Tech Bytes: ThousandEyes Expands Visibility Into Modern App Architectures (Sponsored)
Today's Tech Bytes peers into cloud visibility with sponsor ThousandEyes. The company is improving its platform with multi-service views, Internet and hybrid cloud visibility, SD-WAN monitoring, and more. The goal is to give you a more comprehensive picture of the dependencies that make up today's applications, services, and networks. Our guests are Angelique Medina and Archana Kesavan.
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Day Two Cloud 077: Why Kubernetes Is Wrong For You
Kubernetes seems like a shining paragon of Ops efficiency, but the reality of running it is quite different. Is your organization up to the task? Is Kubernetes the thing you actually want or need? In this Day Two Cloud episode we talk to Cory O’Daniel and Rishi Malik from Container Heroes, and they have some thoughts on why Kubernetes is wrong for you.Day Two Cloud 077: Why Kubernetes Is Wrong For You
Kubernetes seems like a shining paragon of Ops efficiency, but the reality of running it is quite different. Is your organization up to the task? Is Kubernetes the thing you actually want or need? In this Day Two Cloud episode we talk to Cory O’Daniel and Rishi Malik from Container Heroes, and they have some thoughts on why Kubernetes is wrong for you.
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Remembering Francis Kariuki: Africa’s Tweeting Chief
The African community networks community is sad to learn about the passing of one of its prolific members, Chief Francis Kariuki of Lanet-Umoja, a rural community in Nakuru County, Kenya. He died on on 21 October 2020 after a short illness.
Chief Kariuki was a renowned Kenyan administrator who pioneered the use of technology to foster development, justice, trust, peace, and inclusion in his community. His struggle for digital inclusion earned him several nicknames, including “The Digital Champion” and “The Tweeting Chief,” for being the first African local administrator to use social media channels to promote community development. His passion and drive for adopting technologies in service delivery at the local level earned him national and global recognition.
Chief Kariuki was a strong advocate for community networks in Africa. He successfully championed for a community network in Lanet-Umoja and worked with his community members to coordinate its installation, operation, and management.
Beyond Kenya, Chief Kariuki engaged in the Africa Summits on Community Networks, a platform where community network operators in Africa gather to foster learning, networking, knowledge, and experience sharing. At the Summits, Chief Kariuki shared key insights on community networks and inspired many young people to adopt digital Continue reading
Chasing CRC Errors in a Data Center Fabric
One of my readers encountered an interesting problem when upgrading a data center fabric to 100 Gbps leaf-to-spine links:
- They installed new fiber cables and SFPs;
- Everything looked great… until someone started complaining about application performance problems.
- Nothing else has changed, so the culprit must have been the network upgrade.
- A closer look at monitoring data revealed CRC errors on every leaf switch. Obviously something was badly wrong with the whole batch of SFPs.
Fortunately my reader took a closer look at the data before they requested a wholesale replacement… and spotted an interesting pattern:
Chasing CRC Errors in a Data Center Fabric
One of my readers encountered an interesting problem when upgrading a data center fabric to 100 Gbps leaf-to-spine links:
- They installed new fiber cables and SFPs;
- Everything looked great… until someone started complaining about application performance problems.
- Nothing else has changed, so the culprit must have been the network upgrade.
- A closer look at monitoring data revealed CRC errors on every leaf switch. Obviously something was badly wrong with the whole batch of SFPs.
Fortunately my reader took a closer look at the data before they requested a wholesale replacement… and spotted an interesting pattern:
Anatomy of a Build-to-Suit Data Center
Enterprises seeking alternatives to one-size-fits-all data center solutions are increasingly considering building their own facilities for more flexibility and greater control over costs.Some Site Updates
For the last three years, the site has been largely unchanged with regard to the structure and overall function even while I continue to work to provide quality technical content. However, time was beginning to take its toll, and some “under the hood” work was needed. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I spent some time updating the site, and there are a few changes I wanted to mention.
- The site has been updated to use a much more recent version of Hugo. This change is largely invisible to readers, but a couple of the site changes are related to this upgrade. Specifically…
- Although the main RSS feed for the site (found here) remains a full content feed, I ran into issues getting Hugo to use my custom RSS templates for generating the category and tag feeds (for example, the RSS feed for the “Tutorial” category, or the RSS feed for the “Kubernetes” tag). You’ll now find that the category and tag feeds are summary feeds only as opposed to full content feeds. I do intend to restore them to full content feeds as soon as possible.
