BrandPost: Why SD-WAN will play a bigger role in multicloud networking

By Scott Raynovich, Founder and Chief Analyst, Futuriom. Fact: SD-WAN will play a key role as more enterprises adopt multicloud to host applications. Is your organization ready?One of the trends developing in 2023 is the increased need for networking that can facilitate hybrid and multicloud connectivity. As cloud services proliferate, organizations are looking for more efficient ways to build cloud-based networking services to connect multiple clouds.As networking and IT managers embark on their multicloud journey, they are expected to solve several challenges for their stakeholders. This includes connecting remote workers, hybrid workers, branch offices, multiple cloud services, and possibly Internet of Things (IoT) devices – all with the same network.To read this article in full, please click here

Consent management made easy and clear with Cloudflare Zaraz

Depending on where you live you may be asked to agree to the use of cookies when visiting a website for the first time. And if you've ever clicked something other than Approve you'll have noticed that the list of choices about which services should or should not be allowed to use cookies can be very, very long. That's because websites typically incorporate numerous third party tools for tracking, A/B testing, retargeting, etc. – and your consent is needed for each one of them.

For website owners it's really hard to keep track of which third party tools are used and whether they've asked end users about all of them. There are tools that help you load third-party scripts on your website, and there are tools that help you manage and gather consent. Making the former respect the choices made in the latter is often cumbersome, to say the least.

This changes with Cloudflare Zaraz, a solution that makes third-party tools secure and fast, and that now can also help you with gathering and managing consent. Using the Zaraz Consent Manager, you can easily collect users’ consent preferences on your website, using a consent modal, and apply your consent policy Continue reading

Making home Internet faster has little to do with “speed”

More than ten years ago, researchers at Google published a paper with the seemingly heretical title “More Bandwidth Doesn’t Matter (much)”. We published our own blog showing it is faster to fly 1TB of data from San Francisco to London than it is to upload it on a 100 Mbps connection. Unfortunately, things haven’t changed much. When you make purchasing decisions about home Internet plans, you probably consider the bandwidth of the connection when evaluating Internet performance. More bandwidth is faster speed, or so the marketing goes. In this post, we’ll use real-world data to show both bandwidth and – spoiler alert! – latency impact the speed of an Internet connection. By the end, we think you’ll understand why Cloudflare is so laser focused on reducing latency everywhere we can find it.

First, we should quickly define bandwidth and latency. Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transmitted at any single time. It’s the maximum throughput, or capacity, of the communications link between two servers that want to exchange data. Usually, the bottleneck – the place in the network where the connection is constrained by the amount of bandwidth available – is in the “last mile”, either the Continue reading

Measuring network quality to better understand the end-user experience

You’re visiting your family for the holidays and you connect to the WiFi, and then notice Netflix isn’t loading as fast as it normally does. You go to speed.cloudflare.com, fast.com, speedtest.net, or type “speed test” into Google Chrome to figure out if there is a problem with your Internet connection, and get something that looks like this:

If you want to see what that looks like for you, try it yourself here. But what do those numbers mean? How do those numbers relate to whether or not your Netflix isn’t loading or any of the other common use cases: playing games or audio/video chat with your friends and loved ones? Even network engineers find that speed tests are difficult to relate to the user experience of… using the Internet..

Amazingly, speed tests have barely changed in nearly two decades, even though the way we use the Internet has changed a lot. With so many more people on the Internet, the gaps between speed tests and the user’s experience of network quality are growing. The problem is so important that the Internet’s standards organization is paying attention, too.

From a high-level, there are three grand network Continue reading

IPv6 Addressing on Point-to-Point Links

One of my readers sent me this question:

In your observations on IPv6 assignments, what are common point-to-point IPv6 interfaces on routers? I know it always depends, but I’m hearing /64, /112, /126 and these opinions are causing some passionate debate.

