IP Addressing through 2021

Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let's see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself.

How to Monitor Calico’s eBPF Data Plane for Proactive Cluster Management

Monitoring is a critical part of any computer system that has been brought in to a production-ready state. No IT system exists in true isolation, and even the simplest systems interact in interesting ways with the systems “surrounding” them. Since compute time, memory, and long-term storage are all finite, it’s necessary at the very least to understand how these things are being allocated.

Why Does the Calico eBPF Data Plane Support Metrics?

Perhaps this question seems contrived. However, it’s always worth spending a moment thinking about reasons before adding any technical complexity to a distributed system! After all, they are already quite complicated! So why does the Calico eBPF data plane support metrics through Prometheus and Grafana?

Well, the Calico eBPF data plane is production ready and widely deployed, so a well-configured Kubernetes cluster with the Calico eBPF data plane correctly enabled will be stable and reliable. However, distributed systems are inherently complex and when dealing with them, it is generally good practice to instrument and baseline metrics wherever they are available. Doing so provides many benefits, especially for capacity planning, change management, and as an early-warning or smoke-testing system.

Additionally, seeing a running distributed system fully instrumented can be Continue reading

Juniper adds more smarts to its SD-WAN

Juniper Networks is expanding its portfolio of cloud-based, AI-driven services aimed at managing and controlling intelligent enterprise SD-WAN networks.The latest additions build on Session Smart Routing (SSR) software Juniper acquired when it bought 128 Technology in 2020 for $450 million. SSR promises to reduce the costs of running WANs and SD-WANs by making intelligent routing decisions based on sessions and application needs running over individual traditional tunnels.To read this article in full, please click here

Full Stack Journey 062: Advice And Recommendations For Tech Learners

The Full Stack Journey is back for 2022, and kicking off the year Scott shares recommendations for learning new technologies based on his own career experiences and the technology transitions he's lived through, including virtualization to networking and networking to containers. Scott also shares four key takeaways for learners in the tech industry.

The post Full Stack Journey 062: Advice And Recommendations For Tech Learners appeared first on Packet Pushers.

VaporIO Brings Infrastructure, Networking On-Demand For Dynamic Edge Services, And VMware Is Interested

This article was originally posted on the Packet Pushers Ignition site on June 15, 2021. There’s a growing need at the provider edge to let customers provision services closer to users and data sources. What do I mean by the ‘provider edge’? In the case of application infrastructure with low-latency connectivity for mobile, industrial, and […]

The post VaporIO Brings Infrastructure, Networking On-Demand For Dynamic Edge Services, And VMware Is Interested appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Layer-3 Carrier Ethernet

One of ipSpace.net subscribers asked for my opinion about Adaptive IP, a concept promoted by one of the optical connectivity vendors. As he put it:

My interest in Carrier Ethernet moving up to Layer 3 is to see if it would be something to account for in the future.

A quick search resulted in a marketecture using Segment Routing (of course) and an SDN controller (what else could one be using today) using Path Computation Element Protocol (PCEP) to program the network devices… and then I hit a regwall. They wanted to collect my personal details to grace me with their whitepaper, and I couldn’t find even a link to the product documentation.

Layer-3 Carrier Ethernet

One of ipSpace.net subscribers asked for my opinion about Adaptive IP, a concept promoted by one of the optical connectivity vendors. As he put it:

My interest in Carrier Ethernet moving up to Layer 3 is to see if it would be something to account for in the future.

A quick search resulted in a marketecture using Segment Routing (of course) and an SDN controller (what else could one be using today) using Path Computation Element Protocol (PCEP) to program the network devices… and then I hit a regwall. They wanted to collect my personal details to grace me with their whitepaper, and I couldn’t find even a link to the product documentation.

Tech Bytes: Why Network Design Matters For Security Clouds (Sponsored)

On today’s Tech Bytes podcast we’re talking security clouds; that is, cloud services that offer capabilities including firewalls, traffic inspection, Web gateways, and more. We explore why these clouds aren’t all the same, and why the architecture, including networking, makes a difference. Netskope is this episode's sponsor.

The post Tech Bytes: Why Network Design Matters For Security Clouds (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Zero Trust is hard but worth it

At the end of last year, I heard from a long-time enterprise contact that had a major security concern. The company had installed three layers of security and just completed an audit. It showed that since thIey’d finished their installation they’d had five security incidents, and all of them had originated inside their security perimeter, bypassing most of their protection.Their question was what they did wrong and how they could fix it.What this company experienced is far from rare, and the source of their problems and the paths to correction are far from easy.We tend to think of security as a goal we can achieve with a simple toolkit. Not so. Security is the state you achieve by dealing with all likely threats, and every threat has to be addressed in its own unique way. Problems can come from hackers gaining access to an application or database from the outside, through things like stealing credentials or exploiting weak authentication.To read this article in full, please click here

Zero Trust is hard but worth it

At the end of last year, I heard from a long-time enterprise contact that had a major security concern. The company had installed three layers of security and just completed an audit. It showed that since thIey’d finished their installation they’d had five security incidents, and all of them had originated inside their security perimeter, bypassing most of their protection.Their question was what they did wrong and how they could fix it.What this company experienced is far from rare, and the source of their problems and the paths to correction are far from easy.We tend to think of security as a goal we can achieve with a simple toolkit. Not so. Security is the state you achieve by dealing with all likely threats, and every threat has to be addressed in its own unique way. Problems can come from hackers gaining access to an application or database from the outside, through things like stealing credentials or exploiting weak authentication.To read this article in full, please click here

Using the Linux look command to select lines from files

The look command on Linux can be handy for selecting particular lines from text files with sorted contents. Let's look into how it can be used and where you might run into some problems.Case sensitivity If you type a command such as "look unix", you should see this:$ look unix UNIX Unix unix Notice that, because no file was specified in the command shown, look reverts to using the words file on the system (probably /usr/share/dict/words or whatever that points to). Also notice that it finds the three lines in the file even though the argument for the command has only lowercase characters. The command is case-insensitive when you don't provide a file name and instead allow it to default to the words file.To read this article in full, please click here

Using the Linux look command to select lines from files

The look command on Linux can be handy for selecting particular lines from text files with sorted contents. Let's look into how it can be used and where you might run into some problems.Case sensitivity If you type a command such as "look unix", you should see this:$ look unix UNIX Unix unix Notice that, because no file was specified in the command shown, look reverts to using the words file on the system (probably /usr/share/dict/words or whatever that points to). Also notice that it finds the three lines in the file even though the argument for the command has only lowercase characters. The command is case-insensitive when you don't provide a file name and instead allow it to default to the words file.To read this article in full, please click here

Designing Tinder

This is a guest post by Ankit Sirmorya. Ankit is working as a Machine Learning Lead/Sr. Machine Learning Engineer at Amazon and has led several machine-learning initiatives across the Amazon ecosystem. Ankit has been working on applying machine learning to solve ambiguous business problems and improve customer experience. For instance, he created a platform for experimenting with different hypotheses on Amazon product pages using reinforcement learning techniques. Currently, he is in the Alexa Shopping organization where he is developing machine-learning-based solutions to send personalized reorder hints to customers for improving their experience.

Problem Statement

Design a location-based social search application similar to Tinder which if often used as a dating service. It allows users to use a swiping motion to like (swipe right) or dislike (swipe left) other users, and allows users to chat if both parties like each other(a “match”).

Gathering Requirements