Linux as a network operating system


NVIDIA Linux Switch enables any standard Linux distribution to be used as the operating system on the NVIDIA Spectrum™ switches. Unlike network operating systems that are Linux based, where you are limited to a specific version of Linux and control of the hardware is restricted to vendor specific software modules, Linux Switch allows you to install an unmodified version of your favorite Linux distribution along with familiar Linux monitoring and orchestration tools. 

The key to giving Linux control of the switch hardware is the switchdev module - a standard part of recent Linux kernels. Linux switchdev is an in-kernel driver model for switch devices which offload the forwarding (data) plane from the kernel. Integrating switch ASIC drivers in the Linux kernel makes switch ports appear as additional Linux network interfaces that can be configured and managed using standard Linux tools.

The mlxsw wiki provides instructions for installing Linux using ONIE or PXE boot on Mellanox switch hardware, for example, on NVIDIA® Spectrum®-3 based SN4000 series switches, providing 1G - 400G port speeds to handle scale-out data center applications.

Major benefits of using standard Linux as the switch operating system include:

Data Center Threats: Turning Remote Access into Money

Data centers are an appealing target for cybercriminals. Even though they may be more difficult to compromise than the home computer of a kid playing Fortnite or the laptop of a sales representative connecting to a random wireless network, they can bring very large rewards: databases with millions of records containing financial and personal information, substantial computational resources that can be used to mine cryptocurrencies, and access to key assets that can be held for ransom.

In this blog post, we analyze the main pathways that cybercriminals leverage to gain access to data centers, how they take advantage of that access, and what security administrators can do to reduce and manage the associated risks.

Getting into the Data Center

The obvious first goal of an attacker is to gain access to the targeted data center. This can be achieved in several ways — including social engineering [1], physical access [2], and occasionally by deer [3]— but anecdotal evidence suggests that the two main avenues are remote exploitation (also known as remote-to-local attacks [4]), and stolen credentials [5].

Remote-to-local Attacks

In a remote-to-local attack, an attacker targets a remotely accessible service provided by one of the workloads running in the data Continue reading

Improving your monitoring setup by integrating Cloudflare’s analytics data into Prometheus and Grafana

Improving your monitoring setup by integrating Cloudflare’s analytics data into Prometheus and Grafana

The following is a guest post by Martin Hauskrecht, DevOps Engineer at Labyrinth Labs.

Improving your monitoring setup by integrating Cloudflare’s analytics data into Prometheus and Grafana

Here at Labyrinth Labs, we put great emphasis on monitoring. Having a working monitoring setup is a critical part of the work we do for our clients.

Cloudflare's Analytics dashboard provides a lot of useful information for debugging and analytics purposes for our customer Pixel Federation. However, it doesn’t automatically integrate with existing monitoring tools such as Grafana and Prometheus, which our DevOps engineers use every day to monitor our infrastructure.

Cloudflare provides a Logs API, but the amount of logs we’d need to analyze is so vast, it would be simply inefficient and too pricey to do so. Luckily, Cloudflare already does the hard work of aggregating our thousands of events per second and exposes them in an easy-to-use API.

Having Cloudflare’s data from our zones integrated with other systems’ metrics would give us a better understanding of our systems and the ability to correlate metrics and create more useful alerts, making our Day-2 operations (e.g. debugging incidents or analyzing the usage of our systems) more efficient.

Since our monitoring stack is primarily based on Prometheus and Grafana, we decided to implement our own Continue reading

What Not to Miss at DockerCon 2021

You’ll have no shortage of content to choose from at DockerCon 2021. The one-day virtual event on May 27 will offer a smorgasbord of demonstrations, product announcements, company updates and more — all of it focused on modern application delivery in a cloud-native world.

But if you need some help narrowing down what’s in the must-see category, allow us to recommend the following key sessions. They include hands-on coding using Docker’s new HTTP APIs, a dive into Docker Dev Environments, tips for navigating a multi-architecture world, and what to do if your container image has more vulnerabilities than you have Twitter followers.

Check them out. They’re all free! And if you can’t participate live, you can watch recordings at your own pace.

