The network, once seen as little more than plumbing in the datacenter, is at the center of distributed IT operations. …
Moving Networks Forward With Digital Twins was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
If you’re anything like most people, you probably spend a lot of time staring at screens. Whether you’re working on a computer, scrolling through your phone, or watching TV, all that screen time can take a toll on your eyes. If you’re looking for a way to relieve tired eyes, you may want to try a weighted eye mask.
Weighted eye masks are filled with a material, such as plastic beads, that add a gentle pressure to the eyes. This pressure can help to relax the muscles around the eyes and reduce tension headaches. Additionally, the weight of the mask can help to block out light, which can further improve relaxation.
There are a few different types of weighted eye masks on the market, each with its own benefits.
Pure hydrating eye masks are filled with gel or liquid, rather than beads. These masks are often used to help with dry eyes, as the gel can help to increase moisture around the eyes.
Warming eye masks are filled with a material that retains heat. These masks can help to soothe tired eyes and reduce Continue reading
IPv6 is still being deployed, years after the first world IPv6 day, even more years after its first acceptance as an Internet standard by the IETF. What is taking so long? George Michaelson (APNIC) joins Tom Ammon and Russ White on this episode of the Hedge to discuss the current pace of IPv6 deployment, where there are wins, and why things might be moving more slowly in other areas.
When managing infrastructure, there are times when a dynamic inventory is essential. Kubernetes is a perfect example of this where you may create multiple applications within a namespace but you will not be able to create a static inventory due to Kubernetes appending a systems-generated string to uniquely identify objects.
Recently, I decided to play with using a Kubernetes dynamic inventory to manage pods, but finding the details on how to use and apply it was a bit scarce. As such, I wanted to write a quick start guide on how you can create an Ansible Playbook to retrieve your pods within a namespace and generate a Kubernetes dynamic inventory.
This is much easier to do when you take advantage of the kubernetes.core.k8s_info module.
In my example, I’m going to take advantage of using my existing ansible-automation-platform namespace that has a list of pods to create my dynamic inventory. In your scenario, you’d apply this to any namespace you wish to capture a pod inventory from.
When creating your inventory, the first step is to register the pods found within a particular namespace. Here’s an example of a task creating an inventory within the ansible-automation-platform Continue reading
System architects are often impatient about the future, especially when they can see something good coming down the pike. …
CXL Borgs IBM’s OpenCAPI, Weaves Memory Fabrics With 3.0 Spec was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Contributors
Manish Chugtu — VMware
Ramesh Masavarapu, Saidulu Aldas, Sakari Poussa, Tarun Viswanathan — Intel
VMware Tanzu Service Mesh built on open source Istio, provides advanced, end-to-end connectivity, security, and insights for modern applications—across application end-users, microservices, APIs, and data—enabling compliance with Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and data protection and privacy regulations.
Service Mesh architecture pattern solves many problems, which are well known and extensively documented – so we won’t be talking about those in this blog. But it also comes with its own challenges and some of the top focus areas that we will discuss in this series of blogs are around:
Intel and VMware have been working together to optimize and accelerate the microservices middleware and infrastructure with software and hardware to ensure developers have the best-in-class performance and low latency experience when building distributed workloads with a focus on improving the performance, crypto accelerations, and making it more secure.
In Part 1 of this blog series, we will talk about one such performance challenge (with respect to service mesh data path performance) and discuss our solution around that.
The current implementation Continue reading
As more enterprises adopt containers, microservices, and Kubernetes for their cloud-native applications, they need to be aware of the vulnerabilities in container images during build and runtime that can be exploited. In this blog, I will demonstrate how you can implement vulnerability management in CI/CD pipelines, perform image assurance during build time, and enforce runtime threat defense to protect your workloads from security threats.
The majority of images in CI/CD pipelines have vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, or both. An active cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) should scan, identify, and list vulnerabilities in container images based on databases such as NIST and NVD. The active CNAPP should then help teams build security policies to determine which images should be deployed or blocked based on several factors such as severity, last scan timestamp, and organizational exceptions. Given the sheer amount of vulnerabilities that appear daily, users will be easily overwhelmed if they have to address all existing vulnerabilities. Security teams will have to build a deploy/block criteria to prioritize vulnerabilities that they will address first—a workflow that is easy to start but difficult to manage and operate long-term. Hence, security teams should look for a security Continue reading
Yesterday, August 8, 2022, Twilio shared that they’d been compromised by a targeted phishing attack. Around the same time as Twilio was attacked, we saw an attack with very similar characteristics also targeting Cloudflare’s employees. While individual employees did fall for the phishing messages, we were able to thwart the attack through our own use of Cloudflare One products, and physical security keys issued to every employee that are required to access all our applications.
