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Mizar: Scalable Multitenant Networking with XDP on Kubernetes

Mizar is an open source project providing cloud networking to run virtual machines, containers, and other compute workloads. We built Mizar from the ground up with large scale and high performance in mind. Built in the same way as distributed systems in the cloud, Mizar utilizes XDP (eXpress Data Path) and Kubernetes to allow for the efficient creation of multitenant overlay networks with massive amounts of endpoints. Each of these technologies brings valuable perks that enable Mizar to achieve its goals. With XDP, Mizar is able to: Skip unnecessary stages of the network stack whenever possible and transit packet processing to smart NICs. Efficiently use kernel packet processing constructs without being locked into a specific processor architecture. Produce very small packet processing programs (<4KB). With Kubernetes, Mizar is able to: Efficiently program the underlying core XDP programs. Manage the lifecycle of its abstractions via CRDs. Have a scalable and distributed management plane. Deploy its core components and modules across all specified hosts. Mizar’s Goals and Continue reading

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The Once And Future Federated Database

There are many different schools of thought when it comes to databases, which is one of the reasons that we launch our inaugural event focused solely on database technologies this year. …

The Once And Future Federated Database was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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Upcoming Webinar: How Routers Really Work

Just a gentle reminder that on Monday (just a few days from now) I’m teaching a three hour webinar over at Safari Books on How Routers Really Work. From the course description—

This training will peer into the internal components of a router, starting with an explanation of how a router switches packets. This walk through of a switching path, in turn, will be used as a foundation for explaining the components of a router, including the various tables used to build forwarding tables and the software components used to build these tables.

Register here if you’re interested.

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TTL255 finalist of Cisco 2020 IT Blog Awards

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Connecting with the Docker Community– Recap of Our First Community All Hands

Last week, we held our first Community All Hands and the response was phenomenal. A huge thank you to all 1,100+ people who joined. If you missed it, you can watch the recording here. You can also find answers to those questions that came in towards the end that we didn’t have time to answer here.

This all-hands was an effort to further deepen our engagement with the community and bring users, contributors and staff together on a quarterly basis to share updates on what we’re working on and what our priorities are for 2021 and beyond. The event was also an opportunity to give the community direct access to Docker’s leadership and provide a platform to submit questions and upvote those that are most relevant and important to people. 

The overwhelming piece of feedback we got from attendees was that the event was too short and people would have loved to see more demos. We certainly had a packed agenda and we did our best to squeeze in as much into an hour. For our next one (in February 2021!), we’ll aim to extend the event by 30 minutes and include more live demos. We’ll also try Continue reading

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2020 IT Blog Awards finalist!

I have the honor of having my blog selected as a finalist in the Most Educational category of the 2020 IT Blog Awards, hosted by Cisco. It is an honor and a great joy for me to be selected, for the third consecutive year, alongside other high-level bloggers who all have very deep technical knowledge! I hope you enjoy my articles as much as I enjoy writing and sharing them. I know I could write more, but I try to put quality ahead of quantity.   Please click here to vote…

The post 2020 IT Blog Awards finalist! appeared first on AboutNetworks.net.

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International Community Joins Indian Policy and Cybersecurity Experts in Warning about the Dangers of Traceability

A growing group of international and local cybersecurity and policy experts are weighing in on proposed changes to Indian regulations that could jeopardize the safety of billions worldwide. By seeking to restrict WhatsApp and other popular messaging apps’ use of end-to-end encryption, the proposed policies pose a major threat to cybersecurity in India.

In Traceability and Cybersecurity, over 50 cybersecurity experts in Europe, North and Latin America, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region agreed that amendments to the Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules under the Indian Information Technology Act proposed by the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeiTY) will create many more problems than it seeks to solve.

Produced as a result of a global technical experts meeting series organized by the Internet Society in partnership with Medianama, the report notes that MeiTY’s proposal ignores sound advice: requiring intermediaries such as WhatsApp to enable the traceability of the content and data they handle is a major threat not only to the safety of users, but to India’s national security.

