Are you afraid the network automation will eat your job? You might have to worry if you’re a VLAN-provisioning CLI jockey, but then you’re not alone. Textile workers faces the same challenges in 19th century and automation report from 1958 the clerical workers were facing the same dilemma when the first computers were introduced.
Guess what: unemployment rate has been going up and down in the meantime (US data), but mostly due to various crisis. Automation had little impact.
I’ve recently started migrating many of the applications on my Fedora 36 laptop to their Flatpak versions. For the most part, this has been pretty straightforward, although there isn’t really any method for migrating configuration and data. Today I ran into a problem with Meld, a graphical diff utility, and using it with the git difftool command. Below I’ll share how I worked around this problem.
Normally, the integration between Git and Meld—which is what enables you to run git difftool and have the results show up in Meld—would look something like this (this is from ~/.gitconfig):
However, when Meld is installed as a Flatpak, /usr/bin/meld doesn’t exist. In order to continue using Meld with the git difftool command, you must change the Git configuration to look like this instead:
Leading off this weekend, an article by Simon Sharwood on the impact of the centralization of the Internet. I wrote a somewhat longer article on the Public Discourse a while back on the same topic.
Is softwarization really going to change the way we build networks from the ground up? I suspect things will change, but they’ve always changed. I also suspect we’ll be hearing about how software is going to eat the world ten years from now, and IPv6 still won’t be fully deployed.
I recently talked to some security friends on a CloudBytes podcast recording that will be coming out in a few weeks. One of the things that came up was the idea of an air gapped system or network that represents the ultimate in security. I had a couple of thoughts that felt like a great topic for a blog post.
The Gap is Wide
I can think of a ton of classical air gapped systems that we’ve seen in the media. Think about Mission: Impossible and the system that holds the NOC list:
Makes sense right? Totally secure unless you have Tom Cruise in your ductwork. It’s about as safe as you can make your data. It’s also about as inconvenient as you can make your data too. Want to protect a file so no one can ever steal it? Make it so no one can ever access it! Works great for data that doesn’t need to be updated regularly or even analyzed at any point. It’s offline for all intents and purposes.
Know what works great as an air gapped system? Root certificate authority servers. Even Microsoft agrees. So secure that you have to dig it out of storage Continue reading
Today's Heavy Networking dives into the automation and orchestration of 5G networks with sponsor Juniper Networks. We discuss Juniper's RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), Service Management and Orchestration (SMO), how Juniper works with the Open RAN ecosystem, and more. Our guest is Constantine Polychronopoulos, Vice President of 5G and Telco Cloud at Juniper Networks.
Today's Heavy Networking dives into the automation and orchestration of 5G networks with sponsor Juniper Networks. We discuss Juniper's RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), Service Management and Orchestration (SMO), how Juniper works with the Open RAN ecosystem, and more. Our guest is Constantine Polychronopoulos, Vice President of 5G and Telco Cloud at Juniper Networks.
Chipmaker VMware, which was viewed as an acquisition target for server and chip makers looking to grow in the growing data center infrastructure market.
The deal, valued at $61 billion, provides a new home for VMware, which is a software technology provider with decades-long partnerships with server and chip makers that include Nvidia, AMD and Intel.
VMware has been a free agent for a good part of the last decade and has been bounced around between multiple owners. according to chip research firm IC Insights.
Broadcom’s core business is around wireless, networking, cable modem and infrastructure components, which accounted for 73% of the $8.1 billion in Continue reading
This time last year, Arm server CPU startup Ampere Computing provided a roadmap running out through 2023 describing its future products, aimed at demonstrating its commitment to the idea of Arm server chips. …
This is a guest post from Nathan Skrzypczak at Cisco. Nathan is part of a team of external contributors to Calico Open Source that have been working on an integration between Calico Open Source and Cisco’s data plane technology, VPP, for the last year.
Calico v3.23 is out, and with it a lot of new features! This release marks a long-awaited milestone for me and my team, as it includes the Calico VPP data plane (beta). So now seems to be a good time to reflect on what this integration actually is, and why we built it.
The Calico VPP data plane is the fourth data plane option for Calico. Alongside the Linux kernel, eBPF data plane, and Windows kernel, you can now choose to have packet processing done in a userspace network stack: the Vector Packet Processor (VPP). This means the service load-balancing, NAT-ing of packets, encapsulation, encryption and policies will all run in a user-space application. It all seems mostly transparent from the user’s perspective, is seamless to enable, and enabling it allows access to a series of really interesting features.
Quick packets yields more throughput
The first thing the Calico VPP data plane aims to Continue reading
I’m attending Cisco Live US 2022 in Las Vegas this June. I’ll be there on the Explorer Pass, crawling the World Of Solutions and chatting with anyone and everyone my introverted nature can handle. If you’ll be there and want to meet up, DM me on Twitter or ping me on LinkedIn.
