Network Automation at AnsibleFest 2020

This year, we are adapting our signature automation event, AnsibleFest, into a free virtual experience to connect our communities with a wider audience and to collaborate to solve problems. Seasoned pros and brand new Ansiblings alike can find answers and guidance for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, the enterprise solution for building and operating automation at scale. We’re giving our attendees an inside peek into exactly what to expect from each channel. Let’s take a closer look at what is to come from the network channel at AnsibleFest 2020.

 

Network Automation at AnsibleFest

Gone are the days of hand-typing commands into network devices one by one. Manage your network infrastructure using Ansible throughout the entire development and production life cycle. This AnsibleFest channel focuses on network automation topics for module and Collection developers to playbook writers, and is geared towards network and cloud engineers/operators. The channel has a good mix of community, customers, partners and Red Hatters that aims to provide something for everyone.

Attendees will learn how network automation can no longer be a “point tool”, but instead part of a holistic automation strategy that spans IT teams. Although Ansible was built as a DIY tool, it needs Continue reading

Behavior Changes in clusterawsadm 0.5.5

Late last week I needed to test some Kubernetes functionality, so I thought I’d spin up a test cluster really quick using Cluster API (CAPI). As often happens with fast-moving projects like Kubernetes and CAPI, my existing CAPI environment had gotten a little out of date. So I updated my environment, and along the way picked up an important change in the default behavior of the clusterawsadm tool used by the Cluster API Provider for AWS (CAPA). In this post, I’ll share more information on this change in default behavior and the impacts of that change.

The clusterawsadm tool is part of CAPA and is used to help manage AWS-specific aspects, particularly around credentials and IAM (Identity and Access Management). As outlined in this doc, users use clusterawsadm to create a CloudFormation stack that prepares an AWS account for use with CAPA. This stack contains roles and policies that enable CAPA to function as expected.

Here’s the change in default behavior:

  • In clusterawsadm 0.5.4 and earlier, using clusterawsadm to create or update the CloudFormation stack would also create a bootstrap IAM user and group by default.
  • In clusterawsadm 0.5.5 and later, creating or updating the Continue reading

The Digital Divide May Be News, But It’s Not New

This opinion piece was originally published in Morning Consult.

Low-income Americans; Black, Hispanic and Native Americans; the elderly; Americans with a high school education or less; and rural Americans are much more likely to be on the wrong side of the digital divide. Ours remains a nation where too many people, often our most vulnerable citizens, are unconnected or under-connected.

The digital divide may have made the news during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it isn’t new.

For much of the past quarter-century, Washington policymakers have ignored the digital divide. In more recent years, some public officials, for political reasons, have identified the digital divide as primarily a rural issue, noting that approximately 5 million rural American households can’t access broadband networks. In reality, the number of rural households that can’t access broadband is dwarfed by the roughly 20 million American households that can’t afford Internet access, and that number almost certainly has increased as a result of the pandemic.

Today, Washington finally seems willing to engage in addressing the digital divide. What we need now are not the patchwork solutions of the past, but a thoughtful, fully funded, comprehensive effort to ensure broadband connectivity for all Americans.

My colleagues and Continue reading

Tech Bytes: UCT’s Global WAN Performance Sparkles With Silver Peak SD-WAN (Sponsored)

Today's Tech Bytes is a conversation with Silver Peak customer UCT about how it adopted SD-WAN to boost performance and minimize the downtime of critical business applications. With 21 sites in 8 countries, the company relies on its WAN to support in-house applications and manage the logistics of its global operations. Our guest is James Mccoll, Network Engineer at UCT.

Tech Bytes: UCT’s Global WAN Performance Sparkles With Silver Peak SD-WAN (Sponsored)

Today's Tech Bytes is a conversation with Silver Peak customer UCT about how it adopted SD-WAN to boost performance and minimize the downtime of critical business applications. With 21 sites in 8 countries, the company relies on its WAN to support in-house applications and manage the logistics of its global operations. Our guest is James Mccoll, Network Engineer at UCT.

