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AnisbleFest 2021 – What it means for Partners

As the weather turns to Fall, the seasons seem to parallel that of the technology cycles. Over the past couple of decades, we have seen various transformations within the high-tech area:

• From mainframe to distributed computing to hybrid cloud and now edge
• From databases to data warehouse to advanced analytics and machine learning
• From the challenges of storing a gigabyte of data, now grown to storing zetabytes+ of data per day.

All of this has moved businesses forward, driving great innovation. When it comes to infrastructure, nothing is more impactful than a core architectural update that fundamentally changes the way enterprises drive their business.  Distributed computing, distributed architectures like cloud, hybrid cloud and edge computing reinforce this  premise in the era of hybrid cloud computing.

The recent announcement of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 aligns to this blossoming hybrid cloud model, where automation meets the modern hybrid cloud environment.  This represents a great opportunity for our Red Hat Ansible Partner Ecosystem.

 

AnsibleFest Announcements  - Key Partner Takeaways

Red Hat recently held AnsibleFest 2021 which included some fantastic content that is still available on demand. I would like to highlight some of  the exciting AnsibleFest news and Continue reading

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Best Practices for Managing Your Hardening Project

A successful server hardening project requires the right techniques and tools. A critical factor that impacts ROI is how deep are you going to go with automation.

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How we build software at Cloudflare

Cloudflare provides a broad range of products — ranging from security, to performance and serverless compute — which are used by millions of Internet properties worldwide. Often, these products are built by multiple teams in close collaboration and delivering them can be a complex task. So ever wondered how we do so consistently and safely at scale?

Software delivery consists of all the activities to get working software into the hands of customers. It’s usual to talk about software delivery with reference to a model, or framework. These provide the scaffolding for most modern software delivery models, although in order to minimise operational friction it’s usual for a company to tailor their approach to suit their business context and culture.

For example, a company that designs the autopilot systems for passenger aircraft will require very strict tolerances, as a failure could cost hundreds of lives. They would want a different process to a cutting edge tech startup, who may value time to market over system uptime or stability.

Before outlining the approach we use at Cloudflare it’s worth quickly running through a couple of commonly used delivery models.

The Waterfall Approach

Waterfall has its foundations (pun intended) in construction and Continue reading

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Prossimo: Making the Internet Memory Safe

The Let’s Encrypt certificate authority, but it has also turned its hand to fixing memory problems. It sponsors, via Google, so Rust in Linux in no small part to fix its built-in C memory problems. And, it also has a whole department, Rustls, a safer memory-safe code. Memory-safe programs are written in languages that avoid the usual use after free problems. C, C++, and Assembly, for all their speed, make it all too easy to make these kinds of mistakes. Languages such as Rust, Go, and C#, however, Continue reading

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Arista’s Evolution to Data-Driven Networking

Arista’s EOS (Extensible Operating System) has been nurtured over the past decade, taking the best principles of extensible, open and scalable networks. While SDN evangelists insisted that the right way to build networks started with the decoupling of hardware and software in the network, manipulated by a centralized, shared controller, many companies failed to provide the core customer requisite in a clean software architecture and implementation coupled with key technical differentiation. This has been the essence of Arista EOS.

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Collect hashes from remote computers

I was recently asked to create a script that should calculate the hash values of all files on remote computers. The collection must be done in parallel on all computers.  My choice fell on Bash because it allows to quickly collect hashes using a combination of SSH, sshpass, find and hash (coreutils package). The collect_hashes.sh script […]
Continue reading...

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Where Would You Need DNS Anycast?

One of the publicly observable artifacts of the October 2021 Facebook outage was an intricate interaction between BGP routing and their DNS servers needed to support optimal anycast configuration. Not surprisingly, it was all networking engineers’ fault according to some opinions¹

There’s no need for anycast²/BGP advertisement for DNS servers. DNS is already highly available by design. Only network people never understand that, which leads to overengineering.

It’s not that hard to find a counter-argument³: while it looks like there are only 13 root name servers⁴, each one of them is a large set of instances advertising the same IP prefix⁵ to the Internet.

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Where Would You Need DNS Anycast?

One of the publicly observable artifacts of the October 2021 Facebook outage was an intricate interaction between BGP routing and their DNS servers needed to support optimal anycast configuration. Not surprisingly, it was all networking engineers' fault according to some opinions¹

There’s no need for anycast²/BGP advertisement for DNS servers. DNS is already highly available by design. Only network people never understand that, which leads to overengineering.

It’s not that hard to find a counter-argument³: while it looks like there are only 13 root name servers⁴, each one of them is a large set of instances advertising the same IP prefix⁵ to the Internet.

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Customized COSU Device Management Solutions

Once connected to the network, COSU devices should be monitored to determine where they are located and whether use conforms to policy guidelines.

