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2014 in review

Looking back at 2014, it feels like a lot of progress was achieved in the past year in both the cloud infrastructure and NFV infrastructure markets. Some of that progress is technical, some is in terms of increased understanding of the key business and technical aspects. This post is my attempt to capture some changes I’ve observed from my particular vantage point.

This December marks the second anniversary of the acquisition of Contrail Systems by Juniper Networks. In the last year the Contrail team managed to deploy the Contrail network virtualization solution in several marquee customers; to solidify the image of the OpenContrail project as a production-ready implementation of the AWS VPC functionality; but, probably, more importantly to help transform attitudes at Juniper (and in the industry) regarding NFV.

In the late 90s and early naughts, the carrier wireline business went through a significant change with the deployment of provider managed virtual networks (using BGP L3VPN). From a business perspective, this was essentially outsourcing the network connectivity for distributed enterprises. Instead of a mesh of frame relay circuits managed by the enterprise; carriers provide a managed service that includes the circuit but also the IP connectivity. This is a service Continue reading

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Will I Be Blogging Again?

Dan wrote in with a question:

Hey, I like your site as well… are you going to be doing any more posts? It just seems odd that your last blog post was the analyzation of the site and how it portends to your future work. anyway, good luck

I know it’s tacky to write a blog post about how you’re not writing enough blog posts… but here goes.

Yes, I will be blogging again. And I have lots of content ideas. And I’m actually itching to get back to writing. I’ve been working on something else for the past few months and I decided I couldn’t take that on and blog at the same time. So for now my writing is on hold, however I do see and respond to all comments in the articles and am reachable via email as well.

Thanks to everyone who reads and posts comments. I look forward to writing more posts in the new year!

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Copyright Joel Knight. All Rights Reserved.
www.packetmischief.ca

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The Resolvers We Use

The theme of a workshop, held at the start of December 2014 in Hong Kong, was the considerations of further scaling of the root server system, and the 1½ day workshop was scoped in the form of consideration of approaches to that of the default activity of adding further anycast instances of the existing 13 root server anycast constellations. This was a workshop operating on at least three levels. Firstly there was the overt agenda of working through a number of proposed approaches that could improve the services provided by the DNS root service. The second was an unspoken agenda concerned with protecting the DNS from potential national measures that would “fragment” the DNS name space into a number of spaces, which includes, but by no means not limited to, the DNS blocking activities that occur at national levels. The third level, and an even less acknowledged agenda, is that there are various groups who want to claim a seat at the Root Server table.

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More education needed to realize the Internet of Everything

The Internet of Everything (IoE) is essentially about connections, bringing people, processes, data and things together in unprecedented ways. IoE delivers the right information to the right person (or machine) at the right time, and converts data into intelligence to make better decisions.

Organizations will use the connections made by IoE to transform our work and private lives, creating smarter products and services, more convenience for consumers and new forms of work-life integration. However, in order to capitalize on these connections, organizations will need well-trained staff. Cisco predicts that approximately 220,000 new engineers will be needed globally every year for the next 10 years to keep up with the technological surge of IoE. This is a gap that must be filled if the potential of IoE is to be realized.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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iWARP update advances RDMA over Ethernet for data center and cloud networks

The challenge for data center operators selecting a high performance transport technology for their network is striking the ideal balance between acquisition, deployment and management costs, and support for high performance capabilities such as the remote direct memory access (RDMA) protocol.

The iWARP protocol is the open Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard for RDMA over Ethernet, and offers an interchangeable, RDMA verbs-compliant alternative to specialized fabrics such as InfiniBand. iWARP adapters are fully supported within the Open Fabrics Alliance Enterprise software distribution (OFED), with typically no changes needed for applications to migrate from InfiniBand to Ethernet.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Ansible’s Mark Phillips at DOXLON

Ansible's Mark Phillips recently presented at DOXLON in London.

 The Presentation:

The Video:

Follow DOXLON on Twitter and join the Meetup here.

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Community Podcast: 8xCCIE Neil Moore and Orhan Ergun – CCIE Preparation

Neil Moore is the first and only 8 x CCIE in the world. Neil shares his CCIE preparation tricks, study methodology and many other important points.

