The Dangers of 5G Technology for Airplanes

The next generation of wireless technology, 5G, is set to revolutionize the way we live and work. 5G works by using higher frequency signals than previous generations of wireless technology. These higher frequency signals are more easily absorbed by obstacles like buildings and trees, which can cause interference. 

What is 5G technology and how does it work

5G uses a higher frequency of radio waves than previous generations of wireless technology. This means that 5G can carry more data and achieve higher speeds than 4G. However, it also means that 5G signals don’t travel as far as 4G signals and are more easily blocked by obstacles like walls and trees.

To overcome this challenge, 5G networks use a process called beamforming. Beamforming involves using multiple antennas to focus the signal in a specific direction. This allows the signal to travel further and Penetrate obstacles more easily. As a result, beamforming is a key technology that makes 5G possible.

In addition to beamforming, 5G networks also rely on a process called massive MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output). Massive MIMO involves using dozens or even hundreds of antennas to send and receive data. This allows 5G networks to handle large amounts of traffic Continue reading

Monitoring our monitoring: how we validate our Prometheus alert rules

Monitoring our monitoring: how we validate our Prometheus alert rules

Background

Monitoring our monitoring: how we validate our Prometheus alert rules

We use Prometheus as our core monitoring system. We’ve been heavy Prometheus users since 2017 when we migrated off our previous monitoring system which used a customized Nagios setup. Despite growing our infrastructure a lot, adding tons of new products and learning some hard lessons about operating Prometheus at scale, our original architecture of Prometheus (see Monitoring Cloudflare's Planet-Scale Edge Network with Prometheus for an in depth walk through) remains virtually unchanged, proving that Prometheus is a solid foundation for building observability into your services.

One of the key responsibilities of Prometheus is to alert us when something goes wrong and in this blog post we’ll talk about how we make those alerts more reliable - and we’ll introduce an open source tool we’ve developed to help us with that, and share how you can use it too. If you’re not familiar with Prometheus you might want to start by watching this video to better understand the topic we’ll be covering here.

Prometheus works by collecting metrics from our services and storing those metrics inside its database, called TSDB. We can then query these metrics using Prometheus query language called PromQL using ad-hoc queries (for example to power Grafana Continue reading

IPv6 Buzz 101: Innovating With IPv6

In this episode of IPv6 Buzz, Ed, Scott, and Tom talk about innovation using IPv6. The limitless supply of addresses creates new opportunities for network engineers and application developers, including flat networks with many more nodes, robust segmentation options, supporting overlays, and more.

Mitigating controls for cloud-native applications: Why you need them and how Calico Cloud can help

Fixing vulnerabilities can be hard—especially so for cloud-native applications. Let’s take a deeper look at why this is, and how mitigating controls can help secure your cloud-native applications.

Vulnerabilities are like earthquakes—its best to be prepared

The trials and tribulations of Log4j are now safely in our rearview mirror. Most of us responsible for operating a container platform like Kubernetes have navigated through the remediation efforts and disaster has been averted.

But it was a wake-up call for many, and at the very least a healthy reminder for all of us. There have been many infamous vulnerabilities before Log4j, and much like living in an area of the world where earthquakes can strike at any moment, much can be learned from the big ones that came before.

When Heartbleed was publicly disclosed in 2014 it sent shockwaves around the world. It was a critical vulnerability in the ubiquitous OpenSSL library—a cryptographic software library that is used to implement the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. Most of the web relies on TLS to secure communication between clients and servers, and the vulnerability came about through a simple bug that resulted in improper input validation for heartbeats.

The bug existed in OpenSSL Continue reading

Addressing the Challenges of Real-Time Data Sharing

While conventional data warehouses and data lakes have become common practice for analytics workloads, they don’t solve the broader enterprise problems of sharing real-time operational data among departments or across companies. This three-part series explores the challenges and solutions that arise when integrating business data across different applications, clouds and organizations in a modern IT stack. Part 1 highlights the challenges of real-time data sharing, discusses operational vs. analytical data, and legacy solutions and their limitations. Part 2 defines the real-time data mesh and discusses the key tenets for incorporating them into modern IT stacks. Part 3 focuses on what’s needed to effectively evaluate real-time data-sharing solutions. Canyon Spanning — The Foundational IT Challenge Tim Wagner Tim is the inventor of AWS Lambda and a former general manager of AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway services. He has also served as vice president of engineering at Coinbase, where he managed design, security and product management teams. Tim co-founded Vendia to help organizations of all sizes share data more effectively across clouds and companies, and he serves as its CEO. One of the most enduring and foundational challenges for IT professionals regardless of their organization’s size or industry is getting data Continue reading

Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version

Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version
Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version

There’s only one song contest that is more than six decades old and not only presents many new songs (ABBA, Celine Dion, Julio Iglesias and Domenico Modugno shined there), but also has a global stage that involves 40 countries — performers represent those countries and the public votes. The 66th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest, in Turin, Italy, had two semi-finals (May 10 and 12) and a final (May 14), all of them with highlights, including Ukraine’s victory. The Internet was impacted in more than one way, from whole countries to the fan and official broadcasters sites, but also video platforms.

