Is Sticking With A Networking Vendor As Risky As Changing?

The networking industry has had a bumper crop of startup companies including a few unicorns, new and novel solutions, and fresh standards-driven tech in the last decade. There’s been enough churn that you’d think the landscape would be unrecognizable from what it was ten years back. And yet, a dominant vendor supplying networks to enterprises remains Cisco.

Data networking folks sometimes wonder why Cisco remains such a dominant force after all these years. With all the churn in the industry, with all the fancy new products, companies and approaches, with the cloud changing how computing is done, and with software eating the world, there are many more options than Cisco to meet networking needs. Of course, Cisco has always had competition. Cisco’s never gotten 100% of the pie, but, depending on market segment, there’s rarely been a second juggernaut in the enterprise networking space. The choice has typically been between Cisco and everyone else.

But in 2021, the networking market is increasingly fragmented with more startups than I’ve even heard of chasing after slivers of the diverse networking pie. Sure, that impacts Cisco. Still, Cisco tends to dominate, even if their share isn’t quite what it was depending on which Continue reading

Achieving Application Resiliency via VMware Tanzu Service Mesh and AWS Route 53

Service Mesh is quickly becoming a fact of life for modern apps, and many companies are choosing this method for their distributed micro-services communications. While most examples of service mesh focus only on the east-west aspect of app services communications and security, Tanzu Service Mesh aims at including the entire application transaction which includes both east-west as well as north-south communications in the mesh.

In previous blogs and articles (here and here ), we dug into the core construct of the system, called Global Namespace (GNS). GNS is the instantiation of application connectivity patterns and services. In the case we are describing here, one of these services consists of “northbound” access to the application in a resilient configuration through integration with a Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) solution. In the current version of the service, we support the following integrations:

  1. VMware NSX-ALB (aka avi networks) – VMware’s own complete software load balancing solution.
  2. AWS Route 53 – AWS DNS service providing GSLB services for resiliency. This is useful for customers who do not own NSX-ALB.

In this first blog, we’ll describe how the solution works with AWS Route 53 and how to configure it. In a later post, we’ll Continue reading

How Has COVID-19 Impacted Regional Internet Ecosystems?

One year into the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses and work are still online while the pressure on Internet ecosystems remains unprecedented. This has put the question of Internet resilience to the fore. As networks continue to struggle to cope with traffic spikes and connectivity hiccups, we examine how COVID-19 impacted some regional Internet ecosystems in 2020. […]

The post How Has COVID-19 Impacted Regional Internet Ecosystems? appeared first on Internet Society.

Calico Enterprise enables live view of cloud-native apps deployed in Kubernetes

We are happy to announce that the latest release of Calico Enterprise delivers unprecedented levels of Kubernetes observability! Calico Enterprise 3.5 provides full-stack observability across the entire Kubernetes environment, from application layer to networking layer.

With this new release, developers, DevOps, SREs, and platform owners get:

  • A live, high-fidelity view of microservices and workload interactions in the environment, with the ability to take corrective actions in real time
  • An easy-to-understand, action-oriented view that maintains correlations at the service, deployment, container, node, pod, network, and packet levels
  • Kubernetes context for easy filtering and subsequent analysis of traffic payloads
  • A Dynamic Service Graph representing traffic between namespaces, microservices, and deployments for faster problem identification and troubleshooting
  • An interactive display that shows DNS information categorized by microservices and workloads, to determine whether DNS is the root cause of application connectivity issues
  • The ability to customize the duration and packet size for packet capture
  • Application-level observability to detect and prevent anomalous behaviors

For more information, see our official press release.

Are you a Calico Cloud user? Not to worry—these same features are now available in Calico Cloud, too.

