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Cloudflare partners with Kentik to enhance on-demand DDoS protection

We are excited to announce that as of today, network security teams can procure and use Magic Transit, Cloudflare’s industry-leading DDoS mitigation solution, and Kentik’s network observability as an integrated solution. We are excited to help our customers not just with technical simplicity, but business process simplicity as well.

Why monitoring and mitigation?

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are highly disruptive to businesses everywhere. According to the Cloudflare DDoS Attack Trends report, in the first half of 2021 the world witnessed massive ransomware and ransom DDoS attack campaigns that interrupted critical infrastructure, including oil pipelines, healthcare, and financial services. In the second half, we saw a growing swarm of attacks, including one of the most powerful botnets deployed (Meris), with record-breaking network-layer attacks observed on the Cloudflare network.

Along with an increase in severity, there is a proliferation of automated toolkits that make it simple and cheap for anyone to launch these attacks. Detecting and stopping these attacks manually is not effective, and network security engineers are increasingly turning to automated tools to help ensure network and application availability.

DDoS protection has evolved over the years from appliances to hybrid models to fully Internet-native solutions, like Continue reading

Cisco pushes for more recycling of its used gear

Cisco is introducing a new payment scheme to encourage customers to recycling its hardware, alongside a new partner incentive to repurpose or recycle its end-of-use products.The two schemes aim to help Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins build on the vendor’s 2018 sustainability pledge and a commitment to have 100% of hardware returned at the end-of-use.Building the circular economy The Cisco Green Pay payment scheme will see customers offered a 5% incentive on Cisco hardware at the outset of their purchase and a predictable payment strategy over five years. Once the term is up, the product is recovered by Cisco free of charge and the customer receives a certificate confirming that it has entered the circular economy.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco further incentivizes circular consumption for customers and partners

Cisco is introducing a new payment scheme for customers to encourage the recycling of its hardware, alongside a new partner incentive to repurpose or recycle end-of-use products.The two schemes aim to help Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins build on the vendor’s 2018 sustainability pledge and a commitment to have 100% of hardware returned at the end-of-use.Building the circular economy The Cisco Green Pay payment scheme will see customers offered a 5% incentive on Cisco hardware at the outset of their purchase and a predictable payment strategy over five years. Once the term is up, the product is recovered by Cisco free of charge and the customer receives a certificate confirming that it has entered the circular economy.To read this article in full, please click here

HS021 The Great Realisation Not Great Resignation

Headlines about ‘great resignation’ tend to ignore that people are moving jobs not quitting work. We believe many people are making choices about what work they want in their lives. We discuss four reasons: 1) toxic workplaces 2) lifestyle and remote work 3) downstepping and 4) early retirement. We note that recruiters are toxic arms... Read more »

HS021 The Great Realisation Not Great Resignation

The post HS021 The Great Realisation Not Great Resignation appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Edge computing moves toward full autonomy

Edge computing is rapidly shedding its reputation as a fringe concept, and both adopters and vendors are focusing their sights on the technology's next goal: fully autonomous deployment and operation.The edge deployment experience is drawing closer to the simplicity of unboxing a new mobile phone, says Teresa Tung, cloud first chief technologist at IT advisory and consulting firm Accenture. "We're seeing automated technology that simplifies handling the edge’s unique complexity for application, network, and security deployments."The ability to create and manage containerized applications enables seamless development and deployment in the cloud, with the edge simply becoming a specialized location with more stringent resource constraints, Tung says. "Self-organizing and self-healing wireless mesh communications protocols, such as Zigbee, Z-Wave, ISA100.11a, or WirelessHART can create networks where devices can be deployed ad hoc and self-configure."To read this article in full, please click here

Edge computing moves toward full autonomy

AWS Automatic EC2 Instance Recovery

On March 30th 2022, AWS announced automatic recovery of EC2 instances. Does that mean that AWS got feature-parity with VMware High Availability, or that VMware got it right from the very start? No and No.

Automatic Instance Recover Is Not High Availability

Reading the AWS documentation (as opposed to the feature announcement) quickly reveals a caveat or two. The automatic recovery is performed if an instance becomes impaired because of an underlying hardware failure or a problem that requires AWS involvement to repair.