The report stresses that traceability would mean enabling third-party access to private communications, a move that undermines the end-to-end encryption that users everywhere, including government entities, rely on to Continue reading

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Big Blue Shines A Light On The Future Of Tape Storage

IBM knows how to adapt to an ever-changing enterprise tech landscape. …

Big Blue Shines A Light On The Future Of Tape Storage was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

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Migrating to Ansible Collections (Webinar Q&A)

Sean Cavanaugh, Anshul Behl and I recently hosted a webinar entitled “Migrating to Ansible Collections” (link to YouTube on-demand webinar replay and link to PDF slides download). This webinar was focused on enabling the Ansible Playbook writers, looking to move to the wonderful world of Ansible Collections in existing Ansible 2.9 environments and beyond.

 

The webinar was much more popular than we expected, so much so we didn’t have enough time to answer all the questions, so we took all the questions and put them in this blog to make them available to everyone.

 

I would like to use Ansible to automate an application using a REST API (for example creating a new bitbucket project). Should I be writing a role or a custom module? And should I then publish that as a Collection?    

It depends on how much investment you’d like to make into the module or role that you develop. For example, creating a role that references the built-in Ansible URI module can be evaluated versus creating an Ansible module written in Python. If you were to create a module, it can be utilized via a role developed by you or the playbook author. Continue reading

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Introducing Cloudflare Pages: the best way to build JAMstack websites

Across multiple cultures around the world, this time of year is a time of celebration and sharing of gifts with the people we care the most about. In that spirit, we thought we'd take this time to give back to the developer community that has been so supportive of Cloudflare for the last 10 years.

Today, we’re excited to announce Cloudflare Pages: a fast, secure and free way to build and host your JAMstack sites.

Today, the path from an idea to a website is paved with good intentions

Websites are the way we express ourselves on the web. It doesn’t matter if you’re a hobbyist with a blog, or the largest of corporations with millions of customers — if you want to reach people outside the confines of 140 280 characters, the web is the place to be.

As a frontend developer, it’s your responsibility to bring this expression to life. And make no mistake — with so many frontend frameworks, tooling, and static site generators at your disposal — it’s a great time to be in your line of work.

That is, of course, right up until the point when you’re ready to show your work off Continue reading

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Migrating to Ansible Collections (Webinar Q&A)

Sean Cavanaugh, Anshul Behl and I recently hosted a webinar entitled “Migrating to Ansible Collections” (link to YouTube on-demand webinar replay and link to PDF slides download). This webinar was focused on enabling the Ansible Playbook writers, looking to move to the wonderful world of Ansible Collections in existing Ansible 2.9 environments and beyond.

 

The webinar was much more popular than we expected, so much so we didn’t have enough time to answer all the questions, so we took all the questions and put them in this blog to make them available to everyone.

 

I would like to use Ansible to automate an application using a REST API (for example creating a new bitbucket project). Should I be writing a role or a custom module? And should I then publish that as a Collection?    

It depends on how much investment you’d like to make into the module or role that you develop. For example, creating a role that references the built-in Ansible URI module can be evaluated versus creating an Ansible module written in Python. If you were to create a module, it can be utilized via a role developed by you or the playbook author. Continue reading

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Build Your Virtual Lab Faster with netlab

I love my new Vagrant+Libvirt virtual lab environment – it creates virtual machines in parallel and builds labs much faster than my previous VirtualBox-based setup. Eight CPU cores and 32 GB of RAM in my Intel NUC don’t hurt either.

However, it’s still ridiculously boring to set up a new lab. Vagrantfiles describing the private networks I need for routing protocol focused network simulations are a mess to write, and it takes way too long to log into all the devices, configure common parameters, enable interfaces…

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Build Your Virtual Lab Faster with My Network Simulation Tools

I love my new Vagrant+Libvirt virtual lab environment – it creates virtual machines in parallel and builds labs much faster than my previous VirtualBox-based setup. Eight CPU cores and 32 GB of RAM in my Intel NUC don’t hurt either.