On our Eurovision dedicated page, it was possible to see the level of Internet traffic in the 40 participant countries, and we tweeted some highlights during the final.

First, some technicalities. The baseline for the values we use in the following charts Continue reading

NSX-T 3.2.1: Rolling Upgrade for NSX Management Plane

VMware NSX 3.2.1 continues to deliver enhancements for improving the VMware NSX upgrade process, including rolling upgrades that shorten upgrade maintenance windows and improved visibility into the NSX upgrade progress.

During the upgrade, the management plane will always be available, normal operation, ie, API calls, configuration changes, adding and removing Transport Nodes can be performed. If there’s an issue that occurred during the upgrade, users can roll back to the previous release without deploying a new NSX cluster and restoring the backup. The rolling upgrade feature applies to only the NSX Manager upgrade portion of the upgrade. In other words, the sequence of the NSX components upgrade remains in the following order: NSX Upgrade Coordinator upgrade, NSX Edge upgrade, Host upgrade, then the NSX Manager upgrade.

How Rolling Upgrade works

Prior to NSX 3.2.1 release, we upgrade all the manager nodes in the management cluster simultaneously. The advantage of the parallel upgrade is that it takes less time to upgrade the management plane. The tradeoff is that the management plane will not be available for a period during the upgrade process. With the rolling upgrade, the manager nodes will be upgraded sequentially. During the management upgrade Continue reading

Migrate from Cross-VC to Federation using NSX-T Migration Coordinator

NSX-T 3.2.1

With the VMware NSX-T 3.2.1 release, Migration Coordinator adds one more game changing feature: migrating from multisite NSX for vSphere deployments directly to NSX Federation. This feature builds on top of the User Defined Topology mode of migration. Folks familiar with the User Defined Topology will find the workflow similar and following the same simple model.

In this blog post, we will look at this new feature and how to leverage it. Please check out the resource links for more information on Migration Coordinator. Here, we will start with a high-level overview before digging into the details.

Migration Coordinator

Migration Coordinator is a tool that was introduced around 3 years ago, with NSX-T 2.4, to enable customers to migrate from NSX for vSphere to NSX-T. It is a free fully supported tool that is built into NSX-T. Migration Coordinator is flexible with multiple options enabling multiple ways to migrate based on customer requirements.

With the NSX-T 3.2 release, Migration Coordinator offered three primary modes for migration:

  1. Migrate Everything: From edges, to compute, to workloads — in an automated fashion and with a workflow that is like an in-place upgrade on existing hardware. This mode only needs enough resources to host NSX-T manager appliances and edges along Continue reading

Business Agility and Continuity with NSX Federation and Traceflow

Resilient application architectures have evolved quite significantly over the years.  It is increasingly more common for Enterprises to deploy multiple data centers to support flexible workload placement and redundancy to achieve application and network high availability.

Here, we discuss key reasons to deploy multiple data centers and how NSX Federation and the recently introduced traceflow support simplify associated infrastructure strategy and implementation.

Workload Placement and Mobility

Applications and the associated infrastructure (compute, storage, networking, and security) are deployed in multiple locations to support workload mobility between these locations for use cases such as Data Center migration and Disaster Recovery testing.

    Figure: Multi-Cloud Mobility

Data Center Expansion

In this scenario, IT runs out of capacity at a location (rack, building, site) and wants additional capacity at a different location for hosting new applications. Capacity can be of different types such as compute (servers), and/or storage, and/or network (bandwidth).

    Figure: Multi-Cloud Growth

Disaster Avoidance / Disaster Recovery

This is a scenario where you lose one of your locations completely (rack, building, site) and you need to maintain the availability of your application services (compute, storage, network and security).

