Cisco and Intel have extended their technology relationship to enable Cisco Wi-Fi gear to gather data from Intel-based PCs in order to troubleshoot and optimize wireless connections for end-user machines.The companies announced Intel Connectivity Analytics, a feature that helps to evaluate Wi-Fi connectivity and for IT teams to monitor wireless resources.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
The feature is supported by Intel-based PCs deployed with Wi-Fi 6/6E chipsets and Cisco Wi-Fi offerings including the Cisco Catalyst 9800 series wireless-controller family, its Embedded Wireless Controller, and the full range of Meraki cloud-managed access points.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco and Intel have extended their technology relationship to enable Cisco Wi-Fi gear to gather data from Intel-based PCs in order to troubleshoot and optimize wireless connections for end-user machines.The companies announced Intel Connectivity Analytics, a feature that helps to evaluate Wi-Fi connectivity and for IT teams to monitor wireless resources.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
The feature is supported by Intel-based PCs deployed with Wi-Fi 6/6E chipsets and Cisco Wi-Fi offerings including the Cisco Catalyst 9800 series wireless-controller family, its Embedded Wireless Controller, and the full range of Meraki cloud-managed access points.To read this article in full, please click here
Achieving better security is something we all know is necessary but can struggle to get there. It’s like improving your diet: you know you need to eat better and exercise to cultivate a healthier, more well-rounded lifestyle. But you don’t do it because it’s hard, often expensive, and can be a pain. So, you avoid it (trust me, we’ve all been there). But, you learn that putting one foot in front of the other forces you to take small steps toward big results. The same notion applies to needing better security. We know we need it, but it’s not always easy to know where to begin.
There is no quick fix for sustainable change. Sure, we can make better choices each day, but it takes consistency and a solid structural foundation – a lifestyle change – to maintain these advancements. Losing weight is one thing; when it comes to better multi-cloud security, this is a process that leaves little room for fluctuation. Start with the fundamentals and tighten your belt over time.
Let’s take a look at real-world organizations that have benefitted from doing the hard stuff. They’ve done the work and have seen the results. Continue reading
There are no greater bragging rights in supercomputing than those that come with top ten listing on the bi-annual list of the world’s most powerful systems—the Top 500. …
Let’s just cut right to the chase scene. The latest Top500 ranking of supercomputers, announced today at the SC21 supercomputing conference being held in St Louis, needed the excitement of an actual 1 exaflops sustained performance machine running the High Performance Linpack benchmark at 64-bit precision. …
As you certainly know, we are now rebranding DCNM 11 to Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller, consequently, NDFC 12 is the new acronym to automate and operate NX-OS based fabrics
It is NOT just about changing the name, there are several significant changes with NDFC 12. To list few of them:
Enhanced Topology View
Ability to modify switch discovery IP
Flexible CLI option – config profile or native NXOS CLI
Performance Programmable reports
Granular RBAC
Secure POAP User
Simplified and flexible Image Management
Server Smart Licensing
Automate IOS-XR configuration
Automate VXLAN EVPN fabric deployment with Cat9k
One of the key evolution in regard to NDFC is that it now joins the ecosystem of services that runs natively on top of the common Nexus dashboard platform.
One of the key advantages for the network operators with this evolution, is that they just need a single experience, it doesn’t really matter what application you run, from the installation process to the common Web GUI. All applications or services look with the same logic behind any requests.
You have a single pane of glass which is the Nexus dashboard platform through which the end-user can consume different applications for the Continue reading
Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we discuss Containerlab, open-source software that lets you build virtual network labs on a server or even a laptop. It supports a variety of network OSs for network emulation, training, and testing. Containerlab was developed by Nokia, our sponsor for this episode.
Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we discuss Containerlab, open-source software that lets you build virtual network labs on a server or even a laptop. It supports a variety of network OSs for network emulation, training, and testing. Containerlab was developed by Nokia, our sponsor for this episode.
Social media security is vital for every enterprise in blocking targeted attacks, securing corporate accounts from compromise, and fighting scams and frauds.
Way in the past, the EIGRP team (including me) had an interesting idea–why not aggregate routes automatically as much as possible, along classless bounds, and then deaggregate routes when we could detect some failure was causing a routing black hole? To understand this concept better, consider the network below.
In this network, B and C are connected to four different routers, each of which is advertising a different subnet. In turn, B and C are aggregating these four routes into 2001:db8:3e8:10::/60, and advertising this aggregate towards A. From a control plane state perspective, this is a major win. The obvious gain is that the amount of state is reduced from four routes to one. The less obvious gain is A doesn’t need to know about any changes in the state for the four destinations aggregated into the /60. Depending on how often these links change state, the reduction in the rate of change is, perhaps, more important than the reduction in the amount of control plane state.
We always know there will be a tradeoff when reducing state; what is the tradeoff here? If C somehow loses its connection to one of the four routers, say the router advertising 11::/64, Continue reading
Networking equipment was the news of the day at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC), with new hardware for improved end-to-end performance.Nvidia announced the Quantum-2 platform, a 400Gbps InfiniBand networking platform consisting of the Quantum-2 switch, ConnectX-7 network adapter, BlueField-3 data processing unit (DPU), and all the software to support the new architecture.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
At 400Gbps, NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand doubles the network speed and triples the number of network ports over the Quantum-1 product. With a three-fold performance increase in performance, data-center fabric switches can be reduced by six-fold, cutting data center power consumption and reducing the overall data center space by 7%, the company says.To read this article in full, please click here
Networking equipment was the news of the day at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC), with new hardware for improved end-to-end performance.Nvidia announced the Quantum-2 platform, a 400Gbps InfiniBand networking platform consisting of the Quantum-2 switch, ConnectX-7 network adapter, BlueField-3 data processing unit (DPU), and all the software to support the new architecture.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
At 400Gbps, NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand doubles the network speed and triples the number of network ports over the Quantum-1 product. With a three-fold performance increase in performance, data-center fabric switches can be reduced by six-fold, cutting data center power consumption and reducing the overall data center space by 7%, the company says.To read this article in full, please click here
The WAN as initially conceived was about one simple job: the WAN was the network that “connects my sites to each other.” That is, the network connecting users in corporate sites to corporate IT resources in other corporate sites or perhaps colocation facilities. It was all inside-to-inside traffic.Over the past decade so much has changed that, just before COVID-19 work-from-home mandates took hold, only about 37% of a typical WAN’s traffic was still inside-to-inside, according to Nemertes’ “Next Generation Networks Research Study 2020-2021”. The rest touched the outside world, either originating there as with remote work against data-center systems or terminating there as with SaaS use from a company site or both as with VPNing into the network only to head back out to a SaaS app.To read this article in full, please click here
The WAN as initially conceived was about one simple job: the WAN was the network that “connects my sites to each other.” That is, the network connecting users in corporate sites to corporate IT resources in other corporate sites or perhaps colocation facilities. It was all inside-to-inside traffic.Over the past decade so much has changed that, just before COVID-19 work-from-home mandates took hold, only about 37% of a typical WAN’s traffic was still inside-to-inside, according to Nemertes’ “Next Generation Networks Research Study 2020-2021”. The rest touched the outside world, either originating there as with remote work against data-center systems or terminating there as with SaaS use from a company site or both as with VPNing into the network only to head back out to a SaaS app.To read this article in full, please click here
This week's Network Break examines new 400G switches from Arista, discusses the Wi-Fi Alliance's certification program for the HaLow long-range low-power standard, targets key Nvidia announcements, catches up on the latest in space networking, and more IT news.
This week's Network Break examines new 400G switches from Arista, discusses the Wi-Fi Alliance's certification program for the HaLow long-range low-power standard, targets key Nvidia announcements, catches up on the latest in space networking, and more IT news.
The Automation Controller Collection allows Ansible Playbooks to automate the interaction with automation controller. For example, manually interacting via the Web-based UI or the API can now be automated just as the targets it manages.
This Collection provides a programmatic way to create, update or delete automation controller objects as well as perform tasks such as run jobs, change configurations and much more. This article discusses new updates to this Collection, as well as an example playbook and details on how to run it successfully.
The ansible.controller Ansible Collection is the downstream supported distribution available on Ansible automation hub, made to work with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2. The awx.awx Collectionis the upstream community distribution available on Ansible Galaxy. For more details on the difference between Ansible Galaxy and Ansible automation hub, please refer to Ajay Chenampara’s blog post.
In this post, we are use the ansible.controller Collection, but this can be replaced with the legacy ansible.tower or the awx.awx Collection depending on the user’s needs.
Using the Collection with Workflows
One of the goals of the Automation Controller Collection is to allow users to Continue reading
At Cloudflare, we’re building the best compute platform in the world. We want to make it easy, seamless, and obvious to build your applications with us. But simply making the best compute platform is not enough — at the heart of your applications are the data they interact with.
Cloudflare has multiple data storage solutions available today: Workers KV, R2, and Durable Objects. All three follow Cloudflare’s design goals for Workers: global by default, infinitely scalable, and delightful for developers to use. We’ve partnered with third-party storage solutions like Fauna, MongoDB and Prisma, who have built data platforms that align beautifully with our design goals and written tutorials for databases that already support HTTP connections.
The one area that’s been sorely missed: relational databases. Cloudflare itself runs on relational databases, and we’re not alone. In April, we asked which Node libraries you wanted us to support, and four of the top five requests were related to databases. For this Full Stack Week, we asked ourselves: how could we support relational databases in a way that aligned with our design goals?
Today, we’re taking a first step towards that world by announcing support for relational databases, including Postgres and Continue reading
Welcome to a new blog post series called Developer Spotlight. In this series we will be showcasing interesting applications built on top of the Cloudflare Workers Ecosystem.
And to celebrate Durable Objects going GA, what better to kick off the series than with a really cool tech demo of Durable Objects called Full Tilt?
Full Tilt by Guido Zuidhof is a game jam entry for Ludum Dare, one of the biggest and oldest game jams around, where he won first place in the innovation category. A game jam is like a hackathon for games, where you have a very short amount of time (usually 48-72 hours) to create a game from scratch.
We love Full Tilt, not just because Guido used Workers and Durable Objects to build a cool game where you control a game on your computer via your phone, but especially because it shows how powerful Durable Objects are. In less than 48 hours Guido was able to write all the logic to instantly spin up a personal gaming server anywhere in the world, as close to that player as possible. And it is so fast that you feel like you are controlling the computer directly.
Today we are excited to announce that we are developing APIs and infrastructure to support more TCP, UDP, and QUIC-based protocols in Cloudflare Workers. Once released, these new capabilities will make it possible to use non-HTTP socket connections to and from a Worker or Durable Object as easily as one can use HTTP and WebSockets today.
Out of the box, fetch and WebSocket APIs. With just a few internal changes to make it operational in Workers, we’ve developed an example using an off-the-shelf driver (in this example, a Deno-based Postgres client driver) to communicate with a remote Postgres server via WebSocket over a secure Cloudflare Tunnel.
import { Client } from './driver/postgres/postgres'
export default {
async fetch(request: Request, env, ctx: ExecutionContext) {
try {
const client = new Client({
user: 'postgres',
database: 'postgres',
hostname: 'https://db.example.com',
password: '',
port: 5432,
})
await client.connect()
const result = await client.queryArray('SELECT * FROM users WHERE uuid=1;')
ctx.waitUntil(client.end())
return new Response(JSON.stringify(result.rows[0]))
} catch (e) {
return new Response((e as Error).message)
}
},
}
The example works by replacing the bits of the Postgres client driver that use the Deno-specific TCP socket APIs with standard fetch and WebSockets APIs. We then establish a WebSocket connection with a remote Cloudflare Tunnel daemon running adjacent to the Postgres server, establishing what is effectively TCP-over-WebSockets.
