Hybrid cloud demands new tools for performance monitoring

Network performance monitoring has become more complex now that companies have more workloads in the cloud, and network teams are finding visibility into the cloud isn’t on par with what they have into their on-prem resources. Tech Spotlight: Hybrid Cloud Hybrid cloud hurdles — and how to address them (CIO) 5 top hybrid cloud security challenges (CSO) 16 irresistible cloud innovations (InfoWorld) How to choose a SaaS management platform (Computerworld) Migration to the cloud introduced infrastructure that isn’t owned by the organization, and a pandemic-driven surge in remote work is accelerating the shift to the cloud and an associated increase in off-premises environments. Container-based applications deployed on cloud-native architectures further complicate network visibility. For these reasons and more, enterprises need tools that can monitor not only the data center and WAN but also the internet, SaaS applications and multiple providers’ public cloud operations.To read this article in full, please click here

How to buy enterprise firewalls

Enterprise firewalls have been the quintessential security device for decades, standing guard at the perimeter, inspecting all inbound and outbound traffic for malware. So, what happens to firewalls as the perimeter fades away? They evolve.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Using Test-Driven Development for Kustomize Overlays

I am by no means a developer (not by a long shot!), but I have been learning lots of development-related things over the last several years and trying to incorporate those into my workflows. One of these is the idea of test-driven development (see Wikipedia for a definition and some additional information), in which one writes tests to validate functionality before writing the code to implement said functionality (pardon the paraphrasing). In this post, I’ll discuss how to use conftest to (loosely) implement test-driven development for Kustomize overlays.

If you’re unfamiliar with Kustomize, then this introductory article I wrote will probably be useful.

For the discussion around using the principles of test-driven development for Kustomize overlays, I’ll pull in a recent post I did on creating reusable YAML for installing Kuma. In that post, I pointed out four changes that needed to be made to the output of kumactl install control-plane to make it reusable:

  1. Remove the caBundle value for all webhooks.
  2. Annotate all webhooks so that cert-manager will inject the correct caBundle value.
  3. Add a volume and volume mount to the “kuma-control-plane” Deployment.
  4. Change one of the environment variables for the “kuma-control-plane” Deployment to reference the volume added Continue reading

Running OSPF over Unnumbered Ethernet Interfaces

Remember the unnumbered IP interfaces saga? Let’s conclude with the final challenge: can we run link-state routing protocols (OSPF or IS-IS) over unnumbered interfaces?

Quick answer: Sure, just use IPv6.

Cheater! IPv6 doesn’t count. There are no unnumbered interfaces in IPv6 – every interface has at least a link-local address (LLA). Even more, routing protocols are designed to run over LLA addresses, including some EBGP implementations, allowing you to build an LLA-only network (see RFC 7404 for details).

OK, what about IPv4?

TL&DR: It works, but…

Read more …

Running OSPF over Unnumbered Ethernet Interfaces

Remember the unnumbered IP interfaces saga? Let’s conclude it with the final challenge: can we run link-state routing protocols (OSPF or IS-IS) over unnumbered interfaces?

Quick answer: Sure, just use IPv6.

Cheater! IPv6 doesn’t count. There are no unnumbered interfaces in IPv6 – every interface has at least a link-local address (LLA). Even more, routing protocols are designed to run over LLA addresses, including some EBGP implementations, allowing you to build an LLA-only network (see RFC 7404 for details).

OK, what about IPv4?

TL&DR: It works, but…

Read more …

2022 Goals

2022 Goals In 2021, the pandemic managed to get to me. It seemed like alot of curve balls came my way. But, myself and my family came out the other end healthy and in relatively good spirits. 2022 is going to be a bit of a do-over in terms of my goals for the year. Without further...continue reading

F5 BIG-IP DNS Express

As part of a POC I deployed a pair of HA F5 LTM/GTM at home to use for all things DNS based. It is an indulgent over the top DNS solution for a 1 bed flat, but hey-ho we are in a pandemic….. This guide does not go through the HA F5 or GTM (still cant stop calling it that) configuration, it is focussed around using ZoneRunner for DNS (bind) with these zones transferred into DNS express and serviced by a listener.

Monitoring a Multi-Inverter SolarEdge System

Monitoring a Multi-Inverter SolarEdge System

A friend of mine recently had a solar panel system installed on his acreage. Besides being interesting because of the renewable/green aspect of the project, the system itself—from SolarEdge—is actually highly digital.

  • A mobile app is used for commissioning the system.
  • SolarEdge operates a cloud service which collects telemetry from the system and reports various performance metrics in a user-friendly dashboard.
  • The inverters can connect to the IP network and provide a means to collect telemetry from them directly.

The last point interested me the most because any time a device exposes its data or a control connection, it means there’s an opportunity to integrate it with other software. In this case, I wanted to create my own dashboard to display (near) real-time performance data for the system.

Whereas other blogs and articles on this topic describe how to monitor a single inverter system, this post will describe how I built a performance dashboard for a multi-inverter system.