- Finally, I’ve updated the “metadata line” when viewing a single article Continue reading
The Docker Developer Guide to AWS re:Invent
This is the busiest time of the year for developers targeting AWS. Just over a week ago we announced the GA of Docker Compose for AWS, and this week we’re getting ready to virtually attend AWS re:Invent. re:Invent is the annual gathering of the entire AWS community and ecosystem to learn what’s new, get the latest tips and tricks, and connect with peers from around the world. Instead of the traditional week-long gathering of 60,000 attendees in Las Vegas, the event has pivoted to a flexible three-week online conference. This year the event is free, and anyone can participate on their own schedule. This blog post covers highlights of the event so Docker developers can get the most from re:Invent.
In the kickoff keynote by CEO Andy Jassy, AWS announced a number of new features for container developers, including a new capability, ECS Anywhere, which allows Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) to run on-prem and in the cloud to support hybrid computing workloads as well as the launch of AWS Proton, an end-to-end pipeline to deliver containerized and microservices applications. Separately, AWS also announced a new public Elastic Container Registry (ECR) and gallery today. We’re excited to see a Continue reading
Tigera to Support Amazon EKS-Distro
Today, we are excited to announce our commitment to support Calico and Calico Enterprise for the Amazon EKS-Distro, a Kubernetes distribution based on and used by Amazon EKS. EKS-D enables you to create reliable and secure Kubernetes clusters using the same versions of Kubernetes and its dependencies deployed by Amazon EKS.
We view EKS-D as further confirmation of the central role that Kubernetes plays in today’s IT infrastructure. We are excited to work with Amazon on this initiative to enable EKS-D users with the same robust enterprise networking and network security functionality that you rely on today to secure your EKS cluster deployments.
Tigera’s commitment to supporting EKS-D highlights our fundamental design principle of “choice”. Our customers can choose to use Calico and Calico Enterprise with their preferred Kubernetes distribution and use the same solution to operate seamlessly across different Kubernetes distributions, including multi-cloud multi-cluster and hybrid environments. Calico Enterprise, for example, allows you to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters to define, apply, and enforce consistent networking and security policy across all your clusters from a single master cluster. Adding EKS-D clusters, which use the same underlying versions of Kubernetes deployed by Amazon EKS, as an option for our customers Continue reading
Remotely Triggered Black Hole Filtering as Service
Remotely triggered black hole (RTBH) filtering is a technique that provides the ability to drop undesirable traffic before it enters a protected network. It is commonly used for the mitigation of distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) and DoS attacks. We have covered a configuration of source and destination RTBH for Cisco IOS-XR in a previous tutorial. A trigger […]Continue reading...
Data Center Master Classes
I’m doing a series of three master classes through Juniper on various DC fabric topics—
Join Juniper’s Russ White, a widely published 30-year network engineering veteran, in a three-part masterclass exploring the data center. Choose from classes on data center fabric, physical topologies, or data center security.
From the schedule—
- Class 1: Data Center Fabric, December 2, 12 PM EST
- Class 2: Physical Topologies, January 13, 12 PM EST
- Class 3: Security in the Data Center, February 10, 12 PM EST
The EXPERIENCE HAS SHOWN THAT Keyword (RFC2915, Rule 4)
The world of information technology is filled, often to overflowing, with those who “know better.” For instance, I was recently reading an introduction to networking in a very popular orchestration system that began with the declaration that routing was hard, and therefore this system avoided routing. The document then went on to describe a system of moving packets around using multiple levels of Network Address Translation (NAT) and centrally configured policy-based routing (or filter-based forwarding) that was clearly simpler than the distributed protocols used to run large-scale networks. I thought, for a moment, of writing the author and pointing out the system in question had merely reinvented routing in a rather inefficient and probably broken way, but I relented. Why? Because I know RFC2915, rule 4, by heart:
Some things in life can never be fully appreciated nor understood unless experienced firsthand. Some things in networking can never be fully understood by someone who neither builds commercial networking equipment nor runs an operational network.
Ultimately, the people who built this system will likely not listen to me; rather, they are going to have to experience the pain caused by large-scale failures for themselves before they will listen. Many network Continue reading