Using Apache Kafka to process 1 trillion inter-service messages

Using Apache Kafka to process 1 trillion inter-service messages
Using Apache Kafka to process 1 trillion inter-service messages

Cloudflare has been using Kafka in production since 2014. We have come a long way since then, and currently run 14 distinct Kafka clusters, across multiple data centers, with roughly 330 nodes. Between them, over a trillion messages have been processed over the last eight years.

Cloudflare uses Kafka to decouple microservices and communicate the creation, change or deletion of various resources via a common data format in a fault-tolerant manner. This decoupling is one of many factors that enables Cloudflare engineering teams to work on multiple features and products concurrently.

We learnt a lot about Kafka on the way to one trillion messages, and built some interesting internal tools to ease adoption that will be explored in this blog post. The focus in this blog post is on inter-application communication use cases alone and not logging (we have other Kafka clusters that power the dashboards where customers view statistics that handle more than one trillion messages each day). I am an engineer on the Application Services team and our team has a charter to provide tools/services to product teams, so they can focus on their core competency which is delivering value to our customers.

In this blog I’d Continue reading

Introducing Gluware Topology: Packet Pushers Gluware LiveStream, June 28, 2022 (4/7) – Video

Gluware introduces a new Topology feature in its network automation platform. Gluware Topology maps the network using the Gluware model and engine to visualize the network. Benefits of the new capability include improved operations by showing what network devices are where, faster troubleshooting, and streamlining security and audit processes. Packet Pushers host Ethan Banks joins […]

The post Introducing Gluware Topology: Packet Pushers Gluware LiveStream, June 28, 2022 (4/7) – Video appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Tech Bytes: Forecasting SD-WAN Performance With WAN Insights (Sponsored)

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we look at how to get better visibility into the WAN. Our sponsor is Cisco ThousandEyes and we’re going to discuss its latest capability, called WAN Insights, that analyzes WAN performance data to help remove SD-WAN blind spots and give network engineers a better understanding of whether their providers are delivering as promised.

The post Tech Bytes: Forecasting SD-WAN Performance With WAN Insights (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

IBM adds four servers to Power10 lineup

IBM is expanding its Power10 server lineup with four new midrange and scale-out systems designed for on-premises, data-intensive and business-critical workloads.The new Power S1014, Power S1022, Power S1024 and Power E1050 platforms cover a range of workloads.The E1050 is a four-socket system optimized for data-intensive enterprise workloads. In terms of how it ranks, the E1050 is a step below the top end of the Power10 portfolio, which is the existing E1080 four-socket rack server.The new scale-out systems are the single-socket S1014, described as ideal for entry-level SMBs and remote offices, and the S1022 and S1024 systems, which are two-socket systems aimed at higher-end uses.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM adds four servers to Power10 lineup

IBM is expanding its Power10 server lineup with four new midrange and scale-out systems designed for on-premises, data-intensive and business-critical workloads.The new Power S1014, Power S1022, Power S1024 and Power E1050 platforms cover a range of workloads.The E1050 is a four-socket system optimized for data-intensive enterprise workloads. In terms of how it ranks, the E1050 is a step below the top end of the Power10 portfolio, which is the existing E1080 four-socket rack server.The new scale-out systems are the single-socket S1014, described as ideal for entry-level SMBs and remote offices, and the S1022 and S1024 systems, which are two-socket systems aimed at higher-end uses.To read this article in full, please click here

Announcing VMware HCX 4.4

VMware HCX continues to evolve with the release of HCX 4.4 which includes several key enhancements in multiple different areas. These enhancements are going to address new requirements, stabilize the current feature set and provide additional security. This blog aims to highlight the major changes in HCX 4.4.

Transport Analytics

Following the release of HCX 4.1, the HCX team undertook an effort to better understand how various aspects of a network underlay (including bandwidth, packet loss and latency conditions) affect migration outcomes. We called this effort the Network Underlay Characterization for HCX.

During the 4.2 release, the characterization exercise enabled us to officially support services over VPN/SD-WAN, along with the Network Underlay minimum requirements to support any underlay agnostically. We also published detailed tech paper (See Network Underlay Requirements and HCX Performance Outcomes). This document guides the reader through the characterization exercise (manually using command line tooling).

