The Mythical Use Cases: Traffic Engineering for Data Center Backups

Vendor product managers love discussing mythical use cases to warrant complex functionality in their gear. Long-distance VM mobility was one of those (using it for disaster avoidance was Mission Impossible under any real-world assumptions), and high-volume network-based backups seems to be another. Here’s what someone had to say about that particular unicorn in a LinkedIn comment when discussing whether we need traffic engineering in a data center fabric.

When you’re dealing with a large cluster on a fabric, you will see things like inband backup. The most common one I’ve seen is VEEAM. Those inband backups can flood a single link, and no amount of link scheduling really solves that; depending on the source, they can saturate 100G. There are a couple of solutions; IPv6 or eBGP SID has been used to avoid these links or schedule avoidance for other traffic.

It is true that (A) in-band backups can be bandwidth intensive and that (B) well-written applications can saturate 100G server links. However:

Read more …

Cisco Live 2024 Wrap-Up

Last week, I attended my 11th Cisco Live in person, in the fabulous Las Vegas. This post is my Cisco Live 2024 Wrap-up. I can already tell you that the next edition of Cisco Live US will be held June 8-12, 2025 in San Diego, California. If my company agrees to send me there, I’m already looking forward to it, because San Diego is a wonderful city. If you’d like to be notified when the registration opens, you can subscribe here: https://www.ciscolive.com/global/cisco-live-2025.html But that’s not the main purpose of this…

The post Cisco Live 2024 Wrap-Up appeared first on AboutNetworks.net.

Heeding the call to support Australia’s most at-risk entities

When Australia unveiled its 2023-2030 Australian Cyber Security Strategy in November 2023, we enthusiastically announced Cloudflare’s support, especially for the call for the private sector to work together to protect Australia’s smaller, at-risk entities. Today, we are extremely pleased to announce that Cloudflare and the Critical Infrastructure - Information Sharing and Analysis Centre (CI-ISAC), a member-driven organization helping to defend Australia's critical infrastructure from cyber attacks, are teaming up to protect some of Australia’s most at-risk organizations – General Practitioner (GP) clinics.

Cloudflare helps a broad range of organizations -– from multinational organizations, to entrepreneurs and small businesses, to nonprofits, humanitarian groups, and governments across the globe — to secure their employees, applications and networks. We support a multitude of organizations in Australia, including some of Australia’s largest banks and digital natives, with our world-leading security products and services.

When it comes to protecting entities at high risk of cyber attack who might not have significant resources, we at Cloudflare believe we have a lot to offer. Our mission is to help build a better Internet. A key part of that mission is democratizing cybersecurity – making a range of tools readily available for all, including small and medium enterprises Continue reading

Exploring the 2024 EU Election: Internet traffic trends and cybersecurity insights

The 2024 European Parliament election took place June 6-9, 2024, with hundreds of millions of Europeans from the 27 countries of the European Union electing 720 members of the European Parliament. This was the first election after Brexit and without the UK, and it had an impact on the Internet. In this post, we will review some of the Internet traffic trends observed during the election days, as well as providing insight into cyberattack activity.

Elections matter, and as we have mentioned before (1, 2), 2024 is considered “the year of elections”, with voters going to the polls in at least 60 countries, as well as the 27 EU member states. That’s why we’re publishing a regularly updated election report on Cloudflare Radar. We’ve already included our analysis of recent elections in South Africa, India, Iceland, and Mexico, and provided a policy view on the EU elections.

The European Parliament election coincided with several other national or local elections in European Union member states, leading to direct consequences. For example, in Belgium, the prime minister announced his resignation, resulting in a drop in Internet traffic during the speech followed by a clear increase after the speech was Continue reading

The Legacy of Cisco Live

Legacy: Something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past. — Merriam-Webster

Cisco Live 2024 is in the books. I could recap all the announcements but that would take forever. You can find an AI that can summarize them for you much faster. That’s because AI was the largest aspect of what was discussed. Love it or hate it, AI has taken over the IT industry for the time being. More importantly it has also focused companies on the need to integrate AI functions into their product lines to avoid being left behind by upstarts.

That’s what you see in the headlines. Something I noticed while I was there was how the march of time has affected us all. After eighteen years I finally realized the sessions today have less in common with the ones I was attending back in 2010 than ever before. Development and advanced features configuration have replaced the tuning of routing protocols and CallManager deployment tips. It’s a game for younger engineers that have less to unlearn from the legacy technologies I’ve spent my career working on.

Leaving a Legacy

But legacy is a word with more than one definition. It’s Continue reading

Weekend Reads 060724


The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) wants to clarify guidelines for public companies regarding the disclosure of ransomware and other cybersecurity incidents.


Technical report 69, or TR-069, which defines how people’s broadband routers and other customer-premises equipment can be remotely provisioned and managed by ISPs automatically, is turning 20 years old.


Google and many other organizations, such as NIST, IETF, and NSA, believe that migrating to post-quantum cryptography is important due to the large risk posed by a cryptographically-relevant quantum computer (CRQC).


IPng’s network is built up in two main layers, (1) an MPLS transport layer, which is disconnected from the Internet, and (2) a VPP overlay, which carries the Internet.