AWS Automatic EC2 Instance Recovery

Automatic Instance Recover Is Not High Availability

With Aquila, Google Abandons Ethernet To Outdo InfiniBand

Frustrated by the limitations of Ethernet, Google has taken the best ideas from InfiniBand and Cray’s “Aries” interconnect and created a new distributed switching architecture called Aquila and a new GNet protocol stack that delivers the kind of consistent and low latency that the search engine giant has been seeking for decades. …

With Aquila, Google Abandons Ethernet To Outdo InfiniBand was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Introduction to MPLS – Fundamentals of MPLS

MPLS Multiprotocol Label Switching is one of the most popular and commonly used technologies in today’s Service Provider and Enterprise networks. In this post, we will explain the most fundamental topics about MPLS. After reading this post, you will learn a lot about MPLS, why we should use MPLS to MPLS packet formats, USA cases of MPLS to MPLS advantages and MPLS disadvantages, some recommendations about MPLS books, MPLS training, some basics MPLS questions, and many other things will be covered. Sit tight and let’s enjoy!.

What is MPLS in Networking?

Multiprotocol Label Switching – MPLS, is a networking technology that switch the network traffic using the shortest path based on “labels,” rather than IP destination addresses, to handle forwarding over a private Wide Area Network.

MPLS is a scalable and protocol-independent solution, that can carry Layer 3 IP and Non-IP and Layer 2 traffic, PPP, HDLC, Frame-Relay, Ethernet, all are possible.

MPLS provides transport and can be considered one of the tunneling mechanisms.

MPLS transport protocols as of 2022, are LDP, RSVP, Segment Routing and BGP LU.

An MPLS network is Layer 2.5, meaning it falls between Layer 2 (Data Link) and Layer 3 (Network) of the OSI Continue reading

Weaving Infrastructure Islands Into A Cloudy Pangea

For most enterprises, the future of IT is infrastructure and systems software that spans multiple clouds, a combination of both disparate public clouds and their own private clouds. …

Weaving Infrastructure Islands Into A Cloudy Pangea was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Return-to-Office Moment Drives Discord

Big tech and other companies are mandating employees return to the office, at least on a hybrid basis, after two years of pandemic-driven work-from-home. Will employees show up? Or will they quit?

Cisco SD-WAN software gains broader application access, enhanced analytics

Cisco has tweaked its flagship SD-WAN software package to increase customer application flexibility and improve visibility into the performance of distributed resources.The company announced Cisco SD-WAN release 17.8, which adds support for new business and customized cloud applications, analytics and security features.SD-WAN buyers guide: Key questions to ask vendors Specifically, the company upgraded the SD-WAN Cloud OnRamp for SaaS service, which links branch offices or individual remote users to cloud applications such as Cisco’s Webex, Microsoft 365, AWS, Google, Oracle, Salesforce and more.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco SD-WAN software gains broader application access, enhanced analytics

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

This post is also available in 日本語, Deutsch and Français.

Welcome to our first DDoS report of 2022, and the ninth in total so far. This report includes new data points and insights both in the application-layer and network-layer sections — as observed across the global Cloudflare network between January and March 2022.

The first quarter of 2022 saw a massive spike in application-layer DDoS attacks, but a decrease in the total number of network-layer DDoS attacks. Despite the decrease, we’ve seen volumetric DDoS attacks surge by up to 645% QoQ, and we mitigated a new zero-day reflection attack with an amplification factor of 220 billion percent.

In the Russian and Ukrainian cyberspace, the most targeted industries were Online Media and Broadcast Media. In our Azerbaijan and Palestinian Cloudflare data centers, we’ve seen enormous spikes in DDoS activity — indicating the presence of botnets operating from within.

The Highlights

The Russian and Ukrainian cyberspace

Russian Online Media companies were the most targeted industries within Russia in Q1. The next most targeted was the Internet industry, then Cryptocurrency, and then Retail. While many attacks that targeted Russian Cryptocurrency companies originated in Ukraine or the US, another major source of attacks Continue reading

Hot chip startup Ampere files for IPO

California-based chipmaker Ampere confidentially filed for an initial public offering on April 11, when it submitted a draft registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.Founded by the former Intel president Renée James in 2017, Ampere designs fabless server processors based on Arm architectures. It is riding a strong wave of recent demand thanks to its latest Altra and Altra Max CPUs, which are designed for the data center based on the Arm Neoverse N1 architecture. It counts the likes of ByteDance, Cloudflare, Equinix, Oracle, and Tencent as customers of its processors.To read this article in full, please click here

Hot chip startup Ampere files for IPO

IP Transit and the Tiers of Transit Providers

The post IP Transit and the Tiers of Transit Providers appeared first on Noction.

Keep Blogging, Some of Us Still Read

I stumbled upon a sad tweet a few days ago…

… and not surprisingly, a lot of people chimed in saying “don’t give up, we still prefer reading”. Unfortunately, it does seem like the amount of worthy content is constantly decreasing, and way too many quality blogs disappeared over the years, so I’ll try to lift the veil of depression a bit ;)