Unified Cloud Networking Changes the Game

Today we announced our Unified Cloud Networking vision, the industry’s first Unified Cloud Fabric solution and our partnership with NVIDIA. This truly changes the game for cloud network operators.

Last week I made the case that cloud networking needs a new vision in order to meet two strategic goals shared by cloud operators:

1. Transform cloud networks to become as agile, highly available and simple to operate as the hyperscale public clouds.
2. Move rapidly toward a new, more highly distributed networking and zero-trust security architecture to address increasing cybersecurity risks.

Just as importantly, we need new solutions to overcome the obstacles that prevent operators from achieving those goals, i.e. fragmented networks and incomplete solutions for security, automation and visibility.

Today, I outline how we have created the vision and solutions to overcome those obstacles and meet those goals. In a companion blog, Alessandro Barbieri dives deeper into the challenges we are addressing and how we are turning the vision into reality.

Introducing the Unified Cloud Networking Vision

Unified Cloud Networking solutions build on the Unified Cloud Fabric (the next generation of our proven Adaptive Cloud Fabric) to unify networks across multiple dimensions – switches and servers, overlay and underlay Continue reading

Pluribus Unified Cloud Networking: What, Why, How

Today, in partnership with NVIDIA, Pluribus launched the Unified Cloud Networking architecture aiming to transform the way CSPs, telcos and enterprises build and operate cloud networks with radical operational simplification, distributed security services integrated into the network, and significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to existing solutions.

In this blog I discuss the networking and security challenges cloud operators are facing, and then describe how the Pluribus Unified Cloud Fabric addresses these challenges with a holistic approach to cloud networking including both the switching fabric and the compute virtualization fabric. I then explain how the Pluribus Netvisor® ONE network operating system (OS) integrates with the NVIDIA® Bluefield® data processing unit (DPU) hardware architecture to deliver a Unified Cloud Fabric across any workload environment (including ESXi, Hyper-V, Xen, KVM, bare metal, and Kubernetes), provide a zero-trust administration model between compute and network, and radically simplify the networking stack running on the server OS with better overall performance and lower TCO. Finally, I review the initial set of use cases Pluribus is delivering with the Early Field Trial (EFT) program starting next month.

The State of Cloud Networking: A Tale of Many Fabrics

Outside the largest public cloud providers, with Continue reading

Teaching Kubernetes To Do Fractions And Multiplication On GPUs

When any new abstraction layer comes to compute, it can only think in integers at first, and then it learns to do fractions and finally, if we are lucky – and we are not always lucky – that abstraction layer learns to do multiplication and scale out across multiple nodes as well as scaling in – slicing itself into pieces – within a single node. …

Teaching Kubernetes To Do Fractions And Multiplication On GPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Tracing the History of the Internet, Layer by Layer

Grace Andrews An enthusiastic technologist with a cross-cultural focus and experience managing, facilitating and executing entrepreneurial training and processes, Grace has a keen eye for public relations, marketing, consulting and networking. Did you know that the fiber cables that helped bring you this web page may be buried inside a pipeline originally built to carry oil and gas? Or that Cold War military researchers were instrumental in birthing the concepts that gave rise to those cables in the first place? How about the fact that people once tried to build their own cellular phone networks using analog modems? Few of the people who use the internet daily, from those creating GitHub repos to those simply scrolling through Twitter, are aware of the fascinating backstory of the physical infrastructure that makes it all work. The idea behind Apple, RSS. For more creative content by and about the humans that build and scale the internet, follow Twitter, Instagram. Finally, be sure to check out the

WAF for everyone: protecting the web from high severity vulnerabilities

At Cloudflare, we like disruptive ideas. Pair that with our core belief that security is something that should be accessible to everyone and the outcome is a better and safer Internet for all.

This isn’t idle talk. For example, back in 2014, we announced Universal SSL. Overnight, we provided SSL/TLS encryption to over one million Internet properties without anyone having to pay a dime, or configure a certificate. This was good not only for our customers, but also for everyone using the web.

In 2017, we announced unmetered DDoS mitigation. We’ve never asked customers to pay for DDoS bandwidth as it never felt right, but it took us some time to reach the network size where we could offer completely unmetered mitigation for everyone, paying customer or not.

Still, I often get the question: how do we do this? It’s simple really. We do it by building great, efficient technology that scales well—and this allows us to keep costs low.

Today, we’re doing it again, by providing a Cloudflare WAF (Web Application Firewall) Managed Ruleset to all Cloudflare plans, free of charge.

Why are we doing this?

