Ever since AutoCon1, I've been trying to define Network Automation, at least in my own mind. The thinking is, we need to define terms before we can tackle solutions. In a jet lagged, sleep deprived moment, it occurred to me that NAF is trying to help us go from a single celled organisms to a READ MORE
The post What is Network Automation? appeared first on The Gratuitous Arp.
When Fidelma Russo looks at Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s GreenLake, she sees a rapidly expanding platform that like others is trying to keep pace not only with the growing demands of organizations that are continuing to adopt the cloud but also are looking for ways to bring in and deploy emerging AI technologies. …
HPE GreenLake Platform Gets Expanded Storage And Custom KVM Hypervisor was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
COMMISSIONED What’s holding back the next big breakthrough in AI – processing power or the infrastructure supporting it? …
Scaling The AI Frontier And Powering The Future Of Innovation was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Over a decade ago, I created a webinar describing enterprise MPLS/VPN use cases. Surprisingly, some networking engineers still find it useful in the wonderful new world of SD-WAN duct tape, and starting today, you can access it without an ipSpace.net account.
We have said it before, and we will say it again as everyone is chewing on the financial results that Nvidia just turned in for its third quarter of fiscal 2025 ended in October. …
Nvidia Datacenter Revenues Still Booming, “Blackwell” Platforms On Track was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are cyberattacks that aim to overwhelm and disrupt online services, making them inaccessible to users. By leveraging a network of distributed devices, DDoS attacks flood the target system with excessive requests, consuming its bandwidth or exhausting compute resources to the point of failure. These attacks can be highly effective against unprotected sites and relatively inexpensive for attackers to launch. Despite being one of the oldest types of attacks, DDoS attacks remain a constant threat, often targeting well-known or high traffic websites, services, or critical infrastructure. Cloudflare has mitigated over 14.5 million DDoS attacks since the start of 2024 — an average of 2,200 DDoS attacks per hour. (Our DDoS Threat Report for Q3 2024 contains additional related statistics).
If we look at the metrics associated with large attacks mitigated in the last 10 years, does the graph show a steady increase in an exponential curve that keeps getting steeper, especially over the last few years, or is it closer to linear growth? We found that the growth is not linear, but rather is exponential, with the slope dependent on the metric we are looking at.
Why is this question interesting? Simple. The answer Continue reading
When cable cuts occur, whether submarine or terrestrial, they often result in observable disruptions to Internet connectivity, knocking a network, city, or country offline. This is especially true when there is insufficient resilience or alternative paths — that is, when a cable is effectively a single point of failure. Associated observations of traffic loss resulting from these disruptions are frequently covered by Cloudflare Radar in social media and blog posts. However, two recent cable cuts that occurred in the Baltic Sea resulted in little-to-no observable impact to the affected countries, as we discuss below, in large part because of the significant redundancy and resilience of Internet infrastructure in Europe.
On Sunday, November 17 2024, the BCS East-West Interlink submarine cable connecting Sventoji, Lithuania and Katthammarsvik, Sweden was reportedly damaged around 10:00 local (Lithuania) time (08:00 UTC). A Data Center Dynamics article about the cable cut quotes the CTO of Telia Lietuva, the telecommunications provider that operates the cable, and notes “The Lithuanian cable carried about a third of the nation's Internet capacity, but capacity was carried via other routes.”
As the Cloudflare Radar graphs below show, there was no apparent impact to Continue reading
In this post we’ll add a Network Authentication Device (NAD) to ISE to perform TACACS+ authentication and authorization. We’ll also do a deep dive on AAA commands on the NAD. First let’s start with the overall goal of the lab and an overview of how TACACS+ works.
The goal of the lab is to have two users, Bob and Alice, where Bob works in the NOC and Alice is a network admin. Based on the AD group they belong to, they should get different permissions when administrating devices. Alice will be able to use all commands, while Bob will only be able to use basic commands. This is shown below:
Why would we use TACACS+ over RADIUS? The main reason is that it gives us per command authorization and accounting. The overall flow of TACACS+ is shown below:
To get things started, we must first enable TACACS+ on the PSN. Go to Administration -> Deployment located under System:
Click the > symbol next to Deployment and select your PSN that you want to enable TACACS+ on:
Scroll down to the Policy Service part. Notice that Device Admin is currently not enabled:
Select Enable Device Admin Service. You Continue reading
The ISE evaluation license gives you 90 days of full access and after that you won’t be able to make any changes. Currently, my server has 28 days remaining:
As I intend to keep labbing, I’m going to perform a backup and restore where I’ll restore the configuration on another VM that I’ll be installing. Note that this can be automated, but in this post we’re going to focus on the process of doing it manually to understand what steps are involved.
The steps that will be performed are:
The configuration backup will give us everything we need to restore all the system settings and policies. The operational backup gives us data such as logs. While the configuration backup includes the trusted- and system certificates, it’s good to also export them separately in case you need to perform a restore using another method.
The first thing I’m going to do is to install SFTP on my Windows server using Continue reading
In October 2024, we talked about storing billions of logs from your AI application using AI Gateway, and how we used Cloudflare’s Developer Platform to do this.
With AI Gateway already processing over 3 billion logs and experiencing rapid growth, the number of connections to the platform continues to increase steadily. To help developers manage this scale more effectively, we wanted to offer an alternative to implementing HTTP/2 keep-alive to maintain persistent HTTP(S) connections, thereby avoiding the overhead of repeated handshakes and TLS negotiations with each new HTTP connection to AI Gateway. We understand that implementing HTTP/2 can present challenges, particularly when many libraries and tools may not support it by default and most modern programming languages have well-established WebSocket libraries available.
With this in mind, we used Cloudflare’s Developer Platform and Durable Objects (yes, again!) to build a WebSockets API that establishes a single, persistent connection, enabling continuous communication.
Through this API, all AI providers supported by AI Gateway can be accessed via WebSocket, allowing you to maintain a single TCP connection between your client or server application and the AI Gateway. The best part? Even if your chosen provider doesn’t support WebSockets, we handle it Continue reading
As far as we have been concerned since founding The Next Platform literally a decade ago this week, AI training and inference in the datacenter are a kind of HPC. …
HPC Market Bigger Than Expected, And Growing Faster was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The real-time dashboard shows total network traffic at The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC24) conference being held this week in Atlanta. The dashboard shows that 31 Petabytes of data have been transferred already and the conference has just started.
The conference network used in the demonstration, SCinet, is described as the most powerful and advanced network on Earth, connecting the SC community to the world.
Finally, check out the SC24 Dropped packet visibility demonstration to learn about one of newest developments in sFlow monitoring and see a live demonstration.