However, it’s still ridiculously boring to set up a new lab. Vagrantfiles describing the private networks I need for routing protocol focused network simulations are a mess to write, and it takes way too long to log into all the devices, configure common parameters, enable interfaces…

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Flask web app tutorial for network engineers

Most network engineers don’t need to create web sites but they may, like me, want to convert their existing Python command-line programs into web apps so others can use them more easily. This tutorial presents the minimum you need to know about Python, Flask, and the Bootstrap CSS framework to create a practical web app that looks professional.

This tutorial covers a different type of use-case than is usually demonstrated in Flask tutorials aimed at beginners. It shows you how to create a web app that “wraps up” another Python program’s functionality.

I will show you how to use the Flask framework to build a web app that re-uses code from my Usermapper program and enables users to run it on a website, instead of installing and running it locally on their PC. You will create a “usermapper-as-a-service” application, served as a responsive web app that looks good on computer screens, tablets, and mobile phones.

I wrote this tutorial while I was learning Flask and developing my usermapper-web Flask application. It was written by a beginner, for other beginners. It walks through topics in the order in which I learned them. I hope you find this approach to be readable Continue reading

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Get Your Technology Teams Thinking Like the Customer

CIOs must bring customer metrics into their technology teams and wire the voice of the customer into the business processes that they design and automate.

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Automated, Simplified DNS Troubleshooting for Kubernetes: Only in Calico Enterprise

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a naming system for computers, services, or other resources connected to the Internet or a private network. DNS translates domain names to the numerical IP addresses needed for locating and identifying computer services and devices. For decades It’s been an essential component of the Internet. It’s an essential part of Kubernetes as well, and is used to determine how workloads connect to Kubernetes services as well as resources outside the cluster.

DNS also happens to be a common source of outages and issues in Kubernetes clusters. When applications are not working as expected, the root cause is often DNS-related. However, debugging and troubleshooting DNS issues in Kubernetes environments is not a trivial task given the limited amount of information Kubernetes provides for DNS queries.

Lacking the necessary visibility into the cluster to correlate a DNS query or reply with a specific workload, for example, you are left in the dark. Without Kubernetes context, you are unable to capture even the most fundamental information needed for troubleshooting, such as the type of DNS query (or reply) or the source of the query.

Figure: The DNS Dashboard from Tigera helps Kubernetes teams more quickly confirm or Continue reading

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Tech Bytes: Accelerating Cloud Applications With Riverbed’s Cloud SteelHead (Sponsored)

Today's Tech Bytes is a customer story with sponsor Riverbed. It’s a tale of latency and its impact on network performance when moving applications to cloud. Our guests from Riverbed are Aly Walowski, whose title is roughly “Cloud Goddess” at Riverbed; and Jack Sweeney, Major Account Manager.

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Tech Bytes: Accelerating Cloud Applications With Riverbed’s Cloud SteelHead (Sponsored)

Today's Tech Bytes is a customer story with sponsor Riverbed. It’s a tale of latency and its impact on network performance when moving applications to cloud. Our guests from Riverbed are Aly Walowski, whose title is roughly “Cloud Goddess” at Riverbed; and Jack Sweeney, Major Account Manager.

The post Tech Bytes: Accelerating Cloud Applications With Riverbed’s Cloud SteelHead (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Cisco takes additional steps to fight counterfeit network gear

Looking to counter the growing sophistication of counterfeit networking products, Cisco recently added new layers to protect customers.“Counterfeiting hardware and software is an illegal and lucrative trade which leads to an estimated $100B loss of revenue annually across IT industries. As one of the largest and most reputable brands in the world, Cisco is often a target of counterfeiters,” said Al Palladin, legal director and  head of Global Brand Protection at Cisco.Counterfeiting presents serious risks to network quality, performance, safety, and reliability. It is dangerous because counterfeit products are not designed or built to meet the same safety standard certifications that genuine Cisco products attain, he said.To read this article in full, please click here

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The Hedge Podcast #64: Brian Keys and Burnout

Burnout stalks most network engineers—and most people in the world of information technology—striking at least once in every career, it seems, and often more than once. In this episode, Brian Keys joins Eyvonne Sharp, Tom Ammon, and Russ White to discuss his personal experience with burnout. The discussion then turns to general strategies and ideas for avoiding burnout on a day-to-day basis.

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