Introduction to EVPN In VXLAN Networks

In previous posts I described VXLAN using flood and learn behavior using multicast or ingress replication. The drawback to flood and learn is that frames need to be flooded/replicated for the VTEPs to learn of each other and for learning what MAC addresses are available through each VTEP. This isn’t very efficient. Isn’t there a better way of learning this information? This is where Ethernet VPN (EVPN) comes into play. What is it? As you know, BGP can carry all sorts of information and EVPN is just BGP with support to carry information about VTEPs, MAC addresses, IP addresses, VRFs, and some other stuff. What does EVPN provide us?

  • Ability to discover VTEPs.
  • Messaging of MAC prefixes and IP prefixes.
  • Reduced amount of flooding.
  • Optionally ARP suppression.

Note that the use of EVPN doesn’t entirely remove the need for flooding using multicast or ingress replication. Hosts still need to use ARP/ND to find the MAC address of each other, although ARP suppression could potentially help with that. There may also be protocols such as DHCP that leverage broadcast for some messages. In addition, there may be silent hosts in the fabric where VTEP is not aware that the host is Continue reading

Cisco Acquires Isovalent: A Big Win for Cloud-Native Network Security and a Validation of Tigera’s Vision

This week’s news of Cisco’s intent to acquire Isovalent sends an important message to the cloud security ecosystem: network security is no longer an afterthought in the cloud-native world. It’s now a critical component of any robust security posture for cloud-native applications. This move not only validates the work of the Isovalent team in evangelizing this essential category but also underscores the vision Tigera has pioneered since 2016 with Project Calico.

I would first like to extend heartfelt congratulations to Isovalent and its founders on their well-deserved exit and thank them for their invaluable contributions to cloud-native network security.

Cisco’s acquisition recognizes that traditional perimeter security solutions simply don’t translate to the dynamic, distributed nature of cloud-native architectures and that network security is a critical part of a good cloud-native security design. This is a fundamental truth that Tigera identified early on with Project Calico. We saw the need for a fundamentally different approach to network security, one tailored to the unique demands of containerized and distributed applications running in the cloud.

Calico Open Source, born from this vision, has become the industry leader in container networking and security. It now powers over 100 million containers across 8 million+ Continue reading

Calico monthly roundup: December 2023

Welcome to the Calico monthly roundup: December edition! From open source news to live events, we have exciting updates to share—let’s get into it!

Tigera has achieved AWS Security Competency status!

Tigera has gained a new AWS Security Competency, which we’re proud to add to our already existing AWS Containers Software Competency. Read about the addition of our newest security competency.

Read more.
Find your Cluster Security Score

Calico Cloud is releasing new capabilities for security posture management called Security Scoring and Recommended Actions. Start measuring and tracking your security posture.

Learn more.
Customer case study: Leader-bet

Calico provides container security and compliance for online gaming giant, Leader-bet. Read our case study to learn more.

Read case study.
Comparing NGFW container firewalls with Calico container firewall

Learn how to establish robust firewall policies with just code or a single click for advanced threat protection using behavior-based learning and IDS/IPS integrated with the firewall.

Read blog post.

Open source news

Calico v3.27 is out 🎉 and there are a lot of new features, updates, and improvements that are packed into this release. Here is a breakdown of the most important changes:

  • Significant performance improvements, especially for extremely large clusters
  • Calico VPP Continue reading

D2C227: Platforms Reduce Cognitive Overhead

Today’s show explores platform engineering. Guest Chad McElligott has thought a lot about the practice of platform engineering, and a blog post and talk he gave about the subject inspired us to reach out and have a conversation. Chad describes platform engineering as “the application of a Product Mindset to supporting your engineering organization’s software... Read more »

D2C227: Platforms Reduce Cognitive Overhead

Today's Day Two Cloud explores platform engineering. We talk about how to balance the needs of infrastructure engineers and developers, how to shift to a delivery model, and how to account for human personalities and operational processes in your platform. Tools and tech are essential, but you also have to consider and incorporate the non-tech stuff.

The post D2C227: Platforms Reduce Cognitive Overhead appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The RFC Process

I’ve just finished a seven-part series over at Packets Pushers about the process of writing and publishing an RFC. Even if you don’t ever plan to write a draft or participate in the IETF, this series will give you a better idea of the work that goes into creating new standards and IETF documents.

So … you have an idea you think would fit perfectly into the realm of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)—but where do you start?

This, the second, post, will consider document formatting and two of the (sometimes) more difficult sections of an IETF draft to fill in.

There are other seemingly mystical concepts in the IETF process as well—for instance, what is a “document stream,” and what is a document’s “status?”

You’re almost ready to submit a shiny new document to the IETF for consideration, right? Not quite yet—we still need to deal with mandatory sections and language.

You cannot simply post a draft to the IETF repository and expect “someone, somewhere,” to take action.

