BGP AS Numbers for a Private MPLS/VPN Backbone

One of my readers was building a private MPLS/VPN backbone and wondered whether they should use their public AS number or a private AS number for the backbone. Usually, it doesn’t matter; the deciding point was the way they want to connect to the public Internet:

We also plan to peer with multiple external ISPs to advertise our public IP space not directly from our PE routers but from dedicated Internet Routers, adding a firewall between our PEs and external Internet routers.

They could either run BGP between the PE routers, firewall, and WAN routers (see BGP as High-Availability Protocol for more details) or run BGP across a bump-in-the-wire firewall:

Read more …

BGP AS Numbers for a Private MPLS/VPN Backbone

One of my readers was building a private MPLS/VPN backbone and wondered whether they should use their public AS number or a private AS number for the backbone. Usually, it doesn’t matter; the deciding point was the way they want to connect to the public Internet:

We also plan to peer with multiple external ISPs to advertise our public IP space not directly from our PE routers but from dedicated Internet Routers, adding a firewall between our PEs and external Internet routers.

They could either run BGP between the PE routers, firewall, and WAN routers (see BGP as High-Availability Protocol for more details) or run BGP across a bump-in-the-wire firewall:

Read more …

The Cloud Outgrows Linux, And Sparks A New Operating System

Ultimately, every problem in the constantly evolving IT software stack becomes a database problem, which is why there are 418 different databases and datastores in the DB Engines rankings and there are really only a handful of commercially viable operating systems. …

The Cloud Outgrows Linux, And Sparks A New Operating System was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Adding TS’s IP Address to MAC-VRF (L2RIB) and IP-VRF (L3RIB)

In the previous chapter, we discussed how a VTEP learns the local TS's MAC address and the process through which the MAC address is programmed into BGP tables. An example VTEP device was configured with a Layer 2 VLAN and an EVPN Instance without deploying a VRF Context or VLAN routing interface. This chapter introduces, at a theoretical level, how the VTEP device, besides the TS's MAC address, learns the TS's IP address information after we have configured the VRF Context and routing interface for our example VLAN.


Figure 1-3: MAC-VRF Tenant System’s IP Address Propagation.

I have divided Figure 1-3 into three sections. The section on the top left, Integrated Routing and Bridging - IRB illustrates the components required for intra-tenant routing and their interdependencies. By configuring a Virtual Routing and Forwarding Context (VRF Context), we create a closed routing environment with a per-tenant IP-VRF L3 Routing Information Base (L3RIB). Within the VRF Context, we define the Layer 3 Virtual Network Identifier (L3VNI) along with the Route Distinguisher (RD) and Route Target (RT) values. The RD of the VRF Context enables the use of overlapping IP addresses across different tenants. Based on the RT value of the VRF Context, Continue reading

OSPF Summarization and Split Areas

In the Do We Still Need OSPF Areas and Summarization? I wrote this somewhat cryptic remark:

The routers advertising a summarized prefix should be connected by a path going exclusively through the part of the network with more specific prefixes. GRE tunnel also satisfies that criteria; the proof is left as an exercise for the reader.

One of my readers asked for a lengthier explanation, so here we go. Imagine a network with two areas doing inter-area summarization on /24 boundary:

Read more …

OSPF Summarization and Split Areas

In the Do We Still Need OSPF Areas and Summarization? I wrote this somewhat cryptic remark:

The routers advertising a summarized prefix should be connected by a path going exclusively through the part of the network with more specific prefixes. GRE tunnel also satisfies that criteria; the proof is left as an exercise for the reader.

