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Automaton 11. Data Models for NVIDIA Cumulus 5.0. Collecting Config and Operational Data via REST API with Ansible.

Hello my friend,

Right before the New Year we have posted an article, where we introduced a new approach to manage Cumulus Linux, which became available in the latest release to the date Cumulus Linux 5.0. This approach relies on REST API, which makes the automation of this platform very comfortable. Today we’ll cover how to collect the configuration and ope data with the most popular network and infrastructure automation tools these days: Ansible and Python.

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Ansible or Python? Python or Ansible?

To be absolutely frank, there is no “or”. There is only “and” in such a question. Both Ansible and Python play crucial role in network and infrastructure automation. Both of them are widely used in various companies from small enterprise to gigantic tier-1 web companies (e.g., Google, Amazon, etc). We see different usage patterns, such as Ansible + AWX being a main toolkit, or Python + Stackstorm or Apache Airflow Continue reading

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Worth Reading: The Network Does Too Much

Tom Hollingsworth published a more eloquent version of what I’ve been saying for ages:

• Complexity belongs to the end nodes;
• Network should provide end-to-end packet transport, not a fix for every stupidity someone managed to push down the stack;
• There’s nothing wrong with being a well-performing utility instead of pretending your stuff is working on unicorn farts and fairy dust.

Obviously it’s totally against the vested interest of any networking vendor out there to admit it.

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Worth Reading: The Network Does Too Much

Tom Hollingsworth published a more eloquent version of what I’ve been saying for ages:

• Complexity belongs to the end nodes;
• Network should provide end-to-end packet transport, not a fix for every stupidity someone managed to push down the stack;
• There’s nothing wrong with being a well-performing utility instead of pretending your stuff is working on unicorn farts and fairy dust.

Obviously it’s totally against the vested interest of any networking vendor out there to admit it.

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To eBGP or not to iBGP — that is the query (please with me ;)

To eBGP or not to iBGP — that is the query (please 🐻 with me ;)

BGP EVPN with VXLAN to the multi-tenant hosts (using SR Linux and SR OS)

There are many ways to do things, and some ways are subjectively better than others. Sometimes, things that may have been a Bad Idea™ in the past become a Not_So_Bad_After_All(maybe, provided X and not Y) option in light of new developments or concerns. To tell which one is which, we’ll just have to give it a go and see where we end up. And whatever happens — 🤞 chances are we’ll learn some things in the process regardless!

The evolution of BGP-to-the-host (how the … did we end up here?)

“Accelerating waves of change to open (2021)” paints a picture of how we can see things evolving over time. From hardware to software, from L2 to static L3 to dynamically signaled L3 with BGP to VXLAN (L2-over-L3) — it all follows a similar pattern of evolutionary change, building on technology from the past to create the future, following the path of the adjacent possible. The terminology and acronyms we humans Continue reading

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Worth Exploring: Christoph Jaggi’s New Web Site

Christoph Jaggi, the author of Ethernet Encryption webinar and ethernet encryptor market overviews launched a new site in which he collected tons material he created in the past – the network security and news and articles sections are definitely worth exploring.

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Worth Exploring: Christoph Jaggi’s New Web Site

Christoph Jaggi, the author of Ethernet Encryption webinar and ethernet encryptor market overviews launched a new site in which he collected tons material he created in the past – the network security and news and articles sections are definitely worth exploring.

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Which CCIE is most demanded in 2022?

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CCIE Salary – How much you can get if you pass Cisco CCIE Certification?

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Heavy Networking 615: Optimize User Experience With Palo Alto Networks’ ADEM (Sponsored)

How do you know your remote workers are having good performance--a good experience--using the applications they need to get their work done? Today we drill into Autonomous Digital Experience Management (ADEM) with sponsor Palo Alto Networks, including how ADEM works, the benefits of real-time and synthetic monitoring, how ADEM integrates with SASE, and more.

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Heavy Networking 615: Optimize User Experience With Palo Alto Networks’ ADEM (Sponsored)

How do you know your remote workers are having good performance--a good experience--using the applications they need to get their work done? Today we drill into Autonomous Digital Experience Management (ADEM) with sponsor Palo Alto Networks, including how ADEM works, the benefits of real-time and synthetic monitoring, how ADEM integrates with SASE, and more.

The post Heavy Networking 615: Optimize User Experience With Palo Alto Networks’ ADEM (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Rust Notes: Variables

Variables in Rust are defined with the let keyword and values are assigned with the = operator. Constants have a similar syntax except they are defined with the const keyword. Considerations Variables are defined in snake_case by convention. Constants are defined in...continue reading

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Rust Notes: Functions

Rust is a functional language, it may or may not be shocking to discover that functions are a big part of the language. A function is defined with the fn keyword. fn is pronounced: fun 🥳 // Function with parameters that returns an i32 fn add(i: i32, j: i32) -> i32 // The `main`...continue reading

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Between 0x② nerd knobs — BGP unnumbered on SR Linux

Using a custom FRR agent 🕴️

As (also) explained in this vodcast by Jeff Doyle and Jeff Tantsura (April 2020), BGP remains a key protocol in networks of all sizes. As part of a global drive for simplification and automation, the engineers at Cumulus Networks have pioneered a feature called “BGP unnumbered” to simplify the configuration of large data center fabrics: RFC8950 (formerly RFC5549) describes how extended next-hop encoding can be negotiated and used to exchange IPv4 prefix routes using IPv6 next hops, such that the fabric interfaces can use auto-assigned IPv6 link-local addresses (only), with no IPv4 at all. In combination with AS number discovery, this greatly simplifies the configuration.