High profile vulnerabilities have a major impact across the Internet affecting organizations of Continue reading

Cloudflare Zaraz supports CSP

Cloudflare Zaraz can be used to manage and load third-party tools on the cloud, achieving significant speed, privacy and security improvements. Content Security Policy (CSP) configuration prevents malicious content from being run on your website.

If you have Cloudflare Zaraz enabled on your website, you don’t have to ask yourself twice if you should enable CSP because there’s no harmful collision between CSP & Cloudflare Zaraz.

Why would Cloudflare Zaraz collide with CSP?

Cloudflare Zaraz, at its core, injects a <script> block on every page where it runs. If the website enforces CSP rules, the injected script can be automatically blocked if inline scripts are not allowed. To prevent this, at the moment of script injection, Cloudflare Zaraz adds a nonce to the script-src policy in order for everything to work smoothly.

Cloudflare Zaraz supports CSP enabled by using both Content-Security-Policy headers or Content-Security-Policy <meta> blocks.

What is CSP?

Content Security Policy (CSP) is a security standard meant to protect websites from Cross-site scripting (XSS) or Clickjacking by providing the means to list approved origins for scripts, styles, images or other web resources.

Although CSP is a reasonably mature technology with most modern browsers already implementing the standard, less Continue reading

Security for SaaS providers

Some of the largest Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers use Cloudflare as the underlying infrastructure to provide their customers with fast loading times, unparalleled redundancy, and the strongest security — all through our Cloudflare for SaaS product. Today, we’re excited to give our SaaS providers new tools that will help them enhance the security of their customers’ applications.

For our Enterprise customers, we’re bringing WAF for SaaS — the ability for SaaS providers to easily create and deploy different sets of WAF rules for their customers. This gives SaaS providers the ability to segment customers into different groups based on their security requirements.

For developers who are getting their application off the ground, we’re thrilled to announce a Free tier of Cloudflare for SaaS for the Free, Pro, and Biz plans, giving our customers 100 custom hostnames free of charge to provision and test across their account. In addition to that, we want to make it easier for developers to scale their applications, so we’re happy to announce that we are lowering our custom hostname price from \$2 to \$0.10 a month.

But that’s not all! At Cloudflare, we believe security should be available for all. That’s why we’re extending a Continue reading

Improving the WAF with Machine Learning

Cloudflare handles 32 million HTTP requests per second and is used by more than 22% of all the websites whose web server is known by W3Techs. Cloudflare is in the unique position of protecting traffic for 1 out of 5 Internet properties which allows it to identify threats as they arise and track how these evolve and mutate.

The Web Application Firewall (WAF) sits at the core of Cloudflare's security toolbox and  Managed Rules are a key feature of the WAF. They are a collection of rules created by Cloudflare’s analyst team that block requests when they show patterns of known attacks. These managed rules work extremely well for patterns of established attack vectors, as they have been extensively tested to minimize both false negatives (missing an attack) and false positives (finding an attack when there isn’t one). On the downside, managed rules often miss attack variations (also known as bypasses) as static regex-based rules are intrinsically sensitive to signature variations introduced, for example, by fuzzing techniques.

We witnessed this issue when we released protections for log4j. For a few days, after the vulnerability was made public, we had to constantly update the rules to match variations and mutations as Continue reading

A new WAF experience

Around three years ago, we brought multiple features into the Firewall tab in our dashboard navigation, with the motivation “to make our products and services intuitive.” With our hard work in expanding capabilities offerings in the past three years, we want to take another opportunity to evaluate the intuitiveness of Cloudflare WAF (Web Application Firewall).

Our customers lead the way to new WAF

The security landscape is moving fast; types of web applications are growing rapidly; and within the industry there are various approaches to what a WAF includes and can offer. Cloudflare not only proxies enterprise applications, but also millions of personal blogs, community sites, and small businesses stores. The diversity of use cases are covered by various products we offer; however, these products are currently scattered and that makes visibility of active protection rules unclear. This pushes us to reflect on how we can best support our customers in getting the most value out of WAF by providing a clearer offering that meets expectations.

A few months ago, we reached out to our customers to answer a simple question: what do you consider to be part of WAF? We employed a range of user research methods including Continue reading

TOP 25 in Cisco IT Blog Awards

It was a year of big changes in every way. I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by great professionals working on huge projects and then even to get the chance to switch to some completely new technologies that I never really worked with before. It was great, it is still very intense and from my perspective, all changes were for the better. But as with all periods with a lot of action, all those draft articles on this blog’s queue didn’t yield as much new material as I wanted. It was a year of almost no writing but a

The post TOP 25 in Cisco IT Blog Awards appeared first on How Does Internet Work.

