Day Two Cloud 113: Multi-Cloud Network Visibility And Automation With Aviatrix (Sponsored)

Today's Day Two Cloud episode dives into multi-cloud networking with sponsor Aviatrix. Aviatrix offers a cloud network platform with a common data plane and operational model that works across public clouds and supports visibility and automation. We dig into the product with Aviatrix guests and a customer.

The post Day Two Cloud 113: Multi-Cloud Network Visibility And Automation With Aviatrix (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Hybrid Disk/Flash Storage Isn’t New, But It Is Getting Better

Five years ago, Western Digital, known for its hard disk drive (HDD) storage technologies, doled out $19 billion in cash and stock for SanDisk and its solid state drive (SDD) product portfolio, giving it deep expertise in the non-volatile flash memory space at a time when enterprises were looking for expanded storage options in the wake of the rise of the cloud and the edge. …

Hybrid Disk/Flash Storage Isn’t New, But It Is Getting Better was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Will Intel’s new desktop-CPU design come to its Xeon server chips?

As part of its Architecture Day, Intel spent a lot of time discussing its next generation PC microprocessor microarchitecture, Alder Lake, which marks a radical change for Intel. The question for us in the data center is will the design make its way to the server? If past is prologue, then yes, in time.Alder Lake is due later this fall in three versions: desktop, mobile, and ultra portable. It will come with up to 16 cores and 24 threads and support for PCI Express 5 and DDR5 memory plus other features.Now see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI" Here’s where it gets interesting. The desktop part with 16 cores is actually a split between eight performance cores—P-Cores—and eight efficiency cores—E-Cores. The mobile and ultra-mobile parts also use this dual-core design but with fewer cores. The P-Core is for compute tasks, while the E-Core is assigned background tasks like email syncing and antivirus checks. This is hardly a new idea. Arm has done this for years with its big.LITTLE core designs.To read this article in full, please click here

Will Intel’s new desktop-CPU design come to its Xeon server chips?

As part of its Architecture Day, Intel spent a lot of time discussing its next generation PC microprocessor microarchitecture, Alder Lake, which marks a radical change for Intel. The question for us in the data center is will the design make its way to the server? If past is prologue, then yes, in time.Alder Lake is due later this fall in three versions: desktop, mobile, and ultra portable. It will come with up to 16 cores and 24 threads and support for PCI Express 5 and DDR5 memory plus other features.Now see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI" Here’s where it gets interesting. The desktop part with 16 cores is actually a split between eight performance cores—P-Cores—and eight efficiency cores—E-Cores. The mobile and ultra-mobile parts also use this dual-core design but with fewer cores. The P-Core is for compute tasks, while the E-Core is assigned background tasks like email syncing and antivirus checks. This is hardly a new idea. Arm has done this for years with its big.LITTLE core designs.To read this article in full, please click here

Wi-Fi 7 is coming, and Intel makes it sound great

Wi-Fi has been with us since 1997, predating Google, the iPhone, and robotic vacuum cleaners. It’s basically a legacy technology! Wi-Fi resources Test and review of 4 Wi-Fi 6 routers: Who’s the fastest? How to determine if Wi-Fi 6 is right for you Five questions to answer before deploying Wi-Fi 6 Wi-Fi 6E: When it’s coming and what it’s good for Despite its maturity, Wi-Fi is always evolving to meet the needs of consumers and enterprises. There have been eight versions of the Wi-Fi network protocol, with the latest (Wi-Fi 6 or, to use its “street name,” 802.11ax) being released in 2019. Each iteration has been faster and more reliable than its predecessor, a comforting trend. Three-and-a-half generations (Wi-Fi 4, Wi-Fi 5, and Wi-Fi 6 and 6E) currently are in use.To read this article in full, please click here

MikroTik RouterOS Advanced Configuration

In the previous tutorial, we installed and configured a brand new MikroTik hAP ac³ router for connection to the Internet. We also improved the overall security of the router by implementing simple steps to harden it. These include things like disabling unused services, enabling HTTPS for device management, updating RouterOS, and reconfiguring the firewall rules. […]
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netlab Python Package and Unified CLI

One of the major challenges of using netsim-tools (now renamed to netlab) was the installation process – pull the code from GitHub, install the prerequisites, set up search paths… I knew how to fix it (turn the whole thing into a Python package) but I was always too busy to open that enormous can of worms.

That omission got fixed; netlab is now available on PyPI and installed with pip3 install networklab.

Read more …

netsim-tools: Python Package and Unified CLI

One of the major challenges of using netsim-tools was the installation process – pull the code from GitHub, install the prerequisites, set up search paths… I knew how to fix it (turn the whole thing into a Python package) but I was always too busy to open that enormous can of worms.