The post Tech Bytes: UCT’s Global WAN Performance Sparkles With Silver Peak SD-WAN (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Network Break 299: Cisco Acquires Audio Filter BabbleLabs; Apple Update Hits Facebook In The Ads

Today's Network Break shares listener follow-up, then dives into a new Cisco acquisition of an audio company; discusses how Facebook is responding to an Apple update that will hurt a part of Facebook's business; covers financial results from HPE, VMware, and Nutanix; and more tech news.

The post Network Break 299: Cisco Acquires Audio Filter BabbleLabs; Apple Update Hits Facebook In The Ads appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The Week in Internet News: U.S. Moves Closer to Banning Chinese Apps

Shopping for video: As U.S. President Donald Trump pushes for a ban of TikTok unless it’s sold by its Chinese owner, Walmart has joined Microsoft in a bid for the short-video sharing app, CNBC reports. TikTok is reportedly nearing an agreement to sell its U.S., Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand operations for $20 billion to $30 billion.

Boycotting an app ban: Another Chinese app that’s been targeted by Trump is WeChat, but the Chinese foreign ministry has suggested that consumers in the country could boycott Apple if the U.S. takes action against WeChat, The Straits Times says. Apple, as a large U.S. company, seems to be a convenient target for Chinese consumers.

An East/West split: As others have warned, an official with the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre has suggested that the Internet may split into a Western version and a Chinese-led Eastern version if Trump moves forward with a ban of Chinese apps, the Independent reports. A split could raise concerns about Western technology keeping up with the East, the official says.

Spy vs. hacker: New Zealand’s government has turned to its intelligence agency to thwart a sustained, multi-day cyberattack on the Continue reading

Century Link/Level 3 Outage is one of the biggest Internet Problem! 3.5% Drop in Global Internet Traffic

Century Link Outage

 

On August 30, 2020, Level 3/Century Link, AS 3356 had major Internet outage. In fact this outage effected massive amount of networks, including very well know ones such as Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Discord, Reddit etc.

3.5% Global Internet Traffic was dropped due to this outage and entire network converged after almost 7 hours. This is huge amount of time. When we usually discuss convergence, specifically fast convergence, ‘Seconds’ if not ‘ Milliseconds ‘ are the target values.

No one wants to have minutes level network convergence. But when there is an Outage like this, we categorize them as ‘ Catastrophic Failures’ and unfortunately network design usually doesn’t take this kind of failures into an account.

But could it be prevented?

In the first place, let’s understand that, this event, similar to many other catastrophic network events, started at a single location. (According to a CenturyLink status page, the issue originated from CenturyLink’s data center in Mississauga, a city near Ontario, Canada.)

But it spread over entire backbone of AS3356.

In fact, I remember on 2014, which we famously know as 512k incident happened because of this network (Level 3) as well and that event also caused Continue reading

Military looks to ultraviolet networks for secure battlefield communication

U.S. Army researchers are exploring the use of ultraviolet optical communications in battlefield situations because, under the right circumstances, the technology might support links that are undetectable to the enemy.One thing the researchers looked at was the effects of attenuation, the natural phenomenon of the signals getting weaker over distance. They wanted to know whether there was a distance range in which the signals were weak enough that adversaries likely couldn’t detect them, but still be strong enough that friendly receivers could. They say they observed that to be the case, but the research paper about their work doesn’t say what those distances are.To read this article in full, please click here

Enhancing the Linux command line with aliases

Want to get work done a little faster, spend less time remembering commands and maybe even show your coworkers how clever you are? Easy. Set up several dozen bash aliases.Your days will get easier and a tad less stressful. You might even have some fun. In this post, we'll look at the various types of aliases that you can set up, and what you need to know to manage them.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Why use aliases? Using aliases helps you to avoid having to type a lot of command details, especially those that are hard to remember or require a lengthy string of options that might have to be entered in some particular order before they'll spit out just the output that you're waiting to see.To read this article in full, please click here

Pushing to Multiple Git Remotes

I am working on a project where I need to push to both a github and bitbucket repository as the project is stored in both of these locations. I do not have the ability to sync between the two using either github or bitbuckets built in tools. This post goes through the process of ...

