HS117: Environmental, Social and Governance Initiatives: What That Means for Your Organization (Sponsored)

Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) initiatives aren’t just “the right thing to do”, they can also save companies real dollars, particularly if they’re investing in data centers and other infrastructure. Join Jonathan Ciccio, Continuous Improvement Manager for The Siemon Company, as we discuss The Siemon Company’s ESG initiatives. The Siemon Company has been in business for... Read more »

Multi-Pod EVPN Troubleshooting: Fixing Next Hops

Last month, I wrote about the specifics of troubleshooting multi-pod EVPN designs. Today, I’d like to start a journey through an example in which (channeling my inner CCIE preparation lab instructor) I broke as many things as I could think of.

Here’s the lab topology we’ll use (and as usual, the corresponding netlab topology file and device configurations are on GitHub). Our network has two sites (pods), each with a spine switch, a leaf switch, and a host attached to the leaf switch. The inter-pod link is connected to the spine switches to minimize the number of devices.

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Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025

On 18 November 2025 at 11:20 UTC (all times in this blog are UTC), Cloudflare's network began experiencing significant failures to deliver core network traffic. This showed up to Internet users trying to access our customers' sites as an error page indicating a failure within Cloudflare's network.

The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems' permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network.

The software running on these machines to route traffic across our network reads this feature file to keep our Bot Management system up to date with ever changing threats. The software had a limit on the size of the feature file that was below its doubled size. That caused the software to fail.

After we initially wrongly suspected the symptoms we were seeing were caused by a hyper-scale DDoS attack, we correctly identified the core issue and were able Continue reading

Tech Bytes: Monitoring AI Agents and MCP Servers with Cisco ThousandEyes (Sponsored)

If you’re building, testing, or using AI agents and services, how can you get network visibility into, and ensure performance of, these tools? On today’s Tech Bytes podcast, we talk with sponsor Cisco ThousandEyes  about how to monitor and measure performance of AI agents, AI models and services, and Model Context Protocol servers. We’ll get... Read more »

UET Data Transfer Operation: Introduction

Introduction

[Updated 22 November 2025: Handoff Section]

The previous chapter described how an application gathers information about available hardware resources and uses that information to initialize the job environment. During this initialization, hardware resources are abstracted and made accessible to the UET provider as objects.

This chapter explains the data transport process, using gradient synchronization as an example.

Figure 5-1 depicts two GPUs—Rank 0 and Rank 2—participating in the same training job (JobID: 101). Both GPUs belong to the same NCCL topology and are connected to the Scale-Out Backend Network’s rail0.

Because the training model is large, each layer of neural network is split across two GPUs using tensor parallelism, meaning that the computations of a single layer are distributed between GPUs. 

During the first forward-pass training iteration, the predicted model output does not match the expected result. This triggers the backward pass process, in which gradients—values indicating how much each weight parameter should be adjusted to improve the next forward-pass prediction—are computed.

Rank 0 computes its gradients, which in Figure 5-1 are stored as a 2D matrix with 3 rows and 1024 columns. The results are stored in a memory space registered for the process in local VRAM. Continue reading

Replicate is joining Cloudflare

We have some big news to share today: Replicate, the leading platform for running AI models, is joining Cloudflare.

We first started talking to Replicate because we shared a lot in common beyond just a passion for bright color palettes. Our mission for Cloudflare’s Workers developer platform has been to make building and deploying full-stack applications as easy as possible. Meanwhile, Replicate has been on a similar mission to make deploying AI models as easy as writing a single line of code. And we realized we could build something even better together by integrating the Replicate platform into Cloudflare directly.

We are excited to share this news and even more excited for what it will mean for customers. Bringing Replicate’s tools into Cloudflare will continue to make our Developer Platform the best place on the Internet to build and deploy any AI or agentic workflow.

What does this mean for you? 

Before we spend more time talking about the future of AI, we want to answer the questions that are top of mind for Replicate and Cloudflare users. In short: 

For existing Replicate users: Your APIs and workflows will continue to work without interruption. You will soon benefit from the Continue reading

AI Enshittification: Swiss Airlines Edition

Remember the vendor consultants who persuasively told you how to use their gear to build a disaster recovery solution with stretched VLANs, even though the only disaster recovery they ever experienced was the frantic attempt to restart their PowerPoint slide deck? Fortunately, I was only involved in the aftermath of their activity when the laws of physics reasserted themselves, and I helped the poor victims rearchitect their network into a somewhat saner state.

There’s another batch of snake-oil salesmen consultants peddling their warez to the gullible incompetent managers: the AI preachers promising reduction in support costs. Like the other group of consultants, they have never worked in support and have never implemented a working AI solution in their lives, but that never bothered them or their audience.

Unfortunately, this time I had the unfortunate “privilege” of having the painful front-row seat.

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SC25: SDSC Expanse cluster live AI/ML metrics

The SDSC Expanse cluster live AI/ML metrics dashboard is a joint InMon / San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) demonstration at The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC25) conference being held this week in St. Louis, November 16-21. Click on the dashboard link during the show to see live traffic.

By default, the dashboard shows the Last 24 Hours of traffic. Explore the data: select Last 30 Days to get a long term view, select Last 5 Minutes to get an up to the second view, click on items in a chart legend to show selected metric, drag to select an interval and zoom in.