HCX 4.4 adds Transport Analytics the HCX, allowing the user to execute performance baselining for the HCX service transport on-demand and visualizes transport performance in real-time and as time-series graphs.

This enables the migration administrator to understand the network underlay conditions reflected in the transport and plan Continue reading

Sponsored Post: G-Core Labs, Close, Wynter, Pinecone, Kinsta, Bridgecrew, IP2Location, StackHawk, InterviewCamp.io, Educative, Stream, Fauna, Triplebyte

Who's Hiring? 

  • Close is building the sales communication platform of the future and we're looking for a Site Reliability Engineer to help us accomplish that goal. If you have a passion for databases (both SQL and NoSQL), significant experience building, managing, and monitoring infrastructure, databases, and backend services at scale and want to work with a rag-tag team of hardworking, but humble humans, then come check us out!

  • Wynter is looking for system administrators, engineers, and developers to join its research panel. Participate in research surveys, get paid ($90-$180/hr) for your feedback and comments. Super low key commitment, 10-15 mins per survey. Learn more and sign up.

  • DevOps Engineer: At Kinsta, we set out to create the best managed hosting platform in the world. If you are an experienced DevOps Engineer who is constantly looking for ways to innovate and improve, we might just be the place for you! As Kinsta’s DevOps Engineer, you will be instrumental in making sure that our infrastructure is always on the bleeding edge of technology, remaining stable and high-performing at all times. If you love working with Linux, have a background in PHP, and have worked with cutting-edge technologies, such as Continue reading

A story about AF_XDP, network namespaces and a cookie

A story about AF_XDP, network namespaces and a cookie
A story about AF_XDP, network namespaces and a cookie

A crash in a development version of flowtrackd (the daemon that powers our Advanced TCP Protection) highlighted the fact that libxdp (and specifically the AF_XDP part) was not Linux network namespace aware.

This blogpost describes the debugging journey to find the bug, as well as a fix.

flowtrackd is a volumetric denial of service defense mechanism that sits in the Magic Transit customer’s data path and protects the network from complex randomized TCP floods. It does so by challenging TCP connection establishments and by verifying that TCP packets make sense in an ongoing flow.

It uses the Linux kernel AF_XDP feature to transfer packets from a network device in kernel space to a memory buffer in user space without going through the network stack. We use most of the helper functions of the C libbpf with the Rust bindings to interact with AF_XDP.

In our setup, both the ingress and the egress network interfaces are in different network namespaces. When a packet is determined to be valid (after a challenge or under some thresholds), it is forwarded to the second network interface.

For the rest of this post the network setup will be the following:

A story about AF_XDP, network namespaces and a cookie

e.g. eyeball packets Continue reading

Nvidia launches quantum computing platform

Nvidia, the darling of high performance computing (HPC), is bringing new attention to quantum computing. The company has launched its Nvidia Quantum Optimized Device Architecture, or QODA. This hybrid platform is designed to make quantum computing more accessible by enabling programming of both quantum applications and classical applications in a single, consolidated environment. According to Nvidia, it's aimed at speeding breakthroughs in quantum research and development across AI, HPC, health, finance and other disciplines.To read this article in full, please click here

Nvidia launches quantum computing platform

Nvidia, the darling of high performance computing (HPC), is bringing new attention to quantum computing. The company has launched its Nvidia Quantum Optimized Device Architecture, or QODA. This hybrid platform is designed to make quantum computing more accessible by enabling programming of both quantum applications and classical applications in a single, consolidated environment. According to Nvidia, it's aimed at speeding breakthroughs in quantum research and development across AI, HPC, health, finance and other disciplines.To read this article in full, please click here

Automation 15. The Good, The Bad and the Ugly of Model-Driven Network Automation Featuring Cisco, Nokia, and OpenConfig YANG

Hello my friend,

All of us (definitely me, at least) are always thrilled hearing news from network vendors on their implementation of model-driven interfaces for network management. Having spent years automating network devices in a text-based paradigm (i.e., from CLI-based automation to full fledged configuration rendering with a replacement), I’m a firm believer that model-driven approach based on YANG modules and protocols such as GNMI, NETCONF, and RESTCONF, is a proper way to go. Recently we disclosed the development we are doing in terms of network topology visualization with DANT. And today we’d like to share lessons learned based on that experience.

