Machine learning in network management has promise, challenges

As part of the trend toward more automation and intelligence in enterprise networks, artificial intelligence and machine learning are increasingly in-demand because the ability to programmatically identify problems with the network and provide instant diagnosis of complex problems is a powerful one.Applying AI and ML to network management can enable the consolidation of input from multiple management platforms for central analysis. Rather than IT staff manually combing through reports from diverse devices and applications, machine learning can make quick, automated diagnoses of problems.To read this article in full, please click here

Docker Hub Image Retention Policy Delayed, Subscription Updates

Today we are announcing that we are pausing enforcement of the changes to image retention until mid 2021. Two months ago, we announced a change to Docker image retention policies to reduce overall resource consumption. As originally stated, this change, which was set to take effect on November 1, 2020, would result in the deletion of images for free Docker account users after six months of inactivity. After this announcement, we heard feedback from many members of the Docker community about challenges this posed, in terms of adjusting to the policy without visibility as well as tooling needed to manage an organization’s Docker Hub images. Today’s announcement means Docker will not enforce image expiration enforcement on November 1. Instead, Docker is focusing on consumption-based subscriptions that meet the needs of all of our customers. In this model, as the needs of a developer grow, they can upgrade to a subscription that meets their requirements without limits.

This change means that developers will get a base level of consumption to start, and can extend their subscriptions as their needs grow and evolve, only paying for what is actually needed. The community of 6.7 million registered Docker developers is incredibly diverse–the Continue reading

Kolkata IX: The Maiden Community Internet Exchange in India

In 2015, the Internet Society Kolkata Chapter decided to create an Internet Exchange Point (IXP). It had just completed the installation of L-Root Instance, a critical Internet infrastructure to improve security and resiliency of the Web.

It chose the IXP model specifically because it was working towards hosting an authoritative Domain Name System (DNS) root zone for a top-level domain (TLD), another essential infrastructure of the Internet. But they didn’t know where to begin.

So, the team evaluated cost models and the market and held an outreach event with the Internet Service Provider (ISP) community. The engagement raised interest, but no one joined the IXP. The expectation was that Content Distribution Networks (CDN) would kick off the IXP, before others could join. Tushar Kanti Bhakta, a senior member of the Chapter’s board, suggested community building could help.

With no equipment, no members and no CDN, the team started community building efforts. It held workshops where it invited potential members to discuss Domain Name System Security Extensions, DNS, and the Border Gateway Protocol, the routing protocol for the Internet. Each workshop gave the team the opportunity to pitch the idea of a community IXP in Kolkata.

After two years of engagement, Continue reading

A Last Call for QUIC, a giant leap for the Internet

A Last Call for QUIC, a giant leap for the Internet

QUIC is a new Internet transport protocol for secure, reliable and multiplexed communications. HTTP/3 builds on top of QUIC, leveraging the new features to fix performance problems such as Head-of-Line blocking. This enables web pages to load faster, especially over troublesome networks.

QUIC and HTTP/3 are open standards that have been under development in the IETF for almost exactly 4 years. On October 21, 2020, following two rounds of Working Group Last Call, draft 32 of the family of documents that describe QUIC and HTTP/3 were put into IETF Last Call. This is an important milestone for the group. We are now telling the entire IETF community that we think we're almost done and that we'd welcome their final review.

A Last Call for QUIC, a giant leap for the Internet

Speaking personally, I've been involved with QUIC in some shape or form for many years now. Earlier this year I was honoured to be asked to help co-chair the Working Group. I'm pleased to help shepherd the documents through this important phase, and grateful for the efforts of everyone involved in getting us there, especially the editors. I'm also excited about future opportunities to evolve on top of QUIC v1 to help build a better Internet.

There are two aspects Continue reading

A Virtual Product Management Internship Experience

A Virtual Product Management Internship Experience
A Virtual Product Management Internship Experience

In July 2020, I joined Cloudflare as a Product Management Intern on the DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) team to enhance the benefits that Network Analytics brings to our customers. In the following, I am excited to share with you my experience with remote working as an intern, and how I acclimatized into Cloudflare. I also give details about what my work entailed and how we approached the process of Product Management.

Onboarding to Cloudflare during COVID19

As a long-time user of Cloudflare’s Free CDN plan myself, I was thrilled to join the company and learn what was happening behind the scenes while making its products. The entering internship class consisted of students and recent graduates from various backgrounds around the world - all with a mutual passion in helping build a better Internet.

