Situational Awareness for Network Migrations

At IP Architechs we perform a lot of network migrations and it is no secret network migrations/ maintenance windows can be one of the most nerve-racking things for engineers, managers, and business leaders for a variety of reasons.

For the engineers the uncertainty might be caused by fear of failure, not being able to predict the outcome due to complexity, rushed on preparation to meet a deadline, or a litany of other reasons.

For managers and business leaders it might be more along the lines of; what happens if this goes wrong, how will this effect my bottom line, are there going to be 1000s of trouble tickets come 8/9am when everyone hits the office, and so on.

The Preparation

We’re going to look at this at the perspective of the engineer throughout. The prep work is probably one of the most important pieces of success. This is where you do many things including but not limited to:

  • building and testing the configuration to be implemented
  • making a rollback plan — this might be something as simple as move a cable and shut an interface or a multistep/multi-device plan
  • know the situation surrounding the window

Lets explore understanding the situation Continue reading

Programming The Network With Intel NEX Chief Nick McKeown

It would be very difficult indeed to find a better general manager for Intel’s newly constituted Network and Edge Group networking business than Nick McKeown, and Pat Gelsinger, the chief executive officer charged with turning around Intel’s foundries and its chip design business, is lucky that Intel was on an acquisitive bend in the wake of its rumored failed attempt to buy Mellanox and Nvidia’s successful purchase of Mellanox a few months later. …

Programming The Network With Intel NEX Chief Nick McKeown was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Weekend Reads 081222


The distributed, peer-to-peer (P2P) InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) has become a hotbed of phishing-site storage: Thousands of emails containing phishing URLs utilizing IPFS are showing up in corporate inboxes.


Walmart’s advice to companies trying to control the hefty cost of running workloads on the three largest cloud providers comes down to one word: choice.


With nearly half of all breaches involving external attackers enabled by stolen or fake credentials, security firms are pushing a high-fidelity detection mechanism for such intrusions: canary tokens.


These WISPs might have the 100/20 Mbps capability for some customers close to a tower, but it’s impossible to be able to deliver those speeds to everybody across an entire county.


The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced that Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0 is now an official Web standard.


Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger’s carefully assembled house of cards is collapsing around him. And it’s not really that surprising when you look at the hand he’s been dealt.


The Flash Memory Summit 2022 was held as an in-person event again this week for the first time since 2019, at the Santa Clara Convention Center San Francisco, showcasing the latest developments in memory and storage.


Conflicting business Continue reading

eBPF or Not, Sidecars are the Future of the Service Mesh

William Morgan William is the co-founder and CEO of Buoyant, the creator of the open source service mesh projects Linkerd. Prior to Buoyant, he was an infrastructure engineer at Twitter, where he helped move Twitter from a failing monolithic Ruby on Rails app to a highly distributed, fault-tolerant microservice architecture. He was a software engineer at Powerset, Microsoft, and Adap.tv, a research scientist at MITRE, and holds an MS in computer science from Stanford University. eBPF is a hot topic in the Kubernetes world, and the idea of using it to build a “sidecar-free service mesh” has generated recent buzz. Proponents of this idea claim that eBPF lets them reduce service mesh complexity by removing sidecars. What’s left unsaid is that this model simply replaces sidecar proxies with multitenant per-host proxies — a significant step backward for both security and operability that increases, not decreases, complexity. The sidecar model represents a tremendous advancement for the industry. Sidecars allow the dynamic injection of functionality into the application at runtime, while — critically — retaining all the isolation guarantees achieved by containers. Moving from sidecars back to multitenant, shared proxies loses this critical isolation and results in significant regressions in security Continue reading

AWS (sort of) brings private 5G to market

AWS says its private 5G managed service is now available – however, it currently only supports 4G LTE and doesn’t yet support 5G.With AWS Private 5G, which was previewed last November, customers will be able to specify where they want to build a mobile network and its capacity, and AWS will deliver and maintain the small-cell radio units, servers, 5G-core and RAN software, and SIM cards. The idea is to let enterprises quickly procure, deploy, and scale their own private 5G mobile networks without having to acquire, integrate, and maintain hardware and software from multiple third-party vendors.To read this article in full, please click here

Crawler Hints supports Microsoft’s IndexNow in helping users find new content

Crawler Hints supports Microsoft’s IndexNow in helping users find new content
Crawler Hints supports Microsoft’s IndexNow in helping users find new content

The web is constantly changing. Whether it’s news or updates to your social feed, it’s a constant flow of information. As a user, that’s great. But have you ever stopped to think how search engines deal with all the change?

It turns out, they “index” the web on a regular basis — sending bots out, to constantly crawl webpages, looking for changes. Today, bot traffic accounts for about 30% of total traffic on the Internet, and given how foundational search is to using the Internet, it should come as no surprise that search engine bots make up a large proportion of that what might come as a surprise is how inefficient the model is, though: we estimate that over 50% of crawler traffic is wasted effort.

This has a huge impact. There’s all the additional capacity that owners of websites need to bake into their site to absorb the bots crawling all over it. There’s the transmission of the data. There’s the CPU cost of running the bots. And when you’re running at the scale of the Internet, all of this has a pretty big environmental footprint.

Part of the problem, though, is nobody had really stopped to ask: maybe Continue reading

Authority and Responsibility

Congratulations on your promotion! You’re now a manager or leader for your team. You now have to make sure everyone is getting their things done. That also means lots of reports and meetings with your manager about what’s happening and all the new rules that have to be followed in the future. Doesn’t this all sound nice?

