Fast Failover: Techniques and Technologies

Continuing our Fast Failover saga, let’s focus on techniques and technologies available to implement it (assuming you still think it’s worth the effort).

The following text is heavily based on comments Jeff Tantsura wrote on one of my LinkedIn posts as well as the original blog post. Thank you!

There are numerous technologies you can use to implement fast reroute, from the most complex to the easiest one:

Rails Generators Cheat Sheet

As I am digging into Rails again I find myself constantly having to look the naming and syntax of generators up so I am documenting them in this post. Rails utilizes convention over configuration to speed up development and increase developer happiness. If you embrace this fact you will...

Bypassing safety check for an obviously safe change

This is less concrete technical than my usual blog post.

For every 100 changes we’re 99% sure won’t cause an outage, one will

It’s actually hard to be 99% sure of anything. I’m not 99% sure today’s Thursday. I say that because more often than one day in a hundred, I’ll think “hmm… feels like Wednesday” when it’s not.

I just closed my eyes and tried to remember what time it is. I don’t think I can guess with 99% accuracy what hour I’m in. (but to be fair, it’s de-facto Friday afternoon today, as I’m off tomorrow).

Anyway… the reason I say this is that this should be kept in mind every time someone comes and says they want to circumvent some process for a change that they are absolutely sure won’t cause an outage, that can actually be put into numbers. And those numbers are “you are not 100% sure of anything”.

By saying you are 99% sure this won’t cause an outage (and are you right about that?) you are saying that for every 100 requests like yours that will bypass normal checks, there will be an outage. You are taking on an amortized 1% of Continue reading

Broadcom Widens And Smartens Switch Chip Lineup

Cisco Systems may still be the biggest supplier of switches and routers in general, but it has long since been surpassed by Broadcom when it comes to suppling the silicon that does the switching itself and sometimes even a little bit of routing in the datacenter in particular.

Broadcom Widens And Smartens Switch Chip Lineup was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

SUSE’s Rancher acquisition brings containerization support

SUSE’s acquisition of Rancher Labs puts the Germany-based open-source software company in a much stronger position to offer flexible, edge-based services to its customers, according to an analyst at IDC.The deal—which was originally announced this summer—essentially makes Rancher Labs into SUSE’s containerization “innovation center,” said IDC research director Gary Chen. Any customer working on digital transformation and rapid development is likely to appreciate the improved support for containerization—letting workloads function on whatever hardware is handy, and communicate across different arrangements of edge, cloud and local computing.Terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed, but a CNBC report published after the initial announcement quoted sources familiar with the deal as saying that SUSE is paying between $600 million and $700 million.To read this article in full, please click here

SUSE’s Rancher acquisition brings containerization support

SUSE’s acquisition of Rancher Labs puts the Germany-based open-source software company in a much stronger position to offer flexible, edge-based services to its customers, according to an analyst at IDC.The deal—which was originally announced this summer—essentially makes Rancher Labs into SUSE’s containerization “innovation center,” said IDC research director Gary Chen. Any customer working on digital transformation and rapid development is likely to appreciate the improved support for containerization—letting workloads function on whatever hardware is handy, and communicate across different arrangements of edge, cloud and local computing.Terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed, but a CNBC report published after the initial announcement quoted sources familiar with the deal as saying that SUSE is paying between $600 million and $700 million.To read this article in full, please click here

What is a WAN? Wide-area network definition and examples

People want to connect to all of their apps all of the time from all of their devices no matter where they are. And they pretty much can, thanks to wide-area networks (WANs).At its core, a WAN is a network of networks. The Internet itself is a giant WAN, and how you connect to it can be as diverse as through an Ethernet cable, coaxial cable, or a cellular radio signal.Your office network, home Wi-Fi, cellphone, smartwatch, doorbell camera and vehicle-based Internet connection are just endpoints on a vast global WAN that is constantly evolving to carry more traffic, and to carrt that traffic faster as the demands for near-instantaneous access to resources increase.To read this article in full, please click here

Join Docker’s Community All-Hands

Openness and transparency are key pillars of a healthy open source community. We’re constantly exploring ways to better engage the Docker community, to better incorporate feedback and to better foster participation.

To this end, we’re very excited to host our first Community All-Hands on Thursday December 10th at 8am PST / 5pm CET. This one-hour event will be a unique opportunity for Docker staff and the broader Docker community to come together for company and product updates, live demos, community shout-outs and a Q&A. 

The All-Hands will include updates from:

  • Scott Johnston (CEO, Docker) who will go over Docker’s strategic vision and where the company is heading in 2021 and beyond
  • Donnie Berkholz (VP of Products, Docker) who will walk us through our product roadmap  
  • Jean-Laurent de Morlhon (VP of Engineering, Docker) who will provide an inside peek on engineering.