We have confirmed that no Cloudflare systems were compromised. Our Cloudforce One threat intelligence team was able to perform additional analysis to further dissect the mechanism of the attack and gather critical evidence to assist in tracking down the attacker.
This was a sophisticated attack targeting employees and systems in such a way that we believe most organizations would be likely to be breached. Given that the attacker is targeting multiple organizations, we wanted to share here a rundown of exactly what we saw in order to help other companies recognize and mitigate this attack.
On July 20, 2022, the Cloudflare Security team received reports of employees receiving legitimate-looking text messages pointing to what appeared to be a Cloudflare Okta login Continue reading
This article builds on the Docker testbed to demonstrate how advanced flow analytics can be used to separate the two types of traffic and detect the DDoS attack.
docker run --rm -d -e "COLLECTOR=host.docker.internal" -e "SAMPLING=100" \First, start a Host sFlow agent using the pre-built sflow/host-sflow image to generate the sFlow telemetry that would stream from the switches and routers in a production deployment.
--net=host -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro \
--name=host-sflow sflow/host-sflow
setFlow('ddos_amplification', {
keys:'ipdestination,udpsourceport',
value: 'frames',
values: ['count:ipsource']
});
setThreshold('ddos_amplification', {
metric:'ddos_amplification',
value: 10000,
byFlow:true,
timeout: 2
});
setEventHandler(function(event) {
var [ipdestination,udpsourceport] = event.flowKey.split(',');
var [sourcecount] = event.values;
Continue reading
In 2018, I wrote an article on examining X.509 certificates embedded in Kubeconfig files. In that article, I showed one way of extracting client certificate data from a Kubeconfig file and looking at the properties of the client certificate data. While there’s nothing technically wrong with that article, since then I’ve found another tool that makes the process a tad easier. In this post, I’ll revisit the topic of examining embedded X.509v3 certificates in Kubeconfig files.
The tool that I’ve found is yq, which is an incredibly useful tool when it comes to parsing YAML (much in the same way that jq is an incredibly useful tool when it comes to parsing JSON). I should probably write some sort of introductory post on yq.
In any case, you can use yq to replace the grep plus awk combo outlined in my earlier article on examining certificate data in Kubeconfig files. Instead, to pull out only the client certificate data, just use this yq command (you did know that Kubeconfig files are YAML, right?):
yq '.users[0].user.client-certificate-data' < ~./kube/config
(Of course, this command assumes your Kubeconfig file is named config in the ~/.kube Continue reading
As a SaaS provider, you’re juggling many challenges while building your application, whether it’s custom domain support, protection from attacks, or maintaining an origin server. In 2021, we were proud to announce Cloudflare for SaaS for Everyone, which allows anyone to use Cloudflare to cover those challenges, so they can focus on other aspects of their business. This product has a variety of potential implementations; now, we are excited to announce a new section in our Developer Docs specifically devoted to Cloudflare for SaaS documentation to allow you take full advantage of its product suite.
You may remember, from our October 2021 blog post, all the ways that Cloudflare provides solutions for SaaS providers:
However, we received feedback from customers indicating confusion around actually using the capabilities of Cloudflare for SaaS because there are so many features! With the existing documentation, it wasn’t 100% clear how to enhance security and performance, or how to support custom domains. Now, we want Continue reading
I've written before about how I use MediaWiki for taking notes and as one of my study tools. This has worked well for many years. But a problem started to develop: while I wrote my technical notes in MediaWiki, I wrote my day-to-day notes (books I want to read, notes from podcasts I listen to, and even my weekly planner) in Notion. This meant I had to use different apps for reading/writing in each tool, remember two different markup languages, and couldn't (cleanly) link pieces of content between the two. The final straw was realizing how much more effort I had to expend to maintain my MediaWiki instance; I just didn't have the time or will to keep up with new releases not to mention maintain the server itself.
For these reasons, I decided to move all of my MediaWiki content to Notion and unify all of my notes. But this revealed a new problem: there was no tooling to automate this. So I created my own. Here's how it works.