In truth we all want to be able to help out as much as possible. Sometimes that means putting in extra work. For many it also means being promoted to a position of responsibility in a company leading a team or group of teams. That means you will have some new responsibilities and also some new authority. But what’s the difference? And why is one more foundational than the other?

Respect My Authority

Authority is “power to influence or command thought, opinion, or behavior”. It means you have the ability to tell people what to do. You give orders and they are followed. You tell your team the direction that you want things to go and it happens. If it doesn’t there are consequences. When you tell someone they are the boss this is what they usually picture.

Responsibility is “the quality of Continue reading

Heavy Networking 642: 10Mbps Single Pair Ethernet

Single pair Ethernet. That’s right. Ethernet over a single twisted pair, rather than the four you’re used to. Or two if you’ve got a little gray in your beard. Now, single pair Ethernet isn’t fast in the way we network engineers would normally think of fast. SPE runs at 10 megabits per second. But in the use cases SPE was designed for, 10Mbps is very fast indeed. To tell us all about single pair Ethernet is Peter Jones. Although Peter wears many hats in the networking industry, today he comes to the microphone as the chairperson of the Ethernet Alliance.

Heavy Networking 642: 10Mbps Single Pair Ethernet

Single pair Ethernet. That’s right. Ethernet over a single twisted pair, rather than the four you’re used to. Or two if you’ve got a little gray in your beard. Now, single pair Ethernet isn’t fast in the way we network engineers would normally think of fast. SPE runs at 10 megabits per second. But in the use cases SPE was designed for, 10Mbps is very fast indeed. To tell us all about single pair Ethernet is Peter Jones. Although Peter wears many hats in the networking industry, today he comes to the microphone as the chairperson of the Ethernet Alliance.

The post Heavy Networking 642: 10Mbps Single Pair Ethernet appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Technology Short Take 158

Welcome to Technology Short Take #158! What do I have in store for you this time around? Well, you’ll have to read the whole article to find out for sure, but I have links to articles on…well, lots of different topics! DNS, BGP, hardware-based security, Kubernetes, Linux—they’re all in here. Hopefully I’ve managed to find something useful for someone.

Networking

Servers/Hardware

Security

Is Kubernetes the Next Fault Domain?

Keith McClellan Keith McClellan is director, partner solutions engineering, at Cockroach Labs These days, most application architecture is distributed by default: connected microservices running in containers in a cloud environment. Organizations large and small now deploy thousands of containers every day — a complexity of scale that is almost incomprehensible. The vast majority of organizations depend upon Kubernetes (K8s) to orchestrate, automate and manage all these workloads. So what happens, then, when something happens with Kubernetes? A fault domain is the area of a distributed system that suffers the impact when a critical piece of infrastructure or network service experiences problems. Has Kubernetes become the next fault domain? Contemplating the disaster of a Kubernetes-related application failure is the stuff of DevOps nightmares. But in disaster, there is also opportunity: Kubernetes has the potential to help us have a common operating experience across data centers, cloud regions and even clouds by becoming the fault domain we design our high availability (HA) applications to survive. Kubernetes as Common Operating System Many distributed applications need to be distributed as close to users as possible, so let’s say we want to build a three-region cluster. Without Kubernetes, even in a single cloud, that means Continue reading

What are virtual routers and how can they lead to virtual data centers?

OK, you’re a CIO and when you go down to the data center, you see racks of routers, each with a maze of cabling.  When you hear “virtual routers” you think of all of that gone, replaced by mystical router instances floating about somewhere in the ether, and you smile.Or you’re a CFO who gets a bill for hundreds of branch routers, each picking your pocket on service charges and maybe software licenses.  You hear “virtual routers” and think of all those little hands going out of your pocket, and you smile.To read this article in full, please click here

What are virtual routers and how can they lead to virtual data centers?

OK, you’re a CIO and when you go down to the data center, you see racks of routers, each with a maze of cabling.  When you hear “virtual routers” you think of all of that gone, replaced by mystical router instances floating about somewhere in the ether, and you smile.Or you’re a CFO who gets a bill for hundreds of branch routers, each picking your pocket on service charges and maybe software licenses.  You hear “virtual routers” and think of all those little hands going out of your pocket, and you smile.To read this article in full, please click here

What are virtual routers and how can they lead to virtual data centers?

OK, you’re a CIO and when you go down to the data center, you see racks of routers, each with a maze of cabling.  When you hear “virtual routers” you think of all of that gone, replaced by mystical router instances floating about somewhere in the ether, and you smile.Or you’re a CFO who gets a bill for hundreds of branch routers, each picking your pocket on service charges and maybe software licenses.  You hear “virtual routers” and think of all those little hands going out of your pocket, and you smile.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco embraces multi-cloud networking software

As large enterprises spread by deploying distributed data centers and on-prem or public-cloud services, their ability to control and manage applications and workloads utilizing that infrastructure is becoming more difficult.An emerging technology called multi-cloud networking software (MCNS) is coming together from a variety of vendors—Cisco, Arista, VMware, and F5 among them—to address many of these challenges. [ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] In a recent report Gartner said MCNS technology enables consistent networking policy, network security, governance, and network visibility across multiple cloud environments via a single point of management.To read this article in full, please click here

1 … 456 457 458 459 460 … 3,842