That omission got fixed in summer 2021; netsim-tools is now available on PyPI and installed with pip3 install netsim-tools.

Read more …

Calico integration with WireGuard using kOps

It has been a while since I have been excited to write about encrypted tunnels. It might be the sheer pain of troubleshooting old technologies, or countless hours of falling down the rabbit hole of a project’s source code, that always motivated me to pursue a better alternative (without much luck). However, I believe luck is finally on my side.

In this blog post we will explore using open-source WireGuard, a new technology that offers encrypted tunnels with remarkable performance and an effortless implementation, to establish secure encrypted tunnels between workloads in K8s clusters.

 

Introduction: WireGuard

With the release of open-source Calico 3.14 back in June of 2020, Tigera announced a tech preview of its WireGuard integration, which allows node-to-node traffic to be encrypted using WireGuard.

Other encryption methods (e.g. TLS) were available to encrypt workloads’ traffic at higher TCP/IP layers (in this case, the Application Layer). However, WireGuard targets traffic at a lower layer (the Transport Layer), which makes it effective for a wider range of applications, and also reduces complexity for the user.

WireGuard is an open-source project that implements virtual private network (VPN) techniques to establish secure point-to-point connections leveraging Linux Continue reading

Netdev 0x15


The recent Netdev 0x15 conference included a number of papers diving into the technology behind Linux as a network operating system. Slides and videos are now available on the conference web site.
Network wide visibility with Linux networking and sFlow describes the Linux switchdev driver used to integrate network hardware with Linux. The talk focuses on network telemetry, showing how standard Linux APIs are used to configure hardware instrumentation and stream telemetry using the industry standard sFlow protocol for data center wide visibility.
Switchdev in the wild describes Yandex's experience of deploying Linux switchdev based switches in production at scale. The diagram from the talk shows the three layer leaf and spine network architecture used in their data centers. Yandex operates multiple data centers, each containing up to 100,000 servers.
Switchdev Offload Workshop provides updates about the latest developments in the switchdev community. 
FRR Workshop discusses the latest development in the FRRouting project, the open source routing software that is now a defacto standard on Linux network operating systems.

Intel’s Best DPU Will Be Commercially Available — Someday

UPDATE: One of the reasons why Intel spent $16.7 billion to acquire FPGA maker Altera six years ago was because it was convinced that its onload model — where big parts of the storage and networking stack were running on CPUs — was going to go out of favor and that companies would want to offload this work to network interface cards with lots of their own much cheaper and much more energy efficient processing. …

Intel’s Best DPU Will Be Commercially Available — Someday was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

gRPC: A Deep Dive into the Communication Pattern

Danesh Kuruppu is a technical lead at WSO2, with expertise in microservices, messaging protocols and service governance. Danesh has spearheaded development of Ballerina’s standard libraries including gRPC, data and microservices framework. He has co-authored 'gRPC Up and Running' published by O’Reilly media. If you have built gRPC applications and know about the communication fundamentals, you may already know there are four fundamental communication patterns used in gRPC-based applications: simple RPC, server-side streaming, client-side streaming and bidirectional streaming. In this article, I dive deeper into these communication patterns and discuss the importance of each pattern as well as how to pick the right one, according to the use case. Before I discuss each pattern, I’ll discuss what they have in common, such as how gRPC sends messages between clients and servers over the network and how request/response messages are structured. gRPC over HTTP/2 According to official documentation, the gRPC core supports different transport protocols; however, HTTP/2 is the most common among them. In HTTP/2, communication between a client and a server happens through a single TCP connection. Within the connection, there can be multiple bidirectional flows of bytes, which are called streams. In gRPC terms, one RPC call is mapped to Continue reading

The Best Technologists First Try To Solve Their Own Problems

Every once in a while, I get questions from random internet folks who want me to do their homework for them. They want me to provide them with detailed technical information, solve their complex design problem, or curate content on a difficult topic so that they don’t have to do the sifting.

While I like to help folks out as much as anyone (and often do), I usually ignore these sorts of questions. Why? Partly, I don’t have enough time to fix the internet. Partly, I like to get paid for consulting. But more importantly, the best technologists first try to solve their own problems.

A Manager’s Perspective

When interviewing candidates for technical positions, one of my questions is, “If you run into a problem you’ve never faced before, how do you solve it?” There are two typical answers.

  1. “I’ll ask someone else for help. Probably you.”
  2. “I’ll search the internet, company wiki, and product documentation. I’ll set up a lab. If I’m still stuck, I’ll ask for help.”

I prefer to hire a person who first tries to figure things out. While I want neither a cowboy nor science experiments making their way into production, I Continue reading

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