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Introducing advanced session audit capabilities in Cloudflare One

The basis of Zero Trust is defining granular controls and authorization policies per application, user, and device. Having a system with a sufficient level of granularity to do this is crucial to meet both regulatory and security requirements. But there is a potential downside to so many controls: in order to troubleshoot user issues, an administrator has to consider a complex combination of variables across applications, user identity, and device information, which may require painstakingly sifting through logs.

We think there’s a better way — which is why, starting today, administrators can easily audit all active user sessions and associated data used by their Cloudflare One policies. This enables the best of both worlds: extremely granular controls, while maintaining an improved ability to troubleshoot and diagnose Zero Trust deployments in a single, simple control panel. Information that previously lived in a user’s browser or changed dynamically is now available to administrators without the need to bother an end user or dig into logs.

A quick primer on application authentication and authorization

Authentication and Authorization are the two components that a Zero Trust policy evaluates before allowing a user access to a resource.

Authentication is the process of verifying the identity Continue reading

IPB139: Avoiding Typical IPv6 Pitfalls

Network engineers and architects considering IPv6 can benefit from the experiences of those who have gone before them by avoiding the problems that have bedeviled other deployments. On today’s show, your hosts discuss three typical pitfalls and how to get over or around them without falling in. Those IPv6 pitfalls include: IPv4 thinking Deploying ULA... Read more »

IPB139: Avoiding Typical IPv6 Pitfalls

Network engineers and architects considering IPv6 can benefit from the experiences of those who have gone before them by avoiding the problems that have bedeviled other deployments. On today's show, your hosts discuss three typical pitfalls and how to get over or around them without falling in.

The post IPB139: Avoiding Typical IPv6 Pitfalls appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Billion-Dollar AI Promise a Bright Spot in Gloomy Quarter for Cisco

Cisco navigated a rocky road in its first quarter of the year as evidenced by the dips in share price for the networking giant this morning. …

The post Billion-Dollar AI Promise a Bright Spot in Gloomy Quarter for Cisco first appeared on The Next Platform.

Billion-Dollar AI Promise a Bright Spot in Gloomy Quarter for Cisco was written by Nicole Hemsoth Prickett at The Next Platform.

The First Ever Network Automation Conference – AutoCon0

First let me just say that you have got to love a zero indexed conference! If you are a network engineer and you don’t know what that means we need to chat..and that situation was a key topic of the conference. In my mind the goal of the conference was to assess the state of READ MORE

The post The First Ever Network Automation Conference – AutoCon0 appeared first on The Gratuitous Arp.

Microsoft partners with Nvidia, Synopsys for genAI services

Microsoft has announced that it is partnering with chipmaker Nvidia and chip-designing software provider Synopsys to provide enterprises with foundry services and a new chip-design assistant. The announcement was made at the ongoing Microsoft Ignite conference.The foundry services from Nvidia, which will deployed on Microsoft Azure, will combine three of Nvidia’s elements — its foundation models, its NeMo framework, and Nvidia’s DGX Cloud service.To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: Cloudflare Control Plane Outage

Cloudflare experienced a significant outage in early November 2023 and published a detailed post-mortem report. You should read the whole report; here are my CliffsNotes:

Regardless of how much redundancy you have, sometimes all systems will fail at once. Having redundant systems decreases the probability of total failure but does not reduce it to zero.
As your systems grow, they gather hidden- and circular dependencies.
You won’t uncover those dependencies unless you run a full-blown disaster recovery test (not a fake one)
If you don’t test your disaster recovery plan, it probably won’t work when needed.

Also (unrelated to Cloudflare outage):

Worth Reading: Cloudflare Control Plane Outage

Cloudflare experienced a significant outage in early November 2023 and published a detailed post-mortem report. You should read the whole report; here are my CliffsNotes:

Regardless of how much redundancy you have, sometimes all systems will fail at once. Having redundant systems decreases the probability of total failure but does not reduce it to zero.
As your systems grow, they gather hidden- and circular dependencies.
You won’t uncover those dependencies unless you run a full-blown disaster recovery test (not a fake one)
If you don’t test your disaster recovery plan, it probably won’t work when needed.

Also (unrelated to Cloudflare outage):

IPv6, the DNS and Happy Eyeballs

If we are going to update RFC 3901, "DNS IPv6 Transport Guidelines," and offer a revised set of guidelines that are more positive guidelines about the use of IPv6 in the DNS, then what should such updated guidelines say?

Microsoft Holds Chip Makers’ Feet To The Fire With Homegrown CPU And AI Chips

After many years of rumors, Microsoft has finally confirmed that it is following rivals Amazon Web Services and Google into the design of custom processors and accelerators for their clouds. …

The post Microsoft Holds Chip Makers’ Feet To The Fire With Homegrown CPU And AI Chips first appeared on The Next Platform.

Microsoft Holds Chip Makers’ Feet To The Fire With Homegrown CPU And AI Chips was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

SC23 WiFi Traffic Heatmap

Real-time WiFi-Traffic Heatmap (source code GitHub: cod3monk/showfloor-heatmap) displays real-time WiFi traffic from The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC23) being held this week in Denver.

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.

In this example, the sFlow-RT real-time analytics engine receives sFlow telemetry from switches, routers, and servers in the SCinet network and creates metrics to drive the real-time heatmap. Getting Started provides a quick introduction to deploying and using sFlow-RT for real-time network-wide flow analytics.

