A deep-dive into Cloudflare’s autonomous edge DDoS protection

Today, I’m excited to talk about our autonomous DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection system. This system has been deployed globally to all of our 200+ data centers and actively protects all our customers against DDoS attacks across layers 3 to 7 (in the OSI model) without requiring any human intervention. As part of our unmetered DDoS protection commitment, we won’t charge a customer more just because they got hit by a DDoS.

Autonomous protection the edge

To protect our customers quickly and with precision against DDoS attacks, we built an autonomous edge detection and mitigation system that can make decisions on its own without seeking a centralized consensus. It is completely software-defined and runs on our edge on commodity servers. It’s powered by our denial of service daemon (dosd) which originally went live in mid-2019 for protection against L3/4 DDoS attacks. Since then, we’ve been investing in enhancing and improving its capabilities to stay ahead of attackers and to disrupt the economics of attacks. The latest set of improvements have expanded our edge mitigation component to protect against L7 attacks in addition to L3/4.

This system runs on every single server in all our edge Continue reading

Announcing the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Certified Ansible Collection

Today we're thrilled to announce that the RHEL System Roles Collection is now certified with Ansible Automation Platform and is being delivered to organizations through Ansible Automation Hub. Starting with the forthcoming RHEL 8.4, this means that the system roles Collection is immediately available under technology preview support and planned to be fully supported by both RHEL and Ansible Automation Platform product support experts. 

What is it, why use it

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the world's leading enterprise Linux platform. System administrators expect features and improvements to deliver on the agility demanded by their end users. In order to abstract away tedious, error-prone manual administration and configuration, RHEL system roles offer a path towards a repeatable and predictable operating system configuration. Under the hood, these Ansible roles and modules are now packaged, provided via an Ansible Content Collection. 

For customers with both RHEL and Ansible Automation Platform subscriptions, this means that the automation platform gains new certified content to predictably drive the configuration of RHEL, wherever it may be deployed, to ensure the stability that Red Hat customers expect from an enterprise Linux operating system. Finally, continuing the commitment for upstream community development and Continue reading

The Teams Dashboard: The Design Story

Intro

Cloudflare for Teams was first announced in January 2020, along with our acquisition of S2 Systems. It was an exciting day for everyone at Cloudflare, but especially my team, who was in charge of building Teams.

Here is the story of how we took Cloudflare for Teams from initial concepts, to an MVP, to now a comprehensive security platform that secures networks, users, devices, and applications.

Background

When I joined Cloudflare in April 2019, I was excited to have an impact on helping to build a better Internet. I was fascinated by the intricacy of how the Internet works, and wanted to untangle that complexity to provide our users with the best in class experience, with a simple and concise design approach. Little did I know that I would have the opportunity to launch a product that would impact thousands during a time when people need the Internet the most.

We started conceptualizing what would eventually become Cloudflare for Teams in July 2019, with a big vision and a small team. Coming off the excitement of 1.1.1.1, the team began thinking about how to bring this functionality to small, medium, and enterprise businesses. Our Continue reading

New Guide to Federal Broadband Funding Opportunities in the U.S.

New resource will help communities find the right funding for their networks

At the 2020 Indigenous Connectivity Summit (ICS), participants asked the Internet Society to create a “centralized database that captures funding opportunities, eligibility, and information on how to apply.” There is currently no coordinated federal database where applicants can find all available funding sources. This is particularly challenging for those without Internet access – the intended benefactors of funding – as they are unable to surf the web to research all the different departments, commissions, and agencies that offer grants and loans related to Internet access.

Today, I am pleased to announce the launch of the Guide to Federal Broadband Opportunities in the U.S. By creating this consolidated resource, especially as large amounts of funding become available as a part of COVID-19 relief and Tribes begin utilizing their Educational Broadband Service spectrum, the Internet Society hopes to assist our community to access these vital funds.

Over the past three months, we have worked with our partners to create a comprehensive database of federal funding opportunities in the United States. These opportunities vary dramatically in size and include a variety of deployment and end-user scenarios. For example, Continue reading

Public Cloud Behind-the-Scenes Magic

One of my subscribers sent me this question after watching the networking part of Introduction to Cloud Computing webinar:

Does anyone know what secret networking magic the Cloud providers are doing deep in their fabrics which are not exposed to consumers of their services?

TL&DR: Of course not… and I’m guessing it would be pretty expensive if I knew and told you.

However, one can always guess based on what can be observed (see also: AWS networking 101, Azure networking 101).

Public Cloud Behind-the-Scenes Magic

One of my subscribers sent me this question after watching the networking part of Introduction to Cloud Computing webinar:

Does anyone know what secret networking magic the Cloud providers are doing deep in their fabrics which are not exposed to consumers of their services?

