Pendulums are always swinging back and forth in the datacenter, with functions being offloaded from one thing and onloaded to another cheaper thing that is often more flexible or faster. …
Ubiquiti is known primarily for wireless equipment for residential and small business use, but it can be a player in the enterprise world. On today’s show, we talk with Darrell DeRosia, Sr. Director, Network & Infrastructure Services with the Memphis Grizzlies, about how he provides that connectivity for the FedExForum, home to the Memphis Grizzlies... Read more »
Cloud networks aren’t like traditional data center networks, so applying a traditional network design to the cloud probably isn’t the best idea. On today’s Day Two Cloud, guest Aidan Finn guides us through significant differences between Microsoft Azure networking and on-prem data center networks. For instance, subnets don’t segment hosts, network security groups do; every... Read more »
Sean Goedecke published an interesting compilation of practical advice for engineers. Not surprisingly, they include things like “focus on fundamentals” and “spend your working time doing things that are valuable to the company and your career” (OMG, does that really have to be said?).
Link state protocols like OSPF and IS-IS use the Shortest Path First (SPF) algorithm developed by Edsger Dijkstra. Edsger was a Dutch computer scientist, programmer, software engineer, mathematician, and science essayist. He wanted to solve the problem of finding the shortest distance between two cities such as Rotterdam and Groningen. The solution came to him when sitting in a café and the rest is history. SPF is used in many applications, such as GPS, but also in routing protocols, which I’ll cover today.
To explain SPF, I’ll be working with the following topology:
Note that SPF only works with a weighted graph where we have positive weights. I’m using symmetrical costs, although you could have different costs in each direction. Before running SPF, we need to build our Link State Database (LSDB) and I’ll be using IS-IS in my lab for this purpose. Based on the topology above, we can build a table showing the cost between the nodes:
This triplet of information consists of originating node, neighbor node, and cost. It can also be represented as [R1, R2, 2], [R1, R3, 8], [R2, R1, 2], [R2, R3, 5], [R2, R4, 6], [R3, R1, 8], [R3, R2, 5], [R3, R4, Continue reading
Sponsored Post: The 2025 AI Infra Summit will bring some of the brightest minds in AI and its supporting infrastructure to Santa Clara on September 9-11 this year. …
Aviatrix is a cloud network security company that helps you secure connectivity to and among public and private clouds. On today’s Packet Protector, sponsored by Aviatrix, we get details on how Aviatrix works, and dive into a new feature called the Secure Network Supervisor Agent. This tool uses AI to help you monitor and troubleshoot... Read more »
Take a Network Break! We begin with a Red Alert for critical vulnerabilities Kubernetes Gardener. Up next, a threat actor has been squatting on unused CNAME records to distribute malware and spam, and IP Fabric rolls out a new firewall rule simulation capability to let administrators test the effect of firewall rules on traffic patterns.... Read more »
In the last few days, I decided to check out how much better ChatGPT has gotten in the last year or two. I tried to be positive and was rewarded with some surprisingly good results. I even figured out I can use it to summarize my blog posts using prompts like this one:
Using solely the information from blog.ipspace.net, what can you tell me about running ospf over unnumbered interfaces
And then I asked it about unnumbered interfaces and IS-IS, and it all went sideways:
Today, organizations struggle managing disparate technologies for their Kubernetes networking and network security needs. Leveraging multiple technologies for networking and security for in-cluster, ingress, egress, and traffic across clusters creates challenges, including operational complexities and increased costs. For example, to manage ingress traffic for Kubernetes clusters, users cobble together multiple solutions from different providers such as ingress controllers or gateways and load balancers for routing traffic, as well as Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) for enhanced security.
Despite the challenges it brings, deploying disparate technologies has been a “necessary evil” for organizations to get all the capabilities needed for holistic Kubernetes networking. Here, we’ll explore challenges this proliferation of tooling introduces, and provide actionable tips for today’s platform and security teams to overcome these issues.
Challenges Managing Multiple Technologies
The fragmented approach to networking and network security in Kubernetes leads to challenges and inefficiencies, including:
Operational overhead: Each technology comes with its own learning curve, setup, configuration, integration, and maintenance requirements. This leads to a challenging user experience.
Increased costs: Licensing and operational costs accumulate as more tools are deployed.
Scaling challenges: As clusters grow or spread across diverse environments, ensuring consistent and secure networking becomes harder.
For EVPN/VXLAN, Type 5 routes are used for two purposes: Internally and Externally
Internally it’s used to communicate which VTEPs have a given subnet instantiated on it.
Here’s an example of the output of the command show ip bgp route-type ip-prefix ipv4 on an Arista cEOS spine running EVPN/VXLAN.
It’s showing you that 10.1.10.0/24 (VLAN 10/VNI 10010) is only available on leaf1 and leaf2 (10.1.255.1-2) and 10.1.20.0/24 (VLAN 20/VNI 10020) is only available on leaf3 and leaf4 (10.1.255.3-4). It’s eBGP so each leaf has its own ASN (you see in the path field). The next hop shows the VTEP IP (10.1.254.1-4). I checked on the spine as the spine receives all the EVPN routes from the leafs and propagates them as a route server. The spines don’t install any of these routes, they just propagates them.
Although LLMs have been readily available for the past few years, inroads into the IT sector have been minimal. We have seen successful generative AI (GenAI) model penetration into SaaS solutions and areas like help desks; however, successful GenAI integration into security software has been few and far between.
Generally speaking, it is not easy to repurpose an LLM to work within a security domain. LLMs are optimized for natural language; they can’t immediately understand or process security elements such as flow packets, logs, alerts, and knowledge graphs.
To build out effective genAI integration in the security sphere, it’s time to embrace bespoke, foundational AI for IT workflows.
AI Model Efficiency
The recent trend toward building out models more efficiently, as opposed to scaling at all costs, is a natural progression of GenAI tools in the enterprise space. Despite all the LLM hype, not every business problem requires an LLM solution. If you utilize LLMs within your infrastructure, it’s best to right-size them (distill them into smaller models that address specific business problems) while focusing on privacy, security, and explainability.
By right-sizing your models, compute is kept to a minimum, which prevents costs from being passed on to your customers. Continue reading
Netris is tackling the issue of automating multi-tenancy in an AI data center. Netris has your answer to this challenge, and it’s a solution certified to work with NVIDIA. We’re going to get into the nuts and bolts of Netris network automation with Alex Saroyan, CEO and co-founder of Netris. Along the way, we will... Read more »
Here is how you know you are in a tough business: No matter what you do, no matter how hard your people work and how smart they are, no matter that you are riding the wild tiger of AI growth and revenues have grown marvelously, you can’t make any money. …
Data Center construction has reached an incredible pace over the last few years with implications on NetOps and operations of all kinds. Today we with talk with sponsor Siemon regarding the state of data centers, past, present and future. We explore legacy data centers and how they are evolving to work in today’s environments. We... Read more »