Arm to cut up to 15% of jobs following failed takeover by Nvidia

The chip designer is making major cuts to its workforce a month after its takeover by Nvidia fell apart.

Marvell’s newest Arm processor integrates 5G hardware accelerators

In the battle between Intel and AMD, it can be easy to overlook Marvell Technology, but you shouldn’t. Through acquisition and organic growth, the company has turned into quite a powerhouse playing in multiple areas.Marvell is the first major vendor to support the Arm on 5G initiative that Arm unveiled last October, when it launched the Arm 5G Solutions Lab. The lab is designed to let hardware and software partners work on 5G-based products running on Arm architecture. Read more: SmartNICs set to infiltrate enterprise networksTo read this article in full, please click here

netsim-tools Release 1.1.4

netsim-tools release 1.1.4 includes a number of seemingly unrelated goodies; here’s the the reasoning (or story) behind some of them:

netlab clab tarball creates a tar package that can be deployed with containerlab without netsim-tools

netsim-tools Release 1.1.4

netsim-tools release 1.1.4 includes a number of seemingly unrelated goodies; here’s the the reasoning (or story) behind some of them:

netlab clab tarball creates a tar package that can be deployed with containerlab without netsim-tools

Julio Perez wanted to create ready-to-use labs running Arista cEOS on containerlab. Requiring the users of his labs to deploy netsim-tools and Ansible just to configure the lab devices is a clear overkill considering the startup-config support in containerlab. What he needed was:

Dropping privileges

If you’re writing a tool that takes untrusted input, and you should treat almost all input as untrusted, then it’s a good idea to add a layer of defense against bugs in your code.

What good is a buffer overflow, if the process is fully sandboxed?

This applies to both processes running as root, and as normal users. Though there are some differences.

Standard POSIX

In POSIX you can only sandbox if you are root. The filesystem can be hidden with chroot(), and you can then change user to be non-root using setuid() and setgid().

There have been ways to break out of a chroot() jail, but if you make sure to drop root privileges then chroot() is pretty effective at preventing opening new files and running any new programs.

But which directory? Ideally you want it to be:

• read-only by the process (after dropping root)
• empty
• not shared by any other process that might write to it

The best way no ensure this is probably to create a temporary directory yourself, owned by root.

This is pretty tricky to do, though:

// Return 0 on success.
int do_chroot()
{
  const char* tmpdir = getenv("TMPDIR");
  if (tmpdir == NULL)  Continue reading

Ethernet Switching Keeps Rising Despite Supply Chain Woes

Whenever demand exceeds supply, inflation is inevitable. And it is not at all surprising to find that in certain sectors of the networking space, the cost of bandwidth is flattening out instead of decreasing and in some cases is on the rise. …

Ethernet Switching Keeps Rising Despite Supply Chain Woes was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

COVID, slow endpoint deployment could put the brakes on private 5G growth

The pace of private 5G/LTE growth in the enterprise is likely to drop substantially below earlier estimates, thanks to Covid's aftereffects and slack growth in the development of 5G-equipped endpoints, according to a report issued today by IDC.A December 2020 forecast predicted the size of the annual market for private LTE/5G wireless infrastructure to reach roughly $4.7 billion in 2023, but that figure has been revised downward to about $3.8 billion in the new report. That's still a sharp increase from 2021's $1.8 billion figure, but a substantial change, nonetheless.To read this article in full, please click here

DHCP defined and how it works

If Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) didn’t exist, network administrators would have to manually parcel out IP addresses from the available pool, which would be prohibitively time consuming, inefficient, and error prone. Fortunately, DHCP does exist.What is DHCP and how does it work? DHCP is an under-the-covers mechanism that automates the assignment of IP addresses to fixed and mobile hosts that are connected wired or wirelessly.When a device wants access to a network that’s using DHCP, it sends a request for an IP address that is picked up by a DHCP server. The server responds be delivering an IP address to the device, then monitors the use of the address and takes it back after a specified time or when the device shuts down. The IP address is then returned to the pool of addresses managed by the DHCP server to be reassigned to another device as it seeks access to the network.To read this article in full, please click here

The Case for Full-Stack Observability with Business Context

Cisco Enterprise Networks Presents at Tech Field Day Exclusive with Cisco 2022

I am honored to be welcomed back to Tech Field Day Exclusive with Cisco scheduled on 16-17 March 2022. It …

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