Dynamic inventory plugin collection for network device management

Tackling the complexities of enterprise inventories

One common challenge our customers face is the need to track hosts from multiple sources: LDAP, cloud providers, and enterprise CMDB systems. Using a dynamic inventory allows users to integrate with these systems and update the Ansible inventory as it varies over time, with hosts spinning up and shutting down in response to business demands.

Ansible supports two ways to connect with external inventory: Inventory plugins and inventory scripts.

Today we are going to cover dynamic inventory plugins as a Collection for network device management through an /etc/hosts file. This same type of setup can be used for creating any dynamic inventory using different items from /etc/hosts files to ini files or even csv’s.

The first mission: Where is the source of truth?

We are going to start by figuring out the source of truth of the inventory we want to import.

If you want to test and use this inventory plugin you can find the code in this Github repository:

https://github.com/jmcleroy/inventoryplugin.git

In this case, it will be an /etc/hosts file externally stored in the Github/Gitlab inventory plugin repo as a test, in a similar fashion this file Continue reading

Combining MLAG Clusters with VXLAN Fabric

In the previous MLAG Deep Dive blog posts we discussed the innards of a standalone MLAG cluster. Now let’s see what happens when we connect such a cluster to a VXLAN fabric – we’ll use our standard MLAG topology and add a VXLAN transport underlay to it with another switch connected to the other end of the underlay network.

MLAG cluster connected to a VXLAN fabric

Combining MLAG Clusters with VXLAN Fabric

Gelsinger Is Still Trying To Build The Next Intel

Intel chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger came into this week’s Intel Innovation 2022 conference less than two years into his plans to reshape the giant chip maker to fit into an IT world that is rapidly becoming more open, more cooperative, and more software-driven. …

Gelsinger Is Still Trying To Build The Next Intel was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Revisiting BGP EVPN VXLAN to the hosts with SR Linux 22.6.3

Featuring Netlab 1.3.1 and FRR 8.3.1

Containerlab topology for EVPN-VXLAN-to-the-host

At the beginning of this year I wrote about my SR Linux BGP EVPN adventures, with considerations around underlay and overlay design and the illustrious iBGP-over-eBGP approach. Some readers may have noticed a resemblance to the constellation of Ursa Major — the Big Bear: A reference to our friends at CloudBear, a recent SR Linux customer.

Fast forward to September 2022 and we now have SR Linux 22.6.3 with some features I have been waiting for, like (e)BGP Unnumbered. From my side, I have been working with the open source community to extend support for tools like Netlab (formerly Netsim-tools), Containerlab and FRR to enable sophisticated and advanced network topologies using truly open source tools and components.

New features and changes

The issue of running BGP to Linux hosts using FRR popped up in several discussions. Though technically possible, it can be challenging to configure, and there are many design variations with implications that aren’t always obvious. To enable simple experimentation and quick design iterations, I decided to help out by extending Netlab with VLAN, VXLAN and VRF support for FRR. I also made some changes to Continue reading

Software vulnerabilities pose a risk to network infrastructure

As the Log4J crisis made clear, understanding what is in the software unpinning your applications is crucial to understanding your security posture. This is no less true of your network services.Enterprise-network infrastructure is still very much about hardware in data center and LAN and WAN, but now it is becoming more and more about software.In this era of software-defined networks, an ever-increasing number of network appliances are just proprietary software running on generic switching hardware or even a plain vanilla x86 server with extra network cards. That shift in emphasis from the hard to the soft has made the software stacks running the network a new source of risk and worry for cybersecurity.To read this article in full, please click here

Service Mesh and Ingress In Kubernetes: Lesson 6 – Consul Service Mesh And App Installation – Video

Continuing with examples of installing a service mesh, this video walks through deploying the Consul mesh. Host Michael Levan brings his background in system administration, software development, and DevOps to this video series. He has Kubernetes experience as both a developer and infrastructure engineer. He’s also a consultant and Pluralsight author, and host of the […]

The post Service Mesh and Ingress In Kubernetes: Lesson 6 – Consul Service Mesh And App Installation – Video appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Why Connectivity Makes Work From Home a Work in Progress

Residences can require business-class access services to support greater productivity, broadband bandwidth for collaboration, and robust security to better protect the expanded enterprise network.

Fortinet targets SD-WAN, 5G with new AIOps support

Fortinet has added support for AI operations to its Secure SD-WAN and 5G/LTE gateways giving customers more insights into the networks linking their distributed resources and reducing the time it takes to fix problems.The company has expanded its FortiAIOps platform, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to collect network data and analytics to help identify and automate problem resolution. The addition of Secure SD-WAN and 5G/LTE fills out the FortiAIOps portfolio, which already supported WAN, wireless LAN, and LAN operations on a single console to manage and secure wired and wireless connectivity.To read this article in full, please click here

What is new in Calico v3.24

A couple of weeks ago, TIgera engineers released the new version of Calico, as part of a community effort to drive cloud security and networking even further. But before I begin diving into the details of this new release, I want to first spotlight a few of our community members who have merged their contributions to Calico Open Source for the first time.