The working group chairs asked if your draft should become a working group item, and the consensus was to accept! It might seem like your draft is home free Continue reading

Hedge 206: Taking Care of Yourself with Ethan Banks

As we reach the end of what has been a hard two-year stretch for what seems like the entire world, Ethan Banks joins Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ to talk about the importance of taking care of yourself. In the midst of radical changes, you can apply self-discipline to make your little part of the world a better place by keeping yourself sane, fit, and well-rested.

 

 

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Great Accelerations: Just How Much Will We Spend On GenAI Again?

Ever since the launch of the “Antares” MI300X and MI300A compute engines by AMD back in early December, we have been mulling over the spending forecasts for AI spending in general and for infrastructure and accelerators more specifically. …

The post Great Accelerations: Just How Much Will We Spend On GenAI Again? first appeared on The Next Platform.

Great Accelerations: Just How Much Will We Spend On GenAI Again? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Have your data and hide it too: An introduction to differential privacy

Many applications rely on user data to deliver useful features. For instance, browser telemetry can identify network errors or buggy websites by collecting and aggregating data from individuals. However, browsing history can be sensitive, and sharing this information opens the door to privacy risks. Interestingly, these applications are often not interested in individual data points (e.g. whether a particular user faced a network error while trying to access Wikipedia) but only care about aggregated data (e.g. the total number of users who had trouble connecting to Wikipedia).

The Distributed Aggregation Protocol (DAP) allows data to be aggregated without revealing any individual data point. It is useful for applications where a data collector is interested in general trends over a population without having access to sensitive data. There are many use cases for DAP, from COVID-19 exposure notification to telemetry in Firefox to personalizing photo albums in iOS. Cloudflare is helping to standardize DAP and its underlying primitives. We are working on an open-source implementation of DAP and building a service to run with current and future partners. Check out this blog post to learn more about how DAP works.

DAP takes a significant step in the right direction, Continue reading

Thoughts on 2023

As we close out 2023, some random observations about engineering, culture, and life.

Network engineering needs help. I am hearing, from all over the place, that network engineering is “not cool.” There is a dearth of students entering the pipeline. College programs are struggling, and many organizations are struggling with a lack of engineering talent—in fact, I would guess the most common reason for companies to move to “the cloud” is because they cannot find anyone who knows how to build an operate a network any longer.

It probably didn’t help that for the last few years many “thought leaders” in the network engineering space have been saying there is no future in network engineering. It also doesn’t help that network engineering training has become stilted and … boring. Coders are off talking about how to solve problems. Robotics folks are working on cool projects that solve problems.

Network engineers are being taught how to spend less money and told to “find another career.”

I don’t know how we think we can sustain a healthy world of IT without network engineers.

And yes, I know there are folks who think networking problems are simple, easy enough to solve Continue reading

Next-Level Lateral Security for Your Private Cloud

Cyber attacks are growing in frequency and complexity. And at an average cost of $4.35M1, data breaches are no joke. With Generative AI, this threat will grow even further—equipping even an unsophisticated attacker with the means to become a sophisticated hacker.

Reality is, you can’t get away with just protecting your perimeter anymore. Today, the most common type of attack vectors—lateral movement, vulnerability exploits and zero day attacks — are all matters of lateral security. And with the majority of your traffic going east-west, protecting the inside of your network is beyond critical.

Traditional security solutions aren’t enough when it comes to lateral security: implemented with multiple appliances, they lead to traffic hairpinning, create bottlenecks, are cost-prohibitive, and only protect a subset of workloads. To make matters worse, they’re blind to VM-to-VM traffic, since traditional methods of using network taps only see traffic between physical hosts. And you can’t protect what you can’t see. 

To protect the inside of your private cloud, you need a comprehensive lateral security solution that gives you complete visibility and security.

VMware’s Lateral Security answers that call; it is distributed, built into the hypervisor, and scales seamlessly to meet your evolving Continue reading

A return to US net neutrality rules?

For nearly 15 years, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the United States has gone back and forth on open Internet rules – promulgating and then repealing, with some court battles thrown in for good measure. Last week was the deadline for Internet stakeholders to submit comments to the FCC about their recently proposed net neutrality rules for Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which would introduce considerable protections for consumers and codify the responsibility held by ISPs.

For anyone who has worked to help to build a better Internet, as Cloudflare has for the past 13 years, the reemergence of net neutrality is déjà vu all over again. Cloudflare has long supported the open Internet principles that are behind net neutrality, and we still do today. That’s why we filed comments with the FCC expressing our support for these principles, and concurring with many of the technical definitions and proposals that largely would reinstitute the net neutrality rules that were previously in place.

But let’s back up and talk about net neutrality. Net neutrality is the principle that ISPs should not discriminate against the traffic that flows through them. Specifically, when these rules were adopted by the FCC in 2015, there Continue reading

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