Heavy Networking 563: Automating Documentation With Ansible, Genie, And Jinja2
On today’s Heavy Networking, we explore how to get network data you reference all the time and store it in a CSV using Ansible, the Genie parser, and Jinja2. Our guide for how to assemble these gears and get them cranking is John Capobianco, automation maven and Sr. IT Planner and Integrator for the House of Commons in the Canadian Parliament.
The post Heavy Networking 563: Automating Documentation With Ansible, Genie, And Jinja2 appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Engineering dependability and fault tolerance in a distributed system
This is a guest post by Paddy Byers, Co-founder and CTO at Ably, a realtime data delivery platform. You can view the original article on Ably's blog.
Users need to know that they can depend on the service that is provided to them. In practice, because from time to time individual elements will inevitably fail, this means you have to be able to continue in spite of those failures.
In this article, we discuss the concepts of dependability and fault tolerance in detail and explain how the Ably platform is designed with fault tolerant approaches to uphold its dependability guarantees.
As a basis for that discussion, first some definitions:
Dependability
The degree to which a product or service can be relied upon. Availability and Reliability are forms of dependability.
Availability
The degree to which a product or service is available for use when required. This often boils down to provisioning sufficient redundancy of resources with statistically independent failures.
Reliability
The degree to which the product or service conforms to its specification when in use. This means a system that is not merely available but is also engineered with extensive redundant measures to continue to work as its Continue reading
Tech Field Day Changed My Life
It’s amazing to me that it’s been ten years since I attended by first Tech Field Day event. I remember being excited to be invited to Tech Field Day 5 and then having to rush out of town a day early to beat a blizzard to be able to attend. Given that we just went through another blizzard here I thought the timing was appropriate.
How did attending an industry event change my life? How could something with only a dozen people over a couple of days change the way I looked at my career? I know I’ve mentioned parts of this to people in the past but I feel like it’s important to talk about how each piece of the puzzle built on the rest to get me to where I am today.
Voices Carry
The first thing Tech Field Day did to change my life was to show me that I mattered. I grew up in a very small town and spent most of my formative school years being bored. The Internet didn’t exist in a usable form for me. I devoured information wherever I could find it. And I languished as I realized that I needed more Continue reading
Using HPKE to Encrypt Request Payloads
The Managed Rules team was recently given the task of allowing Enterprise users to debug Firewall Rules by viewing the part of a request that matched the rule. This makes it easier to determine what specific attacks a rule is stopping or why a request was a false positive, and what possible refinements of a rule could improve it.
The fundamental problem, though, was how to securely store this debugging data as it may contain sensitive data such as personally identifiable information from submissions, cookies, and other parts of the request. We needed to store this data in such a way that only the user who is allowed to access it can do so. Even Cloudflare shouldn't be able to see the data, following our philosophy that any personally identifiable information that passes through our network is a toxic asset.
This means we needed to encrypt the data in such a way that we can allow the user to decrypt it, but not Cloudflare. This means public key encryption.
Now we needed to decide on which encryption algorithm to use. We came up with some questions to help us evaluate which one to use:
- What requirements do we have for Continue reading
How Software Defined Packet Brokers Can Improve Network Observability
Network Packet Brokers (NPBs) can be valuable in improving network visibility and observability for both network operations (NetOps) and security...
The post How Software Defined Packet Brokers Can Improve Network Observability appeared first on Pluribus Networks.
Podcast: State of Networking (Early 2021)
In January, Jason Edelman kindly invited me for a chat about the state of (software defined) networking and network automation in particular. The recording was recently published on Network Collective.
Podcast: State of Networking (Early 2021)
In January, Jason Edelman kindly invited me for a chat about the state of (software defined) networking and network automation in particular. The recording was recently published on Network Collective.