Shout out to @agaffney for adding configurable labels and annotations to the tigera-operator deployment in Helm charts.

Shout out to @backjo for improving the Calico Windows installation script and adding support for IMDSv2 in AWS EC2 data retrieval.

Shout out to @EugenMayer for pointing out an improvement for the calicoctl binary in a Helm chart installation and @lou-lan for making it happen.

Shout out to @joskuijpers for informing the community about the outdated ipset package in the calico-node ARM64 image and @ScOut3R for updating it.

Shout out to @juanfresia for contributing changes to enable Calico to run without programming the route table, useful when integrating with other routing mechanisms.

Shout out to @muff1nman, who added Wireguard traffic to the Calico failsafe ports, allowing us to confidently apply network security policies without worrying about accidentally cutting off Continue reading

Intel To Broaden FPGA Lineup And Make Them At Home

Back in 2015, when Intel was flush with cash thanks to a near-monopoly from X86 datacenter compute, it shelled out an incredible $16.7 billion to acquire FPGA maker Altera because a few hyperscalers and cloud builders were monkeying around with offloading whole chunks of CPU compute to FPGAs to create SmartNICs. …

Intel To Broaden FPGA Lineup And Make Them At Home was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Redesign of BPA Platforms is Long Overdue

The challenge for IT architects, operations personnel, application developers, and business users is that all processes and workflows are impacted if the platform or any of its services go down or are taken offline.

Cloudflare named a Leader in WAF by Forrester

Forrester has recognised Cloudflare as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Web Application Firewalls, Q3 2022 report. The report evaluated 12 Web Application Firewall (WAF) providers on 24 criteria across current offering, strategy and market presence.

You can register for a complimentary copy of the report here. The report helps security and risk professionals select the correct offering for their needs.

We believe this achievement, along with recent WAF developments, reinforces our commitment and continued investment in the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF), one of our core product offerings.

The WAF, along with our DDoS Mitigation and CDN services, has in fact been an offering since Cloudflare’s founding, and we could not think of a better time to receive this recognition: Birthday Week.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to thank Forrester.

Leading WAF in strategy

Cloudflare received the highest score of all assessed vendors in the strategy category. We also received the highest possible scores in 10 criteria, including:

Innovation
Management UI
Rule creation and modification
Log4Shell response
Incident investigation
Security operations feedback loops

According to Forrester, “Cloudflare Web Application Firewall shines in configuration and rule creation”, “Cloudflare stands out for its active online user community and its Continue reading

Leading venture capital firms to provide up to $1.25 BILLION to back startups built on Cloudflare Workers

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

From our earliest days, Cloudflare has stood for helping build a better Internet that’s accessible to all. It’s core to our mission that anyone who wants to start building on the Internet should be able to do so easily, and without the barriers of prohibitively expensive or difficult to use infrastructure.

Nowhere is this philosophy more important – and more impactful to the Internet – than with our developer platform, Cloudflare Workers. Workers is, quite simply, where developers and entrepreneurs start on Day 1. It’s a full developer platform that includes cloud storage; website hosting; SQL databases; and of course, the industry’s leading serverless product. The platform’s ease-of-use and accessible pricing (all the way down to free) are critical in advancing our mission. For startups, this translates into fast, easy deployment and iteration, that scales seamlessly with predictable, transparent and cost-effective pricing. Building a great business from scratch is hard enough – we ought to know! – and so we’re aiming to take all the complexity out of your application infrastructure.

Announcing the Workers Launchpad funding program

Today, we’re taking things a step further and Continue reading

Introducing workerd: the Open Source Workers runtime

Today I'm proud to introduce the first beta release of workerd, the JavaScript/Wasm runtime based on the same code that powers Cloudflare Workers. workerd is Open Source under the Apache License version 2.0.

workerd shares most of its code with the runtime that powers Cloudflare Workers, but with some changes designed to make it more portable to other environments. The name "workerd" (pronounced "worker dee") comes from the Unix tradition of naming servers with a "-d" suffix standing for "daemon". The name is not capitalized because it is a program name, which are traditionally lower-case in Unix-like environments.

What it's for

Self-hosting Workers

workerd can be used to self-host applications that you'd otherwise run on Cloudflare Workers. It is intended to be a production-ready web server for this purpose. workerd has been designed to be unopinionated about hosting environments, so that it should fit nicely into whatever server/VM/container hosting and orchestration system you prefer. It's just a web server.

Workers has always been based on standardized APIs, so that Continue reading

Introducing Configuration Rules

A powerful new set of tools

In 2012, we introduced Page Rules to the world, announcing:

“Page Rules is a powerful new set of tools that allows you to control how CloudFlare works on your site on a page-by-page basis.”