DockerCon LIVE 2021
Join us for DockerCon LIVE 2021 on Thursday, May 27. DockerCon LIVE is a free, one day virtual event that is a unique experience for developers and development teams who are building the next generation of modern applications. If you want to learn about how to go from code to cloud fast and how to solve your development challenges, DockerCon LIVE 2021 offers engaging live content to help you build, share and run your applications. Continue reading

Automation: Dealing with Vendor-Specific Configuration Keywords

One of the students in our Building Network Automation Solutions online course asked an interesting question:

I’m building an IPsec multi-vendor automation solution and am now facing the challenge of vendor-specific parameter names. For example, to select the AES-128 algorithm, Juniper uses ‌aes-128-cbc, Arista aes128, and Checkpoint AES-128.

I guess I need a kind of Rosetta stone to convert the IKE/IPSEC parameters from a standard parameter to a vendor-specific one. Should I do that directly in the Jinja2 template, or in the Ansible playbook calling the template?

Both options are awkward. It would be best to have a lookup table mapping parameter values from the data model into vendor-specific keywords, for example:

Read more …

Automation: Dealing with Vendor-Specific Configuration Keywords

One of the students in our Building Network Automation Solutions online course asked an interesting question:

I’m building an IPsec multi-vendor automation solution and am now facing the challenge of vendor-specific parameter names. For example, to select the AES-128 algorithm, Juniper uses ‌aes-128-cbc, Arista aes128, and Checkpoint AES-128.

I guess I need a kind of Rosetta stone to convert the IKE/IPSEC parameters from a standard parameter to a vendor-specific one. Should I do that directly in the Jinja2 template, or in the Ansible playbook calling the template?

Both options are awkward. It would be best to have a lookup table mapping parameter values from the data model into vendor-specific keywords, for example:

Read more …

Juniper i40e NVM Firmware Upgrade

Juniper Routing Engines with VM Host need an i40e NVM firmware upgrade. The procedure is a pain in the ass, and documentation is not great. But you can’t avoid the upgrade any more. New Junos versions need the firmware upgrade, and replacement REs will ship with it already installed. Here’s some tips on doing the upgrade.

Background

Newer Juniper Routing Engines use a Linux-based hypervisor, and Junos (still BSD-based) runs as a guest VM. This is mostly transparent for day to day operations. When you do a Junos upgrade, it will upgrade the underlying hypervisor if required.

Upcoming Junos versions ship with a new version of Wind River Linux that needs i40e firmware version 6.01. Older versions used v4.26. You need the new i40e firmware installed first, before you can install the latest Junos versions. You can’t put this upgrade off forever. Sooner or later you’ll want to ugprade to a Junos version that only supports the new firmware. Or you’ll get a replacement RE delivered with new firmware, and you can’t downgrade it.

For the last couple of years, Juniper has been shipping Junos versions that will work with both old & new firmware versions. You Continue reading

Why you don’t want to miss the upcoming Kubernetes Security and Observability Summit

The inaugural Kubernetes Security and Observability Summit will be a free, live, online experience full of Kubernetes-related security and observability content. On June 3, 2021, industry experts will gather under one virtual roof to discuss trends, strategies, and technologies for Kubernetes security and observability, to help you understand and navigate today’s pressing issues in the world of cloud-native applications.

Why attend?

The Summit is a great opportunity to:

  • Network with the industry’s best security, DevOps, and site reliability engineer (SRE) teams for cloud-native platforms
  • Learn how to secure, observe, and troubleshoot Kubernetes environments
  • Explore real-world Kubernetes security and observability use cases presented by experts from industry-leading companies like Amazon, Box, Citi, EY, Mirantis, Morgan Stanley, PayPal, Salesforce, and of course, Tigera

Who should attend?

SREs, platform architects, and DevOps and security teams will all find value in attending the Summit.

