organizations aren’t so different after all.

A Hour A Week

Most of my readers know that one of my passion projects outside of Tech Field Day and this humble blog is the involvement of my children in Scouting. I spend a lot of my free time volunteering as a leader and organizer for various groups. I get to touch grass quite often. At least I do when I’m not stuck in meetings or approving paperwork.

One of the things that struck me in Alex’s post was how he talked about the lack of incoming talent to help with projects as older maintainers are aging out. We face a similar problem in scouting. Rather than our volunteers getting too old to do the Continue reading

Enhancing Kubernetes network security with microsegmentation: A strategic approach

Microsegmentation represents a transformative approach to enhancing network security within Kubernetes environments. This technique divides networks into smaller, isolated segments, allowing for granular control over traffic flow and significantly bolstering security posture. At its core, microsegmentation leverages Kubernetes network policies to isolate workloads, applications, namespaces, and entire clusters, tailoring security measures to specific organizational needs and compliance requirements.

The essence of microsegmentation strategies

Scalability and flexibility

The fundamental advantage of microsegmentation through network policies lies in its scalability and flexibility. Kubernetes’ dynamic, label-based selection process facilitates the addition of new segments without compromising existing network infrastructure, enabling organizations to adapt to evolving security landscapes seamlessly.

Labeling the assets is key to microsegmentation success

Prevent lateral movement of threats

Workload isolation, a critical component of microsegmentation, emphasizes the importance of securing individual microservices within a namespace or tenant by allowing only required and approved communication. This minimizes the attack surface and prevents unauthorized lateral movement.

Namespace and tenant isolation

Namespace isolation further enhances security by segregating applications into unique namespaces, ensuring operational independence and reducing the impact of potential security breaches. Similarly, tenant isolation addresses the needs of multi-tenant environments by securing shared Kubernetes infrastructure, thus protecting tenants from each other Continue reading

KU054: OpenTelemetry: Open Source Observability

Observability is foundational to application and infrastructure performance. That’s why it’s fitting that OpenTelemetry is the second most active project in the CNCF after Kubernetes. Today CNCF ambassador Dotan Horovits tells us about the project: OpenTelemetry is a uniform, vendor-agnostic observability framework for generating and collecting telemetry data across both infrastructure and application, across different... Read more »

Single-AS EVPN Fabric with OSPF Underlay: Underlay Network Unicast Routing

 Introduction


Image 2-1 illustrates the components essential for designing a Single-AS, Multicast-enabled OSPF Underlay EVPN Fabric. These components need to be established before constructing the EVPN fabric. I've grouped them into five categories based on their function.

  • General: Defines the IP addressing scheme for Spine-Leaf Inter-Switch links, set the BGP AS number and number of BGP Route-Reflectors, and set the MAC address for the Anycast gateway for client-side VLAN routing interfaces.
  • Replication: Specifies the replication mode for Broadcast, Unknown Unicast, and Multicast (BUM) traffic generated by Tenant Systems. The options are Ingress-Replication and Multicast (ASM or BiDir options).
  • vPC: Describes vPC multihoming settings such as vPC Peer Link VLAN ID and Port-Channel ID, vPC Auto-recovery and Delay Restore timers, and define vPC Peer Keepalive interface.
  • Protocol: Defines the numbering schema for Loopback interfaces, set the OSPF Area identifier, and OSPF process name.
  • Resources: Reserves IP address ranges for Loopback interfaces defined in the Protocols category and for the Rendezvous Point specified in the Replication category. Besides, in this section, we reserve Layer 2 and Layer 3 VXLAN and VLAN ranges for overlay network segments.

The model presented in Figure 2-1 outlines the steps for configuring an EVPN fabric using the Continue reading

Repost: Think About the 99% of the Users

Daniel left a very relevant comment on my Data Center Fabric Designs: Size Matters blog post, describing how everyone rushes to sell the newest gizmos and technologies to the unsuspecting (and sometimes too-awed) users1:

Absolutely right. I’m working at an MSP, and we do a lot of project work for enterprises with between 500 and 2000 people. That means the IT department is not that big; it’s usually just a cost center for them.

Read more …

Repost: Think About the 99% of the Users

Daniel left a very relevant comment on my Data Center Fabric Designs: Size Matters blog post, describing how everyone rushes to sell the newest gizmos and technologies to the unsuspecting (and sometimes too-awed) users1:

Absolutely right. I’m working at an MSP, and we do a lot of project work for enterprises with between 500 and 2000 people. That means the IT department is not that big; it’s usually just a cost center for them.

Read more …

IPv6 Prefix Lengths

These days its up to IPv6 Service providers to determine what IPv6 address prefix length they assign to each customer. This leads to the question: What lengths are commonly used for customer assignments? Let's see if we can answer it.

NAN061: Transforming Network Telemetry Into Operational Insights With Kentik (Sponsored)

The expectations for application delivery are higher than ever before, the networks that support those applications are increasingly distributed, and visibility is essential for network operations and troubleshooting. On today’s sponsored episode, Kentik’s Phil Gervasi joins us to discuss how Kentik collects essential performance data to help you monitor and manage all the networks your... Read more »
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