On Thursday, June 20, 2024, two independent events caused an increase in latency and error rates for Internet properties and Cloudflare services that lasted 114 minutes. During the 30-minute peak of the impact, we saw that 1.4 - 2.1% of HTTP requests to our CDN received a generic error page, and observed a 3x increase for the 99th percentile Time To First Byte (TTFB) latency.
These events occurred because:
Impact from these events were observed in many Cloudflare data centers around the world.
With respect to the backbone congestion event, we were already working on expanding backbone capacity in the affected data centers, and improving our network mitigations to use more information about the available capacity on alternative network paths when taking action. In the remainder of this blog post, we will go into Continue reading
I plan to add several challenge labs using multihop EBGP sessions to the BGP labs project, including:
However, I would love to start with a simple use case to help engineers unfamiliar with BGP realize when they might have to use multihop EBGP sessions. Unfortunately, I can’t find one, and the scenarios where I used multihop EBGP in the past (EBGP load balancing and using a low-end router in the EBGP path, where I was effectively using the reverse application of #2 as a customer) are mostly irrelevant.
Would you have an easy-to-understand use case that is best solved with a multihop EBGP session? Please share it in the comments. Thanks a million!
I plan to add several challenge labs using multihop EBGP sessions to the BGP labs project, including:
However, I would love to start with a simple use case to help engineers unfamiliar with BGP realize when they might have to use multihop EBGP sessions. Unfortunately, I can’t find one, and the scenarios where I used multihop EBGP in the past (EBGP load balancing and using a low-end router in the EBGP path, where I was effectively using the reverse application of #2 as a customer) are mostly irrelevant.
Would you have an easy-to-understand use case that is best solved with a multihop EBGP session? Please share it in the comments. Thanks a million!
I’ve been working with Palo Alto Firewalls and Panorama for a few years now, yet the best ways to use Templates still seem somewhat mysterious. I bet many of you feel the same way. Since every network is unique, there isn’t one “right” way to manage this. In this blog post, I’ll break down what Templates and Template Stacks are in Panorama and share some effective strategies for organizing them. Let’s dive in.
If you’re new to Panorama, it’s a centralized management tool that simplifies managing multiple Palo Alto firewalls from a single place. There are two key concepts in Panorama which are Device Groups and Templates. Device Groups manage the configurations you’d usually find under the Policies and Objects tabs on the firewall, while Templates manage with configurations from the Network and Device tabs.
It’s important to note that Device Groups and Templates serve different purposes and manage different parts of the configurations. This blog post will focus exclusively on Templates. If you need a refresher on Device Groups and Templates, I’ve covered that in a previous post. Feel free to check it out here for a quick recap.
Designing chips and shepherding them through the foundry and package and assembly is a complex and difficult process, and not having these skills at a national level has profound implications for the competitiveness of those nations. …
Ruminations About Europe’s “Alice Recoque” Exascale Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Broadcom’s $69 billion acquisition of virtualization stalwart VMware was not an easy proposition. …
Cloud Foundation Updates Reflect The New VMware By Broadcom was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Kubernetes is used everywhere, from test environments to the most critical production foundations that we use daily, making it undoubtedly a de facto in cloud computing. While this is great news for everyone who works with, administers, and expands Kubernetes, the downside is that it makes Kubernetes a favorable target for malicious actors.
Malicious actors typically exploit flaws in the system to gain access to a portion of the environment. They then chain these flaws together to move laterally within the environment, ultimately seeking root access or access to critical information.
While the best way to fix security flaws in any software is to patch it with appropriate fixes that the project maintainers publish, there are certain security practices that you can adopt to fortify your environment, like using network policies. However, most people find network policies complex and overwhelming, which discourages them from implementing policies in their environment.
In this blog post, we will examine four pain points that people face when they want to implement network policies and provide solutions to help you effectively secure your Kubernetes environment.
In Kubernetes, a network policy (KNP) resource is the Continue reading
I love open-source tools (and their GitHub repositories). Someone launches a cool idea, and you can dig through their source code to figure out how it works. It beats reading documentation or fixing AI hallucinations every day of the week ;)
Not too long ago, the containerlab team launched the ability to run containerlab within a free1 container2 running on GitHub, and that seemed like a perfect solution to run the BGP labs (Jeroen van Bemmel pointing me in the right direction was another significant step forward).
I love open-source tools (and their GitHub repositories). Someone launches a cool idea, and you can dig through their source code to figure out how it works. It beats reading documentation or fixing AI hallucinations every day of the week ;)
Not too long ago, the containerlab team launched the ability to run containerlab within a free1 container2 running on GitHub, and that seemed like a perfect solution to run the BGP labs (Jeroen van Bemmel pointing me in the right direction was another significant step forward).
A while back I started thinking about why it took so long before we started using anycast gateways. I started thinking about what would be the reason(s) for not doing it earlier. I came up with some good reasons and it started making sense to me. I then asked you all what your thoughts were and received a ton of great responses. Here are a few that were mentioned:
These are all certainly true to some degree. I would argue though that the main reason why we didn’t have it earlier is because of the topology and protocols we used in traditional LANs. The typical design was to have three layers, access, distribution, and core. The links in access to distribution layer were L2 only and the distribution layer had all the L3 configuration. A typical topology looked like this:
In a topology like this, there are only two devices that host the L3 configuration needed for hosts. When you have two of something, it’s natural to think Continue reading
It has been an invaluable asset for AMD as it re-engaged in the datacenter in the past decade to have Forrest Norrod as the general manager of its datacenter business. …
The Appetite For Datacenter Compute Is Ravenous was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Password reuse is a real problem. When people use the same password across multiple services, it creates a risk that a breach of one service will give attackers access to a different, apparently unrelated, service. Attackers know people reuse passwords and build giant lists of known passwords and known usernames or email addresses.
If you got to the end of that paragraph and realized you’ve reused the same password multiple places, stop reading and go change those passwords. We’ll wait.
To help protect Cloudflare customers who have used a password attackers know about, we are releasing a feature to improve the security of the Cloudflare dashboard for all our customers by automatically checking whether their Cloudflare user password has appeared in an attacker's list. Cloudflare will securely check a customer’s password against threat intelligence sources that monitor data breaches in other services.
If a customer logs in to Cloudflare with a password that was leaked in a breach elsewhere on the Internet, Cloudflare will alert them and ask them to choose a new password.
For some customers, the news that their password was known to hackers will come as a surprise – no one wants to intentionally use passwords that Continue reading
When learning how to use OSPF with MikroTik, it can sometimes be difficult to understand how the different LSA types flow between areas.
In MikroTik’s OSPF documentation they briefly cover the LSA for OSPFv2 but don’t have OSPFv3 listed yet.
To better illustrate how the LSAs work, I created these graphical overviews for OSPFv2 and OSPFv3. When troubleshooting OSPF, it’s very helpful to understand which LSAs you should see in an area and how IPv4 and IPv6 differ.
Hope you find these helpful!