Calico in 2020: The World’s Most Popular Kubernetes CNI

Calico and Kubernetes go hand-in-hand. Kubernetes is the de facto standard for deploying and managing container-based applications at scale, both on-premises and in the cloud. Calico continues to be the most popular open-source networking and network security solution for Kubernetes. Despite the cataclysmic events that occurred in 2020, the Calico community, supported by the team at Tigera, remained focused and achieved several major successes. We are excited to share these highlights.

Calico By The Numbers…

Since the beginning of 2020, we have experienced a 50% increase in the number of Calico Users. As of this writing, it is estimated that Calico is running on…

• 1,000,000 nodes daily
• 250,000 clusters daily
• In 166 countries around the world

That’s an 85% year-to-year increase in the number of clusters running Calico.

Calico: Clear Winner Among All Tested CNIs

Alex Ducastel published an independent benchmark comparison of Kubernetes CNIs in August which showed that among all of the CNI’s tested, Calico was the clear winner, excelling in nearly every category and delivering superlative results which are summarized in the chart below. In fact, Calico is the CNI of choice in the primary use cases presented by the author in the report’s summary.

The exceptional Continue reading

A Look Back at 2020: How Community Networks Helped People Connect during COVID-19

Community networks connect people, helping to close the global digital divide one community at a time. At the Internet Society, we believe so much in this vision, we made ambitious goals for 2020.

We set out to support new networks, give people the training they need to deploy and manage them, bring people together to build a stronger community, and create and promote policies that support community networks (CNs), enabling more people to start or improve existing networks.

COVID-19 made this work especially pressing. Almost overnight, the Internet had become a lifeline to many, helping them to stay connected to friends and family, work and study from home, and access vital information and public services.

As the world saw the digital divide clearer than it ever has, the pandemic made working with communities harder. We had to adapt, change plans, and look for creative solutions to help people access the opportunities the Internet provides. It was one of the most challenging years in recent history, but through long-standing and new partnerships we were able to achieve our goals. Thank you to all our partners who made it possible!

Together, we trained over 300 people in skills for creating, operating, Continue reading

7 Things You Need to Know to Successfully Deploy AIOps

Microsoft updates Azure Stack HCI

Microsoft has updated its Azure Stack HCI software, an on-premises version of its Azure cloud services to try and catch up with hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) leaders VMware and Nutanix.Hyperconverged infrastructure is where compute, storage, and networking are all tightly integrated on the same server in a cluster. The tight hardware and software integration makes it easier to deploy than having to configure the parts separately.Azure Stack HCI was launched in 2019 and is built on Windows Server 2019 Datacenter, Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization software, Storage Spaces Direct software-defined storage, and software-defined networking.To read this article in full, please click here

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Reimagining the Africa Community Networks Summit during the COVID-19 Pandemic

At the Virtual Summit on Community Networks in Africa over 200 local connectivity network operators learn better ways to bring affordable and reliable connectivity to underserved communities.

Every year since 2016, community network operators, allies, partners, policymakers, and regulators in the region gather for the Summit on Community Networks in Africa. The gathering enables them to learn, share experiences, collaborate, and find solutions to connect the unconnected.

Last year’s summit was held in Dodoma, Tanzania under the theme Towards Resilient Community Networks. Fantsuam Foundation, one of the oldest community networks in Africa, who after building a vast network lost everything due to sectarian violence, inspired this theme.

This year’s event built on 2019’s theme but focused on navigating new challenges community networks faced in 2020 as they grappled with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Although the global pandemic prevented a physical gathering for the community networks, it presented an opportunity to reimagine the summit and find ways to promote collaboration, engagement, and learning among community network operators as well as the supporting ecosystem.

During the pandemic, access to the Internet has become a lifeline with day-to-day activities shifting online and responses to curb the spread of the virus with Continue reading

Docker Captain Take 5 – Gianluca Arbezzano

Docker Captains are select members of the community that are both experts in their field and are passionate about sharing their Docker knowledge with others. “Docker Captains Take 5” is a regular blog series where we get a closer look at our Captains and ask them the same broad set of questions ranging from what their best Docker tip is to whether they prefer cats or dogs (personally, we like whales and turtles over here). Today, we’re interviewing Gianluca Arbezzano who has been a Docker Captain since 2016. He is a Senior Software Staff Engineer at Equinix Metal and is based in Italy. 

How/when did you first discover Docker?