Read the rest of this post.

Carriers Are Scaling Backbones With Merchant Silicon & Disaggregated, Distributed Networking

This post originally appeared on the Packet Pushers’ Ignition site on August 20, 2021. For both individuals and businesses, the past 18-months have vastly increased their reliance on the Internet to access cloud services, online retail and entertainment venues and each other via high-definition video conferences. In the period from just before the initial SARS-CoV-2 […]

The post Carriers Are Scaling Backbones With Merchant Silicon & Disaggregated, Distributed Networking appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Enhanced Networking – 2 – Verifying ENA

Previous Post – https://r2079.wordpress.com/2021/12/28/enhanced-networking-1-sriov-aws/

As Discussed in Part-1 SRIOV (Enhanced Networking on EC2) can be enabled in two ways, the first in the series is by far the simplest one, Enabling it with using ENA (Elastic Network Adapter).

Great, would that work for any instance – The answer is NO!, below are the specifications, to make summarize any Instance other than C4, D2, M4 instances smaller than m4.16xlarge, or T2 from current generation Instances.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/enhanced-networking-ena.html

How do I Check:

The Latest Ubuntu / Amazon Linux AMI include the module required for Enhanced networking with ENA installed and enabled for support, if you happen to use the old AMI’s the procedure listed in the above webpage will help

Testing:

I spin up a T3.large instance and below is how it looks like

You also have the option to verify it in a Cloud shell

How do you know if AMI supports it?

Finally on the interface itself

The next post will be similar but would cover an Intel specific Network Adapter.

-Rakesh

Make Sure You Juggle The Right Way in IT

When my eldest son was just a baby, he had toys that looked like little baseballs. Long story short, I decided to teach myself to juggle with them. I’d always wanted to learn and thought to myself “How hard can it be?” Well, the answer was harder than I thought and it took me more time that I realized to finally get the hang of it.

One of the things that I needed to learn is that adding in one more ball to track while I’m trying to manage the ones that I had wasn’t as simple as it sounded. You would think that adding in a fourth ball should only be about 25% harder than the three you had been working with before. Or, you might even believe the statistical fallacy that you’re only going to fail about a quarter of the time and be successful the rest. The truth is that adding in one more object makes your entire performance subpar until you learn to adjust for it.

Clogging Up the Pipe

I mention this example because the most obvious application for the juggling metaphor is in Quality of Service (QoS). If you’ve ever read any of Continue reading

How VMware Protects Organizations with Simply Stronger Security [INFOGRAPHIC]

Every 11 seconds, a new organization falls victim to ransomware. That means by the time you’re done reading these two sentences, your organization could very well become another statistic. In the war against ransomware, there are two cohorts: those who are armed for war and those who will suffer digital casualties. With threats becoming increasingly more agile, it’s up to you to protect your organization’s past, present, and future. 

The Numbers Don’t Lie 

Cybercrime has become a bigger entity than any of us could’ve ever imagined. With over 4,000 attacks every day and $20 billion in damages in 2021 alone, ransomware has become the big business we’ve all feared. Imposing numbers like these make it seem nearly impossible to protect against ransomware – but there is a solution that will strengthen your armor.  

Protection Served with Simplicity 

We know that shopping for new digital armor can be daunting. But the threat is real, and VMware is not in the business of smoke and mirror solutions. We are, however, in the business of helping enterprises scale out – simply, securely, swiftly. To that end, the VMware Distributed Firewall is a foundational step for many customers strengthening their multi-cloud environments. Enforcing east-west advanced threat protection at each workload, our distributed firewall solution can scale to 20TB+ while coming in at one-third of the cost of other solutions in the industry. Providing support to over 30,000 customers, VMware Security Solutions have consistently been able to stop attackers in Continue reading

Cloudflare Innovation Weeks 2021

Cloudflare Innovation Weeks 2021
Cloudflare Innovation Weeks 2021

One of the things that makes Cloudflare unique is our Innovation Weeks. Rather than having one large conference annually, we have multiple Innovation Weeks throughout the year to highlight new product announcements, beta products opening up to general availability, and share how our customers are using Cloudflare to help build a better Internet.

Internally, these weeks generate a lot of energy and excitement as well, as they provide an opportunity for teams from across Cloudflare to work together on product delivery and celebrate company-wide successes. In 2021, we had seven Cloudflare Innovation Weeks. As we start planning our 2022 Innovation Weeks, we are reflecting back on the highlights from each of these weeks.

Cloudflare Innovation Weeks 2021

Security Week March 21-26, 2021

Patrick Donahue

Security Week kicked off Cloudflare’s 2021 Innovation Weeks with a series of foundational security announcements. The Internet wasn’t built with security in mind, but the products and partnerships announced this week continued Cloudflare’s core mission of helping build a better Internet—one that companies of all sizes can plug into and be protected by default from the types of attacks that have historically resulted in loss of data, computing resources, and customer confidence.

At the start of the week, we took Continue reading

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