(Checks the calendar) It’s 2023, IPv6 RFC has been published almost 25 years ago, and there are still people debating this stuff and confusing those who want to deploy IPv6? No wonder we’re not getting it deployed in enterprise networks ;)

IPv6 Addressing on Point-to-Point Links

One of my readers sent me this question:

In your observations on IPv6 assignments, what are common point-to-point IPv6 interfaces on routers? I know it always depends, but I’m hearing /64, /112, /126 and these opinions are causing some passionate debate.

(Checks the calendar) It’s 2023, IPv6 RFC has been published almost 25 years ago, and there are still people debating this stuff and confusing those who want to deploy IPv6? No wonder we’re not getting it deployed in enterprise networks ;)

Tracing function calls

Sometimes you want to see functions of a library, as they’re called. I know of two ways of doing this.

Let’s have a super simple test program:

#include<iostream>
#include<unistd.h>

void func1() {}
void func2() {}

int main()
{
  std::cout << "Hello world\n";
  func1();
  func2();
  func1();

  // Wait a bit for bpftrace to be able to aquire the function name.
  // Not applicable for something that doesn't exist.
  sleep(1);
}

bpftrace

Start a bpftrace in one terminal, and run the program in another.

$ sudo bpftrace -e 'uprobe:./a.out:func* { print(func); }'
Attaching 2 probes...
func1()
func2()
func1()

GDB

$ gdb a.out
[…]
(gdb) rbreak func.*
[…]
(gdb) commands
Type commands for breakpoint(s) 1-3, one per line.
End with a line saying just "end".
>silent
>bt 1
>cont
>end
(gdb) r
Starting program: […]/a.out
[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
Using host libthread_db library "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libthread_db.so.1".
#0  0x0000555555555215 in _GLOBAL__sub_I__Z5func1v ()
Hello world
#0  0x000055555555516d in func1() ()
#0  0x0000555555555174 in func2() ()
#0  0x000055555555516d in func1() ()
[Inferior 1 (process 424744) exited normally]
(gdb)

Which to use?

bpftrace is lower (but Continue reading

What’s the Enterprise Impact of Microsoft’s Open-Sourced SONiC?

How to create netstat aliases to help focus on network activity

The netstat command provides a tremendous amount on information on network activity. With the -s option (netstat -s), it will display summaries for various protocols such as packets received, active connections, failed connections and a lot more. While the data is extensive enough to make you dizzy, the more you get used to what the command's output looks like, the more you'll become familiar with what to expect and maybe even get better at spotting what's unusual. In this post, we're going to look at various portions of the netstat -s command's output using crafted aliases to make it easier.To read this article in full, please click here

How to create netstat aliases to help focus on network activity

The netstat command provides a tremendous amount on information on network activity. With the -s option (netstat -s), it will display summaries for various protocols such as packets received, active connections, failed connections and a lot more. While the data is extensive enough to make you dizzy, the more you get used to what the command's output looks like, the more you'll become familiar with what to expect and maybe even get better at spotting what's unusual. In this post, we're going to look at various portions of the netstat -s command's output using crafted aliases to make it easier.To read this article in full, please click here

Network Break 426: NetBox Labs Raises $20 Million; Intel Foundry, Arm Team Up To Make SoCs

Network Break 426: NetBox Labs Raises $20 Million; Intel Foundry, Arm Team Up To Make SoCs

This week's Network Break discusses NetBox Labs's $20 million funding round and why it spun itself out of NS1's IBM acquisition, Intel Foundry and Arm teaming up on SoC manufacturing, why Amazon sees headwinds for public cloud spending (and why the opportunity is still huge), how the juice-jacking threat got hyped, and more tech news.

The post Network Break 426: NetBox Labs Raises $20 Million; Intel Foundry, Arm Team Up To Make SoCs appeared first on Packet Pushers.

