Azure Networking Update (Phase 1)

Last week I completed the first part of the annual Azure Networking update. The Azure Firewall section is already online; hope you’ll find it useful. I already have the materials for the Private Link and Gateway Load Balancer services, but haven’t decided whether to schedule another live session to cover them, or just create a short video.

Then there are a half-dozen smaller things I found while processing a year worth of Azure networking News. You’ll find them (and links to documentation) in New Azure Services and Features document.

Mastodon – Part 2 – Monitoring

About this series

I have seen companies achieve great successes in the space of consumer internet and entertainment industry. I’ve been feeling less enthusiastic about the stronghold that these corporations have over my digital presence. I am the first to admit that using “free” services is convenient, but these companies are sometimes taking away my autonomy and exerting control over society. To each their own of course, but for me it’s time to take back a little bit of responsibility for my online social presence, away from centrally hosted services and to privately operated ones.

In the [previous post], I shared some thoughts on how the overall install of a Mastodon instance went, making it a point to ensure my users’ (and my own!) data is somehow safe, and the machine runs on good hardware, and with good connectivity. Thanks IPng, for that 10G connection! In this post, I visit an old friend, [Borgmon], which has since reincarnated and become the de facto open source observability and signals ecosystem, and its incomparably awesome friend. Hello, Prometheus and Grafana!

Anatomy of Mastodon

Looking more closely at the architecture of Mastodon, it consists of a few moving Continue reading

Time to Talk

It’s a holiday week here in the US so most people are working lighter days or just taking the whole week off. They’re looking forward to spending time with family and friends. Perhaps they’re already plotting their best strategy for shopping during Black Friday and snagging a new TV or watch. Whatever the case may be there’s lots things going on all over.

One thing that I feel needs to happen is conversation. Not just the kind of idle conversation that we make when we don’t know what to talk about. I also don’t mean the kinds of deep conversations that we need to prepare ourselves to have. I’m talking about the ones where we learn. The ones we have with friends and family where we pick up tidbits of stories and preserve them for the future.

It sounds rather morbid but these conversations aren’t going to be available forever. Our older loved ones are getting older every year. Time marches on and we never know when that time I going to run out. I have several friends that have lost loved ones this year and still others that have realized the time is growing shorter. Mortality is something that Continue reading

Network Modernization Unlocks the Power of Modern Cloud Applications

This is a guest post from IDC Analyst Brad Casemore.

Modern applications are more distributed than ever before, deployed variously across on-premises data centers, public clouds (IaaS), private clouds, and edge locations, and sometimes delivered as SaaS. While the primacy of these data-centric applications is undeniable and will only grow with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), a failure to ensure the modernization of underlying network infrastructure can compromise and constrain an organization’s application-driven digital strategies.

Needs of today

Network modernization, especially within the context of cloud-native architectures and multi-cloud strategies, cannot be an afterthought for rapidly digitizing enterprises. As applications become the powerhouse behind digital success and competitive differentiation, organizations should consider investing in software-defined network infrastructure.

A software-defined network infrastructure provides consistent network and security policies, operational simplicity, elastic scale, and ubiquitous visibility, with support for traditional and cloud-native applications spanning on-premises environments and clouds.

Preparing for tomorrow

Special consideration also must be given to the future networking needs of the organization, particularly in relation to how modern network infrastructure will provide inherent portable application layer networking for cloud-native applications through functionality such as ingress controllers, service meshes, and visibility into workloads Continue reading

How we detect route leaks and our new Cloudflare Radar route leak service

Today we’re introducing Cloudflare Radar’s route leak data and API so that anyone can get information about route leaks across the Internet. We’ve built a comprehensive system that takes in data from public sources and Cloudflare’s view of the Internet drawn from our massive global network. The system is now feeding route leak data on Cloudflare Radar’s ASN pages and via the API.

This blog post is in two parts. There’s a discussion of BGP and route leaks followed by details of our route leak detection system and how it feeds Cloudflare Radar.

About BGP and route leaks

Inter-domain routing, i.e., exchanging reachability information among networks, is critical to the wellness and performance of the Internet. The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the de facto routing protocol that exchanges routing information among organizations and networks. At its core, BGP assumes the information being exchanged is genuine and trust-worthy, which unfortunately is no longer a valid assumption on the current Internet. In many cases, networks can make mistakes or intentionally lie about the reachability information and propagate that to the rest of the Internet. Such incidents can cause significant disruptions of the normal operations of the Internet. One type Continue reading

Cloud Security is Hard Because Multi-Cloud is Complex

In today’s multi-cloud world, security-as-a-service is growing as a strategic means of standardizing security practices that span all applications, no matter where they are deployed.

Day Two Cloud 173: Istio Ambient Mesh Minimizes Sidecar Proxies

Today on Day Two Cloud we examine Istio Ambient Mesh, a new option for building service meshes in a microservices environment. Istio Ambient Mesh essentially brings the concept of a load balancer to a cluster of containers. Rather than run a sidecar proxy for each pod or container, you can run Ambient Mesh per node. Our guest and guide to this open source project is Christian Posta, Global Field CTO at Solo.io.

Day Two Cloud 173: Istio Ambient Mesh Minimizes Sidecar Proxies

The post Day Two Cloud 173: Istio Ambient Mesh Minimizes Sidecar Proxies appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Why Cloudflare’s one of the Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces in 2022

This post is also available in Français, 日本語, 简体中文, 한국어, Español.

