The enterprise rush to embrace multicloud and hybrid cloud has not slowed over the past several years and, indeed, has only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic as organizations rushed to leverage cloud services to adapt to their suddenly highly distributed IT environments, with most of their employees working remotely. …
Creating A Transit System For The Multicloud World was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
It's always better to catch misconfigurations and security issues earlier in your pipeline rather than later. That's especially true for cloud services where a simple configuration error can expose sensitive assets to the entire Internet. On today's Day Two Cloud podcast we discuss how to incorporate security checks into your Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) workflows. Our guest is Christophe Tafani-Dereeper, a cloud security engineer.
The post Day Two Cloud 125: Scanning Infrastructure-as-Code For Security Issues appeared first on Packet Pushers.
I got into an interesting debate after I published the Anycast Works Just Fine with MPLS/LDP blog post, and after a while it turned out we have a slightly different understanding what anycast means. Time to fall back to a Wikipedia definition:
Anycast is a network addressing and routing methodology in which a single destination IP address is shared by devices (generally servers) in multiple locations. Routers direct packets addressed to this destination to the location nearest the sender, using their normal decision-making algorithms, typically the lowest number of BGP network hops.
Based on that definition, any transport technology that allows the same IP address or prefix to be announced from several locations supports anycast. To make it a bit more challenging, I would add “and if there are multiple paths to the anycast destination that could be used for multipath forwarding1, they should all be used”.
I got into an interesting debate after I published the Anycast Works Just Fine with MPLS/LDP blog post, and after a while it turned out we have a slightly different understanding what anycast means. Time to fall back to a Wikipedia definition:
Anycast is a network addressing and routing methodology in which a single destination IP address is shared by devices (generally servers) in multiple locations. Routers direct packets addressed to this destination to the location nearest the sender, using their normal decision-making algorithms, typically the lowest number of BGP network hops.
Based on that definition, any transport technology that allows the same IP address or prefix to be announced from several locations supports anycast. To make it a bit more challenging, I would add “and if there are multiple paths to the anycast destination that could be used for multipath forwarding1, they should all be used”.
It is refreshing to find instances in the IT sector where competing groups with their own agendas work together for the common good and the improvement of systems everywhere. …
Finally, A Coherent Interconnect Strategy: CXL Absorbs Gen-Z was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
A single Kubernetes cluster expends a small percentage of its total available assigned resources on delivering in-cluster networking. We don’t have to be satisfied with this, though—achieving the lowest possible overhead can provide significant cost savings and performance improvements if you are running network-intensive workloads. This article explores and explains the improvements that can be achieved in Microsoft Azure using Calico eBPF in AKS, including reducing CPU usage, decreasing complexity, enabling easier compliance and troubleshooting, and more.
Before going into details about how exactly Calico takes advantage of eBPF, it is important to note that in the context of this article, Calico is viewed as an additional networking layer on top of Azure CNI, providing functionality that turbocharges its performance. In particular, the standard instructions for installing Calico’s network policy engine with AKS use a version of Calico that pre-dates eBPF mode.
To show how Calico accelerates AKS network performance using eBPF, the Calico team ran a series of network performance benchmarks based on the k8s-bench-suite. These performance benchmarks compared the latest Calico eBPF data plane (using the iptables data plane) with a vanilla AKS cluster.
Tests were run using Standard_D2s_v3 nodes, which are a Continue reading
When building out network labs, often multiple people will need access to the lab. The main way right now is to use something like EVE-NG or GNS3 to provide access.
There are 2 downsides to this method. The first is that your server is exposed to the internet and if your usernames/passwords aren’t strong enough, your server can become compromised. The second is that sometimes you may not want everyone to be able to add or edit to the lab topology.
The solution to this is using Containerlab and ZeroTier. This setup is great for things like testing new hires, training classes, or for providing lab access to others on a limited basis.
Containerlab is a container orchestrating tool for managing container-based networking labs. It doesn’t just support Container based Network Operating Systems though. Through vrnetlab, there is support for a wide variety of commonly used NOSes: Mikrotik RouterOS, Nokia SROS, Juniper vMX and vQFX, and many more.
Configs are text based making it easy to add/update links between nodes. The lab does need to be destroyed and redeployed when adding/removing links. With some tools to generate configs, it’s easy to spin up a 500+ node Continue reading
Patience in a slow-growing market is tough, but supercomputing cloud startup, Rescale, is reaping rewards for its persistence. …
What Rescale’s $105M Funding Round Says About HPC Cloud was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Today we're excited to announce the general availability of Argo for Spectrum, a way to turbo-charge any TCP based application. With Argo for Spectrum, you can reduce latency, packet loss and improve connectivity for any TCP application, including common protocols like Minecraft, Remote Desktop Protocol and SFTP.
When people think of the Internet, many of us think about using a browser to view websites. Of course, it’s so much more! We often use other ways to connect to each other and to the resources we need for work. For example, you may interact with servers for work using SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), git or Remote Desktop software. At home, you might play a video game on the Internet with friends.
To help people that protect these services against DDoS attacks, Spectrum launched in 2018 and extends Cloudflare’s DDoS protection to any TCP or UDP based protocol. Customers use it for a wide variety of use cases, including to protect video streaming (RTMP), gaming and internal IT systems. Spectrum also supports common VoIP protocols such as SIP and RTP, which have recently seen an increase in DDoS ransomware attacks. A lot of Continue reading
When I wrote the Why Does Internet Keep Breaking? blog post a few weeks ago, I claimed that FRR still uses single-threaded routing daemons (after a too-cursory read of their documentation).
Donald Sharp and Quentin Young politely told me I was an idiot I should get my facts straight, I removed the offending part of the blog post, promised to write another one going into the details, and Quentin improved the documentation in the meantime, so here we are…
When I wrote the Why Does Internet Keep Breaking? blog post a few weeks ago, I claimed that FRR still uses single-threaded routing daemons (after a too-cursory read of their documentation).
Donald Sharp and Quentin Young politely told me I was an idiot I should get my facts straight, I removed the offending part of the blog post, promised to write another one going into the details, and Quentin improved the documentation in the meantime, so here we are…
A key trend in the ever-changing IT world is bringing whatever is needed – processing, storage, analytics, networking – closer to where the data is. …
ScaleFlux Takes Computational Storage Up A Notch With Homegrown Chip, Software Tools was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
.png?width=360&name=image%20(30).png)
Seamlessly, every single day, we wake up and check our health statistics in smart watches, scan QR codes to validate information, pay using credit cards in different locations, use surveillance cameras to record our neighborhoods, and connect our smartphones to distributed WiFi access points in our restaurants or coffee shops. According to the Statista, in the Forecast number of mobile users worldwide 2020-2025[1] report, the number of mobile users worldwide reached 7.1 billion in 2021, and this number is projected to grow. This initiates a new set of use cases for edge devices due to the explosive growth of network-connected entry points.
Edge computing and networking is not specific to any industry; all of these scenarios span many different types of organizations. However, all edge scenarios have one common factor: creating and consuming data resources that are geographically distributed. As a final objective we want to analyze, consume or react to data to fulfill our customer and business needs.
12 years ago, I was the network administrator for a bank. We had a branch office connected through a satellite link, which was easily impacted by the constant heavy rains. In the Continue reading