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Edge Automation: A Paradigm Shift

Introduction

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has seen wide-scale adoption in a variety of automation domains, however with edge use cases becoming more mainstream, the thought process around automation must shift from “complete a task immediately” to being able to run automation now and later, and respond to incoming automation requests from devices that are yet unmanaged.

 

Automation in a hybrid cloud environment

In today’s hybrid cloud environment, automation exists in a tightly controlled and predictable space, meaning it’s easy to determine what endpoints are reachable and available for connection. In practice, this manifests as inventory syncs from our various management planes (think AWS/Azure/GCP/VMware) and then targeting the devices brought into Controller via those inventory syncs with automation. Cross connectivity shouldn’t be an issue: If we can see the device in a management plant, we can contact and automate against it. In addition, if there are exceptions to the “connectivity everywhere” model, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has features and functionality to help address more complex connectivity circumstances.

We can even take this automation approach one step further by pulling those management planes under the management of our automation, giving us the ability to really automate end-to-end. For example, Continue reading

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History of Ethernet Encapsulations

Henk Smit conscientiously pointed out a major omission I made when summarizing Peter Paluch’s excellent description of how bits get parsed in network headers:

EtherType? What do you mean EtherType? There are/were 4 types of Ethernet encapsulation. Only one of them (ARPA encapsulation) has an EtherType. The other 3 encapsulations do not have an EtherType field.

What is he talking about? Time for another history lesson¹.

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History of Ethernet Encapsulations

Henk Smit conscientiously pointed out a major omission I made when summarizing Peter Paluch’s excellent description of how bits get parsed in network headers:

EtherType? What do you mean EtherType? There are/were 4 types of Ethernet encapsulation. Only one of them (ARPA encapsulation) has an EtherType. The other 3 encapsulations do not have an EtherType field.

What is he talking about? Time for another history lesson¹.

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Partial Cloudflare outage on October 25, 2022

Today, a change to our Tiered Cache system caused some requests to fail for users with status code 530. The impact lasted for almost six hours in total. We estimate that about 5% of all requests failed at peak. Because of the complexity of our system and a blind spot in our tests, we did not spot this when the change was released to our test environment.  

The failures were caused by side effects of how we handle cacheable requests across locations. At first glance, the errors looked like they were caused by a different system that had started a release some time before. It took our teams a number of tries to identify exactly what was causing the problems. Once identified we expedited a rollback which completed in 87 minutes.

We’re sorry, and we’re taking steps to make sure this does not happen again.

Background

One of Cloudflare’s products is our Content Delivery Network, or CDN. This is used to cache assets for websites globally. However, a data center is not guaranteed to have an asset cached. It could be new, expired, or has been purged. If that happens, and a user requests that asset, our CDN needs Continue reading

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Network observability: What it means to vendors and to you

As an industry analyst who focuses on network management, I make it my business to cut through hype and buzzwords. When vendors started talking about “network observability” last year, I found myself at an impasse. It seemed everyone had their own take on what this term means.Google network observability, and you will find an endless list of varying definitions. I recently read a blog that boiled it down to this: “Network monitoring is fault management. Network observability is performance management.”No! No, it is not!I decided to do something about this chaos. I talked to multiple network tool buyers and users, and I surveyed 402 IT stakeholders. I asked them to define network observability and explore what it means in the context of their network management tools and processes.To read this article in full, please click here

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Palo commit and rollback

Palo Alto firewalls use the concept of a running config to hold the devices live configuration and the candidate config is copy of the running config where changes are made. A Commit operation causes the running config to be overwritten by the candidate config activating the changes.

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4 Ways SSDs Are Failing Your Applications…and What You Can Do About It

Accelerated SSDs can help overcome the challenges commodity SSDs have in keeping up with the demands of the modern data center.

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Zero trust in the cloud: Best practices and potential pitfalls

Architecturally speaking, cloud-native applications are broken down into smaller components that are highly dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral. Because each of these components is communicating with other components inside or outside the cluster, this architecture introduces new attack vectors that are difficult to protect against using a traditional perimeter-based approach. A prudent way to secure cloud-native applications is to find a way to reduce the number of attack vectors, and this is where the principles of zero trust come into play.

With today’s multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments, networks are no longer restricted to a clear perimeter with clearly defined borders to defend—and cyber criminals are taking advantage of this fact by tricking users and systems into providing unauthorized access. While a lot of zero trust is focused on limiting access from users and devices, organizations are now also recognizing that in the world of distributed cloud-native applications, workloads themselves are communicating with each other and the same principles of zero trust need to be extended to cloud-native applications.

Because traditional security methods such as network firewalls rely on fixed network addresses, they are insufficient to protect dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral cloud-native workloads, which do not have fixed network addresses. They simply Continue reading

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Finding and fixing typos on Linux

If you want to check a text file for typos, Linux can help.It has a couple of tools and a number of commands that can point out the errors including aspell and enchant, and I’ll share a script that I put together recently that looks for typos using the system's words file.Using aspell aspell is very clever tool that will point out typos and make it surprisingly easy to fix them. When used to make changes to a single file, it reverses the text and background colors to highlight misspelled words. You would start it with a command like this:$ aspell check myfile If aspell detects no typos, it simply exits. Otherwise, it will open with a display that contains the file text (or just the top lines depending on the length of the file) followed by a list of suggested replacement words and, below that, a list of the commands that you can run. The first typo (or suspected typo) will be displayed with the text and background colors reversed as shown below.To read this article in full, please click here

