Fast and dynamic encoding of Protocol Buffers in Go

Protocol Buffers are a popular choice for serializing structured data due to their compact size, fast processing speed, language independence, and compatibility. There exist other alternatives, including Cap’n Proto, CBOR, and Avro.

Usually, data structures are described in a proto definition file (.proto). The protoc compiler and a language-specific plugin convert it into code:

$ head flow-4.proto
syntax = "proto3";
package decoder;
option go_package = "akvorado/inlet/flow/decoder";

message FlowMessagev4 {

  uint64 TimeReceived = 2;
  uint32 SequenceNum = 3;
  uint64 SamplingRate = 4;
  uint32 FlowDirection = 5;
$ protoc -I=. --plugin=protoc-gen-go --go_out=module=akvorado:. flow-4.proto
$ head inlet/flow/decoder/flow-4.pb.go
// Code generated by protoc-gen-go. DO NOT EDIT.
// versions:
//      protoc-gen-go v1.28.0
//      protoc        v3.21.12
// source: inlet/flow/data/schemas/flow-4.proto

package decoder

import (
        protoreflect "google.golang.org/protobuf/reflect/protoreflect"

Akvorado collects network flows using IPFIX or sFlow, decodes them with GoFlow2, encodes them to Protocol Buffers, and sends them to Kafka to be stored in a ClickHouse database. Collecting a new field, such as source and destination MAC addresses, requires modifications in multiple places, including the proto definition file and the ClickHouse migration code. Moreover, Continue reading

Oracle to invest $1.5 billion in Saudi Arabia to expand cloud capacity

Oracle on Monday said it is planning to invest $1.5 billion in Saudi Arabia to bolster its cloud computing capacity in the Middle East.The planned investment, which is part of Oracle’s memorandum of understanding with Saudi Arabia Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, will see the public cloud services provider expand its existing cloud region in Jeddah, and open a new one in Riyadh.  In addition to the Riyadh region, Oracle will work with the ministry to set up a commercial and operational model for another cloud region in Saudi Arabia that complies with Saudi government requirements and local data residency regulations.To read this article in full, please click here

Oracle to invest $1.5 billion in Saudi Arabia to expand cloud capacity

Oracle on Monday said it is planning to invest $1.5 billion in Saudi Arabia to bolster its cloud computing capacity in the Middle East.The planned investment, which is part of Oracle’s memorandum of understanding with Saudi Arabia Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, will see the public cloud services provider expand its existing cloud region in Jeddah, and open a new one in Riyadh.  In addition to the Riyadh region, Oracle will work with the ministry to set up a commercial and operational model for another cloud region in Saudi Arabia that complies with Saudi government requirements and local data residency regulations.To read this article in full, please click here

Oracle to invest $1.5 billion in Saudi Arabia to expand cloud capacity

Oracle on Monday said it is planning to invest $1.5 billion in Saudi Arabia to bolster its cloud computing capacity in the Middle East.The planned investment, which is part of Oracle’s memorandum of understanding with Saudi Arabia Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, will see the public cloud services provider expand its existing cloud region in Jeddah, and open a new one in Riyadh.  In addition to the Riyadh region, Oracle will work with the ministry to set up a commercial and operational model for another cloud region in Saudi Arabia that complies with Saudi government requirements and local data residency regulations.To read this article in full, please click here

Oracle to invest $1.5 billion in Saudi Arabia to expand cloud capacity

Oracle on Monday said it is planning to invest $1.5 billion in Saudi Arabia to bolster its cloud computing capacity in the Middle East.The planned investment, which is part of Oracle’s memorandum of understanding with Saudi Arabia Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, will see the public cloud services provider expand its existing cloud region in Jeddah, and open a new one in Riyadh.  In addition to the Riyadh region, Oracle will work with the ministry to set up a commercial and operational model for another cloud region in Saudi Arabia that complies with Saudi government requirements and local data residency regulations.To read this article in full, please click here

Mix Containers and VMs with netlab Release 1.5.0

Maybe it’s just me, but I always need a few extra devices in my virtual labs to have endpoints I could ping to/from or to have external routing information sources. We used VRF- and VLAN tricks in the days when we had to use physical devices to carve out a dozen hosts out of a single Cisco 2501, and life became much easier when you could spin up a few additional virtual machines in a virtual lab instead.