At this point, it is not easy to pick a date. Four years ago I was in Dublin away from my home town near Turin. The Docker Meetup along with many other meetups were a great opportunity for nerds like me looking for new friends and to grab free pizza while having a good time. Back then I was working for a company that helps businesses move to the cloud. I saw that Docker was a powerful tool to master. Not only was Docker a useful tool and led me Continue reading

Wi-Fi: How to deploy 802.1x authentication using WPA3-Enterprise

Wi-Fi Protected Access 3 (WPA3) has brought significant security improvements to Wi-Fi networks, particularly WPA-3Enterprise, which includes tweaks to make authenticating to the network more secure. One of these is has to do with 802.1x authentication that is used to determine whether Wi-Fi clients will be granted access to the enterprise network. Wi-Fi resources Test and review of 4 Wi-Fi 6 routers: Who’s the fastest? How to determine if Wi-Fi 6 is right for you Five questions to answer before deploying Wi-Fi 6 Wi-Fi 6E: When it’s coming and what it’s good for The enterprise mode of WPA has always allowed you to give each user a unique username/password to login to the Wi-Fi or to utilize unique digital certificates for each user to install on devices for even more security. Now with WPA3-Enterprise, the security is increased as clients are now required to make sure it’s communicating with the real authentication server before sending login credentials. That verification was optional with the earlier two versions of WPA.To read this article in full, please click here

How to deploy 802.1x for Wi-Fi using WPA3-Enterprise

Wi-Fi Protected Access 3 (WPA3) has brought significant security improvements to Wi-Fi networks, particularly WPA-3Enterprise, which includes tweaks to make authenticating to the network more secure. One of these is has to do with 802.1x authentication that is used to determine whether Wi-Fi clients will be granted access to the enterprise network. Wi-Fi resources Test and review of 4 Wi-Fi 6 routers: Who’s the fastest? How to determine if Wi-Fi 6 is right for you Five questions to answer before deploying Wi-Fi 6 Wi-Fi 6E: When it’s coming and what it’s good for The enterprise mode of WPA has always allowed you to give each user a unique username/password to login to the Wi-Fi or to utilize unique digital certificates for each user to install on devices for even more security. Now with WPA3-Enterprise, the security is increased as clients are now required to make sure it’s communicating with the real authentication server before sending login credentials. That verification was optional with the earlier two versions of WPA.To read this article in full, please click here

How to deploy 802.1x for Wi-Fi using WPA3-Enterprise

Wi-Fi Protected Access 3 (WPA3) has brought significant security improvements to Wi-Fi networks, particularly WPA-3Enterprise, which includes tweaks to make authenticating to the network more secure. One of these is has to do with 802.1x authentication that is used to determine whether Wi-Fi clients will be granted access to the enterprise network. Wi-Fi resources Test and review of 4 Wi-Fi 6 routers: Who’s the fastest? How to determine if Wi-Fi 6 is right for you Five questions to answer before deploying Wi-Fi 6 Wi-Fi 6E: When it’s coming and what it’s good for The enterprise mode of WPA has always allowed you to give each user a unique username/password to login to the Wi-Fi or to utilize unique digital certificates for each user to install on devices for even more security. Now with WPA3-Enterprise, the security is increased as clients are now required to make sure it’s communicating with the real authentication server before sending login credentials. That verification was optional with the earlier two versions of WPA.To read this article in full, please click here

Keep up with Tech ? How Far ?

One of the hardest things to do is to keep up with tech, now thats some thing every once in a while we hear from our colleagues and we might say it to ourselves as well. There are two things which needs some discussion here

1. New certifications in Networking scope
2. New paths like programming and cloud services

After working for a while, am at a point where I have been exposed to so many technologies within networking, there is Service provider, datacenter, enterprise and other aspects like programming and cloud services.

The choice to take both paths is not efficient if I give it a good thought, but on the other hand its always good to know other aspects of the job as well, am not trying to be diplomatic but rather speaking from experience here.

One path is to be an expert in certain aspect of the field, the other side is to invest time to learn new things, choice is not easy, any field is vast and it takes life time just to be good at one thing, imagine trying to be good at multiple things, it wont work for many people.

Other day I had to explore Continue reading

What You Need to Know About Security Challenges in 2021

Making Time For Yourself

I was a recent pop-in guest on the Network Collective Holiday Show with my friends Jordan Martin and Tony Efantis. One of the questions they had been asking their guests was about the big lessons we’ve learned this year. As I thought back on the roller coaster ride that was 2020, I realized that one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned is that I need to make time for the important things for myself.

Mark It Down

I know it sounds like a given, but we all need to make time for ourselves. I realized that when my usual schedule of running myself in overdrive and jumping from one event or travel opportunity to the next evaporated back in March. I found myself sitting at home and working toward some uncertain future. I never thought that there were going to be huge problems but I also didn’t know how things would end up turning out.

As the days grew into weeks and eventually into months, I quickly figured out that the normal I once knew was going to stay gone for quite a while. In place of that was a situation that I needed to adjust to. And that Continue reading

DC. Part 17. High-available server cluster connected to DC fabric.