I’m especially looking to connect with…
The networking & cloud community. Maybe you listen to a podcast I host or read something I wrote and want to meet up. Yup, I’m all for that. Let’s do it. I’m always looking for new podcast guests, so if you’ve got a story to tell or opinion to share, let’s discuss. No pressure, though. I’d be just as happy to shake hands bump air-gapped fists and make your acquaintance.
Vendors with new shinies. Brief me on your latest and greatest. Show off your nifty thing.
Stealth companies getting close to launch. I focus on IT operations and infrastructure–networking and cloud especially. I’d like to hear about what you’re coming to market with.
Welcome to Technology Short Take #155, just in time for the 2022 Memorial Day holiday weekend! (Here in the US, at least.) I mean, don’t you want to spend this weekend catching up on some technology-related articles instead of cooking on the grill and gathering with friends and family? I certainly hope not! Still, for those who need a little technology fix over the weekend, hopefully I’ve included something useful in the list of articles below. Enjoy!
Networking
Isovalent—the company behind the Cilium project—has been talking a lot about how the use of eBPF will transform things, including the architecture of a service mesh. Along those lines, one of their latest articles discusses how to achieve identity-based mutual authentication leveraging eBPF. If I’m understanding the article correctly (and feel free to correct me if I am mistaken) it looks as if Cilium Service Mesh will leverage/does leverage a combination of certificate-based mTLS for identity at the workload level and node-based transport encryption (via WireGuard) for data confidentiality. Even though I know that the underlying mechanisms are different, subjectively this feels a lot like using tunnels to connect workloads on different compute nodes (i.e., network virtualization). Is the Continue reading
Today’s storage solutions are falling short in meeting customer needs. Because of these limitations, organizations are not realizing the full potential and value of their storage.
We recently updated developers.cloudflare.com, the Cloudflare Developers documentation website, to a new version of our custom documentation engine. This change consisted of a significant migration from Gatsby to Hugo and converged a collection of Workers Sites into a single Cloudflare Pages instance. Together, these updates brought developer experience, performance, and quality of life improvements for our engineers, technical writers, and product managers.
In this blog post, we’ll cover the history of Cloudflare’s developer docs, why we made this recent transition, and why we continue to dogfood Cloudflare’s products as we develop applications internally.
What are Cloudflare’s Developer Docs?
Cloudflare’s Developer Docs, which are open source on GitHub, comprise documentation for all of Cloudflare’s products. The documentation is written by technical writers, product managers, and engineers at Cloudflare. Like many open source projects, contributions to the docs happen via Pull Requests (PRs). At time of writing, we have 1,600 documentation pages and have accepted almost 4,000 PRs, both from Cloudflare employees and external contributors in our community.
The underlying documentation engine we’ve used to build these docs has changed multiple times over the years. Documentation sites are often built with static site generators and, at Cloudflare, we’ve Continue reading
In this post we will have a look at another EVPN Route Type, that being RT-3, which goes by the rather opaque name of 'Inclusive Multicast Ethernet Tag'; and look at how it is used to ensure EVPN peers flood traffic to those neighbours that need it.
Firstly, we'll look at EVPN packet forwarding to provide some context around why this Route Type is important, then we will dive into its details, with all the usual show commands, packet captures and plethora of RFC name drops.
EVPN Packet Forwarding
Let's start off by running through EVPN Packet forwarding, for that we need an example network.
Example Network
For this post, we'll use a slightly larger network, this time with three switches.
As shown in Figure 1 below, this consists of three Aruba 6300s, all configured for OSPF and EVPN.
To emulate customer workloads, I have a physical linux server attached to each 6300. I have configured the interconnecting port as a trunk to generate traffic in different VLANs.
Each node is configured with customer-faced VLAN 10, which is bound to VNI 1010.
However, only two of the three peers, 6300-1 and 6300-2, are configured with a second VLAN and VNI, Continue reading
Broadcom's planned acquisition of VMware could open opportunities to reach enterprise and telco companies alike with innovative technology. The question is whether Broadcom will let VMware further develop tools for 5G, software-defined networking (SDN), and other technologies.Semiconductor manufacturer and infrastructure software vendor Broadcom confirmed Thursday that it has reached an agreement to buy VMware in a deal worth roughly $61 billion in stock and cash, subject to closing conditions, including regulatory and shareholder approval.To read this article in full, please click here
Broadcom's planned acquisition of VMware might open opportunities to reach enterprise and telco companies alike with innovative technology. The question is whether Broadcom will give VMware the opportunity to further develop 5G, SDN (software-defined networking), multicloud management and other networking tools.Semiconductor manufacturer and infrastructure software vendor Broadcom confirmed Thursday that it has reached an agreement to buy VMware in a deal worth roughly $61 billion in stock and cash, subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory and shareholder approval.To read this article in full, please click here