Ten years later, and with all F’s lowercase, we are excited to introduce Configuration Rules — a Page Rules successor and a much improved way of controlling Cloudflare features and settings. With Configuration Rules, users can selectively turn on/off features which would typically be applied to every HTTP request going through the zone. They can do this based on URLs - and more, such as cookies or country of origin.

Configuration Rules opens up a wide range of use cases for our users that previously were impossible without writing custom code in a Cloudflare Worker. Such use cases as A/B testing configuration or only enabling features for a set of file extensions are now made possible thanks to the rich filtering capabilities of the product.

Configuration Rules are available for use immediately across all plan levels.

Turn it on, but only when…

As each HTTP request enters a Cloudflare zone we apply a configuration. This configuration tells the Cloudflare Continue reading

Introducing Cache Rules: precision caching at your fingertips

Ten years ago, in 2012, we released a product that put “a powerful new set of tools” in the hands of Cloudflare customers, allowing website owners to control how Cloudflare would cache, apply security controls, manipulate headers, implement redirects, and more on any page of their website. This product is called Page Rules and since its introduction, it has grown substantially in terms of popularity and functionality.

Page Rules are a common choice for customers that want to have fine-grained control over how Cloudflare should cache their content. There are more than 3.5 million caching Page Rules currently deployed that help websites customize their content. We have spent the last ten years learning how customers use those rules to cache content, and it’s clear the time is ripe for evolving rules-based caching on Cloudflare. This evolution will allow for greater flexibility in caching different types of content through additional rule configurability, while providing more visibility into when and how different rules interact across Cloudflare’s ecosystem.

Today, we’ve announced that Page Rules will be re-imagined into four product-specific rule sets: Origin Rules, Cache Rules, Configuration Rules, and Redirect Rules.

In this blog we’re going to discuss Cache Rules, and Continue reading

WebRTC live streaming to unlimited viewers, with sub-second latency

Creators and broadcasters expect to be able to go live from anywhere, on any device. Viewers expect “live” to mean “real-time”. The protocols that power most live streams are unable to meet these growing expectations.

In talking to developers building live streaming into their apps and websites, we’ve heard near universal frustration with the limitations of existing live streaming technologies. Developers in 2022 rightly expect to be able to deliver low latency to viewers, broadcast reliably, and use web standards rather than old protocols that date back to the era of Flash.

Today, we’re excited to announce in open beta that Cloudflare Stream now supports live video streaming over WebRTC, with sub-second latency, to unlimited concurrent viewers. This is a new feature of Cloudflare Stream, and you can start using it right now in the Cloudflare Dashboard — read the docs to get started.

WebRTC with Cloudflare Stream leapfrogs existing tools and protocols, exclusively uses open standards with zero dependency on a specific SDK, and empowers any developer to build both low latency live streaming and playback into their website or app.

The status quo of streaming live video is broken

The status quo of streaming live video has high Continue reading

Build real-time video and audio apps on the world’s most interconnected network

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

In the last two years, there has been a rapid rise in real-time apps that help groups of people get together virtually with near-zero latency. User expectations have also increased: your users expect real-time video and audio features to work flawlessly. We found that developers building real-time apps want to spend less time building and maintaining low-level infrastructure. Developers also told us they want to spend more time building features that truly make their idea special.

So today, we are announcing a new product that lets developers build real-time audio/video apps. Cloudflare Calls exposes a set of APIs that allows you to build things like:

A video conferencing app with a custom UI
An interactive conversation where the moderators can invite select audience members “on stage” as speakers
A privacy-first group workout app where only the instructor can view all the participants while the participants can only view the instructor
Remote 'fireside chats' where one or multiple people can have a video call with an audience of 10,000+ people in real time (<100ms delay)

The protocol that makes all this possible is WebRTC. And Cloudflare Calls is the product Continue reading

Dynamic URL redirects: 301 to the future

The Internet is a dynamic place. Websites are constantly changing as technologies and business practices evolve. What was front-page news is quickly moved into a sub-directory. To ensure website visitors continue to see the correct webpage even if it has been moved, administrators often implement URL redirects.

A URL redirect is a mapping from one location on the Internet to another, effectively telling the visitor's browser that the location of the page has changed, and where they can now find it. This is achieved by providing a virtual ‘link’ between the content’s original and new location.

URL Redirects have typically been implemented as Page Rules within Cloudflare, however Page Rules only match on the URL, rather than other elements such as the visitor's source country or preferred language. This limitation meant customers with a need for more dynamic URL redirects had to implement alternative solutions such Cloudflare Workers to achieve their goals.

To simplify the management of these more complex use cases we have created Dynamic Redirects. With Dynamic Redirects, users can redirect visitors to another webpage or website based upon hundreds of options such as the visitor's country of origin or language, without having to write a single line Continue reading

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