Running OVS on Fedora Atomic Host

In this post, I’d like to share the results of some testing I’ve been doing to run Open vSwitch (OVS) in containers on a container-optimized Linux distribution such as Atomic Host (Fedora Atomic Host, specifically). I’m still relatively early in my exploration of this topic, but I felt like sharing what I’ve found so far might be helpful to others, and might help spark conversations within the relevant communities about how this experience might be improved.

The reason for the use of Docker containers in this approach is twofold:

  1. Many of the newer container-optimized Linux distributions—CoreOS Container Linux (soon to be part of Red Hat in some fashion), Project Atomic, etc.—eschew “traditional” package management solutions in favor of containers.
  2. Part of the reason behind my testing was to help the OVS community better understand what it would look like to run OVS in containers so as to help make OVS a better citizen on container-optimized Linux distributions.

In this post, I’ll be using Fedora 27 Atomic Host (via Vagrant with VirtualBox). If you use a different version or release of Atomic Host, your results may differ somewhat. For the OVS containers, I’m using the excellent keldaio/ovs Docker containers.

Continue reading

Networking With Intent

Networking has always been the laggard in the enterprise datacenter. As servers and then storage appliances became increasingly virtualized and disaggregated over the past 15 years or so, the network stubbornly stuck with the appliance model, closed and proprietary. As other datacenter resources became faster, more agile and easier to manage, many of those efficiencies were hobbled by the network, which could take months to program and could require new hardware before making any significant changes.

However slowly, and thanks largely to the hyperscalers and now telcos and other communications service providers, that has begun to change. The rise of …

Networking With Intent was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

802.11: Wi-Fi standards and speeds explained

In the world of wireless, the term Wi-Fi is synonymous with wireless access in general, despite the fact that it is a specific trademark owned by the Wi-Fi Alliance, a group dedicated to certifying that Wi-Fi products meet the IEEE’s set of 802.11 wireless standards.These standards, with names such as 802.11b (pronounced “Eight-O-Two-Eleven-Bee”, ignore the “dot”) and 802.11ac, comprise a family of specifications that started in the 1990s and continues to grow today. The 802.11 standards codify improvements that boost wireless throughput and range as well as the use of new frequencies as they  become available. They also address new technologies that reduce power consumption.To read this article in full, please click here

802.11: Wi-Fi standards and speeds explained

In the world of wireless, the term Wi-Fi is synonymous with wireless access in general, despite the fact that it is a specific trademark owned by the Wi-Fi Alliance, a group dedicated to certifying that Wi-Fi products meet the IEEE’s set of 802.11 wireless standards.These standards, with names such as 802.11b (pronounced “Eight-O-Two-Eleven-Bee”, ignore the “dot”) and 802.11ac, comprise a family of specifications that started in the 1990s and continues to grow today. The 802.11 standards codify improvements that boost wireless throughput and range as well as the use of new frequencies as they  become available. They also address new technologies that reduce power consumption.To read this article in full, please click here

Docker for Windows Desktop… Now With Kubernetes!

Today we are excited to announce the beta for Docker for Windows Desktop with integrated Kubernetes is now available in the edge channel! This release includes Kubernetes 1.8, just like the Docker for Mac and Docker Enterprise Edition and will allow you to develop Linux containers.

The easiest way to get Kubernetes on your desktop is here.

Simply check the box and go

Windows containers Kubernetes

What You Can Do with Kubernetes on your desktop?

Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows are the most popular way to configure a Docker dev environment, and are each used everyday by millions of developers to build, test, and debug containerized apps. The beauty of building with Docker for Mac or Windows is that you can deploy the exact same set of Docker container images on your desktop as you do on your production systems with Docker EE.

Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows are used for building, testing and preparing to ship applications, whereas Docker EE provides the ability to secure and manage your applications in production at scale. You eliminate the “it worked on my machine” problem because you run the same Docker containers on the same Docker engines in development, testing, and production environments, along with the Continue reading

Reckoning The Spectre And Meltdown Performance Hit For HPC

While no one has yet created an exploit to take advantage of the Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution vulnerabilities that were exposed by Google six months ago and that were revealed in early January, it is only a matter of time. The patching frenzy has not settled down yet, and a big concern is not just whether these patches fill the security gaps, but at what cost they do so in terms of application performance.

