AWS launches new chips, replacement for TCP

Amazon Web Services has introduced a new CPU customized for high-performance computing (HPC) and the next generation of its Nitro smart networking chip, plus instances that take full advantage of the hardware.The Arm-based CPU is called the Graviton3E and has been optimized for floating point math, key in HPC, the company announced at AWS re:Invent conference. Amazon said Hpc7g instances powered by the new Graviton3E chips offer up to double the floating point and vector performance compared to the current generation of instances.The vast datasets that accompany HPC need to be moved around, so Amazon also introduced the fifth generation of its Nitro smartNICs, offering up to twice the network bandwidth and up to 50% higher packet processing-per-second performance compared to current generation networking-optimized instances.To read this article in full, please click here

Commands for finding out if compressed Linux files are the same

Compressed Linux files are helpful because they save disk space, but what should you do when you have a series of compressed files and want to determine if any are duplicates? The zdiff and zcmp commands can help.To begin, if a directory contains two files like those below, it’s easy to tell just from the listing that they are not identical. After all, the file sizes are a little different. The files look like this:$ ls -l total 200 -rw-r--r--. 1 shs shs 102178 Nov 22 2021 2021.gz -rw-r--r--. 1 shs shs 102181 Nov 22 11:19 2022.gz If you compare the files with the diff command, it will confirm that the files differ:To read this article in full, please click here

Commands for finding out if compressed Linux files are the same

Compressed Linux files are helpful because they save disk space, but what should you do when you have a series of compressed files and want to determine if any are duplicates? The zdiff and zcmp commands can help.To begin, if a directory contains two files like those below, it’s easy to tell just from the listing that they are not identical. After all, the file sizes are a little different. The files look like this:$ ls -l total 200 -rw-r--r--. 1 shs shs 102178 Nov 22 2021 2021.gz -rw-r--r--. 1 shs shs 102181 Nov 22 11:19 2022.gz If you compare the files with the diff command, it will confirm that the files differ:To read this article in full, please click here

DPUs Could Change The Network Forever

You wouldn’t think that AWS re:Invent would be a big week for networking, would you? Most of the announcements are focused on everything related to the data center but teasing out the networking specific pieces isn’t as easy. That’s why I found mention of a new-ish protocol in an unrelated article to be fascinating.

In this Register piece about CPUs there’s a mention of the Nitro DPU. More importantly there’s also a reference to something that Amazon has apparently been working on for the last couple of years. It turns out that the world’s largest online bookstore and data center company is looking to get rid of TCP.

Rebuilding Transport

The new protocol was developed in 2020. Referred to as Scalable Reliable Datagram (SRD), it was build to solve specific challenges Amazon was seeing related to performance in their cloud. Amazon decided that TCP had bigger issues for them that they needed to address.

The first was that dropped packets required retransmission. In an environment like the Internet that makes sense. You want to get the data you lost. However, when TCP was developed fifty years ago the amount of data that was lost in transit was tiny compared to Continue reading

Antrea Egress on vSphere 8 with Tanzu

Welcome to this new new blog post series about Container Networking with Antrea. In this blog, we’ll take a look at the Egress feature and show how to implement it on vSphere with Tanzu.

According to the official Antrea documentation Egress is a Kubernetes Custom Resource Definition (CRD) which allows you to specify which Egress (SNAT) IP the traffic from the selected Pods to the external network should use. When a selected Pod accesses the external network, the Egress traffic will be tunneled to the Node that hosts the Egress IP if it’s different from the Node that the Pod runs on and will be SNATed to the Egress IP when leaving that Node. You can see the traffic flow in the following picture.

Antrea Egress

When the Egress IP is allocated from an externalIPPool, Antrea even provides automatic high availability; i.e. if the Node hosting the Egress IP fails, another node will be elected from the remaining Nodes selected by the nodeSelector of the externalIPPool.

Note: The standby node will not only take over the IP but also send a layer 2 advertisement (e.g. Gratuitous ARP for IPv4) to notify the other hosts and routers on the Continue reading

Day Two Cloud 174: Building Kubernetes Clusters

On today's Day Two Cloud podcast we walk through how to build a Kubernetes cluster to support a container-based application. We cover issues such as what constitutes a minimum viable cluster, rolling your own vs. Kubernetes-as-a-service, managing multiple clusters, pros and cons of bare metal vs. running clusters in VMs, design recommendations and gotchas using a cloud service, and more.

Day Two Cloud 174: Building Kubernetes Clusters

On today's Day Two Cloud podcast we walk through how to build a Kubernetes cluster to support a container-based application. We cover issues such as what constitutes a minimum viable cluster, rolling your own vs. Kubernetes-as-a-service, managing multiple clusters, pros and cons of bare metal vs. running clusters in VMs, design recommendations and gotchas using a cloud service, and more.

The post Day Two Cloud 174: Building Kubernetes Clusters appeared first on Packet Pushers.

ICMP Redirects and Suboptimal Routing

A while ago, I wrote a blog post explaining why we should (mostly) disable ICMP redirects, triggering a series of comments discussing the root cause of ICMP redirects. A few of those blamed static routes, including:

Put another way, the presence or absence of ICMP Redirects is a red herring, usually pointing to architectural/design issues instead. In this example, using vPC Peer Gateway or, better yet, running a minimal IGP instead of relying on static routes eliminates ICMP Redirects from both the problem and solution spaces simultaneously.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. You can get suboptimal routing that sometimes triggers ICMP redirects in well-designed networks running more than one routing protocol.