Unfortunately, those virtual machines eat precious resources. For example, netlab allocates 1GB to every Linux virtual machine when you only need bash and ping. Wouldn’t it be great if you could start that ping in a busybox container instead?

Mix Containers and VMs with netlab Release 1.5.0

Maybe it’s just me, but I always need a few extra devices in my virtual labs to have endpoints I could ping to/from or to have external routing information sources. We used VRF- and VLAN tricks in the days when we had to use physical devices to carve out a dozen hosts out of a single Cisco 2501, and life became much easier when you could spin up a few additional virtual machines in a virtual lab instead.

Unfortunately, those virtual machines eat precious resources. For example, netlab allocates 1GB to every Linux virtual machine when you only need bash and ping. Wouldn’t it be great if you could start that ping in a busybox container instead?

Azure Networking Fundamentals: Virtual WAN Part 1 – S2S VPN and VNet Connections

 This chapter introduces Azure Virtual WAN (vWAN) service. It offers a single deployment, management, and monitoring pane for connectivity services such as Inter-VNet, Site-to-Site VPN, and Express Route. In this chapter, we are focusing on S2S VPN and VNet connections. The Site-to-Site VPN solutions in vWAN differ from the traditional model, where we create resources as an individual components. In this solution, we only deploy a vWAN resource and manage everything else through its management view. Figure 11-1 illustrates our example topology and deployment order. The first step is to implement a vWAN resource. Then we deploy a vHub. It is an Azure-managed VNet to which we assign a CIDR, just like we do with the traditional VNet. We can deploy a vHub as an empty VNet without associating any connection. A vHub deployment process launches a pair of redundant routers, which exchange reachability information with the VNet Gateway router and VGW instances using BGP. We intend to allow Inter-VNet data flows between vnet-swe1, vnet-swe2, and Branch-to-VNet traffic. For Site-to-Site VPN, we deploy VPN Gateway (VGW) into vHub. The VGW started in the vHub creates two instances, instance0, and instance1, in active/active mode. We don’t deploy a GatewaySubnet for VGW Continue reading

Weekend Reads 020323

Yann LeCun, Metaâ€s chief AI scientist, is not impressed by ChatGPT, the wildly popular artificial intelligence technology that is making headlines daily.

German antitrust enforcers known for leveling charges against high-profile tech companies have a new target for accusations of dominant market position abuse: PayPal.

Data anonymization is an important tool for organizations to protect the personal data of individuals, while averting the onerous requirements of the EU and U.K.

Phishing is a big deal, with a State of Phishing report from security firm SlashNext claiming that there were more than 255 million phishing attacks in 2022, a 61% increase from the year before.

The goal of the CGA is to highlight and reduce damages done to all utilities when working underground.

More than 91% of malware utilizes DNS communication at some point during its attack lifecycle, making DNS an invaluable choke point in the fight against cyber threats.

When it comes to operating systems and now CPU instruction sets, there is proprietary, there is licensable and modifiable with a standard base of functionality with room for some originality, and there is true open source.

Since 2017, China has held at least seven of these competitions—called Robot Hacking Continue reading

High throughput Kubernetes cluster networking with the Calico/VPP dataplane and accelerated memif

What’s Continue reading

Worth Reading: 2 Mpps on a Pentium CPU

Robert Graham published a blog post describing how his IDS/IPS system handled 2 Mpps on a Pentium III CPU 20 years ago… and yet some people keep claiming that “Driving a 100 Gbps network at 80% utilization in both directions consumes 10–20 cores just in the networking stack” (in 2023). I guess a suboptimal-enough implementation can still consume all the CPU cycles it can get and then some.

Worth Reading: 2 Mpps on a Pentium CPU

Robert Graham published a blog post describing how his IDS/IPS system handled 2 Mpps on a Pentium III CPU 20 years ago… and yet some people keep claiming that “Driving a 100 Gbps network at 80% utilization in both directions consumes 10–20 cores just in the networking stack” (in 2023). I guess a suboptimal-enough implementation can still consume all the CPU cycles it can get and then some.

Heavy Networking 664: Semantic Networking – Science Project Or Networking’s Future?

Heavy Networking 664: Semantic Networking – Science Project Or Networking’s Future?

