Looking Forward: Some Predictions for 2022

As the year comes to a close, I often reflect and make predictions about what’s to come in the next. I’ve written end-of-year predictions posts in the past, but this is my first one at Cloudflare. I joined as Field CTO in September and currently enjoy the benefit of a long history in the Internet industry with fresh eyes regarding Cloudflare. I’m excited to share a few of my thoughts as we head into the new year. Let’s go!

“Never make predictions, especially about the future.”
— Casey Stengel

Adapting to a 5G world

Over the last few years, 5G networks have begun to roll out gradually worldwide. When carriers bombard us with holiday ads touting their new 5G networks, it can be hard to separate hype from reality. But 5G technology is real, and the promise for end-users is vastly more wireless bandwidth and lower network latency. Better network performance will make websites, business applications, video streaming, online games, and emerging technologies like AR/VR all perform better.

The trend of flexible work will also likely increase the adoption of 5G mobile and fixed wireless broadband. Device makers will ship countless new products with embedded 5G in the coming Continue reading

Proxmox Certificate Error Fix After Node Replacement

Recently, I had to replace one of the nodes in my 3 node Proxmox cluster. Once I replaced it, I found that I had certificate (both HTTP and SSH) errors between the hosts In this post, I will show you how to resolve that issue. The following software was used in this post. Proxmox -...continue reading

Go: A Summary

This post has been in my drafts for a while, and its time to finish it off. Over the last couple of years I have been learning Go off and on. It was one of my goals for 2021 to learn Go well and I spent a fair amount of time digging into Go at the first half of this year. I have...continue reading

Operating SAP in the Cloud

Why More Businesses Will be Creating Their Own Chips in 2022

Faster troubleshooting of microservices, containers, and Kubernetes with Dynamic Packet Capture

Troubleshooting container connectivity issues and performance hotspots in Kubernetes clusters can be a frustrating exercise in a dynamic environment where hundreds, possibly thousands of pods are continually being created and destroyed. If you are a DevOps or platform engineer and need to troubleshoot microservices and application connectivity issues, or figure out why a service or application is performing slowly, you might use traditional packet capture methods like executing tcpdump against a container in a pod. This might allow you to achieve your task in a siloed single-developer environment, but enterprise-level troubleshooting comes with its own set of mandatory requirements and scale. You don’t want to be slowed down by these requirements, but rather address them in order to shorten the time to resolution.

Dynamic Packet Capture is a Kubernetes-native way that helps you to troubleshoot your microservices and applications quickly and efficiently without granting extra permissions. Let’s look at a specific use case to see some challenges and best practices for live troubleshooting with packet capture in a Kubernetes environment.

Use case: CoreDNS service degradation

Let’s talk about this use case in the context of a hypothetical situation.

Scenario

Your organization’s DevOps and platform teams are trying to figure out Continue reading

Work From Home: A Year in Review

SD-Access Programmability Part I – creating a Nornir network inventory from DNAC

In this post, we look at how to generate a Nornir network inventory from DNA-Center, using Python.

CyberFlood L4-L7 Traffic Generator: New Blog/YouTube Combo Series

So excited about this new series of blogs and YouTube videos. Absolutely LOVE “getting my geek on” and then sharing it. This series will be about the Layer 4 thru Layer 7 traffic generation tool from Spirent. If you are... Read More ›

The post CyberFlood L4-L7 Traffic Generator: New Blog/YouTube Combo Series appeared first on Networking with FISH.

Automation 8. Overview and Getting Started with Model-Driven Automation in Cumulus Linux 5.0

Hello my friend,

yes, we are nerds. Despite the Christmas holidays we continue working and delivering value. After all, Guido von Rossum has created Python over Christmas holidays. We find that very inspiring to be honest and, therefore, decided to look into something appealing as well.

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No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a 

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any 

means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission of the author.

How to automate the automation?