    Figure: Multi-Location DR

Simplifying Deployment and Operations with NSX Federation

Continue reading

Cisco’s $15B backlog: China COVID worries, impact of war in Ukraine

Global uncertainties created by ongoing COVID closures and the war in Ukraine continues to impact business for Cisco and its networking competitors.Cisco’s 3Q earnings announced this week show another round of backlog growth—this time to $15 billion with an additional $2 billion in software backlog and a $200 million earnings hit from the company pulling business from Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. Overall quarterly revenue of $12.8B was flat year-over-year while total product revenue was up 3%.Two big factors affected Q3 earnings the most, according to Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins. "The first is the war in Ukraine which resulted in us ceasing operations in Russia and Belarus and had a corresponding revenue impact,: he said. "The second relates to COVID-related lock down in China, which began in late March. These lockdowns resulted in an even more severe shortage of certain critical components."To read this article in full, please click here

Is OpenFlow Still Kicking?

Continuing the how real is the decade-old SDN hype thread, let’s try to figure out if anyone still uses OpenFlow. OpenFlow was declared dead by the troubadour of the SDN movement in 2016, so it looks like the question is moot. However, nothing ever dies in networking (including hop-by-hop IPv6 extension headers), so here we go.

Why Would One Use OpenFlow?

Ignoring for the moment the embarrassing we solved the global load balancing with per-flow forwarding academic blunders1, OpenFlow wasn’t the worst tool for programming forwarding exceptions (ACL/PBR) into TCAM.

Read more …

Is OpenFlow Still Kicking?

Continuing the how real is the decade-old SDN hype thread, let’s try to figure out if anyone still uses OpenFlow. OpenFlow was declared dead by the troubadour of the SDN movement in 2016, so it looks like the question is moot. However, nothing ever dies in networking (including hop-by-hop IPv6 extension headers), so here we go.

Why Would One Use OpenFlow?

Ignoring for the moment the embarrassing we solved the global load balancing with per-flow forwarding academic blunders1, OpenFlow wasn’t the worst tool for programming forwarding exceptions (ACL/PBR) into TCAM.

Read more …

Practical OpenStack #005. How Containers help to Build OpenStack

Hello my friend,

Maintaining application in Linux may be a challenging task, especially when you have a lot of them running on a single host. One of the problems contributing to it is a dependencies management. OpenStack, in its turn, consists of a huge amount of services, which needs to run together. Containers help to solve the problem of a dependencies’ management, and, therefore, helps to setup OpenStack. In this video you will learn how that happens

Don’t Forget to Learn How to Automate All the Things

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P.S.

If you have further questions or you need help with your networks, we are happy to assist you, just send us a message. Also don’t forget to share the article on your social media, if you like it.

BR,

Anton Karneliuk

Pure Storage, Snowflake partner for on-premises data warehousing

Pure Storage and data-warehouse developer Snowflake have partnered to bring Snowflake’s cloud-based data-warehousing technology on-premises.Under the new relationship, the Snowflake Data Cloud compute engine will be run on Pure Storage’s FlashBlade file- and object-storage array. Pure has another line of storage devices, called FlashArray, but those serve a different purpose, notes Rob Lee, CTO of Pure Storage.“I look at FlashArray as our scale-up platform, and FlashBlade as our scale out platform,” he said. “We tend to see FlashArray applied much more to transactional database-type workloads, like OLTP, trading databases, billing databases, where you have high update rates, and we tend to see FlashBlade applied to data warehouses or analytics types of environments where you don't have a ton of transactional change, but you've got a lot of analysis, a lot of read-type workloads,” he said.To read this article in full, please click here

Pure Storage, Snowflake partner for on-premises data warehousing

Pure Storage and data-warehouse developer Snowflake have partnered to bring Snowflake’s cloud-based data-warehousing technology on-premises.Under the new relationship, the Snowflake Data Cloud compute engine will be run on Pure Storage’s FlashBlade file- and object-storage array. Pure has another line of storage devices, called FlashArray, but those serve a different purpose, notes Rob Lee, CTO of Pure Storage.“I look at FlashArray as our scale-up platform, and FlashBlade as our scale out platform,” he said. “We tend to see FlashArray applied much more to transactional database-type workloads, like OLTP, trading databases, billing databases, where you have high update rates, and we tend to see FlashBlade applied to data warehouses or analytics types of environments where you don't have a ton of transactional change, but you've got a lot of analysis, a lot of read-type workloads,” he said.To read this article in full, please click here

Suprise! The internet of things doesn’t necessarily include the internet

When the now-familiar concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) was new, what we really were envisioning a massive deployment of “things”, mostly sensors, connected directly to the internet and, like the internet, available to many companies to form the basis for new applications. Neither the business model nor the privacy/security issues of that approach were easily validated, so we’ve fallen back to something that largely takes the internet out of IoT. But what replaces it?Answer: The Network of Things or NoT, and if you’ve never heard of that concept, you’re at the first step of understanding the problem.To read this article in full, please click here

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