ICMP Redirects and Suboptimal Routing

A while ago, I wrote a blog post explaining why we should (mostly) disable ICMP redirects, triggering a series of comments discussing the root cause of ICMP redirects. A few of those blamed static routes, including:

Put another way, the presence or absence of ICMP Redirects is a red herring, usually pointing to architectural/design issues instead. In this example, using vPC Peer Gateway or, better yet, running a minimal IGP instead of relying on static routes eliminates ICMP Redirects from both the problem and solution spaces simultaneously.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. You can get suboptimal routing that sometimes triggers ICMP redirects in well-designed networks running more than one routing protocol.

Adjusting pricing, introducing annual plans, and accelerating innovation

Adjusting pricing, introducing annual plans, and accelerating innovation

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Adjusting pricing, introducing annual plans, and accelerating innovation

Cloudflare is raising prices for the first time in the last 12 years. Beginning January 15, 2023, new sign ups will be charged \$25 per month for our Pro Plan (up from \$20 per month) and \$250 per month for our Business Plan (up from \$200 per month). Any paying customers who sign up before January 15, 2023, including any currently paying customers who signed up at any point over the last 12 years, will be grandfathered at the old monthly price until May 14, 2023.

We are also introducing an option to pay annually, rather than monthly, that we hope most customers will choose to switch to. Annual plans are available today and discounted from the new monthly rate to \$240 per year for the Pro Plan (the equivalent of \$20 per month, saving \$60 per year) and \$2,400 per year for the Business Plan (the equivalent of \$200 per month, saving \$600 per year). In other words, if you choose to pay annually for Cloudflare you can lock in our old monthly prices.

After not Continue reading

5 DNS services to provide a layer of internet security

Having thorough IT security usually means having a layered approach. Basic antivirus, for instance, might catch PC-based malware once a user downloads it, but you could try to block it before it ever reaches the user device, or at least have another security mechanism in place that might catch it if the basic antivirus doesn’t. DNS-based filtering can do this! It can help stop users from browsing to malware and phishing sites, block intrusive advertising to them, and serve as adult content filters.First, a quick primer for those who are unfamiliar with DNS: You utilize the Domain Name System (DNS) every time you surf the Web. Each time you type a site name into the browser, DNS is queried for the IP address corresponding to that particular domain, so the browser can contact the Web server to get the content. The process of converting the domain name to its IP address is called domain-name resolution.To read this article in full, please click here

5 DNS services to provide a layer of internet security

Having thorough IT security usually means having a layered approach. Basic antivirus, for instance, might catch PC-based malware once a user downloads it, but you could try to block it before it ever reaches the user device, or at least have another security mechanism in place that might catch it if the basic antivirus doesn’t. DNS-based filtering can do this! It can help stop users from browsing to malware and phishing sites, block intrusive advertising to them, and serve as adult content filters.First, a quick primer for those who are unfamiliar with DNS: You utilize the Domain Name System (DNS) every time you surf the Web. Each time you type a site name into the browser, DNS is queried for the IP address corresponding to that particular domain, so the browser can contact the Web server to get the content. The process of converting the domain name to its IP address is called domain-name resolution.To read this article in full, please click here

Automation 17. Using Operational Commands via NETCONF at Nokia SR OS in Sequential Mode

Dear friend,

After a bit of break caused by preparation to Kubernetes exams (we will continue blogs about Kubernetes as well) we are getting back to network and network automation topics. One of the interesting things, which is gradually emerging these days, is the possibility to manage multiple aspects of network devices (not only configuration or collection of operational data), such us issuing ping/traceroute checks, copying file, etc in a model-drive way (i.e., NETCONF, RESTCONF, GNMI with YANG). Today we are going to look into such a topic.


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prior permission of the author.

Is that About Model-Driven Automation?

It is exactly that. NETCONF/YANG all the things, my friend! Usage of model-driven network automation significantly improves the stability and manageability of the network due to much simpler way to perform all the operations remotely. You don’t need to scrape and parse CLI anymore; instead, you interact with network devices via programmable API, what makes it possible to integrate them Continue reading

Schneider Electric, SAP tighten bonds to ease IIoT system integration

ERP giant SAP and industrial automation company Schneider Electric Tuesday announced that they would expand their collaboration in the field of IIoT (industrial IoT) and digital transformation, with a focus on sustainable infrastructure and easy deployment.The two companies plan to create preconfigured deployment options for IIoT customers—so any company looking for, for example, a field service management tool using augmented reality can simply pick up and use the partnership’s preset hardware and software configuration. (Shop floor operational tech integration, using digital twins for lifecycle management, is also planned.)To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco updates SD-WAN to simplify provisioning, management

Cisco is set to unveil a new edition of its SD-WAN software that will extend the system’s reach and include new management capabilities.Among the most significant enhancements to Cisco SD-WAN release 17.10, expected in December, is the ability to use Cisco SD-WAN Multi Region Fabric (MRF) support with existing Software Defined Cloud Interconnect (SDCI) systems to significantly expand the reach and control of the SD-WAN environment. MRF lets customers divide their SD-WAN environments into multiple regional networks that operate distinctly from one another, along with a central core-region network for managing inter-regional traffic, according to Cisco. To read this article in full, please click here