Introducing Quicksilver: Configuration Distribution at Internet Scale

Cloudflare’s network processes more than fourteen million HTTP requests per second at peak for Internet users around the world. We spend a lot of time thinking about the tools we use to make those requests faster and more secure, but a secret-sauce which makes all of this possible is how we distribute configuration globally. Every time a user makes a change to their DNS, adds a Worker, or makes any of hundreds of other changes to their configuration, we distribute that change to 200 cities in 90 countries where we operate hardware. And we do that within seconds. The system that does this needs to not only be fast, but also impeccably reliable: more than 26 million Internet properties are depending on it. It also has had to scale dramatically as Cloudflare has grown over the past decade.

Historically, we built this system on top of the Kyoto Tycoon (KT) datastore. In the early days, it served us incredibly well. We contributed support for encrypted replication and wrote a foreign data wrapper for PostgreSQL. However, what worked for the first 25 cities was starting to show its age as we passed 100. In the summer of 2015 we decided to Continue reading

Uneven or Unbalanced Sound Levels on AirPods and Microphones on MacOS

Random and hard to know

The post Uneven or Unbalanced Sound Levels on AirPods and Microphones on MacOS appeared first on EtherealMind.

5 metrics you need to know about your backup and recovery system

Finding out whether backup and recovery systems work well is more complicated than just knowing how long backups and restores take; agreeing to a core set of essential metrics is the key to properly judging your system to determine if it succeeds or needs a redesign.Here are five metrics every enterprise should gather in order to insure that their systems meet the needs of the business.Storage capacity and usage Let's start with a very basic metric: Does your backup system have enough storage capacity to meet your current and future backup and recovery needs? Whether you are talking a tape library or a storage array, your storage system has a finite amount of capacity, and you need to monitor what that capacity is and what percentage of it you're using over time.To read this article in full, please click here

Webinars in April 2020

With webinars being the only way to deliver training content these days, we’ll run one every week in April 2020:

• Starting on April 2nd I’ll talk about one of my favorite topics: switching, bridging and routing, covering almost everything ever invented from virtual circuits and source route bridging to so-called routing at layer-2 and IP forwarding based on host routes;

• I was planning to update the Introduction to Containers and Docker material for ages… but then had to move the December 2019 workshop to March 2020, only to cancel it a week before the coronavirus exploded for real in Switzerland. I hope I’ll manage to deliver the online version on April 9th ;)

• Dinesh Dutt is back on April 16th with an update of Network Automation Tools webinar, in which he’ll cover (among other things) the new network automation tools launched since we did the original webinar in 2016.

• On April 23rd Pete Lumbis plans to dive as deep into the intricacies of switching ASICs as he can without violating an NDA ;)

Parallel Wireless CEO: Don’t Forget About Radios

CEX (Code EXpress) 09. For loop + if conditional = while loop. And the most popular math functions.

Hello my friend,

So far you have learned about the for loop and if conditional. Both of these tools are very useful and have a wide area of the applicability inside the network automation filed. But what if we need to do some activities in your Python code continuously until a certain condition becomes False? The answer you will find in this blogpost.

Network automation training – boost your career

Don’t wait to be kicked out of IT business. Join our network automation training to secure your job in future. Come to NetDevOps side.

How does the training differ from this blog post series? Here you get the basics and learn some programming concepts in general, whereas in the training you get comprehensive set of knowledge with the detailed examples how to use Python for the network and IT automation. You need both.

What are we going to do today?

While loop is a specific type of the loop in Python, which is being executed infinitely while the associated condition is True. All the knowledge you got about the if conditionals are applicable here as well.

Read the if conditional blogpost for more details.

Therefore, while instruction requires careful planing Continue reading

The 5G Economic Impact

Migrating from VPN to Access

With so many people at Cloudflare now working remotely, it's worth stepping back and looking at the systems we use to get work done and how we protect them. Over the years we've migrated from a traditional "put it behind the VPN!" company to a modern zero-trust architecture. Cloudflare hasn’t completed its journey yet, but we're pretty darn close. Our general strategy: protect every internal app we can with Access (our zero-trust access proxy), and simultaneously beef up our VPN’s security with Spectrum (a product allowing the proxying of arbitrary TCP and UDP traffic, protecting it from DDoS).

Before Access, we had many services behind VPN (Cisco ASA running AnyConnect) to enforce strict authentication and authorization. But VPN always felt clunky: it's difficult to set up, maintain (securely), and scale on the server side. Each new employee we onboarded needed to learn how to configure their client. But migration takes time and involves many different teams. While we migrated services one by one, we focused on the high priority services first and worked our way down. Until the last service is moved to Access, we still maintain our VPN, keeping it protected with Spectrum.