TL&DR: Of course not… and I’m guessing it would be pretty expensive if I knew and told you.

However, one can always guess based on what can be observed (see also: AWS networking 101, Azure networking 101).

VPN’s Days Are Numbered: Here Comes Zero-Trust Security

Unifi controller with a real cert

I finally got sick of seeing a certificate error when connecting to my Ubuiquiti Unifi WiFi controller.

There are a bunch of shitty howtos describing how to install a cert, and one good one. But in order to make it more copy-paste for future me when the certificate needs renewing, and because the paths are not quite the same since I run the controller in a Docker container on a raspberry pi, here are the commands (after copying fullchain.pem and privkey.pem into the stateful data dir):

host$ docker ps  # make note of the docker ID
host$ docker exec ID_HERE -ti bash
docker$ openssl pkcs12 \
        -export \
        -inkey privkey.pem \
        -in fullchain.pem \
        -out cert.p12 \
        -name unifi \
        -password pass:secret
docker$ keytool \
        -importkeystore \
        -deststorepass aircontrolenterprise \
        -destkeypass aircontrolenterprise \
        -destkeystore /usr/lib/unifi/data/keystore \
        -srckeystore cert.p12 \
        -srcstorepass secret \
        -alias unifi \
        -noprompt
docker$ exit
host$ docker stop ID_HERE
host$ docker start ID_HERE

I’m mostly happy with the Ubiquiti access points. I have an AP-AC-LR and an AP-M. My complaints are:

• When I reported a bug about access to SSH on non-management interfaces, they responded by turning off management over IPv6 Continue reading

5G services: Another FCC auction to jumpstart carrier deployments

The Federal Communications Commission plans yet another auction of radio-frequency spectrum suitable for delivering 5G services and continues to scrutinize the security of 5G infrastructure made in China, both of which will affect how quickly 5G services are deployed. 5G resources What is 5G? Fast wireless technology for enterprises and phones How 5G frequency affects range and speed Private 5G can solve some problems that Wi-Fi can’t Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling 5G can make for cost-effective private backhaul CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises The commission says it will seek bids on licensing another 100MHz swath of RF spectrum in the 3.4GHz mid-band range, which lies close to the C-band frequencies that were auctioned off late last year, and will impose stiff build-out requirements on winning bidders in order to get 5G infrastructure up and running quickly.To read this article in full, please click here

Buying Used Cisco Gear From eBay For Your Lab

While most of the lab work I do is with virtualized networking gear, once in a while, I need actual hardware. For instance, to fully explore QoS, hardware is key. Many QoS commands won’t be available to you in a virtual network device.

eBay offers lots of older networking gear for pennies or even fractions of a penny of what the gear was worth new. Why so cheap? Mostly, older networking gear is too slow for modern LANs and WANs. That’s a win for learners who don’t care about the speed as long as they can still use the old box to learn the fundamentals of routing and switching.

There are caveats to eBay networking gear, though, not unlike buying a used car. Know what you’re getting into.

You’re buying someone else’s junk.

Why is it junk? It could be the gear aged out, but still works fine. It could be that the gear broke, but you’ll be able to fix it. It could be that the gear broke, and you won’t be able to fix it. Sometimes, folks who move out of a data center sell pallets of retired gear by weight to whoever will take it just because Continue reading

Can Graviton Win A Three-Way Compute Race At AWS?

One of the main tenets of the hyperscalers and cloud builders is that they buy what they can and they only build what they must. …

Can Graviton Win A Three-Way Compute Race At AWS? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Transit delay and queueing

The diagram provides a logical representation of packet forwarding. A packet is received at an Ingress Port, the packet header is examined and a forwarding decision is made to add the packet to one of the queues associated with an Egress Port, finally the packet is removed from the queue and sent out the Egress Port to be received by the next device in the chain.

The time between sending and receiving a packet is the packet's transit delay. The transit delay is affected by the time it takes to make the forwarding decision and the time the packet spends in the queue. Identifying the specific queue selected and the number of bytes already in the queue fills out the set of performance metrics for the forwarding decision. The sFlow Transit Delay Structures extension adds these performance metrics to the metadata associated with each packet sample. 

The following output from sflowtool shows that data contained in a packet sample:

startSample ----------------------
sampleType_tag 0:1
sampleType FLOWSAMPLE
sampleSequenceNo 91159
sourceId 0:2216
meanSkipCount  Continue reading

The Hedge 75: Mike Parks and the Remote Work Scramble

The international pandemic has sent companies scrambling to support lots of new remote workers, which has meant changes in processes, application development, application deployment, connectivity, and even support. Mike Parks joins Eyvonne Sharp and Russ White to discuss these changes on this episode of the Hedge.

download

VNC Cannot Currently Show the Desktop

I have a Dell Latitude E5440 laptop which most of the time I run headless in a 3D-printed stand next to its slightly bigger brother, a Dell E6500 or similar.