How to Take a Wireless-First Approach to Enterprise Network Design

The Future of SD-WAN and Fixed Cellular Connections

Intel news roundup: chiplets milestone, server exit, and ARM deal

Intel had a busy week. A trio of news announcements revealed its chiplets progress, a manufacturing agreement with Arm, and the shedding of another non-core line of business.Prototype multi-die chips heading to DoD The biggest news is that Intel has begun to ship prototype multi-die chips to the U.S. Department of Defense more than a year ahead of schedule. The DoD project known as State-of-the-Art Heterogeneous Integrated Packaging (SHIP) is an ambitious plan that will connect Intel’s CPUs, FPGAs, ASICs and government-developed chiplets all within the same processor packaging, as opposed to multiple separate dies.AMD was the first to pursue the chiplet design, but AMD took a different approach in that it broke up large, monolithic CPUs into smaller chips. So, instead of one physical piece of silicon with 32 cores, it created four chiplets with eight cores each connected by high-speed interconnects. The idea is that it’s much easier to manufacture an eight-core chip than a 32-core chip.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel news roundup: chiplets milestone, server exit, and ARM deal

Intel had a busy week. A trio of news announcements revealed its chiplets progress, a manufacturing agreement with Arm, and the shedding of another non-core line of business.Prototype multi-die chips heading to DoD The biggest news is that Intel has begun to ship prototype multi-die chips to the U.S. Department of Defense more than a year ahead of schedule. The DoD project known as State-of-the-Art Heterogeneous Integrated Packaging (SHIP) is an ambitious plan that will connect Intel’s CPUs, FPGAs, ASICs and government-developed chiplets all within the same processor packaging, as opposed to multiple separate dies.AMD was the first to pursue the chiplet design, but AMD took a different approach in that it broke up large, monolithic CPUs into smaller chips. So, instead of one physical piece of silicon with 32 cores, it created four chiplets with eight cores each connected by high-speed interconnects. The idea is that it’s much easier to manufacture an eight-core chip than a 32-core chip.To read this article in full, please click here

AWS and Alexa services back online after outage

Amazon web services and Amazon voice assistant Alexa were back online after an outage on Sunday that lasted over three hours. Users also reported issues with accessing the Amazon mobile app.Downdetector, the website that tracks outages, reported that Alexa was down for thousands of users in the US, while an outage in AWS was reported by hundreds of users. More than 16,000 users reported an outage in Alexa at the peak of the disruption.Users could not complete the account signup process and received error messages on their billing console.The billing console is used to manage ongoing payments and payment methods registered to AWS accounts.To read this article in full, please click here

AWS and Alexa services back online after outage

Amazon web services and Amazon voice assistant Alexa were back online after an outage on Sunday that lasted over three hours. Users also reported issues with accessing the Amazon mobile app.Downdetector, the website that tracks outages reported that Alexa was down for thousands of users in the United States, while an outage in AWS was reported by hundreds of users. More than 16,000 users reported an outage in Alexa at the peak of the disruption.Users could not complete the account signup process and received error messages on their billing console.The billing console is used to manage ongoing payments and payment methods registered to AWS accounts.To read this article in full, please click here

Using VLAN and VRF Links in netlab Topologies

I already mentioned the introduction of VRF- and VLAN access links in netlab release 1.5.1. Let’s see how they can simplify your lab topologies.

I always tried to make lab topologies as concise as I could, sometimes cheating using JSON-in-YAML syntax. For example, the topology describing three routers running OSPF could be as simple as this:

module: [ ospf ]
nodes: [ r1, r2, r3 ]
links: [ r1-r2, r2-r3, r3-r1 ]

Let’s unravel that:

Using VLAN and VRF Links in netlab Topologies

I already mentioned the introduction of VRF- and VLAN access links in netlab release 1.5.1. Let’s see how they can simplify your lab topologies.

I always tried to make lab topologies as concise as I could, sometimes cheating using JSON-in-YAML syntax. For example, the topology describing three routers running OSPF could be as simple as this:

module: [ ospf ]
nodes: [ r1, r2, r3 ]
links: [ r1-r2, r2-r3, r3-r1 ]

Let’s unravel that: