IPv6 Buzz 079: IPv6 In The Data Center

In this week's IPv6 Buzz podcast, we explore IPv6 in the data center with guest Jeff Tantsura. Jeff is formerly head of Network Strategy with Juniper/Apstra, and now with Microsoft Azure. We explore IPv6 use cases in the data center, reasons for and challenges of assigning a /64 per host, leveraging IPv6 flow labels to improve data center fabric performance, and more.

The post IPv6 Buzz 079: IPv6 In The Data Center appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Service Mapping with BGP Classful Transport – Kaliraj Vairavakkalai, Principal Engineer @ Juniper Networks

In this episode Kaliraj will explain to us what BGP Classful Transport (BGP-CT) is and how it works. BGP-CT is a mechanism, referred to as “service mapping”, to express association of overlay routes with underlay routes satisfying a certain SLA, using BGP.  It is a framework for classifying underlay routes into transport classes, and mapping service routes to specific transport class.
The “Transport class” construct maps to a desired SLA, and can be used to realize the “Topology Slice” in 5G Network slicing architecture.

BGP-CT is still work in progress in IETF. The draft can be found here: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-kaliraj-idr-bgp-classful-transport-planes/
The authors welcome feedback and input for the draft.

It’s Raining Beacons: Automated Generation of Cobalt Strike Traffic

Introduction

Cobalt Strike [1] is a tool to support red teams in attack simulation exercises. To this end, Cobalt Strike provides several techniques that allow a red team to execute targeted attacks to compromise a target network, established a bridge head on a host, and then move laterally to gain additional access to computers, accounts, and, eventually, data.

While the goal of Raphael Mudge, the author of Cobalt Strike, was to provide a framework to test network defenses to support the development of effective detection mechanisms and incident response procedures, the power provided by the tools was not lost on malicious actors (see, for example, [2]).

Soon, Cobalt Strike was copied, modified, and included in the toolset used in attacks against targets of all kinds. For example, recently Cobalt Strike was used as part of both the SolarWinds supply-chain attack [3] and the ransomware attacks against Colonial Pipeline [4]. The tool is so popular that there are Telegram channels and GitHub repositories dedicated to obtaining or producing modified, pirated copies of the Cobalt Strike software [5].

Given its “dual nature” and wide adoption by both sides of the security battlefield, it is not surprising that security teams struggle to develop Continue reading

Buoyant Cloud Beta Brings Simplified Linkerd

Network software provider Linkerd service mesh, has launched the public beta of William Morgan emphasizes that operational simplicity has always been a focus, he says that they expect Buoyant Cloud to take that one step further. “We want to take the operational burden off of the shoulders of whoever is bringing Linkerd into their organization. We want to handle that for you,” he said. “We want to carry the pager for you, we want to make it so that running Linkerd in production is a trivial task. This falls right in line with everything we’ve been doing with Linkerd since the very beginning — our focus has been really heavily on operational simplicity and on making it so that when you operate Linkerd, you’re not in this horrendous situation where you need to hire a team of experts just to maintain your service mesh. With Buoyant Cloud, we have the opportunity to take on a lot of those operational tasks for you, and make it so you get all Continue reading

Day Two Cloud 104: Cloud Is No Escape From Your Data Center Dumpster Fire

IT and business leaders need to be more nuanced in their approach to the cloud. On today's Day Two Cloud podcast, guest Melissa Palmer discusses why cloud hype is a problem for organizations, the need to understand why you'd use cloud, what problems you're trying to solve, and why poor operational processes on prem won't magically vanish by moving to the cloud.

The post Day Two Cloud 104: Cloud Is No Escape From Your Data Center Dumpster Fire appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Cisco completes purchase of security risk-management firm

Cisco continues to bulk-up its security portfolio, this week closing the deal on risk-based management company Kenna Security for an undisclosed amount.Kenna’s Risk-Based Vulnerability Management system collects and analyzes security data to provide security teams with information about threats so they can prioritize remediation and better understand risks. Read about edge networking How edge networking and IoT will reshape data centers Edge computing best practices How edge computing can help secure the IoT The technology will become part of Cisco’s SecureX service that integrates numerous security components. Cisco says the service is an open, cloud-native system to detect and remediate threats across Cisco and third-party products from a single interface. The SecureX dashboard shows operational metrics, triggers alerts to emerging threats, and accelerates threat investigations and incident management by aggregating and correlating global intelligence and local context in one view.  To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco completes purchase of security risk-management firm

Cisco continues to bulk-up its security portfolio, this week closing the deal on risk-based management company Kenna Security for an undisclosed amount.Kenna’s Risk-Based Vulnerability Management system collects and analyzes security data to provide security teams with information about threats so they can prioritize remediation and better understand risks. Read about edge networking How edge networking and IoT will reshape data centers Edge computing best practices How edge computing can help secure the IoT The technology will become part of Cisco’s SecureX service that integrates numerous security components. Cisco says the service is an open, cloud-native system to detect and remediate threats across Cisco and third-party products from a single interface. The SecureX dashboard shows operational metrics, triggers alerts to emerging threats, and accelerates threat investigations and incident management by aggregating and correlating global intelligence and local context in one view.  To read this article in full, please click here