The laptops don’t take up much space on my desk in this vertical configuration (which is helpful as I have four laptops on my desk) and I use VNC to remote into them when I need to work on a Windows system. My main system is an Apple MacBook Pro, and I have that in a similar vertical dock with two 27″ monitors, a bluetooth keyboard and touchpad, and a USB-C port expander/charger. By using VNC I can keep using the peripherals I like and quickly switch between systems while sharing copy/paste buffers as well, which is pretty much perfect.

There’s one nagging little problem though, that I can’t get around. When I access the E5440 using RealVNC, it is slow to show the screen when initially connecting and every time there is a Windows UAC prompt I have to wait about five seconds or so while staring at a black screen which says “Cannot currently show the desktop”.

This is somewhat annoying and after digging around a bit I Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 17th, 2021

Hey, HighScalability is here again!

 

Reverse engineering an ancient analog computer is a detective story worth reading. A Model of the Cosmos in the ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism.

Do you love this Stuff? Without your encouragement on Patreon this Stuff won't stuffin’ stuff. 

Know someone who needs to know the cloud? I wrote Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 just for them. On Amazon it has 262 mostly 5 star reviews. Here's a review that is not on the block chain:

Number Stuff:

Trends in Data Center Networking: Past to Future

Data center networking has evolved substantially over the past two decades, driven by the move to virtualized applications and cloud...

The post Trends in Data Center Networking: Past to Future appeared first on Pluribus Networks.

Libraries Are Bridging the Digital Divide

Libraries and Community Networks are teaming up and discovering new ways to connect the unconnected

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, libraries across the world shut down their buildings to limit transmission of the virus. What did not shut down were the crucial services they provided. Instead, librarians stepped up and zeroed in on their passion to serve the public, acting as first responders and amplifying their steadfast commitment to ensure people have access to public information.

A year into this pandemic, Internet access is crucial. So many people need to be online for everything from school and work to getting updates about vaccinations. But lifesaving lockdown measures are presenting challenges to the ways many of us have been able to access the Internet in public spaces.

As COVID-19 exacerbates issues associated with lack of Internet access, libraries are playing even more of a key role in getting local communities online. This has happened in multiple creative ways, from turning bookmobile vans into roaming hot spots delivering Wi-Fi throughout the community, to extending library Wi-Fi access into the parking lot and beyond.

Libraries have a long history of working closely with community networks to provide affordable Internet access Continue reading

Lightmatter Normalizing Silicon Photonics for AI

Every chipmaker has an emerging silicon photonics story but as happens only rarely, it could be a small startup that will push them to productize faster. …

Lightmatter Normalizing Silicon Photonics for AI was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Honeypods: Applying a Traditional Blue Team Technique to Kubernetes

The use of honeypots in an IT network is a well-known technique to detect bad actors within your network and gain insight into what they are doing. By exposing simulated or intentionally vulnerable applications in your network and monitoring for access, they act as a canary to notify the blue team of the intrusion and stall the attacker’s progress from reaching actual sensitive applications and data. Once the blue team is aware of the situation, the attack can be traced back to the initial vector. The attack can then be contained and removed from the network.

Applying this technique into a Kubernetes environment works exceedingly well because of the declarative nature of applying manifests to deploy workloads. Whether the cluster is standalone or part of a complex pipeline, workload communications are defined by the application’s code. Any communication that’s not defined can be deemed suspicious at minimum and indicate that the source resource may have been compromised. By introducing fake workloads and services around production workloads, when a workload is compromised, the attacker cannot differentiate between other real and fake workloads. The asymmetric knowledge between the attacker and the cluster operator makes it easy to detect lateral movements from compromised Continue reading

Docker and CNCF Join Forces for “Container Garage” Event Series

At Docker, we’re constantly trying to engage and connect with developer communities around the world to explore ways we can cross pollinate ideas, share, and learn from each other. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Docker and the CNCF are joining forces to run a community-led event series called “Container Garage”, covering all things containers and focusing on a particular theme each time (eg. “runtime”, “images”, “security” etc…). The aim of the event is to engage our respective communities and foster closer collaboration.

To this end Docker Captains and CNCF Ambassadors are taking the lead with the planning and execution of the event, working in lock-step to curate excellent content and recruit amazing speakers for engaging talks, demos, and live panels.

The kick-off event will be on Thursday April 1st around the theme of container runtimes. The agenda is structured as follows: 

2pm – 4pm CET : Talks & Demos

4pm – 4:15 CET : Break

4:15pm – 5pm CET : Live panel discussion

5pm – 5:15 : Break

5pm – 7pm CET : Talks & Demos 

Again, the first event will be held on April 1st on the topic of container runtimes.

You can register for free Continue reading