Does Establishing More IXPs Keep Data Local? Brazil and Mexico Might Offer Answers

Much like air travel, the internet has certain hubs that play important relay functions in the delivery of information. Just as Heathrow Airport serves as a hub for passengers traveling to or from Europe, AMS-IX (Amsterdam Internet Exchange) is a key hub for information getting in or out of Europe. Instead of airline companies gathering in one place to drop off or pick up passengers, it’s internet service providers coming together to swap data – lots and lots of data.

Where the world’s largest internet exchange points (IXPs) reside are mostly where you would expect to find them: advanced economies with sophisticated internet infrastructure. As internet access reached new populations around the world, however, growth in IXPs lagged and traffic tended to make some roundabout, and seemingly irrational, trips to the more established IXPs.

For example, users connected to a server just a few miles away may be surprised to discover that data will cross an entire ocean, turn 180 degrees, and cross that ocean again to arrive at its destination. This occurrence, known as the “boomeranging” or “hair-pinning” (or “trombone effect” due to the path’s shape), is especially true for emerging markets, where local ISPs are less interconnected and Continue reading

Adaptive Micro-segmentation – Built-in Application Security from the Network to the Workload

A zero trust or least-privileged, security model has long been held as the best way to secure applications and data. At its core, a zero trust security model is based on having a whitelist of known good behaviors for an environment and enforcing this whitelist. This model is preferable to one that depends on identifying attacks in progress because attack methods are always changing, giving attackers the upper hand and leaving defenders a step behind.

The problem for IT and InfoSec teams has always been effectively operationalizing a zero trust model. As applications become increasingly distributed across hybrid environments and new application frameworks allow for constant change, a lack of comprehensive application visibility and consistent security control points is exacerbated for IT and InfoSec, making achieving a zero trust model even harder.

A modern application is not a piece of software running on a single machine — it’s a distributed system. Different pieces of software running on different workloads, networked together. And we have thousands of them, all commingled on a common infrastructure or, more lately, spanning multiple data centers and clouds. Our internal networks have evolved to be relatively flat — a decision designed to facilitate organic growth. But Continue reading

NSX Portfolio Realizing the Virtual Cloud Network for Customers

If you’re already in Las Vegas or heading there, we are excited to welcome you into the Virtual Cloud Network Experience at VMworld US 2018!

First, why is the networking and security business unit at VMware calling this a “Virtual Cloud Network Experience”? Announced May 1, the Virtual Cloud Network is the network model for the digital era. It is also the vision of VMware for the future of networking to empower customers to connect and protect applications and data, regardless of where they sit – from edge to edge.

At VMworld this year we’re making some announcements that are helping turn the Virtual Cloud Network vision into reality and showcasing customer that have embraced virtual cloud networking.

With that, here’s what’s new:

Public Cloud, Bare Metal, and Containers

NSX is only for VMs, right? Wrong! We’ve added support for native AWS and Azure workloads with NSX Cloud, support for applications running on bare metal servers (no hypervisor!), and increased support for containers (including containers running on bare metal). There’s much to get up to speed on so check out the can’t-miss 100-level sessions below, plus there are a bunch of 200 and 300 level sessions covering the Continue reading

Provisioning a headless Raspberry Pi

The typical way of installing a fresh Raspberry Pi is to attach power, keyboard, mouse, and an HDMI monitor. This is a pain, especially for the diminutive RPi Zero. This blogpost describes a number of options for doing headless setup. There are several options for this, including Ethernet, Ethernet gadget, WiFi, and serial connection. These examples use a Macbook as an example, maybe I'll get around to a blogpost describing this from Windows.

Burning micro SD card

We are going to edit the SD card before booting, so for completeness, I thought I'd describe the process of burning an SD card.

We are going to download the latest "raspbian" operating system. I download the "lite" version because I'm not using the desktop features. It comes as a compressed .zip file which we need to extract into an .img file. Just double-click on the .zip on Windows or Mac.

The next step is to burn the image to an SD card. On Windows I use Win32DiskImager. On Mac I use the following command-line steps:

$ sudo -s
# mount
# diskutil unmount /dev/disk2s1
# dd bs=1m if=~/Downloads/2018-06-27-raspbian-stretch-lite.img of=/dev/disk2 conv=sync

First, I need a root prompt. I then use the Continue reading

Using Workers To Make Static Sites Dynamic

Using Workers To Make Static Sites Dynamic

The following is a guest post by Paddy Sherry, Lead Developer at Gambling.com Group. They build performance marketing websites and tools, using Cloudflare to serve to their global audience. Paddy is a Web Performance enthusiast with an interest in Serverless Computing.