Is that even a right term “automating the automation”? It is quite right, yes. It ultimately means the capability to be able to invoke automation workflows not only manually by the automation operator, but also in an automated way: via API request (e.g., called from a customer self-service portal or web hook from some other application) or certain event or condition (e.g., based on syslog, SNMP streaming telemetry). For various types of the application (Ansible or Python) there are different automation platforms (AWX, Apache Airflow, StackStorm) existing, which ultimately fulfil that task.

And in our trainings you will get an exposure Continue reading

Enhanced Networking – 1. SRIOV – AWS

In preparation for AWS Advanced Networking Speciality Track, I have come across Enhanced Networking and application in various scenarios. I am going to cover this in a few different parts in the blog posts.

Enhanced Networking

Enhanced Networking – boils down to speeds (100Gbps vs 10Gbps) , from the picture below you can use enable Enhanced Networking either by choosing ENA stands for Elastic Network Adapter (which is supported by most of current gen instances) or by using Intel 82599 Virtual Function Interface which supports speeds upto 10Gbps with specific Instances.

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

I have heard about SR-IOV but never did a deep dive into what exactly it does, to be honest. While going through Enhanced Networking documentation on AWS documentation, I have seen mention of SR-IOV at several places.

What is SR-IOV ?

More on SR-IOV is written in this blog-post, but in short SR-IOV which stands for Single Root I/O Virtualisation provides device virtualisation by using virtual-functions/DMA(Direct memory access)/virtual function devices (VFD’s) and lowering CPU interrupts.

So, the first question is if this enabled by default ? No. you have to manually enable it, per Amazon website https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance-types.html#current-gen-instances , all current generation instances Continue reading

How 5G Networks are Secured and Enabled by SASE

Holiday Networking Thoughts from 2021

It’s the Christmas break for 2021, which means lots of time spent doing very little work-related stuff. I’m currently putting together a Lego set, playing Metroid Dread and working on beating Ocarina of Time again.

As I waited for updates to download on Christmas morning I remembered how many packets must be flying across the wire to update software and operating systems for consoles. Even having done a few of the updates the night before I could see the traffic to those servers started to get a bit congested. It’s like Black Friday but for the latest patches to keep your games running. Add in the content that needs to be installed now in order to make that game disc work, or the download-only consoles for sale, and you can see that network engineers aren’t going to be a dying profession any time soon.

I’m a bit jaded because I come from a time when you didn’t need to be constantly connected to use software or need to download an update every few days. Heck, some of the bugs in Ocarina of Time have been there for over twenty years because those cartridges are not designed to be patched, Continue reading

Make The Most Of 5G/LTE SD-WAN Links With Fortinet Wireless WAN Gateways

Fortinet's FortiExtender cellular gateways support multiple LTE or 5G connections. The FortiExtender can be placed in the best physical location to get a mobile signal, and then tied back into an SD-WAN appliance to provide an active link or failover option in an SD-WAN deployment.

The post Make The Most Of 5G/LTE SD-WAN Links With Fortinet Wireless WAN Gateways appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Cisco SDA design study #1 – understanding user authentication in the fabric

In this post, we look at how a typical user gets authenticated and authorized in a SD-Access fabric.

Cisco SDA part XII – BSR, Auto-RP for the fabric and a catch-22

In this post, we look at why BSR and Auto-RP do not work with a SD-Access fabric.

Cisco SDA Part XI – understanding ARP in SDA

In this post, we look at how an ARP packet flows within a SD-Access fabric.

Cisco SDA Part X – understanding L2 handoff

In this post, we take a detailed look at the L2 handoff feature in Cisco’s SD-Access.

Cisco SDA Part IX – need for duplicate IPs on fabric borders

In this post, we look at why SD-Access borders have the anycast IP addresses configured as loopback addresses.

Cisco SDA Part VIII – DHCP challenges in SDA

In this post, we look at various DHCP challenges in Cisco’s SD-Access fabric and how it is solved.