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Finding and fixing typos on Linux

If you want to check a text file for typos, Linux can help.It has a couple of tools and a number of commands that can point out the errors including aspell and enchant, and I’ll share a script that I put together recently that looks for typos using the system's words file.Using aspell aspell is very clever tool that will point out typos and make it surprisingly easy to fix them. When used to make changes to a single file, it reverses the text and background colors to highlight misspelled words. You would start it with a command like this:$ aspell check myfile If aspell detects no typos, it simply exits. Otherwise, it will open with a display that contains the file text (or just the top lines depending on the length of the file) followed by a list of suggested replacement words and, below that, a list of the commands that you can run. The first typo (or suspected typo) will be displayed with the text and background colors reversed as shown below.To read this article in full, please click here

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Email Routing leaves Beta

Email Routing was announced during Birthday Week in 2021 and has been available for free to every Cloudflare customer since early this year. When we launched in beta, we set out to make a difference and provide the most uncomplicated, more powerful email forwarding service on the Internet for all our customers, for free.

We feel we've met and surpassed our goals for the first year. Cloudflare Email Routing is now one of our most popular features and a top leading email provider. We are processing email traffic for more than 550,000 inboxes and forwarding an average of two million messages daily, and still growing month to month.

In February, we also announced that we were acquiring Area1. Merging their team, products, and know-how with Cloudflare was a significant step in strengthening our Email Security capabilities.

All this is good, but what about more features, you ask?

The team has been working hard to enhance Email Routing over the last few months. Today Email Routing leaves beta.

Also, we feel that this could be a good time to give you an update on all the new things we've been adding to the service, including behind-the-scenes and not-so-visible improvements.

Let’s Continue reading

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IRP 4.1 has arrived, featuring automated DDoS detection and mitigation capability

The post IRP 4.1 has arrived, featuring automated DDoS detection and mitigation capability appeared first on Noction.

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The Number of the Beast or the Practical usage of the Blackhole Community

BGP blackhole filtering is a routing technique used to drop unwanted traffic. Black holes are placed in the parts of a network

The post The Number of the Beast or the Practical usage of the Blackhole Community appeared first on Noction.

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Notes from OARC 39

OARC held its fall meeting in Belgrade on October 22 and 23. Here are my impressions of some of the presentations from that meeting.

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IRP 4.1 has arrived, featuring automated DDoS detection and mitigation capability

The post IRP 4.1 has arrived, featuring automated DDoS detection and mitigation capability appeared first on Noction.

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Network Automation Considered Harmful

Some of the blog comments never cease to amaze me. Here’s one questioning the value of network automation:

I think there is a more fundamental reason than the (in my opinion simplistic) lack of skills argument. As someone mentioned on twitter

“Rules make it harder to enact change. Automation is essentially a set of rules.”

We underestimated the fact that infrastructure is a value differentiator for many and that customization and rapid change don’t go hand in hand with automation.

Whenever someone starts using MBA-speak like value differentiator in a technical arguments, I get an acute allergic reaction, but maybe he’s right.

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Network Automation Considered Harmful

Some of the blog comments never cease to amaze me. Here’s one questioning the value of network automation:

I think there is a more fundamental reason than the (in my opinion simplistic) lack of skills argument. As someone mentioned on twitter

“Rules make it harder to enact change. Automation is essentially a set of rules.”

We underestimated the fact that infrastructure is a value differentiator for many and that customization and rapid change don’t go hand in hand with automation.

Whenever someone starts using MBA-speak like value differentiator in a technical arguments, I get an acute allergic reaction, but maybe he’s right.

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Oracle and Nvidia expand AI partnership

Oracle and Nvidia have extended their partnership to help speed customer adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) services.As part of the deal, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which is Oracle’s cloud service, will beef up the infrastructure with tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs, both the Ampere A100 currently on the market and the upcoming Hopper H100. Oracle will also add Nvidia’s AI software stack that supports AI training and deep learning.This includes an upcoming release of Nvidia AI Enterprise software with access to Nvidia’s AI development and deployment platform that provides processing engines for each step of the AI workflow, from data processing and AI model training to simulation and large-scale deployment.To read this article in full, please click here

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Cleaning Out The Cruft

I spent the weekend doing something I really should have done a long time ago. I went through my piles of technology that I was going to get around to using one day and finally got rid of anything I didn’t recognize. Old access points, old networking gear, and even older widgets that went to devices that I don’t even remember owning.

Do you have one of these piles? Boxes? Corners of your office or cave? The odds are good there’s a pile of stuff that you keep thinking you’re eventually going to get around to doing something with some day. Except some day hasn’t come yet. So maybe it’s time to get rid of that pile. Trust me you’re going to feel better for getting rid of that stuff.

What to do with it? It needs to be properly recycled so don’t just toss it in the trash can. Anything with electric circuits needs to be properly disposed of so look for an electronics recycling facility. Yes, there are stories that electronics recycling isn’t all it’s cracked up to be but it’s better than polluting with e-waste everywhere.

Consider donating the devices to a trade school or other maker Continue reading

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Cisco WLAP and WLC fail to create CAPWAP connection

Last days I’ve encounter an issue when some of the Wireless Lightweight Access Points (WLAP) just disappeared from the Wireless LAN Controller (WLC). I saw before these kind of problems before and usually, whatever the reason, the WAP cannot discover the WLC. It was not the case now, everything seems to be in order both … Continue reading Cisco WLAP and WLC fail to create CAPWAP connection