We’ll then dive into specific product updates around Docker Desktop, Hub and Developer Tooling, followed by two awesome live demos where we’ll show cool new features and integrations. 

A Community All-Hands is not complete without a community update. We will announce new community initiatives and recognize outstanding contributors who have gone above and beyond to help push Docker Continue reading

BGP Training on Ignition

The first hour of material in my new BGP course over at Ignition dropped this week. I’m not going to talk about configuration and other operational things—this is all about understanding how BGP works, why it works that way, and thinking about design. This course will apply to cloud, Internet edge, DC fabric, and other uses of BGP. From the official site:

BGP is one of the fundamental protocols for routing traffic across the Internet. This course, taught by networking expert and network architect Russ White, is designed to take you from BGP basics to understanding BGP at scale. The 6-hour course will be divided into several modules. Each module will contain multiple video courses of approximately 15 minutes each that drill into key concepts. The first module contains four videos that describe how BGP works. They cover basics including reachability, building loop-free paths, BGP convergence, intra-AS models, and route reflectors.

Available here.

Insights Platform Now Live! A Deeper, Data-Driven View of the Internet

There are many people, projects, and organizations that are collecting data on various facets of the Internet, but there’s no single site that provides a curated set of insights.

To help address this gap, we’ve launched the Internet Society Insights platform to help everyone gain deeper, data-driven insight into the Internet.

One of the key deliverables of the Measuring the Internet project, we have spent the last few months building the Insights platform together with our valued development partner, Frontwerks AG.

Data and Focus Areas

We’re collating data from several trusted organizations – our data partners – and will examine Internet trends, generate reports, and tell data-driven stories about how the Internet is evolving. Insights launched with two initial focus areas, Internet Shutdowns and Enabling Technologies.

Work is continuing on three additional focus areas – Internet Resilience, the Internet Way of Networking, and Keeping Traffic Local. We aim to add data and insights on these focus areas throughout 2021 and beyond.

TLS Version adoption

Use and Share

Everyone is encouraged to use and share the text, images, and charts presented on Insights under our creative commons license.

If you would like to submit an idea for a guest post for the Continue reading

The Hedge Podcast #62: Jacob Hess and the Importance of History

At first glance, it would seem like the history of a technology would have little to do with teaching that technology. Jacob Hess of NexGenT joins us in this episode of the Hedge to help us understand why he always includes the history of a technology when teaching it—a conversation that broadened out into why learning history is important for all network engineers.

download

You can find the history of networking here.

Bootstrapping a Cluster API Management Cluster

Cluster API is, if you’re not already familiar, an effort to bring declarative Kubernetes-style APIs to Kubernetes cluster lifecycle management. (I encourage you to check out my introduction to Cluster API post if you’re new to Cluster API.) Given that it is using Kubernetes-style APIs to manage Kubernetes clusters, there must be a management cluster with the Cluster API components installed. But how does one establish that management cluster? This is a question I’ve seen pop up several times in the Kubernetes Slack community. In this post, I’ll walk you through one way of bootstrapping a Cluster API management cluster.

The process I’ll describe in this post is also described in the upstream Cluster API documentation (see the “Bootstrap & Pivot” section of this page).

At a high level, the process looks like this:

  1. Create a temporary bootstrap cluster.
  2. Make the bootstrap cluster into a temporary management cluster.
  3. Use the temporary management cluster to establish a workload cluster (through Cluster API).
  4. Convert the workload cluster into a permanent management cluster.
  5. Remove the temporary bootstrap cluster.

The following sections describe each of these steps in a bit more detail.

Create a Temporary Bootstrap Cluster

The first step is Continue reading

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.

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.

The post Tech Bytes: ThousandEyes Expands Visibility Into Modern App Architectures (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

What to know about Azure Arc’s hybrid-cloud server management

Azure Arc for servers, a centralized management tool that provides visibility into Azure data services, Kubernetes clusters, and servers running Windows or Linux, has been generally available since September, helping fulfill Microsoft’s stated intent to support enterprise hybrid-cloud architectures.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

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.

The post Day Two Cloud 077: Why Kubernetes Is Wrong For You appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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

KubeCon+CloudNativeCon: Service Mesh Battle Stories and Fixes

KubeCon+CloudNativeCon. “There’s a lot to say about each of these service meshes and how they work: their architecture, why they’re made, what they’re focused on, what they do when they came about and why some of them aren’t here anymore and why we’re still seeing new ones,” Layer5, explained during his talk with “Service Mesh Specifications and Why They Matter in Your Deployment.” Service mesh is increasingly seen as a requirement to manage microservices in Kubernetes environments, offering a central control plane to manage microservices access, testing, metrics and other functionalities. One-third of the respondents in The New Stack survey of our readers said their organizations already use service mesh. Among the numerous service mesh options available; Envoy, Linkerd and