The Expanse cluster at the San Diego Supercomputer Center is a batch-oriented science computing gateway serving thousands of users and a wide range of research projects, see Google News for examples.

The SDSC Expanse cluster live AI/ML metrics dashboard displays real-time metrics for workloads running on the cluster:

  • Total Traffic Total traffic entering fabric
  • Cluster Services Traffic associated with Lustre, Ceph and NFS storage, and Slurm workload management
  • Core Link Traffic Histogram of load on fabric links
  • Edge Link Traffic Histogram of load on access ports
  • RDMA Operations Total RDMA operations
  • Continue reading

Worth Reading 111425


An Autonomous System (AS) can protect itself against DDoS attacks by rerouting incoming DDoS traffic through a ‘DDoS scrubber’, a process that is typically implemented using the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). While BGP-based scrubbing is a useful service, its adoption on the global Internet is unknown.


Until recently, many professionals, including many doctors, thought they needed to become more machine-like to keep their jobs. Such worry contributed to the specialization trend of the last century.


In an era of growing cyber threats, traditional defensive measures can be insufficient in the face of sophisticated or novel tactics. As a result, the question of whether private or public entities should engage in active defense or offensive “hack back” tactics has taken on greater urgency.


In this episode of PING, APNIC Chief Scientist Geoff Huston explores the complex landscape of undersea cables.


By 1990 it was clear that IP had a problem. It was still a tiny Internet at the time, but the growth patterns were exponential, doubling in size every 12 months. We were stressing out the pool of Class B IPv4 addresses and in the absence of any corrective measures this address pool would be fully depleted in 1994.

Worth Reading 111225

If you’re using IP address truncation thinking it makes data “anonymous” or “non-personal,” you’re creating a false sense of security.


With distressingly typical Silicon Valley fake-it-till-you make-it bravado, LLM creators have been telling investors that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is just around the corner (or has already been achieved!). The problem the promoters blithely ignore is that LLMs do not know how the words they input and output relate to the real world.


Many organizations rushing to cut staff in the name of AI efficiency are expected to quietly rehire those roles – often “offshore or at lower salary.”


While Silicon Valley is investing tens of billions of dollars chasing the artificial general intelligence dream, academic computing research in the U.S. is facing a severe drought.


There are two competing forces in IT, and they are at play during the GenAI era as much as they have ever been during prior eras in the datacenter.

Using netlab for Classroom Training with Sander Steffann

In March 2024, I received my first PR from an airplane: Sander Steffann was flying to South Africa to deliver an Ansible training and fixed a minor annoyance in the then-new multilab feature.

Of course, I wanted to know more about his setup, but it took us over a year and a half till we managed to sit down (virtually) and chat about it, the state of IPv6, the impact of CG-NAT on fraud prevention, and why digital twins don’t make sense in large datacenter migrations.

For more details, listen to Episode 202 of Software Gone Wild.

Listen to the podcast

Hedge 288: Loneliness

Sometimes we just like to talk about “life issues” as they relate to network engineering and technology career fields. Loneliness seems to especially plague network engineering and other “small” IT fields, where communities are small, change is rapid, and stress is high. Loneliness expert Lucy Rose joins Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ to discuss loneliness.

Check out the Cost of Loneliness here.

download

How We Measure: IPv6

At APNIC Labs we publish a number of measurements of the deployment of various technologies that are being adopted on the Internet. Here I will look at how we measure the adoption of IPv6.

Finding the grain of sand in a heap of Salt

How do you find the root cause of a configuration management failure when you have a peak of hundreds of changes in 15 minutes on thousands of servers?

That was the challenge we faced as we built the infrastructure to reduce release delays due to failures of Salt, a configuration management tool. (We eventually reduced such failures on the edge by over 5%, as we’ll explain below.) We’ll explore the fundamentals of Salt, and how it is used at Cloudflare. We then describe the common failure modes and how they delay our ability to release valuable changes to serve our customers.

By first solving an architectural problem, we provided the foundation for self-service mechanisms to find the root cause of Salt failures on servers, datacenters and groups of datacenters. This system is able to correlate failures with git commits, external service failures and ad hoc releases. The result of this has been a reduction in the duration of software release delays, and an overall reduction in toilsome, repetitive triage for SRE.

To start, we will go into the basics of the Cloudflare network and how Salt operates within it. And then we’ll get to how we solved the challenge Continue reading

netlab 25.11: SRv6 on IOS/XE, Streamlined Graphs and Reports

I managed to push out netlab release 25.11 yesterday. Here are the highlights:

  • SRv6 on IOS/XE. It works with Catalyst 8000v, IOL, and IOL layer-2 image, and can be used to build L3VPNs (the IOS/XE image I have supports no other service on top of SRv6)
  • RIPv2/RIPng on OpenBSD
  • A more streamlined way to create reports and graphs
  • The netlab graph command creates the SVG/PNG/JPEG/PDF graph instead of a graph description file if you’ve installed D2/Graphviz on your system.

We also had to make a few potentially-breaking changes, fixed a bunch of bugs, and added over a dozen small improvements.

You’ll find all the details in the release notes.

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