Analysis of Today’s CenturyLink/Level(3) Outage

Analysis of Today's CenturyLink/Level(3) Outage

Today CenturyLink/Level(3), a major ISP and Internet bandwidth provider, experienced a significant outage that impacted some of Cloudflare’s customers as well as a significant number of other services and providers across the Internet. While we’re waiting for a post mortem from CenturyLink/Level(3), I wanted to write up the timeline of what we saw, how Cloudflare’s systems routed around the problem, why some of our customers were still impacted in spite of our mitigations, and what appears to be the likely root cause of the issue.

Increase In Errors

At 10:03 UTC our monitoring systems started to observe an increased number of errors reaching our customers’ origin servers. These show up as “522 Errors” and indicate that there is an issue connecting from Cloudflare’s network to wherever our customers’ applications are hosted.

Cloudflare is connected to CenturyLink/Level(3) among a large and diverse set of network providers. When we see an increase in errors from one network provider, our systems automatically attempt to reach customers’ applications across alternative providers. Given the number of providers we have access to, we are generally able to continue to route traffic even when one provider has an issue.

Analysis of Today's CenturyLink/Level(3) Outage
The diverse set of network providers Cloudflare connects Continue reading

Docker Talks Live Stream Monthly Recap

It’s time for a round up of Docker Talks, this time from the month of August. As you may remember, Chad Metcalf (@metcalfc) and I (@pmckee) started the weekly live-streaming video series to connect with you, our extended family of developers, and to help you succeed in your Docker journey.

In August, we held four sessions covering how to set up your local development environment with Node.js, Visual Studio remote debugging extension, the Awesome Compose project and common questions people have when starting with Docker. Below, I’ve put together the list of live streams for the month for your viewing and learning pleasure.

We live stream on our YouTube channel every Wednesday at 10 a.m. Pacific Time. You’ll find all of the past streams there and you can subscribe to get notifications. See you on the next live stream.

Docker Talks Live! Setting up your local development environment with Node.js
Chad and I explore how to set up your local development environment with Node.js and debugging inside of containers. (Streamed live Aug. 5)

Docker Live! Debugging Node.js with VSCode Docker Extension
I talk about Visual Studio remote debugging extension, do some Continue reading

IoT power: battery, wired or wireless?

The term “Internet of Things” can be used to describe a huge range of different technologies, from sensors to gateways to back-end systems that organize data and keep machine-to-machine networks secure. Lots of attention is rightly paid to the way IoT systems gather data and how it moves from place to place. However, for some parts of the IoT, the issue of how to keep sensors powered may be just as important.Particularly in the case of IoT systems that feature small sensors and sensors that might be far away from each other or from the rest of the system, energy usage is a critical concern, because traditional wired power may simply not be an option.To read this article in full, please click here

In South Asia an Online Training Course Equips Engineers for the Future

The Internet Society, in partnership with South Asia Network Operators Group (SANOG) recently concluded a five-week, hands-on training course for entry level network engineers and system administrators from South Asia. The online course Introduction to Network Operations, which took place from June 15 to July 19, prepared professionals to take advantage of the new opportunities the Internet is creating. The training provided practical learning about UNIX/Linux, networking, and the Domain Name System (DNS) to over 40 participants from Research Education Networks (RENs), government institutions, network operators, universities, and private institutions. SANOG subject matter experts Thilina Pathirana from Sri Lanka and Gazi Zehadul Kabir from Bangladesh moderated via Moodle, an e-learning platform.

Skills and Knowledge for Digital Transformation

The course aimed to prepare young engineers for the future. The technical skills and hands-on knowledge enable them to build expertise to advance professionally in their chosen field of network and system administration. The course also served as a common platform for South Asia community members to actively interact, exchange knowledge, and learn from one another.

For participants, the course was a great learning experience. “It was the best online course I had yet,” said Afaq Ahmed from Pakistan. For young engineers Shreekar Continue reading

Heavy Networking 537: Ansible Vs. Terraform For Network Automation

The networking community seems to have coalesced around Ansible for network device automation and Terraform for cloud. Why this divide? Are the two tools really that different? Today's Heavy Networking explores how and where you can use both these tools, with guests Ned Bellavance and Josh VanDeraa.

The post Heavy Networking 537: Ansible Vs. Terraform For Network Automation appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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