Hello my friend,

In the vast majority of cases we speak about the network, network devices and network configuration. Which is absolutely legitimate, as we write about the networks. However, sometimes exactly the same network technologies live in the server world and do the same things under different names. So today we’ll take a look how to create the high-available server cluster using the Keepalived.

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retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any 

means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission of the author.

Servers are perfect for automation

The network exists to span the applications and customers. However, it doesn’t host applications itself; instead, they are hosted on the servers. That’s why automation of the servers is very big topic and, in all honesty, the automation originally has started in the server world.

In the same time, the tools and approaches you learn at our network automation training are universal: they are applicable both for the network and servers automation. Automate all things!

At our network automation training we explore the Linux setup and Continue reading

Using One Cron Parser Everywhere With Rust and Saffron

As part of the development for Cron Triggers on Cloudflare Workers, we had an interesting problem to tackle relating to parsers and the cron expression format. Cron expressions are the format used to write schedules in Cron Triggers, and extensions for cron expressions are everywhere. They vary between parsers and platforms as well, and aren’t standardized by a governing body, which means most parsers out there support many different feature sets, which isn’t good if you’d like something off the shelf that just works.

It can be tough to find the right parser for each part of the Cron Triggers stack, when its user interface, API, and edge service are all written in different languages. On top of that, it isn’t practical to reinvent the wheel multiple times by writing the same parser in different languages and make sure they all match perfectly. So you’re likely stuck with a less-than-perfect solution.

However, in the end, because we wrote our backend service in Rust, it took much less effort to solve this problem. Rust has a great ecosystem for working across multiple languages, which allows us to write a parser once and pull it from the backend to the frontend and Continue reading

Weekend Reads 122420

The easiest way to understand the concept is with an example. Consider a passive optical fiber network where up to 32 homes share the same neighborhood fiber. In the most common GPON technology, the customers on one of these neighborhood nodes (called a PON) share a total of 2.4 gigabits of download data.

The push to develop and deploy applications faster has evolved from simply a goal for developers to a business-level priority that affects every organization’s bottom line. To meet this goal, companies have begun to de-silo development, operations, and security, moving toward a DevSecOps model to deliver

In a survey of 603 free and open source software (FOSS) contributors, the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) and the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard University (LISH) discovered that the average FOSS developer only spent 2.3% of their time on improving the security of their code.

Chris Lewis joins EFF hosts Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien as they discuss how our access to knowledge is increasingly governed by click-wrap agreements that prevent users from ever owning things like books and music, and how this undermines the legal doctrine of “first sale” – which states that once Continue reading

Rails 6 Forms With Bootstrap 5 Styling

Olivier Bonaventure | MPTCP: The coolest protocol you’re already using – but didn’t know

Derick and Brandon chat with Olivier Bonaventure, Professor at Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) and co-founder at Tessares, about the evolution of Multipath TCP, a protocol that is changing the way we experience the Internet. 

Going Virtual with Community Networks Voices in the Asia-Pacific: CNX APAC 2020

Each community network deployment has its own characteristics – ranging from the physical terrain to environmental conditions to local and cultural contexts. Having been involved in some 150 deployments, I can safely say no two are the same.

We helped establish CNX APAC in 2017 as a means to better understand the role, relevance, and evolution of community networks (CNs). It was designed to explore the different characteristics that make up CNs, their local context, the challenges they face, and the opportunities they create. It’s an event in the spirit of community, where community network practitioners come to exchange knowledge, share ideas, inspire others, and be inspired themselves.

For the past three years, we have typically held these as physical events located around some of our community networks deployments in the region. This allowed participants to get hands on with a working CN. The events were multi-dimensional in nature with a conference and knowledge-sharing session, coupled with training and technology demonstrations.

“To make community networks sustainable in the long run, the first thing is, the community has to own it, and the community needs to own it.”
— Mahabir Pun, Nepal

The impact of the global pandemic meant that Continue reading

Year in Review: The Most Viewed Docker Blog Posts of 2020 Part 1

2020 was some type of year…as we wrap up a year that undoubtedly will never be forgotten, we rounded up the most viewed Docker blog posts. The following posts are some of what you, the Docker community, found to be most interesting and useful. Which was your favorite?

10) Announcing the Compose Specification

Starting the list with a *bang* is a post highlighting that we created a new open community to develop the Compose Specification. This new community is run with open governance and with input from all interested parties, allowing us together to create a new standard for defining multi-container apps that can be run from the desktop to the cloud. 

9) Advanced Dockerfiles: Faster Builds and Smaller Images Using BuildKit and Multistage Builds 

This post showed some more advanced patterns that go beyond copying files between a build and a runtime stage, allowing one to get the most out of the multistage build feature. Who doesn’t want more efficient multistage Dockerfiles? 

8) Containerized Python Development – Part 2

The second in a series, this post discussed how to set up and wire other components to a containerized Python service. It showed a good way to Continue reading