Minding the Gap: SDS That Carries You Through Last Mile

Data center modernization is inevitable to keep pace with today’s performance-intensive workloads, which are growing especially rapidly in the financial services and e-commerce sectors. Software-defined storage (SDS) offers the promise of greater agility, scalability and reduced costs, making it a compelling part of the platform architect’s vision of a streamlined, software-driven infrastructure. A common priority for modernization is retiring traditional Fibre Channel (FC) SANs, which are perceived as legacy and complex. While still adequate for many application workloads, performance gaps exist in SDS block storage solutions that are engineered into legacy FC SANs, which cannot support the organization’s mission-critical application workloads. Once reserved as the primary storage tier for traditional workloads,

Palo Alto Upgrade from 10.2 to 11.2 (PA-440)

Palo Alto Upgrade from 10.2 to 11.2 (PA-440)

I have PA-440 in my home lab and was happily running PAN-OS 10.2.10-h9. But with the recent announcement that PAN-OS 10.2 will enter limited support from 26th August 2025, I decided it was time to upgrade. I was deciding between 11.1 and 11.2 for a while, but after reading through a few forums and discussions, I ended up choosing 11.2, specifically PAN-OS 11.2.4-h7.

Since I was already on 10.2, I could upgrade directly to 11.2 without going through any intermediate versions. As per the upgrade guide, all I had to do was download the 11.2.0 base image, then download and install 11.2.4-h7.

Palo Alto Upgrade from 10.2 to 11.2 (PA-440)
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Just to clarify, you only need to download the 11.2.0 base image, there’s no need to install it.
Palo Alto Upgrade from 10.2 to 11.2 (PA-440)

After downloading both the base image and the target image, just click 'Install' on the target image. As usual, make sure to take a backup before starting. If you’re running in HA, you can upgrade the firewalls one at a time without any downtime.

Palo Alto Upgrade from 10.2 to 11.2 (PA-440)
Palo Alto Upgrade from 10.2 to 11.2 (PA-440)

The whole process took about 10 to 15 minutes, and now I'm running 11.2.4-h7. If I come across any issues, I'll be sure to update this post.

Palo Alto Upgrade from 10.2 to 11.2 (PA-440)

Worth Reading: Expert Generalists

Martin Fowler published an interesting article about Expert Generalists. Straight from the abstract:

As computer systems get more sophisticated we’ve seen a growing trend to value deep specialists. But we’ve found that our most effective colleagues have a skill in spanning many specialties.

Also:

There are two sides to real expertise. The first is the familiar depth: a detailed command of one domain’s inner workings. The second, crucial in our fast-moving field is the ability to learn quickly, spot the fundamentals that run beneath shifting tools and trends, and apply them wherever we land.

Remember how I told you to focus on the fundamentals? 😎

Keep reading

A Detailed Look at Calico Cloud Free Tier

Why Calico Cloud Free Tier?

As Kubernetes environments grow in scale and complexity, platform teams face increasing pressure to secure workloads without slowing down application delivery. But managing and enforcing network policies in Kubernetes is notoriously difficult—especially when visibility into pod-to-pod communication is limited or nonexistent. Teams are often forced to rely on manual traffic inspection, standalone logs, or trial-and-error policy changes, increasing the risk of misconfiguration and service disruption. Safe policy management and microsegmentation becomes a daunting task without clear knowledge or insight into which services should communicate with each other.

In this detailed look, we’ll explore how Calico Cloud Free Tier builds upon Calico Open Source, and helps platform teams visualize traffic with a dynamic service graph, simplifies policy management, and even analyzes actual traffic to recommend policies.

What is Calico Cloud Free Tier?

Calico Cloud Free Tier is a managed SaaS, no-cost offering that extends the capabilities of Calico Open Source 3.30 and higher to help Kubernetes teams improve network visibility, simplify policy management, and improve security by simplifying microsegmentation. Designed for single-cluster environments, it provides platform engineers and operators with powerful observability and policy management tools. With a seamless onboarding experience for users already Continue reading

Site-to-site VPN between AWS and Palo Alto (Static & BGP)

Site-to-site VPN between AWS and Palo Alto (Static & BGP)

In this blog post, we'll look at how to create a site-to-site VPN between AWS and a Palo Alto firewall. We'll go through both static routing and BGP options. This post assumes you're already somewhat familiar with AWS and Palo Alto, so we won't cover the basics like creating a VPC in AWS or setting up zones and policies on the firewall.