Cloudflare’s Network Doubles CPU Capacity and Expands Into Ten New Cities in Four New Countries

Cloudflare’s Network Doubles CPU Capacity and Expands Into Ten New Cities in Four New Countries
Cloudflare’s Network Doubles CPU Capacity and Expands Into Ten New Cities in Four New Countries

Cloudflare’s global network is always expanding, and 2021 has been no exception. Today, I’m happy to give a mid-year update: we've added ten new Cloudflare cities, with four new countries represented among them. And we've doubled our computational footprint since the start of pandemic-related lockdowns.

No matter what else we do at Cloudflare, constant expansion of our infrastructure to new places is a requirement to help build a better Internet. 2021, like 2020, has been a difficult time to be a global network — from semiconductor shortages to supply-chain disruptions — but regardless, we have continued to expand throughout the entire globe, experimenting with technologies like ARM, ASICs, and Nvidia all the way.

The Cities

Cloudflare’s Network Doubles CPU Capacity and Expands Into Ten New Cities in Four New Countries

Without further ado, here are the new Cloudflare cities: Tbilisi, Georgia; San José, Costa Rica; Tunis, Tunisia; Yangon, Myanmar; Nairobi, Kenya; Jashore, Bangladesh; Canberra, Australia; Palermo, Italy; and Salvador and Campinas, Brazil.

These deployments are spread across every continent except Antarctica.

We’ve solidified our presence in every country of the Caucuses with our first deployment in the country of Georgia in the capital city of Tbilisi. And on the other side of the world, we’ve Continue reading

IoT startup makes battery-free sensors

[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] A startup founded by two MIT grads says that it can deploy self-powering sensors to handle low-intensity IoT tasks, eliminating the need for batteries or power cabling and adding a new level of flexibility to IoT deployments.Ben Calhoun and Dave Wentzloff are the founders of Everactive, an IoT-device startup whose sensor modules can create their own power from a variety of sources, including indoor solar that gathers energy from artificial lighting, and thermal-gradient differential using waste heat to generate electricity. These techniques don’t generate a lot of power but don’t need to for Everactive’s purposes.To read this article in full, please click here

Thank You for Everything Irena, We’ll Miss You Badly

In February 2018, Irena Marčetič joined ipSpace.net to fix the (lack of) marketing. After getting that done, she quickly took over most of sales, support, logistics, content production, guest speaker coordination… If you needed anything from us in the last few years, it was probably Irena answering your requests and helping you out.

She did a fantastic job and transformed ipSpace.net from Ivan and an occasional guest speaker to a finely tuned machine producing several hours of new content every month. She organized our courses, worked with guest speakers, podcast guests and hosts, participated in every guest speaker webinar to take notes for the editing process, managed content editing, watched every single video we created before it was published to make sure the audio was of acceptable quality and all the bloopers were removed… while answering crazy emails like I need you to fill in this Excel spreadsheet with your company data because I cannot copy-paste that information from your web site myself and solving whatever challenges our customers faced.

Unfortunately, Irena decided to go back to pure marketing and is leaving ipSpace.net today. Thanks a million for all the great work – we’ll badly miss you.

Thank You for Everything Irena, We’ll Miss You Badly

In February 2018, Irena Marčetič joined ipSpace.net to fix the (lack of) marketing. After getting that done, she quickly took over most of sales, support, logistics, content production, guest speaker coordination… If you needed anything from us in the last few years, it was probably Irena answering your requests and helping you out.

She did a fantastic job and transformed ipSpace.net from Ivan and an occasional guest speaker to a finely tuned machine producing several hours of new content every month. She organized our courses, worked with guest speakers, podcast guests and hosts, participated in every guest speaker webinar to take notes for the editing process, managed content editing, watched every single video we created before it was published to make sure the audio was of acceptable quality and all the bloopers were removed… while answering crazy emails like I need you to fill in this Excel spreadsheet with your company data because I cannot copy-paste that information from your web site myself and solving whatever challenges our customers faced.

Unfortunately, Irena decided to go back to pure marketing and is leaving ipSpace.net today. Thanks a million for all the great work – we’ll badly miss you.

What is edge computing and why does it matter?

Edge computing is transforming how data generated by billions of IoT and other devices  is stored, processed, analyzed and transported.The early goal of edge computing was to reduce the bandwidth costs associated with moving raw data from where it was created to either an enterprise data center or the cloud. More recently, the rise of real-time applications that require minimal latency, such as autonomous vehicles and multi-camera video analytics, are driving the concept forward.The ongoing global deployment of the 5G wireless standard ties into edge computing because 5G enables faster processing for these cutting-edge, low-latency use cases and applications.To read this article in full, please click here