One of my readers asked for a lengthier explanation, so here we go. Imagine a network with two areas doing inter-area summarization on /24 boundary:

Read more …

HexaMesh: Chiplet Topologies Inspired By Nature

With the reticle limit for chip manufacturing pretty much set in stone (pun intended) at 26 millimeters by 33 millimeters down to 2 nanometer transistor sizes with extreme ultraviolet lithography techniques and being cut in half to 26 millimeters by 16.5 millimeters for the High-NA extreme ultraviolet lithography needed to push below 2 nanometer transistor sizes, chiplets are inevitable and monolithic dies are absolutely going to become a thing of the past. …

HexaMesh: Chiplet Topologies Inspired By Nature was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Tech Bytes: Cisco ThousandEyes Deepens Visibility for Remote Workforce Management (Sponsored)

SecOps, NetOps, and help desks need integrated data, increased context, and the ability to quickly understand interdependencies in order to take on the complex tasks facing them. That’s why ThousandEyes is now integrated with Cisco Secure Access, Cisco’s SSE solution. Tune in to learn about ThousandEyes’ deeper visibility, system process metrics, streamlined test setup, and... Read more »

User Discomfort As A Security Function

If you grew up in the 80s watching movies like me, you’ll remember Wargames. I could spend hours lauding this movie but for the purpose of this post I want to call out the sequence at the beginning when the two airmen are trying to operate the nuclear missile launch computer. It requires the use of two keys, one each in the possession of one of the airmen. They must be inserted into two different locks located more than ten feet from each other. The reason is that launching the missile requires two people to agree to do something at the same time. The two key scene appears in a number of movies as a way to show that so much power needs to have controls.

However, one thing I wanted to talk about in this post is the notion that those controls need to be visible to be effective. The two key solution is pretty visible. You carry a key with you but you can also see the locks that are situated apart from each other. There is a bit of challenge in getting the keys into the locks and turning them simultaneously. That not only shows that the Continue reading

Simplify Kubernetes Hosted Control Planes with K0smotron

Multicluster Kubernetes gets complicated and expensive fast — especially in dynamic environments. Private cloud multicluster solutions need to wrangle a lot of moving parts: Private or public cloud APIs and compute/network/storage resources (or bare metal management) Linux and Kubernetes dependencies Kubernetes deployment etcd configuration Load balancer integration And, potentially other details, too. So they’re fragile — Kubernetes control planes on private clouds tend to become “pets” (and not in a cute way). Multicluster on public clouds, meanwhile, hides some of the complexity issues (at the cost of flexibility) — but presents challenges like cluster proliferation, hard-to-predict costs, and lock-in. What Are Hosted Control Planes (HCPs)? Kubecon Hosted Control Planes (HCPs) route around some (not all) of these challenges while bringing some new challenges. An HCP is a set of Kubernetes manager node components, running in pods on a host Kubernetes cluster. HCPs are less like “pets” and more like “cattle.” Like other Kubernetes workloads, they’re defined, operated, and updated in code (YAML manifests) — so are repeatable, version-controllable, easy to standardize. But worker nodes, as always, need to live somewhere and networked to control planes, and there are several challenges here. They gain basic resilience from Kubernetes itself: if Continue reading

NB 469: Arista Debuts Network Observability Service; Startups Aim To Break Nvidia’s AI Chip Grip

This week we discuss a new network observability offering from Arista that integrates network telemetry with application data, why startups such as Groq and Taalas think they can break Nvidia’s grip on the AI chip market, and how Microsoft is hedging its LLM bets. Amazon goes nuclear with the purchase of a reactor-powered data center... Read more »

Security Week 2024 wrap up

The next 12 months have the potential to reshape the global political landscape with elections occurring in more than 80 nations, in 2024, while new technologies, such as AI, capture our imagination and pose new security challenges.

Against this backdrop, the role of CISOs has never been more important. Grant Bourzikas, Cloudflare’s Chief Security Officer, shared his views on what the biggest challenges currently facing the security industry are in the Security Week opening blog.

Over the past week, we announced a number of new products and features that align with what we believe are the most crucial challenges for CISOs around the globe. We released features that span Cloudflare’s product portfolio, ranging from application security to securing employees and cloud infrastructure. We have also published a few stories on how we take a Customer Zero approach to using Cloudflare services to manage security at Cloudflare.

We hope you find these stories interesting and are excited by the new Cloudflare products. In case you missed any of these announcements, here is a recap of Security Week:

Responding to opportunity and risk from AI

Title Excerpt
Cloudflare announces Firewall for AI Cloudflare announced the development of Firewall for AI, Continue reading
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