To try to ascertain the performance impact of the Spectre and Meltdown patches, most people have relied on comments from Google on the negligible …

Reckoning The Spectre And Meltdown Performance Hit For HPC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Giving the Monkey a Smaller Club

Over at the ACM blog, there is a terrific article about software design that has direct application to network design and architecture.

The problem is that once you give a monkey a club, he is going to hit you with it if you try to take it away from him.

What do monkeys and clubs have to do with software or network design? The primary point of interaction is security. The club you intend to make your network operator’s life easier is also a club an attacker can use to break into your network, or damage its operation. Clubs are just that way. If you think of the collection of tools as not just tools, but also as an attack surface, you can immediately see the correlation between the available tools and the attack surface. One way to increase security is to reduce the attack surface, and one way to reduce the attack surface is tools, reduce the number of tools—or the club.

The best way to reduce the attack surface of a piece of software is to remove any unnecessary code.

Consider this: the components of any network are actually made up of code. So to translate this to Continue reading

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Fun and Informative Events

  • Webinar: January 23, 11am GMT & again at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern. Continue reading

What is microsegmentation? How getting granular improves network security

Microsegmentation is a method of creating secure zones in data centers and cloud deployments that allows companies to isolate workloads from one another and secure them individually. It’s aimed at making network security more granular. Microsegmentation vs. VLANs, firewalls and ACLs Network segmentation isn’t new. Companies have relied on firewalls, virtual local area networks (VLAN) and access control lists (ACL) for network segmentation for years. With microsegmentation, policies are applied to individual workloads for greater attack resistance.To read this article in full, please click here

What is microsegmentation? How getting granular improves network security

Microsegmentation is a method of creating secure zones in data centers and cloud deployments that allows companies to isolate workloads from one another and secure them individually. It’s aimed at making network security more granular. Microsegmentation vs. VLANs, firewalls and ACLs Network segmentation isn’t new. Companies have relied on firewalls, virtual local area networks (VLAN) and access control lists (ACL) for network segmentation for years. With microsegmentation, policies are applied to individual workloads for greater attack resistance.To read this article in full, please click here

What is microsegmentation? How getting granular improves network security

Microsegmentation is a method of creating secure zones in data centers and cloud deployments that allows companies to isolate workloads from one another and secure them individually. It’s aimed at making network security more granular. Microsegmentation vs. VLANs, firewalls and ACLs Network segmentation isn’t new. Companies have relied on firewalls, virtual local area networks (VLAN) and access control lists (ACL) for network segmentation for years. With microsegmentation, policies are applied to individual workloads for greater attack resistance.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 4 questions to ask before deploying SD-WAN

SD-WAN has become the definitive buzzword in enterprise networking, and if you’re a decision maker in IT, chances are the technology has come up in conversation. According to Gartner, by 2018, 40 percent of WAN edge infrastructure will be based on SD-WAN or something similar.What is SD-WAN? In a nutshell, Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) simplifies enterprise connectivity between remote locations and branch offices. Common features of a SD-WAN solution include: Combining network links of one location into a single pool of capacity available for all applications and services Customization of the bandwidth and connectivity to meet the needs of your specific network services, locations, or users The ability to centrally define and manage policies and network traffic without requiring manual configuration at each device. Many startups and tech giants have positioned themselves as an SD-WAN solution, each with their own idea on how the technology works and what solution it offers the business. Yet with so many vendors out there claiming to be SD-WAN, it’s hard to determine which solution is right for your business.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 4 questions to ask before deploying SD-WAN

SD-WAN has become the definitive buzzword in enterprise networking, and if you’re a decision maker in IT, chances are the technology has come up in conversation. According to Gartner, by 2018, 40 percent of WAN edge infrastructure will be based on SD-WAN or something similar.What is SD-WAN? In a nutshell, Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) simplifies enterprise connectivity between remote locations and branch offices. Common features of a SD-WAN solution include: Combining network links of one location into a single pool of capacity available for all applications and services Customization of the bandwidth and connectivity to meet the needs of your specific network services, locations, or users The ability to centrally define and manage policies and network traffic without requiring manual configuration at each device. Many startups and tech giants have positioned themselves as an SD-WAN solution, each with their own idea on how the technology works and what solution it offers the business. Yet with so many vendors out there claiming to be SD-WAN, it’s hard to determine which solution is right for your business.To read this article in full, please click here

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