AWS Networking Fundamentals
If you’re brand new to AWS, don’t worry. This post focuses on the basics of AWS networking. General networking knowledge is helpful but not required - I’ll try to explain things clearly so everyone can follow along.
Site-to-site VPN between AWS and Palo Alto (Static & BGP)PacketswitchSuresh Vina
Site-to-site VPN between AWS and Palo Alto (Static & BGP)

Overview

To create a VPN connection, you first need a compatible IPsec VPN device, like a firewall or router, at your on-premise location. In AWS, the resource you create to represent this device is called a Customer Gateway. In our example, the customer gateway is the Palo Alto firewall.

To send traffic from your VPC to your on-premise network, you route it to a Virtual Private Gateway (VGW). The VGW is a logical, redundant resource on the AWS side of the connection that you attach to your VPC. It serves as the target in your Continue reading

NAN095: Certification Deep Dive – The New Cisco Automation Track

Cisco recently announced a major evolution to its certification roadmap: starting February 2026, the popular DevNet certifications will transition to a brand-new Automation track. Joining us today is Francois Caen, Product Manager at Cisco, also an expert in network automation and a recognized voice in the Cisco Learning and Certification Community. We talk with Francois... Read more »

Molly-Guard: a Lifesaver on a Ubuntu Server

Have you ever managed to type reload in the wrong terminal window and brought down a core switch (I probably did)? I managed to do the Ubuntu equivalent of that stupidity: I told my main Ubuntu server to sudo poweroff instead of doing that to a Vagrant VM.

Fortunately, the open-source world doesn’t have to rely on the roadmaps created by networking vendors’ product managers; if there’s a big enough pain, someone will solve it.

Read more …

Next Generation SD-WAN in the AI Era

Next Generation SD-WAN in the AI Era

The advent of cloud native applications in the 2025 era (CRM, SaaS, storage, or ERP apps) and the public cloud has caused a re-architecture of traditional WANs based on popular Ethernet and IP across cloud boundaries. Arista has been the thought leader and pioneer of this leaf-spine cloud network for data centers, and now we can see a seamless extension of this concept to the WAN and inter data center using the same principles that have served our customers. The distribution of applications across AI, cloud, SaaS, edge, and enterprise environments creates new challenges for wide area networking architecture and Internet routing to refine branch and WAN networks.

Content Independence Day: no AI crawl without compensation!

Almost 30 years ago, two graduate students at Stanford University — Larry Page and Sergey Brin — began working on a research project they called Backrub. That, of course, was the project that resulted in Google. But also something more: it created the business model for the web.

The deal that Google made with content creators was simple: let us copy your content for search, and we'll send you traffic. You, as a content creator, could then derive value from that traffic in one of three ways: running ads against it, selling subscriptions for it, or just getting the pleasure of knowing that someone was consuming your stuff.

Google facilitated all of this. Search generated traffic. They acquired DoubleClick and built AdSense to help content creators serve ads. And acquired Urchin to launch Google Analytics to let you measure just who was viewing your content at any given moment in time.

For nearly thirty years, that relationship was what defined the web and allowed it to flourish.

But that relationship is changing. For the first time in its history, the number of searches run on Google is declining. What's taking its place? AI.

If you're like me, you've been amazed Continue reading

The crawl before the fall… of referrals: understanding AI’s impact on content providers

Content publishers welcomed crawlers and bots from search engines because they helped drive traffic to their sites. The crawlers would see what was published on the site and surface that material to users searching for it. Site owners could monetize their material because those users still needed to click through to the page to access anything beyond a short title.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) bots also crawl the content of a site, but with an entirely different delivery model. These Large Language Models (LLMs) do their best to read the web to train a system that can repackage that content for the user, without the user ever needing to visit the original publication.

The AI applications might still try to cite the content, but we’ve found that very few users actually click through relative to how often the AI bot scrapes a given website. We have discussed this challenge in smaller settings, and today we are excited to publish our findings as a new metric shown on the AI Insights page on Cloudflare Radar.

Visitors to Cloudflare Radar can now review how often a given AI model sends traffic to a site relative to how often it crawls that site. We Continue reading

Control content use for AI training with Cloudflare’s managed robots.txt and blocking for monetized content

Cloudflare is giving all website owners two new tools to easily control whether AI bots are allowed to access their content for model training. First, customers can let Cloudflare create and manage a robots.txt file, creating the appropriate entries to let crawlers know not to access their site for AI training. Second, all customers can choose a new option to block AI bots only on portions of their site that are monetized through ads.