The catch here was that 2020 would make the experience of being an intern very different. As it was the case with many other fellow interns, it was the first time I had taken up work remotely from scratch. The initial challenge was to integrate into the working environment without ever meeting colleagues in a physical office. Because everything took place online, it was much harder Continue reading

ACI Fabric Access Policies Part 2: Physical Domain

 Physical Domain

This section explains how to create a Physical Domain (Fabric Access Policy). It starts by mapping the REST call POST method and JSON Payload into Fabric Access Policy modeling. Then it explains how the same configurations can be done by using the APIC GUI. Phase 2 in Figure 1-15 illustrates the APIC Management Information Model (MIM) from the Physical Domain perspective. I have already added the object Phys-Standalone_ESXi_PHY into the figure. The format of the RN for this object is Prefix1-{name}, where the Prefix1 is “phys”. This gives us the RN “phys-Standalone_ESXi_PHY”.



Figure 1-15: Fabric Access Policy Modeling: Physical Domain (click image to enlarge).


Continue reading

Weird: Wrong Subnet Mask Causing Unicast Flooding

When I still cared about CCIE certification, I was always tripped up by the weird scenario with (A) mismatched ARP and MAC timeouts and (B) default gateway outside of the forwarding path. When done just right you could get persistent unicast flooding, and I’ve met someone who reported average unicast flooding reaching ~1 Gbps in his data center fabric.

One would hope that we wouldn’t experience similar problems in modern leaf-and-spine fabrics, but one of my readers managed to reproduce the problem within a single subnet in FabricPath with anycast gateway on spine switches when someone misconfigured a subnet mask in one of the servers.

Read more …

Weird: Wrong Subnet Mask Causing Unicast Flooding

When I still cared about CCIE certification, I was always tripped up by the weird scenario with (A) mismatched ARP and MAC timeouts and (B) default gateway outside of the forwarding path. When done just right you could get persistent unicast flooding, and I’ve met someone who reported average unicast flooding reaching ~1 Gbps in his data center fabric.

One would hope that we wouldn’t experience similar problems in modern leaf-and-spine fabrics, but one of my readers managed to reproduce the problem within a single subnet in FabricPath with anycast gateway on spine switches when someone misconfigured a subnet mask in one of the servers.

Read more …

Verizon deals with Microsoft, Nokia aim at making private 5G easier

Verizon’s recent announcements of new partnership deals with Microsoft and with Nokia are designed to create a unified platform for businesses to use as they build their own edge deployments, according to experts.Those deals will see Verizon offer Azure integration natively on its 5G Edge networking platform, as well as partnering for private 5G delivery with Nokia, with the latter agreement focusing on areas where Verizon does not already have a public networking presence, like Europe and Asia-Pacific. The company already has partnerships in place with AWS and IBM, among other major edge technology players.To read this article in full, please click here

Understanding Inner Loop Development and Pull Rates

We have heard feedback that given the changes Docker introduced relating to network egress and the number of pulls for free users, that there are questions around the best way to use Docker as part of your development workflow without hitting these limits. This blog post covers best practices that improve your experience and uses a sensible consumption of Docker which will mitigate the risk of hitting these limits and how to increase the limits depending on your use case. 

If you are interested in how these limits are addressed in a CI/CD pipeline, please have a look at our post: Best Practices for using Docker Hub for CI/CD. If you are using Github Action, have a look at our Docker Github Actions post.

Prerequisites

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following:

Determining Number of Pulls

Docker defines pull rate limits as the number of manifest requests to Docker Hub. Rate limits for Docker pulls are based Continue reading

Gartner crystal ball: Look to neuromorphic computing, DNA storage

Gartner is taking a swing at predicting future trends in IT, flagging neuromorphic computing and DNA storage technologies, and an expanded responsibility for CIOs to deliver digital-business outcomes.Future technologies are resetting everything as current technologies are being stressed to their limits, and conventional computing is hitting a wall,  Daryl Plummer, distinguished research vice president and Gartner fellow told the virtual audience at the firm’s IT Symposium/Xpo Americas.The industry is on a roller-coaster ride that will lead the "reset of everything," Plummer said. The future technologies Gartner forecasts will impact the industry the most have three key common threads: they promote greater innovation and efficiency in the enterprise; they are more effective than the technologies that they are replacing; and they have a transformational impact on society, Plummer said.To read this article in full, please click here

Gartner crystal ball: Look to neuromorphic computing, DNA storage

Gartner is taking a swing at predicting future trends in IT, flagging neuromorphic computing and DNA storage technologies, and an expanded responsibility for CIOs to deliver digital-business outcomes.Future technologies are resetting everything as current technologies are being stressed to their limits, and conventional computing is hitting a wall,  Daryl Plummer, distinguished research vice president and Gartner fellow told the virtual audience at the firm’s IT Symposium/Xpo Americas.The industry is on a roller-coaster ride that will lead the "reset of everything," Plummer said. The future technologies Gartner forecasts will impact the industry the most have three key common threads: they promote greater innovation and efficiency in the enterprise; they are more effective than the technologies that they are replacing; and they have a transformational impact on society, Plummer said.To read this article in full, please click here

A video walk through of EVPN multihoming

You may have overheard someone talking about EVPN multihoming but do you know what it is? If you have, are you up to speed on the latest around it? I walk you through it all, beginning to end, in this three part video series. Watch all three below.