To learn more about new cloud-native approaches for establishing security and observability with Kubernetes, check Continue reading

Final Results of the 2021 Internet Society Board of Trustees Elections and IETF Selections

ISOC Logo

The Internet Society Elections Committee is pleased to announce the final results of the 2021 elections and the IETF selections for the Internet Society Board of Trustees. Voting concluded on 23 April. The results were announced to the voting communities and the challenge period was opened on 26 April. The deadline to file challenges was […]

The post Final Results of the 2021 Internet Society Board of Trustees Elections and IETF Selections appeared first on Internet Society.

Community Rooms at DockerCon LIVE 2021

The Docker community spans the four corners of the world. To celebrate the global nature of our community at DockerCon this year, we’ve created something new: Community Rooms.

Building on the learnings of our “regional rooms experiment” during our last Community All-Hands, Community Rooms are virtual spaces that DockerCon attendees will be able to join to discuss, share and learn about Docker in their own language and/or around a specific topic area. 

100% LIVE

The main focus of these Community Rooms is to bring people together and encourage interaction so we have set them up to be 100% live. Yep, that’s right, all the content you’ll find in these rooms, whether they’re talks, demos, workshops, panel discussions etc. will be in real-time, all broadcast over a live Zoom link. 

Hosted by the Community for the Community

Each Community Room will be overseen by Docker Captains and Community Leaders. They will be responsible for every aspect of the room, from the curation of content, to the management of the schedule, to the recruitment of the speakers, to the moderation of their room’s live chat. 

There will be seven community rooms to choose from, each with one or Continue reading

Cisco adds to its Catalyst software stack for back-to-work safety

Cisco has taken the wraps off a technology package it says will utilize existing core wireless and wired systems to help enterprises better control their physical environments and enable a safer, more secure return to the office.While supporting remote offices and branches of one—IDC says that post-COVID, more than 52% of workers will either remain remote or hybrid—they rest could return to an altered business space.  Who’s selling SASE, and what do you get? In these offices, sensors and devices that have been used to manage lighting and HVAC systems can be adapted to occupancy and density monitoring, air-quality testing, contact tracing, and in-room presence, according to Anoop Vetteth, vice president of product management with Cisco’s Enterprise Switching and Software Solutions group.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco adds to its Catalyst software stack for back-to-work safety

Cisco has taken the wraps off a technology package it says will utilize existing core wireless and wired systems to help enterprises better control their physical environments and enable a safer, more secure return to the office.While supporting remote offices and branches of one—IDC says that post-COVID, more than 52% of workers will either remain remote or hybrid—they rest could return to an altered business space.  Who’s selling SASE, and what do you get? In these offices, sensors and devices that have been used to manage lighting and HVAC systems can be adapted to occupancy and density monitoring, air-quality testing, contact tracing, and in-room presence, according to Anoop Vetteth, vice president of product management with Cisco’s Enterprise Switching and Software Solutions group.To read this article in full, please click here

Segment Routing Segment IDs and MPLS Labels

In one of my introductory Segment Routing videos, I made claims along the lines of “Segment Routing totally simplifies the MPLS control plane, replacing LDP and local labels allocated to various prefixes with globally managed labels advertised in IGP”

It took two years for someone to realize the stupidity over-simplification of what I described. Matjaž Strauss sent me this kind summary of my errors:

You’re effectively claiming that SRGB has to be the same across all devices in the network. That’s not true; routers advertise SIDs and must configure label swap operations in case SRGBs don’t match.

Wait, what? What is SRGB and why could it be different across devices in the same network? Also, trust IETF to take a simple idea and complicate it to support vendor whims.

Read more …

Segment Routing Segment IDs and MPLS Labels

In one of my introductory Segment Routing videos, I made claims along the lines of “Segment Routing totally simplifies the MPLS control plane, replacing LDP and local labels allocated to various prefixes with globally managed labels advertised in IGP”

It took two years for someone to realize the stupidity over-simplification of what I described. Matjaž Strauss sent me this kind summary of my errors:

You’re effectively claiming that SRGB has to be the same across all devices in the network. That’s not true; routers advertise SIDs and must configure label swap operations in case SRGBs don’t match.