The post Community Podcast: 8xCCIE Neil Moore and Orhan Ergun – CCIE Preparation appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Community Podcast: 8xCCIE Neil Moore and Orhan Ergun – CCIE Preparation

Neil Moore is the first and only 8 x CCIE in the world. Neil shares his CCIE preparation tricks, study methodology and many other important points.

Author information

The post Community Podcast: 8xCCIE Neil Moore and Orhan Ergun – CCIE Preparation appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Orhan Ergun.

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4 Inevitable Questions When Joining a Monitoring Group, Pt.3

Leon Adato, Technical Product Marketing Manager with SolarWinds is our guest blogger today, with a sponsored post — the third in a four-part series on the topic of alerting. In the last two posts in this series, I described two of the four (ok, really five) questions that monitoring professionals are frequently asked: Why did […]

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The post 4 Inevitable Questions When Joining a Monitoring Group, Pt.3 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Sponsored Blog Posts.

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Packet Flow with FirePower.

As I was going through some CiscoLive365 sessions (Remember CiscoLive365 is great!) just this last weekend I came across the slides for BRKSEC-2028 – Deploying Next Generation Firewall with ASA & Firepower services. Unfortunately there is no video for this session yet but the presentation slides are there and luckily the slides are detailed enough so […]

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Ansible Makes Work Easier

Michael DeHaan, the founder of Ansible, gave a lightning talk at the Opensource.com event prior to the All Things Open conference in Raleigh, NC. He talks about how Ansible can make work easier, less stressful and more efficient.

Watch the video:

 

 

See the full post at OpenSource.com

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DHCP Snooping – Filter those broadcasts!

I had a specific requirement recently and I wanted to test it’s behaviour. In particular the feature is DHCP snooping. Let’s quickly go over the DHCP process at a high level to see how it works: DHCP Let’s take the following simple diagram to show what’s going on. We have a switch with two hosts […]

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The Network as a Complex Distributed System

Through http://blog.ipspace.net I landed on this article on acm.org discussing the complexity of distributed systems. Through some good examples, George Neville-Neil makes it clear that creating and scaling distributed systems is very complex and “any one that tells you it is easy is either drunk or lying, and possibly both”.

Networks are of course inherently distributed systems. Most everyone that has managed a good sized network before knows that like the example in the article, minor changes in traffic or connectivity can have huge implications on the overall performance of a network. In my time supporting some very large networks I have seen huge chain reactions of events based on what appear to be some minor issues.

Very few networks are extensively modeled before they are implemented. Manufacturers of machines, cars and many other things go through extensive modeling to understand the behaviors of what they created and their design choices. Using modeling they will look at all possible inputs and outputs, conditions, failure scenarios and anything else we can think of to see how their product behaves.

There are few if any true modeling tools for networks. We build networks with extensive distributed protocols to control connectivity Continue reading

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Performance Tests and Out-of-Box Performance

Simonp made a perfectly valid point in a comment to my latest OVS blog post:

Obviously the page you're referring to is a quick-and-dirty benchmark. If you wanted the optimal numbers, you would have to tune quite a few parameters just like for hardware benchmarks (sysctl kernel parameters, Jumbo frames, ...).

While he’s absolutely right, this is not the performance data a typical user should be looking for.

Read more ...

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InfluxDB and Grafana

Cluster performance metrics describes how to use sFlow-RT to calculate metrics and post them to Graphite. This article will describe how to use sFlow with the InfluxDB time series database and Grafana dashboard builder.

The diagram shows the measurement pipeline. Standard sFlow measurements from hosts, hypervisors, virtual machines, containers, load balancers, web servers and network switches stream to the sFlow-RT real-time analytics engine. Over 40 vendors implement the sFlow standard and compatible products are listed on sFlow.org. The open source Host sFlow agent exports standard sFlow metrics from hosts. For additional background, the Velocity conference talk provides an introduction to sFlow and case study from a large social networking site.