  • DevOps teams and SREs – Learn how to include security and observability in your CI/CD to enable security, observability, and troubleshooting
  • Platform architects – Learn architecture patterns and best practices to secure and troubleshoot cloud-native applications
  • Security teams – Learn how to holistically secure your cloud-native applications following today’s best practices

Speakers & sessions

An opening keynote address from Continue reading

Mythic AI gets funding to mass-produce edge chips

Just six months after unveiling its first AI inferencing processor, Mythic AI has announced a new round of funding for $70 million in Series C investment to begin mass production of its chips and to develop its next generation of hardware and software products.In November, the company announced the M1108 Analog Matrix Processor (AMP) aimed at edge AI deployments across a wide range of applications, including manufacturing, video surveillance, smart cities, smart homes, AR/VR, and drones.Now see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI" For a company that is nine years old and has zero sales, it’s got some heavy hitters behind it. The new investment round was led by led by venture fund giant BlackRock and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Other investors include Alumni Ventures Group and UDC Ventures.To read this article in full, please click here

Mythic AI gets funding to mass-produce edge chips

Just six months after unveiling its first AI inferencing processor, Mythic AI has announced a new round of funding for $70 million in Series C investment to begin mass production of its chips and to develop its next generation of hardware and software products.In November, the company announced the M1108 Analog Matrix Processor (AMP) aimed at edge AI deployments across a wide range of applications, including manufacturing, video surveillance, smart cities, smart homes, AR/VR, and drones.Now see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI" For a company that is nine years old and has zero sales, it’s got some heavy hitters behind it. The new investment round was led by led by venture fund giant BlackRock and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Other investors include Alumni Ventures Group and UDC Ventures.To read this article in full, please click here

Answering Your Questions at DockerCon LIVE 2021

 Guest post by Docker Captain Bret Fisher, a DevOps consultant and the creator of the popular Docker Mastery Udemy course. Join us for DockerCon LIVE 2021 on Thursday, May 27. DockerCon LIVE for a free, one day virtual event at https://dockr.ly/2PSJ7vn

I have the pleasure of hosting many of the live events at DockerCon this year. You may remember my 7+ hour non-stop live stream from last year’s DockerCon LIVE 2020 with nearly 20 guests:

We’re back!

This year we’re calling them Live Panels. You’ll find them in their own track in the schedule.

If you’ve never visited one of my live streams before, they tend to be DevOps focused, and as practical and real-world as we can be. Come ready to ask my guests questions in chat on our selected topics, and we’ll do our best to answer as many as we can! You get to guide the conversation with the live stream chat Q&A.

I’m hosting three live panels on three topics. I wanted to discuss the top three things that I think are the hottest topics in Docker and Cloud Native container tech today for developers and DevOps professionals, so be sure to stop Continue reading

How Upgrading PHP On WordPress Became *It Was DNS*-An IT Operations Tale

The server needed a PHP update. WordPress told me so with a severe-sounding notification adorned with red coloration, a security warning, boldface type, and a link explaining how to change the PHP version. I sighed. Security issues never end, and I have a recurring reminder in my todo list to patch the Virtual Private Server (VPS) boxes I shepherd.

But this PHP issue…hmm. This felt like a bigger deal, and many sites I support lean heavily into WordPress. Rather than wait for the next regular patching session, I decided to get on it. I did a process test on one server, a lower profile machine that wouldn’t hurt too much if things went awry. The goal was to move from PHP 7.2.insecure to PHP 7.4.secure. How hard could it be?

Most of the search engine hits for “upgrade PHP on WordPress” told me to go into CPanel or a similar tool my hosting provider might offer to abstract what’s going on with the server itself. That’s not what I was looking for, because I manage my own hosts. I needed to know how to reconfigure the host itself. The OS packages to install. The conf files Continue reading

Near Real-Time Kubernetes at Scale: Increasing App Throughput with Linkerd

Stephen Reardon The one-man band that keeps the show running, Stephen Reardon is the DevOps engineer in the Entain Trading Solutions team, operating hundreds of Kubernetes nodes in the cloud using IaC tooling, chaos engineering testing tools and end to end monitoring. His main responsibility is operational reliability, keeping the platform resilient and available, and above all developer-proof.

Day Two Cloud 098: Cloud Centers Of Excellence – Should You Have One?

A fractured cloud strategy causes headaches such as duplicated services, unnecessary costs, poor security controls, and other problems. A cloud center of excellence can reduce the pain by developing and championing best practices, socializing adoption, and addressing inevitable exceptions. Fred Chagnon visits the Day Two Cloud podcast to advocate for building a cloud center of excellence in your org.
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