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Javascript Notes: Variables

Like most languages, variables in Javascript are defined with the = operator. There are 3 different keywords that can be used to define a variable. var - Depricated, should not be used for ES6+. let - Variable can be re-assigned. Value can be mutated. const - Variable cannot be...continue reading

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Searching through compressed files on Linux

There are quite a few ways to search through compressed text files on Linux systems without having to uncompress them first. Depending on the format of the files, you can choose to view entire files, extract specific text, navigate through file contents searching for content of interest, and sometimes even edit content. IFirst, to show you how this works, I compressed the words file on one of my Linux systems (/usr/share/dict/words) using these commands:$ cp /usr/share/dict/words . $ 7z a words.7z words $ bzip2 -k words $ gzip -k words $ xz -k words $ zip words.zip words How to use the grep command on Linux   The -k options used with the bzip2, gzip, and xz commands kept these commands from removing the original file, which they would by default. The resultant files then looked like this:To read this article in full, please click here

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Searching through compressed files on Linux

There are quite a few ways to search through compressed text files on Linux systems without having to uncompress them first. Depending on the format of the files, you can choose to view entire files, extract specific text, navigate through file contents searching for content of interest, and sometimes even edit content. IFirst, to show you how this works, I compressed the words file on one of my Linux systems (/usr/share/dict/words) using these commands:$ cp /usr/share/dict/words . $ 7z a words.7z words $ bzip2 -k words $ gzip -k words $ xz -k words $ zip words.zip words How to use the grep command on Linux   The -k options used with the bzip2, gzip, and xz commands kept these commands from removing the original file, which they would by default. The resultant files then looked like this:To read this article in full, please click here

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It’s official: VMware and Dell have split

VMware is once again a standalone company as it has officially split with its parent firm, Dell and untied the knot that has held them together since 2016.The move is widely seen as a way for both companies to work with new partners and expand their respective technologies while keep close ties to each other.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] It also has financial impacts. According to the Financial Times, Dell Technologies will shed its 81% stake in publicly traded VMware, creating an independent software company with a stock market value of nearly $64 billion. Dell’s remaining hardware operations have an implied value of $33 billion, based on its latest share price. To read this article in full, please click here

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Vapor IO Realizes Open Grid Vision With INZONE 5G Edge Services

One of the defining characteristics of edge applications is the need for low latency to absorb and analyze data from connected devices deployed in locations such as retail stores, manufacturing facilities, distribution centers, and municipal infrastructure. Until recently, most chatter about “the edge” has been vague, often conflating the extension of cloud service delivery to […]

The post Vapor IO Realizes Open Grid Vision With INZONE 5G Edge Services appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Tech Bytes: Advania Chooses Apstra For Data Center Operations (Sponsored)

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast, sponsored by Juniper, we talk with a customer of Juniper’s Apstra intent-based networking data center software. IT solutions provider Advania uses Apstra internally to operate its own data centers, as well as for customer engagements.

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Tech Bytes: Advania Chooses Apstra For Data Center Operations (Sponsored)

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast, sponsored by Juniper, we talk with a customer of Juniper’s Apstra intent-based networking data center software. IT solutions provider Advania uses Apstra internally to operate its own data centers, as well as for customer engagements.

The post Tech Bytes: Advania Chooses Apstra For Data Center Operations (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Using Kustomize Components with Cluster API

I’ve been using Kustomize with Cluster API (CAPI) to manage my AWS-based Kubernetes clusters for quite a while (along with Pulumi for managing the underlying AWS infrastructure). For all the time I’ve been using this approach, I’ve also been unhappy with the overlay-based approach that had evolved as a way of managing multiple workload clusters. With the recent release of CAPI 1.0 and the v1beta1 API, I took this opportunity to see if there was a better way. I found a different way—time will tell if it is a better way. In this post, I’ll share how I’m using Kustomize components to help streamline managing multiple CAPI workload clusters.

Before continuing, I feel it’s important to point out that while the bulk of the Kustomize API is reasonably stable at v1beta1, the components portion of the API is still in early days (v1alpha1). So, if you adopt this functionality, be aware that it may change (or even get dropped).

More information on Kustomize components can be found in the Kustomize components KEP or in this demo document. The documentation on Kustomize components is somewhat helpful as well. I won’t try to rehash information found in those sources here, but Continue reading

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Sunburst

The recently released open source Sunburst application provides a real-time visualization of the protocols running a network. The Sunburst application runs on the sFlow-RT real-time analytics platform, which receives standard streaming sFlow telemetry from switches and routers throughout the network to provide comprehensive visibility.

docker run -p 8008:8008 -p 6343:6343/udp sflow/prometheus

The pre-built sflow/prometheus Docker image packages sFlow-RT with the applications for exploring real-time sFlow analytics. Run the command above, configure network devices to send sFlow to the application on UDP port 6343 (the default sFlow port) and connect with a web browser to port 8008 to access the user interface.

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VXLAN: Virtualizing Data Center Networks for the Cloud Era

Since VXLAN was introduced in 2014 it has become an important component of modern data center network fabrics. This blog reviews what VXLAN is, why it was developed, how it is being used in data centers, and advantages over other virtualization technologies. In an upcoming blog, we will look at some innovative VXLAN applications outside the data center.

What is VXLAN?

Virtual eXtensible Local Area Network (VXLAN) is an Internet standard protocol that provides a means of encapsulating Ethernet (Layer 2) frames over an IP (Layer 3) network, a concept often referred to as “tunneling.” This allows devices and applications to communicate across a large physical network as if they were located on the same Ethernet Layer 2 network.

Tunneling approaches such as VXLAN provide an important tool to virtualize the physical network, often called the “underlay,” and allow for connectivity to be defined and managed as a set of virtual connections, called the “overlay.” These virtual connections can be created, modified and removed as needed without any change to the physical underlay network. (Mike Capuano’s blog, What to Know About Data Center Overlay Networks, provides a deeper dive on overlays.)

While VXLAN is only one Continue reading

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VXLAN: Virtualizing Data Center Networks for the Cloud Era

This blog reviews what VXLAN is, why it was developed, how it is being used in data centers, and advantages over other virtualization technologies.

The post VXLAN: Virtualizing Data Center Networks for the Cloud Era appeared first on Pluribus Networks.