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.

Iron Chef: Certification Edition

My friend Joshua Williams (@802DotMe) texted me today with a great quote that I wanted to share with you that made me think about certifications:

You’ve probably already thought through this extensively, and maybe even written about it, but after sitting through another 8 hour practical exam yesterday I’m more convinced than ever that expert level exams from technical companies are more analogous to a gimmicky Food Network TV show than real world application of technical acumen. They don’t care so much about my skill level as they do about what kind of meal I can prepare in 30 minutes using Tialapia, grapes, and Dr. Pepper syrup with my salt shaker taken away halfway through.

I laughed because it’s true. And then I thought about it more and realized he’s way more than right. We know for a fact that companies love to increase the level of challenge in their exams from novice to expert. It’s a way to weed out the people that aren’t committed to learning about something. However, as the questions and tasks get harder it becomes much more difficult to get a good sense of how candidates are going to perform.

Boiling Water Isn’t Continue reading

Weekend Reads 082820

CENTR has published a white paper separating registry lock services into two standardized models. This categorization and the included recommendations can help top-level domain registries (re)design their registry lock services.

Simply stated: No matter how sophisticated your security software is, data cannot be simultaneously used and secured. But that may be changing soon.

Blockchain technology is going to change everything: the shipping industry, the financial system, government … in fact, what won’t it change? But enthusiasm for it mainly stems from a lack of knowledge and understanding. The blockchain is a solution in search of a problem.

Or you could reduce all of that complexity to a single roll of 25 dice into a plastic box.

Multitenancy is a common pattern in Kubernetes. Many organizations deploy Kubernetes-as-a-Service, where one cluster houses many tenants and workloads. This pattern might sound familiar, as cloud computing services like AWS, Azure, and GCP have enabled multiple customers (tenants) to run their business-critical workloads in a single cluster for years.

As gaming grows in stature in the lives of Americans during the pandemic, it has highlighted the extraordinary grip that two of the four tech companies under investigation have over the white-hot industry.

In general Continue reading

Asynchronous HTMLRewriter for Cloudflare Workers

Asynchronous HTMLRewriter for Cloudflare Workers
Asynchronous HTMLRewriter for Cloudflare Workers

Last year, we launched HTMLRewriter for Cloudflare Workers, which enables developers to make streaming changes to HTML on the edge. Unlike a traditional DOM parser that loads the entire HTML document into memory, we developed a streaming parser written in Rust. Today, we’re announcing support for asynchronous handlers in HTMLRewriter. Now you can perform asynchronous tasks based on the content of the HTML document: from prefetching fonts and image assets to fetching user-specific content from a CMS.

How can I use HTMLRewriter?

We designed HTMLRewriter to have a jQuery-like experience. First, you define a handler, then you assign it to a CSS selector; Workers does the rest for you. You can look at our new and improved documentation to see our supported list of selectors, which now include nth-child selectors. The example below changes the alternative text for every second image in a document.

async function editHtml(request) {
  return new HTMLRewriter()
     .on("img:nth-child(2)", new ElementHandler())
     .transform(await fetch(request))
}

class ElementHandler {
   element(e) {
      e.setAttribute("alt", "A very interesting image")
   }
}

Since these changes are applied using streams, we maintain a low TTFB (time to first byte) and users never know the HTML was transformed. If you’re interested in how we’re Continue reading

Navigating the open network operating systems space

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Some of your favorites are back together on this episode of the Kernel of Truth podcast— specifically Roopa Prabhu, Brian O’Sullivan and Pete Lumbis. Things have changed a little around here since the last time the three of them were chatting together on the podcast but one thing hasn’t, how much they love to talk all things open networking. In this episode the group talks about how to navigate the open networking operating systems space. From figuring out how to choose an open network operating system, to understanding what works best for deployments, and even what resources and communities are out there for you to tap into. We have it all here for you to help you get started. All you have to do is sit back and enjoy the episode and don’t forget to also check out the links below with resources referenced in the podcast.

Guest Bios

Roopa Prabhu: Roopa is a Linux Architect at NVIDIA, formally Cumulus Networks. She and her team work on all things kernel networking and Linux system infrastructure areas. Her primary Continue reading

Pure Storage unveils an all-flash hybrid-storage killer

All-flash storage arrays are fairly common in the most mission-critical of environments, where response time is of the essence. But if you move a step down to where archival activity takes place, there are still plenty of hard-disk/flash hybrid storage arrays.That’s because hard-disk drives have retained one advantage over flash: capacity. HDDs from Seagate and Western Digital are pushing into the 20TB range for a whole lot less than a comparable flash drive.But Pure Storage thinks the second generation of its FlashArray//C storage platform will be a hybrid flash/disk storage killer because it has the capacity to match a hybrid array with an all-flash storage setup. The pitch is that with FlashArray//C’s capacity, enterprises can do away with hard-drive-based storage, which draws much more power than an SSD and generate far more heat.To read this article in full, please click here