The Founder Of CentOS Is Building The Next Platform
Greg Kurtzer, one of the co-founders of the CentOS Linux distribution, the creator of the Singularity container environment for HPC workloads, the founder of the new Rocky Linux distribution that seeks to replace the now defunct CentOS, and an HPC guru in his own right, is on a mission. …
The Founder Of CentOS Is Building The Next Platform was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Introducing: Smarter Tiered Cache Topology Generation
Caching is a magic trick. Instead of a customer’s origin responding to every request, Cloudflare’s 200+ data centers around the world respond with content that is cached geographically close to visitors. This dramatically improves the load performance for web pages while decreasing the bandwidth costs by having Cloudflare respond to a request with cached content.
However, if content is not in cache, Cloudflare data centers must contact the origin server to receive the content. This isn’t as fast as delivering content from cache. It also places load on an origin server, and is more costly compared to serving directly from cache. These issues can be amplified depending on the geographic distribution of a website’s visitors, the number of data centers contacting the origin, and the available origin resources for responding to requests.
To decrease the number of times our network of data centers communicate with an origin, we organize data centers into tiers so that only upper-tier data centers can request content from an origin and then they spread content to lower tiers. This means content that loads faster for visitors, is cheaper to serve, and reduces origin resource consumption.
Today, I’m thrilled to announce a fundamental improvement to Argo Continue reading
Tiered Cache Smart Topology
A few years ago, we released Argo to help make the Internet faster and more efficient. Argo observes network conditions and finds the optimal route across the Internet for origin server requests, avoiding congestion along the way.
Tiered Cache is an Argo feature that reduces the number of data centers responsible for requesting assets from the origin. With Tiered Cache active, a request in South Africa won’t go directly to an origin in North America, but, instead, look in a large, nearby data center to see if the data requested is cached there first. The number and location of the data centers used by Tiered Cache is controlled by a piece of configuration called the topology. By default, we use a generic topology for every customer that strikes a balance between cache hit ratios and latency that is suitable for most users.
Today we’re introducing Smart Topology, which maximizes cache hit ratios by building on Argo’s internal infrastructure to identify the single best data center for making requests to the origin.
Standard Cache
The standard method for caching assets is to let each data center be a reverse proxy for the origin server. In this scheme, a miss in any Continue reading
How to fix Wi-Fi interference
Since Wi-Fi transmits over the airwaves, it’s of course much more susceptible to interference than the wired network. There can be interference from your own network or neighbor's, non-Wi-Fi wireless devices, microwaves, and even radar systems. Because there are so many possibilities, tracking down or fixing the interference can be quite a task, but knowing where to start can help.
The symptoms of interference issues can easily be mistaken for symptoms of other, more apparent problems such as poor Wi-Fi coverage. If so, maybe you blindly add more access points (AP) and, not knowing that you already had interference, that can actually cause more interference. So, try to find the root causes of any symptoms and be very intentional about the changes you make.
How to fix Wi-Fi interference
Since Wi-Fi transmits over the airwaves, it’s of course much more susceptible to interference than the wired network. There can be interference from your own network or neighbor's, non-Wi-Fi wireless devices, microwaves, and even radar systems. Because there are so many possibilities, tracking down or fixing the interference can be quite a task, but knowing where to start can help.
The symptoms of interference issues can easily be mistaken for symptoms of other, more apparent problems such as poor Wi-Fi coverage. If so, maybe you blindly add more access points (AP) and, not knowing that you already had interference, that can actually cause more interference. So, try to find the root causes of any symptoms and be very intentional about the changes you make.
How to fix Wi-Fi interference
Since Wi-Fi transmits over the airwaves, it’s of course much more susceptible to interference than the wired network. There can be interference from your own network or neighbor's, non-Wi-Fi wireless devices, microwaves, and even radar systems. Because there are so many possibilities, tracking down or fixing the interference can be quite a task, but knowing where to start can help.
The symptoms of interference issues can easily be mistaken for symptoms of other, more apparent problems such as poor Wi-Fi coverage. If so, maybe you blindly add more access points (AP) and, not knowing that you already had interference, that can actually cause more interference. So, try to find the root causes of any symptoms and be very intentional about the changes you make.