Choosing technology that is used on a large network of sites is a key architectural decision that must be correct. We build static websites but needed to find a way to make them dynamic to do things like geo targeting, restrict access and A/B testing. This post shares our experiences on what we learned when using Workers to tackle these challenges.

Our Background

At Gambling.com Group, we use Cloudflare on all of our sites so our curiosity level in Workers was higher than most. We are big fans of static websites because nothing is faster than flat HTML. We had been searching for a technology like this for some time and applied to be part of the beta program, so were one of the first to gain access to the functionality.

The reason we were so keen to experiment with Workers is that for anyone running static sites, 99% of the time, the product requirements Continue reading

Deploying TLS 1.3

Last week saw the formal publication of the TLS 1.3 specification as RFC 8446. It’s been a long time coming – in fact it’s exactly 10 years since TLS 1.2 was published back in 2008 – but represents a substantial step forward in making the Internet a more secure and trusted place.

What is TLS and why is it needed?

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is widely used to encrypt data transmitted between Internet hosts, with the most popular use being for secure web browser connections (adding the ‘S’ to HTTP). It is also commonly (although less visibly) used to encrypt data sent to and from mail servers (using STARTTLS with SMTP and IMAP/POP etc..), but can be used in conjunction with many other Internet protocols (e.g. DNS-over-TLS, FTPS) where secure connections are required. For more information about how TLS works and why you should use it, please see our TLS Basics guide.

TLS is often used interchangeably with SSL (Secure Socket Layers) which was developed by Netscape and predates it as an IETF Standard, but many Certification Authorities (CAs) still market the X.509 certificates used by TLS as ‘SSL certificates’ due to their familiarity with Continue reading

Dell XPS 15 (9560) Ubuntu 1804 Setup

I recently upgraded my Dell XPS (9560) to Ubuntu 1804 LTS from 1604 and I ran into a few issues along the way. This post may help others so I am documenting it here. Pre-Flight Prior to installing Ubuntu 1604 I upgraded the BIOS from Windows 10. Also in the BIOS settings I disabled secure...

White Box Open Networking: A Cure for Your Regulatory Compliance Ills

Just about every major US regulatory requirement says companies must use software that’s fully supported by the vendor that sells it. Simply put, if you’re using software that is beyond its end of life, you’re not only posing a security risk to your company – you’re also out of regulatory compliance.

It’s an issue for any public company, given that they must all comply with the Sarbanes Oxley Act, as well as any company that must meet the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).  Those three acts alone cover an awful lot of, if not most, US companies.

All software has a lifecycle, including the network operating system (NOS) software controlling all the network switches and routers in enterprise networks. When that NOS is nearing its end of life, meaning you have no choice but to upgrade in order to stay in compliance, it’s a good time to assess your available options. In fact, given the pace of technology change, it’s a safe bet that you’ve got alternatives that quite literally didn’t exist when you installed your current NOS five, six — or more — years ago.

White Continue reading

Network Automation at AnsibleFest: That’s How We Role

AF-Network-Automation-Blog

I am getting super excited about my first ever AnsibleFest! Despite using Ansible for more than five years now, I have never had the opportunity to attend this famed event. I had coworkers from previous employers attend, and they were always excited and invigorated after the conference. October is fast approaching and the energy around the event is growing every day.

I’m especially excited for AnsibleFest 2018 because it will have an entire track dedicated to my favorite subject: Network Automation. Join us for two days (October 2-3) as Ansible network developers, Ansible experts from around the world, partners and community members showcase new functionality, use cases, stories and paths to production. You will hear from the developers who design, create, test and distribute the code. You’ll also hear from industry experts and network operators who create and deploy Ansible Playbooks to manage a variety of network gear and situations.

I’ll highlight two talks I’m especially excited about, to give you an idea of what you’ll learn in the Network Automation track at AnsibleFest 2018.

First up is one of my favorite coworkers, Trishna Guha, talking about the Network-Engine role. Trishna will highlight how Network-Engine extracts data from network devices Continue reading

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