The new generation of AI crawlers

Creators that monetize their content by showing ads depend on traffic volume. Their livelihood is directly linked to the number of views their content receives. These creators have allowed crawlers on their sites for decades, for a simple reason: search crawlers such as Googlebot made their sites more discoverable, and drove more traffic to their content. Google benefitted from delivering better search results to their customers, and the site owners also benefitted through increased views, and therefore increased revenues.

But recently, a new generation of crawlers has appeared: bots that crawl sites to gather data for training AI models. While these crawlers operate in the same technical way as search crawlers, the relationship is no longer symbiotic. AI Continue reading

Introducing pay per crawl: enabling content owners to charge AI crawlers for access

A changing landscape of consumption 

Many publishers, content creators and website owners currently feel like they have a binary choice — either leave the front door wide open for AI to consume everything they create, or create their own walled garden. But what if there was another way?

At Cloudflare, we started from a simple principle: we wanted content creators to have control over who accesses their work. If a creator wants to block all AI crawlers from their content, they should be able to do so. If a creator wants to allow some or all AI crawlers full access to their content for free, they should be able to do that, too. Creators should be in the driver’s seat.

After hundreds of conversations with news organizations, publishers, and large-scale social media platforms, we heard a consistent desire for a third path: They’d like to allow AI crawlers to access their content, but they’d like to get compensated. Currently, that requires knowing the right individual and striking a one-off deal, which is an insurmountable challenge if you don’t have scale and leverage. 

What if I could charge a crawler? 

We believe your choice need not be binary — Continue reading

From Googlebot to GPTBot: who’s crawling your site in 2025

Web crawlers are not new. The World Wide Web Wanderer debuted in 1993, though the first web search engines to truly use crawlers and indexers were JumpStation and WebCrawler. Crawlers are part of one of the backbones of the Internet’s success: search. Their main purpose has been to index the content of websites across the Internet so that those websites can appear in search engine results and direct users appropriately. In this blog post, we’re analyzing recent trends in web crawling, which now has a crucial and complex new role with the rise of AI.

Not all crawlers are the same. Bots, automated scripts that perform tasks across the Internet, come in many forms: those considered non-threatening or “good” (such as API clients, search indexing bots like Googlebot, or health checkers) and those considered malicious or “bad” (like those used for credential stuffing, spam, or scraping content without permission). In fact, around 30% of global web traffic today, according to Cloudflare Radar data, comes from bots, and even exceeds human Internet traffic in some locations.

A new category, AI crawlers, has emerged in recent years. These bots collect data from across the web to train Continue reading

Message Signatures are now part of our Verified Bots Program, simplifying bot authentication

As a site owner, how do you know which bots to allow on your site, and which you’d like to block? Existing identification methods rely on a combination of IP address range (which may be shared by other services, or change over time) and user-agent header (easily spoofable). These have limitations and deficiencies. In our last blog post, we proposed using HTTP Message Signatures: a way for developers of bots, agents, and crawlers to clearly identify themselves by cryptographically signing requests originating from their service. 

Since we published the blog post on Message Signatures and the IETF draft for Web Bot Auth in May 2025, we’ve seen significant interest around implementing and deploying Message Signatures at scale. It’s clear that well-intentioned bot owners want a clear way to identify their bots to site owners, and site owners want a clear way to identify and manage bot traffic. Both parties seem to agree that deploying cryptography for the purposes of authentication is the right solution.     

Today, we’re announcing that we’re integrating HTTP Message Signatures directly into our Verified Bots Program. This announcement has two main parts: (1) for bots, crawlers, and agents, we’re simplifying enrollment into the Verified Continue reading

IS-IS 3-Way Handshake and the Power of SHOULD

Yesterday, I mentioned that a Cisco router running pre-standard IS-IS 3-way handshake (this is why you need it) interoperates with multiple implementations of RFC 5303. How’s that possible, and does it matter whether you configure the ancient Cisco routers (release 15.x) to use IETF 3-way handshake instead of the “proprietary” one?

TL&DR: It SHOULD NOT matter, but the more I explore the RFCs, the more I’m amazed anything works at all.

I took a trip to the Wireshark land to figure out the details (you can download the capture file):

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