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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Network Automation: a Service Provider Perspective

Antti Ristimäki left an interesting comment on Network Automation Considered Harmful blog post detailing why it’s suboptimal to run manually-configured modern service provider network.


I really don’t see how a network any larger and more complex than a small and simple enterprise or campus network can be developed and engineered in a consistent manner without full automation. At least routing intensive networks might have very complex configurations related to e.g. routing policies and it would be next to impossible to configure them manually, at least without errors and in a consistent way.

Network Automation: a Service Provider Perspective

Antti Ristimäki left an interesting comment on Network Automation Considered Harmful blog post detailing why it’s suboptimal to run manually-configured modern service provider network.


I really don’t see how a network any larger and more complex than a small and simple enterprise or campus network can be developed and engineered in a consistent manner without full automation. At least routing intensive networks might have very complex configurations related to e.g. routing policies and it would be next to impossible to configure them manually, at least without errors and in a consistent way.

Network Automation with CUE – Advanced workflows

What I’ve covered in the previous blog post about CUE and Ansible were isolated use cases, disconnected islands in the sea of network automation. The idea behind that was to simplify the introduction of CUE into existing network automation workflows. However, this does not mean CUE is limited to those use cases and, in fact, CUE is most powerful when it’s used end-to-end — both to generate device configurations and to orchestrate interactions with external systems. In this post, I’m going to demonstrate how to use CUE for advanced network automation workflows involving fetching information from an external device inventory management system, using it to build complex hierarchical configuration values and, finally, generating and pushing intended configurations to remote network devices.

CUE vs CUE scripting

CUE was designed to be a simple, scalable and robust configuration language. This is why it includes type checking, schema and constraints validation as first-class constructs. There are some design decisions, like the lack of inheritance or value overrides, that may take new users by surprise, however over time it becomes clear that they make the language simpler and more readable. One of the most interesting features of CUE, though, is that all code Continue reading

Using the zip and zipcloak commands on Linux

Both the Linux zip and zipcloak commands can create encrypted zip files, but they have some important and interesting differences. Here’s what you need to know about how they work and what you should understand when using them.zip The zip command provides an easy way to take a group of files and squeeze their content into a single smaller file. To join a group of files into a single file—often done to make copying them to other systems considerably easier—use a command like the one shown below. The first argument is the name to be used for the zip file and is followed by the list of files to be included.To read this article in full, please click here