Pure Storage unveils an all-flash hybrid-storage killer

All-flash storage arrays are fairly common in the most mission-critical of environments, where response time is of the essence. But if you move a step down to where archival activity takes place, there are still plenty of hard-disk/flash hybrid storage arrays.That’s because hard-disk drives have retained one advantage over flash: capacity. HDDs from Seagate and Western Digital are pushing into the 20TB range for a whole lot less than a comparable flash drive.But Pure Storage thinks the second generation of its FlashArray//C storage platform will be a hybrid flash/disk storage killer because it has the capacity to match a hybrid array with an all-flash storage setup. The pitch is that with FlashArray//C’s capacity, enterprises can do away with hard-drive-based storage, which draws much more power than an SSD and generate far more heat.To read this article in full, please click here

Announcing VMware Container Networking with Antrea for Kubernetes

By Cody McCain, Senior Product Manager and Susan Wu, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Networking and Security Business Unit

Enterprises benefit from collaborative engineering and receive the latest innovations from open source projects. However, it’s a challenge for enterprise to rely solely on community support to run their operations. This is because community support is best-effort and cannot provide a pre-defined SLA.

While Kubernetes itself is open source, and part of Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), it takes an ecosystem of surrounding technologies as curated by CNCF—from the container registry and storage engine to the container network plugin to run Kubernetes.

Announcing VMware Container Networking with Antrea

With the new release of VMware Container Networking with Antrea, enterprises get the best of both worlds – access to the latest innovation from Project Antrea and world-class support from VMware. Container Networking with Antrea is the commercial offering consisting of and 24/7 support for Project Antrea.

Container Networking with Antrea will package the latest release of Project Antrea version 0.9.1. Antrea is a purpose-built Kubernetes networking solution for public and private clouds building upon Open vSwitch, the open source technology optimized for distributed multi-layer switching performance. Antrea is designed to run anywhere Kubernetes Continue reading

Cisco: Making remote users feel at home on the new enterprise network

When Covid-19 reared its ugly head earlier this year it altered the way millions of corporate workers access enterprise resources.  Now that it’s obvious those changes in many cases are going to be more permanent than originally thought, many customers and vendors are looking to support remote workers in ways not really expected in the past.“The Covid-19 pandemic brought about a huge experiment in widespread remote working,” said Gartner vice president Elisabeth Joyce, of a recent survey of 127 company leaders that found  47% said they intend to allow employees to work remotely full time going forward. “As business leaders plan and execute reopening of their workplaces, they are evaluating more permanent remote working arrangements as a way to meet employee expectations and to build more resilient business operations."To read this article in full, please click here

Getting Started With OSPFV2 Resource Modules

With the increasing size and complexity of modern enterprise networks, the demand on simplifying the networks management becomes more intense. The introduction of resources modules with Ansible 2.9 provide a path to users to ease the network management, especially across multiple different product vendors.

In the past, we’ve already covered resource modules for VLAN management and for ACLs. However, simplifying network management is not limited to rather local network setups: Open Shortest Path First ( OSPFv2) is a protocol used to distribute IP routing information throughout a single Autonomous System (AS). It is used in larger network setups, as the Wikipedia page so aptly observes:

OSPF is a widely used IGP in large enterprise networks. IS-IS, another LSR-based protocol, is more common in large service provider networks.

Managing OSPFv2 manually for a network device can be a very difficult and tedious task, and more often this needs to be performed carefully, as the manual process is more prone to human error.

This blog post goes through the OSPFV2 resource module for the VyOS network platform. We will walk through several examples and describe the use cases for each state parameter and how we envision these being used in Continue reading

How Argo Tunnel engineering uses Argo Tunnel

How Argo Tunnel engineering uses Argo Tunnel

Whether you are managing a fleet of machines or sharing a private site from your localhost, Argo Tunnel is here to help. On the Argo Tunnel team we help make origins accessible from the Internet in a secure and seamless manner. We also care deeply about productivity and developer experience for the team, so naturally we want to make sure we have a development environment that is reliable, easy to set up and fast to iterate on.

A brief history of our development environment (dev-stack)

Docker compose

When our development team was still small, we used a docker-compose file to orchestrate the services needed to develop Argo Tunnel. There was no native support for hot reload, so every time an engineer made a change, they had to restart their dev-stack.

We could hack around it to hot reload with docker-compose, but when that failed, we had to waste time debugging the internals of Docker. As the team grew, we realized we needed to invest in improving our dev stack.

At the same time Cloudflare was in the process of migrating from Marathon to kubernetes (k8s). We set out to find a tool that could detect changes in source code and Continue reading

Information could be half the world’s mass by 2245, says researcher

Digital content should be considered a fifth state of matter, along with gas, liquid, plasma and solid, suggests one university scholar.Because of the energy and resources used to create, store and distribute data physically and digitally, data has evolved and should now be considered as mass, according to Melvin Vopson, a senior lecturer at the U.K.'s University of Portsmouth and author of an article, "The information catastrophe," published in the journal AIP Advances.Vopson also claims digital bits are on a course to overwhelm the planet and will eventually outnumber atoms.To read this article in full, please click here

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