Chapter 1:

EVPN multihoming provides support for all-active server redundancy. In this intro to EVPN multihoming you will hear an overview of the feature and how it compares with EVPN-MLAG.


Chapter 2:

In this episode we dive into the various unicast packet flows in a network with EVPN multihoming. This includes, new data plane constructs such as MAC-ECMP and layer-2 nexthop-groups that have been introduced for the express purpose of EVPN-MH.


Chapter 3:

PIM-SM is used for optimizing flooded traffic in network with EVPN-MH. In this episode we walk through the implementation aspects of flooded traffic, including DF election and Split horizon filtering.


Want to know more? You can find more resources about EVPN and all things networking in our resource hub here.

ACI Fabric Access Policies Part 1: VLAN Pool

 

Introduction

 

Everything in ACI is managed as an Object. Each object belongs to a certain Class. As an example, when we create a VLAN Pool, we create an object that belongs to Class VlanInstP. Classes, in turn, are organized in Packages, Class VlanInstP belongs to Package fvns (fv = fabric virtualization, ns namespace). Figure 1-1 illustrates the classes that we are using in this chapter when we create Fabric Access Policies. Lines with an arrow represent Parent-Child structure and dotted lines represent a relationship (Rs) between classes. We will get back to Rs in becoming sections.



Figure 1-1: ACI Fabric Access Policies.

Continue reading

Docker and Snyk Extend Partnership to Docker Official and Certified Images

Today we are pleased to announce that Docker and Snyk have extended our existing partnership to bring vulnerability scanning to Docker Official and certified images. As the exclusive scanning partner for these two image categories, Snyk will work with Docker to provide developers with insights into our most popular images. It builds on our previous announcement earlier this year where Snyk scanning was integrated into the Docker Desktop and Docker Hub. This means that developers can now incorporate vulnerability assessment along each step of the container development and deployment process.

Docker Official images represent approximately 25% of all of the pull activity on Docker Hub. Docker Official images are used extensively by millions of developers and developer world wide teams to build and run tens of millions of containerized applications. By integrating vulnerability scanning from Snyk users are now able to get more visibility into the images and have a higher level of confidence that their applications are secure and ready for production.

Docker Official images that have been scanned by Snyk will be available early next year.

You can read more about it from Snyk here and you can catch Docker CEO Scott Johnson and Snyk CEO Peter McKay Continue reading

The Hedge Podcast #57: Brian Trammell and PANRG

Brian Trammell joins Alvaro Retana and Russ White to discuss the Path Aware Research Group in the IRTF. According to the charter page, PANRG “aims to support research in bringing path awareness to transport and application layer protocols, and to bring research in this space to the attention of the Internet engineering and protocol design community.”

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Gartner: COVID-era infrastructure trends you should know about

COVID-19 has turned the world inside out, and the impact on infrastructure and operations teams is significant.That's the conclusion of Gartner research vice president Jeffrey Hewitt, who detailed the core infrastructure trends that IT executives can expect to see in the next 12-18 months. Hewitt shared the research at Gartner's IT Symposium/Xpo 2020 Americas event, which is being held virtually this week. (Related story: Gartner's top 9 strategic technology trends for 2021)"The situations created by COVID-19 have had a significant impact on the world," Hewitt said. "This impact is having an influence on almost all of the trends that infrastructure and operations leaders will be facing going forward."To read this article in full, please click here

Gartner: COVID-era infrastructure trends you should know about

COVID-19 has turned the world inside out, and the impact on infrastructure and operations teams is significant.That's the conclusion of Gartner research vice president Jeffrey Hewitt, who detailed the core infrastructure trends that IT executives can expect to see in the next 12-18 months. Hewitt shared the research at Gartner's IT Symposium/Xpo 2020 Americas event, which is being held virtually this week. (Related story: Gartner's top 9 strategic technology trends for 2021)"The situations created by COVID-19 have had a significant impact on the world," Hewitt said. "This impact is having an influence on almost all of the trends that infrastructure and operations leaders will be facing going forward."To read this article in full, please click here

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