It is possible to simply convert the raw sFlow metrics into InfluxDB metrics. The sflow2graphite.pl script provides an example that can be modified to support InfluxDB's native format, or used unmodified with the InfluxDB Graphite input plugin. However, there are scaleability advantages to placing the sFlow-RT analytics engine in front of the time series database. For example, in large scale cloud environments the metrics for each member of a dynamic pool isn't necessarily worth trending since virtual machines are frequently added and removed. Instead, sFlow-RT tracks all the Continue reading

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RPKI: BGP Security Hammpered by a Legal Agreement

Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) is a relatively new standard for establishing BGP route origination. I wrote a brief introductory article here. Apologies  for the self-promotion, but rather than rehash the basics here, I raise another issue that needs community attention: ARIN’s Relying Party Agreement (RPA: PDF link). Having said that, some basics are needed. […]

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Will I Be Blogging Again?

Dan wrote in with a question: Hey, I like your site as well… are you going to be doing any more posts? It just seems odd that your last blog post was the analyzation of the site and how it portends to your future work. anyway, good luck I know it's tacky to write a blog post about how you're not writing enough blog posts… but here goes.

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Pioneers vs. Protectors in Cloud Networking Innovation

The innovation of hundreds of startup companies created the Internet, and the Internet has changed the world. Innovation continues to have a dramatic impact on networking in recent years. These new developments have changed the way applications, workloads and networks interact. Having been involved in this industry for more than three decades, I have witnessed and been part of these transformations from the 1980s to the 2015 era. Each phase of innovation has been characterized by new companies and entrants, as depicted below:

PHASES OF NETWORK INNOVATION
Epoch	Vendors	Network Technologies	Trends
First 1980–1995	AT&T, Sun, 3Com, NET, Proteon, UB, BBN, DEC, IBM	ARPANET, Circuits, Hubs, SNA, Ethernet, Token Ring, Routers	Terminal-Mainframes and Minis, Channel Attach
Second 1995–2010	Cisco, Juniper, Nortel/Bay, Alcatel, Lucent, Avaya	Switching, Multiprotocol Routing, LAN-WAN, TCP/IP	PC, Client-Server, Web, North-South traffic
Third 2010–present	Arista, VMware, Facebook, Microsoft, Splunk, Red Hat, Palo Alto, Aruba, many others	The SDN Era of Open, Programmable Networking, DevOps meets NetOps, Universal Cloud Networks	Mobile Virtual Workloads and Workflows, Big Data, Hyperscale Web, Virtual Machines / Containers

Traits of a Pioneering Innovator vs. Protector

Dominant companies often fall by the wayside when they do not anticipate and react to clear market trends as Continue reading

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Ansible on AWS: Free Best Practices Webinar on December 17th!

We'd like to invite you to a free webinar on December 17th featuring Ansible and our friends at DualSpark, an expert Amazon Web Services consulting partner.

Register for the Webinar Here

Ansible Automation on AWS: Best Practices by Battle-Hardened Experts

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BGP hijack incident by Syrian Telecommunications Establishment

The Syrian national Telecommunications Establishment (STE) has been in the news numerous times over the last few years, mostly because of the long lasting large scale Internet outages in Syria. This morning however we observed a new incident involving the two Autonomous systems for STE (AS29386 and AS29256). Starting at 08:33 UTC we detected  that hundreds of new prefixes were being announced by primarily AS 29386. The new BGP announcements by STE (AS29386) were for prefixes that are not owned or operates by the Syrian Telco and as a result triggered ‘hijack / origin AS’ alerts for numerous BGPmon users. The announcements lasted for a few minutes only and we saw paths changing back to the original origin AS at about 08:37 UTC.

RIPE stat has some great tools that visualize the event, this example shows what happened to the youtube prefix 208.117.232.0/24

Propagation
STE buys upstream connectivity to the rest of the Internet via three providers, AS3491 (PCCW Global), AS3320 (Deutsche Telekom AG) and AS6762 (Telecom Italia Sparkle). The ‘bad’ BGP updates from this morning were only seen via Telecom Italia. This is either because STE only announced it to Telecom Italia, or because the other two providers filtered Continue reading