We planned to write this blogpost for a few weeks if not months, but due to various reasons it was delayed. We are delighted to finally post it, so that you can get some useful ideas how you can build your own CI/CD pipeline with GitHub, probably the most popular platform for collaborative software development.



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No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a 

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any 

means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission  Continue reading

Configuring BGP and open-source FRR docker on AWS — Advanced Networking

MEDIUM: <https://raaki-88.medium.com/configuring-bgp-and-open-source-frr-docker-on-aws-advanced-networking-d21fd0d76b33&gt;

What is FRR?
a. License based AWS internal routing platform 
b. Only supports static routing and IPSEC vpn 
c. Open-source internet routing protocol suite for *nix platforms
d. Support BGP along with ISIS,OSPF networking protocols

Answer is at the end of the post, feel free to skip it, I just did not want to make a spoiler residing just below the question

Before I write anything on implementation, I can vouch for FRR stability. It’s an open source internet routing protocol suite and used by many organisations on bare-metal and cloud instances as well, its very stable and

https://frrouting.org/

Simply put, FRR can make your bare metal or a cloud instance a routing platform to connect various networks together. The reason why we explore this is that this setup builds onto other posts on how AWS interacts with various routing platforms hosted from on-premises and to show the possibility if someone is considering FRR as an alternative.

Setup is extremely simple but there is one caveat which consumed almost a day for me to figure out and at last it was an answer to a known problem. FRR builds on Quagga which provided Continue reading

Traffic Mirroring- Interesting one — AWS Advanced Networking

MEDIUM: <https://raaki-88.medium.com/traffic-mirroring-interesting-one-aws-advanced-networking-a7e41027c75&gt;

What is Traffic Mirroring ? 
a. Used for Content Inspection,Threat Monitoring,Troubleshooting 
b. Can only be implemented with a Load Balancer 
c. Needs Elastic Fabric Adapter 
d. Flow logs capture mirrored traffic   

Answer is at the end of the post, feel free to skip it, I just did not want to  make a spoiler residing just below the question

Traffic Mirroring is an awesome concept which can now be implemented with an AWS VPC. You can mirror the traffic and send packets to a EC2 instance or specific appliances for further processing.

  • Used for Content Inspection, Threat Monitoring and Troubleshooting.
  • An interesting as aspect is Packet-Format

*So when a packet gets mirrored it gets VXLAN encapsulated, end host/appliance should be able to decapsulate VXLAN header( we will see a PCAP ).

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/mirroring/traffic-mirroring- packet-formats.html]

* Two encapsulations – outer GENEVE(from LB if used) and inner VX-LAN

* Source (which should be monitored — Network Interface)

*Target (Destination of mirrored Traffic)

*Filter (What traffic types should be Continue reading

Getting Your CIO to Say Yes to Automation: Gluware LiveStream June 28, 2022 (3/7) – Video

Network engineers need to make a business case to get an automation project off the ground, and it needs to describe the benefits and value in language that non-techincal executives can understand. This video offers tips and a simple blueprint to help engineers make the case to CIOs. Host Drew Conry-Murray from the Packet Pushers […]

The post Getting Your CIO to Say Yes to Automation: Gluware LiveStream June 28, 2022 (3/7) – Video appeared first on Packet Pushers.

HTTP/3 Is Now a Standard: Why Use It and How to Get Started

I’m sure, like me, you welcomed the IETF standard (Internet Engineering Task Force). No, of course, you didn’t — the web just works, so why worry about it? But if you are vaguely intrigued about why the change is happening, here is a short breakdown of the history behind it. Then we will get into the reasons why you should adopt it for your company. HTTP/3 is the third version of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and was previously known as HTTP-over-QUIC. QUIC was initially developed by Google and is the successor of HTTP/2. Companies such as Google and Facebook already use QUIC to speed up the web. A Very Short History of HTTP Back in the day, there were two internet protocols that you could choose to work with. Even before the web, we still had to squirt packets of information (or datagrams) from one machine to another across the internet. For a games developer, the important protocol was UDP (User Datagram Protocol). This was the quick, fire and forget standard: you threw a packet across the network Continue reading

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