Wait, what? What is SRGB and why could it be different across devices in the same network? Also, trust IETF to take a simple idea and complicate it to support vendor whims.

Read more …

9 tips for speeding up your business Wi-Fi

The days are long past when a fast office Wi-Fi connection was a nice-to-have. These days it's essential for your business to provide clients and employees alike with a speedy, reliable wireless network.<aside class="sidebar medium"><h3 class="body">Wi-Fi resources</h3><ul><li><a href="https://www.networkworld.com/article/3541759/test-and-review-of-4-wi-fi-6-routers-whos-the-fastest.html"> Test and review of 4 Wi-Fi 6 routers: Who’s the fastest?</a></li><li><a href="https://www.networkworld.com/article/3356838/how-to-determine-if-wi-fi-6-is-right-for-you.html"> How to determine if Wi-Fi 6 is right for you</a></li><li><a href="https://www.networkworld.com/article/3510461/5-questions-to-answer-before-deploying-wi-fi-6.html">Five questions to answer before deploying Wi-Fi 6</a></li><li><a href="https://www.networkworld.com/article/3563832/wi-fi-6e-when-its-coming-and-what-its-good-for.html"> Wi-Fi 6E: When it’s coming and what it’s good for</a></li></ul></aside>To read this article in full, please click here

Ambiguity and complexity: once more into the breach

Recent research into the text of RFCs versus the security of the protocols described came to this conclusion—

While not conclusive, this suggests that there may be some correlation between the level of ambiguity in RFCs and subsequent implementation security flaws.

This should come as no surprise to network engineers—after all, complexity is the enemy of security. Beyond the novel ways the authors use to understand the shape of the world of RFCs (you should really read the paper; it’s really interesting), this desire to increase security by decreasing the ambiguity of specifications is fascinating. We often think that writing better specifications requires having better requirements, but down this path only lies despair.

Better requirements are the one thing a network engineer can never really hope for.

It’s not just that networks are often used as a sort of “complexity sink,” the place where every hard problem goes to be solved. It’s also the uncertainty of the environment in which the network must operate. What new application will be stuffed on top of the network this week? Will anyone tell the network folks about this new application, or just open a ticket when it doesn’t work right? What about all Continue reading

Cisco 8000 Series routers


Cisco 8000 Series routers are "400G optimized platforms that scale from 10.8 Tbps to 260 Tbps." The routers are built around Cisco Silicon One™ ASICs. The Silicon One ASIC includes the instrumentation needed to support industry standard sFlow real-time streaming telemetry.
Note: The Cisco 8000 Series routers also support Cisco Netflow. Rapidly detecting large flows, sFlow vs. NetFlow/IPFIX describes why you should choose sFlow if you are interested in real-time monitoring and control applications.
The following commands configure a Cisco 8000 series router to sample packets at 1-in-20,000 and stream telemetry to an sFlow analyzer (192.127.0.1) on UDP port 6343.
flow exporter-map SF-EXP-MAP-1
 version sflow v5
 !
 packet-length 1468
 transport udp 6343
 source GigabitEthernet0/0/0/1
 destination 192.127.0.1
 dfbit set
!

Configure the sFlow analyzer address in an exporter-map.

flow monitor-map SF-MON-MAP
 record sflow
 sflow options
  extended-router
  extended-gateway
  if-counters polling-interval 300
  input ifindex physical
  output ifindex physical
 !
 exporter SF-EXP-MAP-1
!

Configure sFlow options in a monitor-map.

sampler-map SF-SAMP-MAP
 random 1 out-of 20000
!

Define the sampling rate in a sampler-map.

interface GigabitEthernet0/0/0/3
 flow datalinkframesection monitor-map SF-MON-MAP sampler SF-SAMP-MAP ingress

Enable sFlow on each interface for complete visibilty into network traffic.

The above configuration instructions are for IOS-XR. Continue reading

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