Some of our services didn't Continue reading

Dogfooding from Home: How Cloudflare Built our Cloud VPN Replacement

It’s never been more crucial to help remote workforces stay fully operational — for the sake of countless individuals, businesses, and the economy at large. In light of this, Cloudflare recently launched a program that offers our Cloudflare for Teams suite for free to any company, of any size, through September 1. Some of these firms have been curious about how Cloudflare itself uses these tools.

Here’s how Cloudflare’s next-generation VPN alternative, Cloudflare Access, came to be.

Rewind to 2015. Back then, as with many other companies, all of Cloudflare’s internally-hosted applications were reached via a hardware-based VPN. When one of our on-call engineers received a notification (usually on their phone), they would fire up a clunky client on their laptop, connect to the VPN, and log on to Grafana.

It felt a bit like solving a combination lock with a fire alarm blaring overhead.

But for three of our engineers enough was enough. Why was a cloud network security company relying on clunky on-premise hardware?

And thus, Cloudflare Access was born.

A Culture of Dogfooding

Many of the products Cloudflare builds are a direct result of the challenges our own team is looking to address, and Access is a Continue reading

Daily Roundup: VMware Pulls FY21 Forecast

Amazon, Microsoft Dethroned in China’s Public Cloud Market

Security Experts Battle Hackers, COVID-19 Cyberattacks

Pushing PCI-Express Fabrics Up To The Next Level

While the long overdue upgrade to PCI-Express 4.0 is finally coming to servers, allowing for high bandwidth links between processors and peripherals. …

Pushing PCI-Express Fabrics Up To The Next Level was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Chipmakers Prep for Pandemic Threat on Supply Chain

Member News: Ethiopia Launches Internet Society Chapter

Ready, set, launch: An Internet Society Chapter launched recently in Ethiopia, with a goal of advocating for the development and expansion of open, secure, trustworthy, and affordable Internet access to everyone in the country. The idea of starting an Internet Society Chapter came from a workshop, “where we became conscious of the fact that more than 85% of the Ethiopia population is losing countless opportunities every day because they don’t have access to the Internet,” wrote Adugna Necho, a networking professor at Bahir Dar University. “We believe the Internet is for everyone and we are here to work with all people – from communities to businesses to governments and ordinary people to connect the unconnected and create a bigger and stronger Internet in Ethiopia.”

More Internet, please: The Internet will keep people connected while the world deals with the coronavirus pandemic, the India Chennai Chapter notes. Governments should resist urges to shut down service, the Chapter says. “With factories, offices, public places, transportation, schools are colleges shut down, and no clear picture of whether normal life would resume in 4 weeks or 4 months, it is the Internet that could make life go on,” the Chapter writes. “While it is Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 27th, 2020

Hey, it's HighScalability time!

 

Awesome explanation of how to build a PID controller to fly a rocket! (BPS.space via Orbital Index)

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Without your support on Patreon this kind of Stuff can't happen. You are that important to the fate of the intelligent world.

Know someone who wants to understand the cloud? I wrote Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 just for them. On Amazon it has 103 mostly 5 star reviews. Here's a recent authentic unfaked review:

Number Stuff:

VMware Pulls 2021 Guidance Citing COVID-19 Risk

The Bane of Backwards Compatibility

I’m a huge fan of video games. I love playing them, especially on my old consoles from my formative years. The original Nintendo consoles were my childhood friends as much as anything else. By the time I graduated from high school, everyone had started moving toward the Sony Playstation. I didn’t end up buying into that ecosystem as I started college. Instead, I just waited for my brother to pick up a new console and give me his old one.

This meant I was always behind the curve on getting to play the latest games. I was fine with that, since the games I wanted to play were on the old console. The new one didn’t have anything that interested me. And by the time the games that I wanted to play did come out it wouldn’t be long until my brother got a new one anyway. But one thing I kept hearing was that the Playstation was backwards compatible with the old generation of games. I could buy a current console and play most of the older games on it. I wondered how they managed to pull that off since Nintendo never did.

When I was older, I did Continue reading

COVID-19 Response – A Letter from Our CEO

As a leading supplier of cloud networking equipment globally, Arista plays a critical role in supporting the cloud communications and computing infrastructure that will keep the world running during these difficult times. The rapid acceleration of Covid-19 developments across the world has been sudden and shocking. It has forced us to take a new perspective on gratitude for what we have, including our families, health and an opportunity to rethink our goals.

COVID-19 Response – A Letter from Our CEO

As a leading supplier of cloud networking equipment globally, Arista plays a critical role in supporting the cloud communications and computing infrastructure that will keep the world running during these difficult times. The rapid acceleration of Covid-19 developments across the world has been sudden and shocking. It has forced us to take a new perspective on gratitude for what we have, including our families, health and an opportunity to rethink our goals.