Additional use cases being demonstrated this week include, SC23 Dropped packet visibility demonstration and SC23 SCinet traffic.

Cisco: Generative AI expectations outstrip enterprise readiness

While 95% of businesses are aware that AI will increase infrastructure workloads, only 17% have networks that are flexible enough to handle the complex requirements of AI. Given that disconnect, it’s too early to see widespread deployment of AI at scale, despite the hype.That's one of the key takeaways from Cisco’s inaugural AI Readiness Index, a survey of 8,000 global companies aimed at measuring corporate interest in and ability to utilize AI technologies.To read this article in full, please click here

D2C220: KubeConversations Part 1 – Platform Engineering

Welcome to a special edition of Day Two Cloud. Host Ned Bellavance traveled to KubeCon Chicago 2023 and spoke to vendors and open source maintainers about what’s going on in the cloud-native ecosystem. This episode features conversations on platform engineering. Part 2 will focus on security. Episode Guests: Cole Morrison, Developer Advocate at HashiCorp LinkedIn... Read more »

D2C219: KubeConversations Part 1 – Platform Engineering

Welcome to a special edition of Day Two Cloud. Host Ned Bellavance traveled to KubeCon NA 2023 and spoke to vendors and open source maintainers about what's going on in the cloud-native ecosystem. This episode features conversations on platform engineering.

The post D2C219: KubeConversations Part 1 – Platform Engineering appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Microsoft’s Maia AI, Azure Cobalt chips to rev up efficiency, performance

After months of speculation that Microsoft was developing its own semiconductors, the company at its annual Ignite conference Wednesday took the covers off two new custom chips, dubbed the Maia AI Accelerator and the Azure Cobalt CPU, which target generative AI and cloud computing workloads, respectively.The new Maia 100 AI Accelerator, according to Microsoft, will power some of the company's heaviest internal AI workloads running on Azure, including OpenAI’s model training and inferencing workloads.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel updates HPC processor roadmap

Intel kicked off the Supercomputing 2023 conference with a series of high performance computing (HPC) announcements, including a new Xeon line and Gaudi AI processor.Intel will ship its fifth-generation Xeon Scalable Processor, codenamed Emerald Rapids, to OEM partners on December 14. Emerald Rapids features a maximum core count of 64 cores, up slightly from the 56-core fourth-gen Xeon.In addition to more cores, Emerald Rapids will feature higher frequencies, hardware acceleration for FP16, and support 12 memory channels, including the new Intel-developed MCR memory that is considerably faster than standard DDR5 memory.According to benchmarks that Intel provided, the top-of-the-line Emerald Rapids outperformed the top-of-the-line fourth gen CPU with a 1.4x gain in AI speech recognition and a 1.2x gain in the FFMPEG media transcode workload. All in all, Intel claims a 2x to 3x improvement in AI workloads, a 2.8x boost in memory throughput, and a 2.9x improvement in the DeepMD+LAMMPS AI inference workload.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel updates HPC processor roadmap

Introducing hostname and ASN lists to simplify WAF rules creation

If you’re responsible for creating a Web Application Firewall (WAF) rule, you’ll almost certainly need to reference a large list of potential values that each field can have. And having to manually manage and enter all those fields, for numerous WAF rules, would be a guaranteed headache.

That’s why we introduced IP lists. Having a separate list of values that can be referenced, reused, and managed independently of the actual rule makes for a better WAF user experience. You can create a new list, such as $organization_ips, and then use it in a rule like “allow requests where source IP is in $organization_ips”. If you need to add or remove IPs, you do that in the list, without touching each of the rules that reference the list. You can even add a descriptive name to help track its content. It’s easy, clean, and organized.

Which led us, and our customers, to ask the next natural question: why stop at IPs?

Cloudflare’s WAF is highly configurable and allows you to write rules evaluating a set of hostnames, Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs), countries, header values, or values of JSON fields. But to do so, you’ve to input a list of Continue reading

Agentless configuration drift detection and remediation

Over time, application owners find themselves compelled to continuously refine their applications and the underlying infrastructure to enhance the products they deliver, whether to internal or external customers. These modifications inevitably lead to changes in the configuration of both applications and infrastructure. While some of these changes may be benign, others can unintentionally steer the systems away from their securely configured state, a phenomenon commonly referred to as "configuration drift." Left unaddressed, the extent of this drift can introduce substantial risks to the organization.

Traditionally, agent-based automation configuration management tools have been favored as the primary solution for tackling configuration drift.

However, is this approach genuinely the most effective strategy?

According to AWS's well-architected framework, the concept of a Fault Isolation Zone (FIZ) is crucial, characterized by isolation boundaries like Availability Zones (AZ), Regions, control planes, and data planes. While this concept is centered in a cloud context, the principles behind FIZ remain relevant in traditional data centers and at the network edge. The core idea is to minimize the impact of errors, particularly human misconfigurations, that can propagate beyond a defined Fault Isolation Zone.

Are misconfigurations resulting from human error still a matter of concern?

BGP Labs: Using Multi-Exit Discriminator (MED)

In the previous labs, we used BGP weights and Local Preference to select the best link out of an autonomous system and thus change the outgoing traffic flow.

Most edge (end-customer) networks face a different problem – they want to influence the incoming traffic flow, and one of the tools they can use is BGP Multi-Exit Discriminator (MED).

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