Elon Musk doesn’t want you to share links from Substack, the blogging and newsletter platform that has grown in popularity over the last two years and serves as the primary mode of expression for independent Internet writers.


Quantum computers are probably coming, though we don’t know when—and when they arrive, they will, most likely, be able to break our standard public-key cryptography algorithms.


Domain name monitoring—that is, the detection of domains with names containing a brand-term (or other string) of interest—is a very well-established element of brand protection Continue reading

Internet insights on 2024 elections in the Netherlands, South Africa, Iceland, India, and Mexico

2024 is being called by the media “the” year of elections. More voters than ever are going to the polls in at least 60 countries for national elections, plus the 27 member states of the European Union. This includes eight of the world’s 10 most populous nations, impacting around half of the world’s population.

To track and analyze these significant global events, we’ve created the 2024 Election Insights report on Cloudflare Radar, which will be regularly updated as elections take place.

Our data shows that during elections, there is often a decrease in Internet traffic during polling hours, followed by an increase as results are announced. This trend has been observed before in countries like France and Brazil, and more recently in Mexico and India — where elections were held between April 19 and June 1 in seven phases. Some regions, like Comoros and Pakistan, have experienced government-directed Internet disruptions around election time.

Below, you’ll find a review of the trends we saw in elections in South Africa (May 29), to Mexico (June 2), India (April 19 - June 1) and Iceland (June 1). This includes election-related shifts in traffic, as well at attacks. For example, during the Continue reading

HN737: Greg Ferro: The Exit Interview

Greg Ferro, co-founder of Packet Pushers, is signing off. After years of frustrating health issues, he’s decided to fully step back from podcasting and industry analysis to take care of himself. After 14 years, today is his last appearance on Heavy Networking. In this parting episode, Greg shares his final dose of incisive insights and... Read more »

Cisco Pushes Nvidia Enterprise AI, But Has Its Own Network Agenda

In those heady months following OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, much of the IT industry’s focus was on huge and expensive cloud infrastructures running on powerful GPU clusters to train the large language models that underpin the chatbots and other generative AI workloads. …

Cisco Pushes Nvidia Enterprise AI, But Has Its Own Network Agenda was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Worth Exploring: Infrahub by Opsmill

A year or two after Damien Garros told me that “he moved to France and is working on something new” we can admire the results: Infrahub, a version-control-based system that includes a data store and a repository of all source code you use in your network automation environment. Or, straight from the GitHub repository,

A central hub to manage the data, templates and playbooks that powers your infrastructure by combining the version control and branch management capabilities of Git with the flexible data model and UI of a graph database.

I’ve seen an early demo, and it looks highly promising and absolutely worth exploring. Have fun ;)

Fun fact: the OpsMill team includes two guest speakers in the ipSpace.net automation course and a netlab contributor.

Calico monthly roundup: May 2024

Welcome to the Calico monthly roundup: May edition! From open source news to live events, we have exciting updates to share—let’s get into it!

What’s new in Calico

Discover the latest enhancements in Calico for Spring 2024, featuring new security capabilities, improved visualization tools, and an advanced workload-centric WAF to streamline and secure your Kubernetes operations.

Read the blog post.
Customer case study: NuraLogix

AI-driven healthtech company, NuraLogix, improves security and compliance on Amazon EKS using Calico Cloud.

Read case study.
Join us at CloudNative SecurityCon 2024 in Seattle
We’re gearing up for CloudNative SecurityCon 2024, on June 26 and 27 in Seattle. Be sure to swing by our booth and learn about exciting container networking updates. Plus, pick up some cool new Calico swag! Stay tuned for details.

View more tradeshows.

S&P Global 451 Market Insight: Tigera Provides Most Comprehensive CNAPP

Learn how Tigera differentiates itself from competitors by focusing on runtime security, aligning with the rapidly growing market category and how it is one of the strong players in this segment.

Read report.

Open source news

What’s new in 3.28 – Explore the new features in Calico 3.28, including a Grafana dashboard for Typha performance monitoring, Continue reading

Dutch political websites hit by cyber attacks as EU voting starts

The 2024 European Parliament election started in the Netherlands today, June 6, 2024, and will continue through June 9 in the other 26 countries that are part of the European Union. Cloudflare observed DDoS attacks targeting multiple election or politically-related Internet properties on election day in the Netherlands, as well as the preceding day.

These elections are highly anticipated. It’s also the first European election without the UK after Brexit.

According to news reports, several websites of political parties in the Netherlands suffered cyberattacks on Thursday, with a pro-Russian hacker group called HackNeT claiming responsibility.

On June 5 and 6, 2024, Cloudflare systems automatically detected and mitigated DDoS attacks that targeted at least three politically-related Dutch websites. Significant attack activity targeted two of them, and is described below.

A DDoS attack, short for Distributed Denial of Service attack, is a type of cyber attack that aims to take down or disrupt Internet services such as websites or mobile apps and make them unavailable for users. DDoS attacks are usually done by flooding the victim's server with more traffic than it can handle. To learn more about DDoS attacks and other types of attacks, visit our Learning Center.

Attackers Continue reading

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