While the fact we were able to build the example and communicate effectively and efficiently with the Postgres server — without making any changes to the Cloudflare Workers runtime — is impressive, there are limitations to the approach. For one, the solution requires additional infrastructure to establish and maintain the WebSocket tunnel — in this case, the instance of the Cloudflare Tunnel daemon running adjacent to the Postgres server. While we are certainly happy to provide that daemon to customers, it would just be better if that component were not required at all. Second, tunneling TCP over WebSockets, which is itself tunneled via HTTP over TCP is a bit suboptimal. It works, but we can do better.
Making connections from Cloudflare Workers
Currently, there is no standard API for socket connections in JavaScript. We want to change that.
If you’ve used Node.js before, then you’re most likely familiar with the net.Socket and net.TLSSocket objects. If you use Deno, then you might know that they’ve recently introduced the Deno.connect() and Deno.connectTLS() APIs. When you look at those APIs, what should immediately be apparent is how different they are from one another despite doing the exact same thing.
When we decided that we would add the ability to open and use socket connections from within Workers, we also agreed that we really have no interest in developing yet another non-standard, platform-specific API that is unlike the APIs provided by other platforms. Therefore, we are extending an invitation to all JavaScript runtime platforms that need socket capabilities to collaborate on a new (and eventually standardized) API that just works no matter which runtime you choose to develop on.
Here’s a rough example of what we have in mind for opening and reading from a simple TCP client connection:
const socket = new Socket({
remote: { address: '123.123.123.123', port: 1234 },
})
for await (const chunk of socket.readable)
console.log(chunk)
Or, this example, sending a simple “hello world” packet using UDP:
The API will be designed generically enough to work both client and server-side; for TCP, UDP, and QUIC; with or without TLS, and will not rely on any mechanism specific to any single JavaScript runtime. It will build on existing broadly supported Web Platform standards such as EventTarget, ReadableStream, WritableStream, AbortSignal, and promises. It will be familiar to developers who are already familiar with the fetch() API, service workers, and promises using async/await.
This is just a proposal at this point and the details will very likely change from the examples above by the time the capability is delivered in Workers. It is our hope that other platforms will join us in the effort of developing and supporting this new API so that developers have a consistent foundation upon which to build regardless of where they run their code.
Introducing Socket Workers
The ability to open socket client connections is only half of the story.
When we first started talking about adding these capabilities an obvious question was asked: What about using non-HTTP protocols to connect to Workers? What if instead of just having the ability to connect a Worker to some other back-end database, we could implement the entire database itself on the edge, inside Workers, and have non-HTTP clients connect to it? For that matter, what if we could implement an SMTP server in Workers? Or an MQTT message queue? Or a full VoIP platform? Or implement packet filters, transformations, inspectors, or protocol transcoders?
Workers are far too powerful to limit to just HTTP and WebSockets, so we will soon introduce Socket Workers -- that is, Workers that can be connected to directly using raw TCP, UDP, or QUIC protocols without using HTTP.
What will this new Workers feature look like? Many of the details are still being worked through, but the idea is to deploy a Worker script that understands and responds to “connect” events in much the same way that “fetch” events work today. Importantly, this would build on the same common socket API being developed for client connections:
The new socket API for JavaScript and Socket Workers are under active development, with focus initially on enabling better and more efficient ways for Workers to connect to databases on the backend — you can sign up here to join the waitlist for access to Database Connectors and Socket Workers. We are excited to work with early users, as well as our technology partners to develop, refine, and test these new capabilities.
Once released, we expect Socket Workers to blow the doors wide open on the types of intelligent distributed applications that can be deployed to the Cloudflare network edge, and we are excited to see what you build with them.