SR Linux inherits its BGP stack from Nokia SR OS, a robust mature hardened software product that runs the internet. It already supports the majority of features that one would expect in a data center context: Besides IPv4/v6 and EVPN address families, there is support for RFC8950 extended next-hop encoding, extensive BGP import/export policies, and much much more. However, in the case of large service provider networks and the internet at large, BGP is often and commonly used between Continue reading

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HPC As A Service Comes Full Circle And Will Help Take HPC Mainstream

The IT industry is at the doorstep of the long-awaited exascale era, which promises massive systems that can run at least one exaflops, or a quintillion (a billion billion) calculations per second, at 64-bit precision and a lot more than that at lower precision and even more using low-precision integer data pumped through their vector and matrix engines. …

HPC As A Service Comes Full Circle And Will Help Take HPC Mainstream was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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The Network Does Too Much

I’m at Networking Field Day this week and it’s good to be back in person around other brilliant engineers and companies. One of the other fun things that happens at Networking Field Day is that I get to chat with folks that help me think about things in new ways and come up with awesome ideas for networking blog posts.

One of the ones that was discussed quickly this week really got me thinking again about fragility and complexity. Thanks to Carl Fugate for reminding me about it. Essentially, networks are inherently unstable because they are doing far too much heavy lifting.

Swiss Army Design

Have you heard about the AxeSaw Reddit? It’s a page dedicated to finding silly tools that attempt to combine too many things together into one package that make the overall tool less useful. Like making a combination shovel and axe that isn’t easy to operate because you have to hold on to the shovel scoop as the handle for the axe and so on. It’s a goofy take on a trend of trying to make things too compact at the sake of usability.

Networking has this issue as well. I’ve talked about it before here Continue reading

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MSPs And SASE: How Enterprises Can Get The Right Fit

MSPs can help enterprises get their SASE projects online faster, from initial design to deployment to full-time operation.

The post MSPs And SASE: How Enterprises Can Get The Right Fit appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Weekend Reads 012822

DigiTimes reports that processor prices are set to increase “substantially” in 2022 due to a boost in foundry costs. Specifically, processors based on the sub-7nm process nodes are expected to be more expensive moving forward.

For the past four months, Apple’s iOS and iPadOS devices and Safari browser have violated one of the Internet’s most sacrosanct security policies. The violation results from a bug that leaks user identities and browsing activity in real time.

Although the advisory discussed above is specific to Russian threat actors, the lessons learned and approaches to preparedness, detection, and prevention are generically applicable to a wide range of threats for both IT and OT.

An active espionage campaign has been attributed to the threat actor known as Molerats that abuses legitimate cloud services like Google Drive and Dropbox to host malware payloads and for command-and-control and the exfiltration of data from targets across the Middle East.

HTTPS serves as a critical infrastructure for web security, protecting the privacy and integrity of communications between networks. An important aspect of the extension is the authentication process, which is powered by Web PKI via digital certificates that are issued by Certificate Authorities (CAs).

Their intention is to expand Continue reading

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Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For January 28th, 2022

Never fear, HighScalability is here!

My Stuff:

• Love this Stuff? I need your support on Patreon to keep this stuff going.
• Know anyone who needs to fix their cloud-obliviousness? My book teaches them all they need to know about the cloud. Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. It has 364 mostly 5 star reviews on Amazon. Here's a 100% antibody free review:
• Do you like Zone 2, Zone 5, interval, reHIT, or HIIT workouts? I made an app for that. Max reHIT Workout. I’m not just the programmer, I’m a client. I use it 4 times a week and if you want to retrain your mitochondria, get fit, get healthy, and live longer, I think you’ll like it too.

Number Stuff:

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Why Haven’t I Tried ZeroTier Before?

I have a confession to make: I am not currently using ZeroTier. It turns out that in this respect I am in a minority among my peers at Networking Field Day 27 and after listening to a great introduction to ZeroTier by company founder and original software author Adam Ierymenko, I now know that I need to change this.

ZeroTier

ZeroTier facilitates the creation of an arbitrarily distributed virtual ethernet switch through which devices can communicate. Since it’s not immediately obvious what that means, here are a few scenarios where ZeroTier can provide a solution:

Home User

Imagine that you want to access your home network when you’re out on the road. ZeroTier can hook you up.

Multi-cloud Connectivity

What if you would like compute instances in multiple cloud providers to be able to communicate directly with one another as if they were on the same VLAN? What if you could also allow your developers to connect to that VLAN and seamlessly access the compute instances without any knowledge or care about which cloud provider is hosting the instance? Or maybe you’d like the cloud instances to appear as if they were on the data center VLAN? ZeroTier can do Continue reading

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Happy Data Privacy Day!

Happy Data Privacy Day 2022! Of course, every day is privacy day at Cloudflare, but today gives us a great excuse to talk about one of our favorite topics.

In honor of Privacy Day, we’re highlighting some key topics in data privacy and data protection that helped shape the landscape in 2021, as well as the issues we’ll be thinking about in 2022. The first category that gets our attention is the intersection of data security and data privacy. At Cloudflare, we’ve invested in privacy-focused technologies and security measures that enhance data privacy to help build the third phase of the Internet, the Privacy phase, and we expect to double down on these developments in 2022.

The second category is data localization. While we don’t think you need localization to achieve privacy, the two are inextricably linked in the EU regulatory landscape and elsewhere.

Third, recent regulatory enforcement actions in the EU against websites’ use of cookies have us thinking about how we can help websites run third-party tools, such as analytics, in a faster, more secure, and more privacy-protective way.

Lastly, we’ll continue to focus on the introduction of new or updated data protection regulations around the world, Continue reading