Today's Heavy Networking is a forward-looking episode about semantic networking. Semantic networking aims to make decisions on how to route packets based on more than just the destination address and give network operators more routing choices based on considerations such as bandwidth, cost, performance, application type, and so on. But how do you add semantic information to IP headers? How do you program routers and networking hardware to consume semantics? Do we really need this? Guests Adrian Farrel and Hannes Gredler join Greg Ferro and Ethan Banks to discuss and debate.

The post Heavy Networking 664: Semantic Networking – Science Project Or Networking’s Future? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Hedge 164: Threat Modeling with Chris Romeo

For this week’s episode of the Hedge, Tom Ammon and Russ White are joined by Chris Romeo to talk about the importance of the human element in threat modeling. If you’ve ever wondered about the importance of threat modeling or how to get started in threat modeling, this episode will guide you on your way.

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Supermicro Aspires To Be A $10 Billion Server Maker

Supermicro has always been an interesting IT supplier for the datacenter, and it is getting more interesting by the year as it continues to grow very fast and has set itself a goal of break $10 billion in annual sales, which would put Supermicro behind only Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, on par with Inspur, and ahead of

Since the advent of the X86 server market thirty years ago, Supermicro has been unique among its server making peers in a number of ways. …

Supermicro Aspires To Be A $10 Billion Server Maker was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Closed Loop Automation With Anuta Networks’ Active Service Assurance

As a network operator, I want to describe in plain language what I need a network to do, and the network is configured accordingly. Then I want the network to monitor itself, and when things aren’t going well, the network will repair itself with no involvement from me. Hey, daydreaming is fun.

In the real world, plain language describing my network requirements isn’t going to conjure a relevant network. I must perform hard work to create a network design that’s useful for a business. I have to think through issues like capacity needs under peak load, redundancy to survive a network failure, and resiliency to support business operations in the face of a catastrophic outage. I need to understand individual application requirements, and be sure the network can support those requirements. I have to consider modularity, repeatability, and supportability. I must work within a budget.

My design will translate into an arcane collection of devices, interfaces, interconnections, protocols, and topologies. I’ll rely on education, experience, and experimentation to fine-tune the design, and then I’ll put it into production. Depending on your personality, this arduous task likely falls somewhere between “fun” and “frightening” for you. But no matter who you are, Continue reading

Monitoring Other People’s Problems

It’s Always the Network is a refrain that causes operations teams to shudder. No matter what your flavor of networking might be it’s always your fault. Even if the actual problem is DNS, a global BGP outage, or even some issue with the SaaS provider. Why do we always get blamed? And how can you prevent this from happening to you?

User Utopia

Users don’t know about the world outside of their devices. As soon as they click on something in a browser window they expect it to work. It’s a lot like ordering a package and having it delivered. It’s expected that the package arrives. You don’t concern yourself with the details of how it needs to be shipped, what routes it will take, and how factors that exist half a world away could cause disruptions to your schedule at home.

The network is the same to the users. If something doesn’t work with a website or a remote application it must be the “network” that is at fault. Because your users believe that everything not inside of their computer is the network. Networking is the way that stuff happens everywhere else. As professionals we know the differences between Continue reading

Reducing Network Overhead with Compute Express Link (CXL)

Manage and control the use of dedicated egress IPs with Cloudflare Zero Trust

Before identity-driven Zero Trust rules, some SaaS applications on the public Internet relied on the IP address of a connecting user as a security model. Users would connect from known office locations, with fixed IP address ranges, and the SaaS application would check their address in addition to their login credentials.

Many systems still offer that second factor method. Customers of Cloudflare One can use a dedicated egress IP for this purpose as part of their journey to a Zero Trust model. Unlike other solutions, customers using this option do not need to deploy any infrastructure of their own. However, not all traffic needs to use those dedicated egress IPs.

Today, we are announcing policies that give administrators control over when Cloudflare uses their dedicated egress IPs. Specifically, administrators can use a rule builder in the Cloudflare dashboard to determine which egress IP is used and when, based on attributes like identity, application, IP address, and geolocation. This capability is available to any enterprise-contracted customer that adds on dedicated egress IPs to their Zero Trust subscription.

Why did we build this?

In today’s hybrid work environment, organizations aspire for more consistent security and IT experiences to manage their employees’ traffic Continue reading