At Cloudflare, we have strived to build a workplace where our entire team feels safe and excited to bring their whole selves to work, so they can do their best work. That’s why we are proud to share that Cloudflare has been named one of the Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces in 2022 by Newsweek and Best Practice Institute (BPI). Most Loved Workplaces recognizes companies where their workers love, and feel in sync with, the company they work for.

With this, and as we’re approaching the end-of 2022, we thought this was a good time to reflect on some of the things that go into being one of these Most Loved Workplaces and just some of what makes up our workplace and culture.

Something that really grounds our entire team is Cloudflare’s mission: to help build a better Internet. When you are solving some of the toughest challenges facing the Internet — helping make the Internet secure, fast, private, and reliable globally — you need a range of talented individuals to do this. The people at Cloudflare are exactly that, and are essential to our Continue reading

Integrated Routing and Bridging (IRB) Design Models

Imagine you built a layer-2 fabric with tons of VLANs stretched all over the place. Now the users want to exchange traffic between those VLANs, and the obvious question is: which devices should do layer-2 forwarding (bridging) and which ones should do layer-3 forwarding (routing)?

There are four typical designs you can use to solve that challenge:

Exchange traffic between VLANs outside of the fabric (edge routing)
Route on core switches (centralized routing)
Route on ingress (asymmetric IRB)
Route on ingress and egress (symmetric IRB)

This blog post is an overview of the design models; we’ll cover each design in a separate blog post.

Integrated Routing and Bridging (IRB) Design Models

There are four typical designs you can use to solve that challenge:

Exchange traffic between VLANs outside of the fabric (edge routing)
Route on core switches (centralized routing)
Route on ingress (asymmetric IRB)
Route on ingress and egress (symmetric IRB)

This blog post is an overview of the design models; we’ll cover each design in a separate blog post.

Riding The Steadily Rising Enterprise IT Market

It is tough to get excited about mature markets that grow at a steady rate unless it happens to be the most profitable part of the market. …

Riding The Steadily Rising Enterprise IT Market was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Heavy Strategy 037 – Metaversing The Office is More Than One Thing

Are there angles on future metaverse that make sensee ? Johna and Greg dive into their perspectives on what is a metaverse and converge on the face that its a form of collaboration. Potentially it could be immersive with VR googles but more likely it’s about engaging data from external domains into the collaboration experience.

Heavy Strategy 037 – Metaversing The Office is More Than One Thing

The post Heavy Strategy 037 – Metaversing The Office is More Than One Thing appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Using Calico to create a Kubernetes cluster mesh for multi-cluster environments

Kubernetes has come of age with more organizations adopting a microservices architecture at scale. But scale brings a whole slew of new challenges, especially with Kubernetes, which is designed to operate as a single cluster. However, the usage of Kubernetes, especially at leading-edge organizations operating at scale, has crossed the single-cluster threshold. Organizations are building and deploying services across multiple clusters for high availability, disaster recovery, application isolation, compliance, latency concerns, staged migration, and multi-tenancy reasons.

Regardless of the reasons to deploy multiple clusters, platform and application teams must address networking, security, and observability issues related to microservices deployed across multi-clusters, sometimes spanning hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Calico, the most widely adopted container networking and security solution (according to a recently published container adoption report by Datadog), provides an operationally simple solution to solve the networking, security, and observability challenges of running multi-cluster Kubernetes environments.

Security, observability, and networking requirements for multiple Kubernetes clusters

In simple terms, creating a multi-cluster Kubernetes environment requires stitching multiple Kubernetes clusters together to provide a common set of services. To create a single logical environment spanning multiple clusters, the key requirements are:

Enabling inter-cluster communication – Communication across pods located in different clusters is Continue reading

Microsoft Azure launches DDoS IP protection for SMBs

DDoS IP Protection for SMBs is designed to provide enterprise-grade distributed denial of service protection at a price that's attractive to small and medium-size companies.

Microsoft Azure launches DDoS IP protection for SMBs

DDoS IP Protection for SMBs is designed to provide enterprise-grade distributed denial of service protection at a price that's attractive to small and medium-size companies.

Network Modernization is Critical to the Future of Healthcare

Healthcare organizations must react to changes quickly by making their networks as automated as possible.

BrandPost: Unlocking Higher Education: AI Improves Student Experience, Institutional Excellence

Over the past two years, institutions of higher education (IHEs) have undergone a tremendous amount of change. The future is more uncertain than ever. To prepare for the future, today’s institutional leaders must navigate the complexities of hybrid-first learning and operations to create flexible, high-quality digital experiences.Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a leading focus of IT investment for higher education leaders with the aim of enhancing the student experience, improving the financial health of their organization, and driving institutional excellence. But without a network capable of meeting these expectations and IT staff equipped to manage this complex IT landscape, institutions risk delivering a poor end-user experience.To read this article in full, please click here

Importing/Exporting Collections in automation hubs

This article discusses how to export and import Collections from one automation hub to another.

Ansible automation hub stores Collections within repositories and the Collections are versioned by the curator, so therefore many versions of the same Collection can exist in the same or different repositories at the same time.

Ansible automation hub repositories store Collections as TAR files, as created by ansible-galaxy during the curation and publishing process. This makes for easy downloading and transportation, especially during import and export workflows. You can be assured that the Collection you are importing to the new repository is the same one that was exported, or originally created by ansible-galaxy (assuming nothing malicious has happened to it; for that level of protection we have digital collection signing and can discuss that in a future article).

There are many reasons why you may wish to export or import Collections from one automation hub to another, so here are some common use cases.

Your production automation hub is on a disconnected network

This scenario means that you need to move content from an internet connected automation hub to another automation hub over an air gap. This could be done using a USB Continue reading

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