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.

Using Cloudflare to secure your cardholder data environment

As part of our ongoing compliance efforts Cloudflare’s PCI scope is reviewed quarterly and after any significant changes to ensure all in-scope systems are operating in accordance with the PCI DSS. This review also allows us to periodically review each product we offer as a PCI validated service provider and identify where there might be opportunities to provide greater value to our customers.

With our customers in mind, we completed our latest assessment and have increased our PCI certified product offering!

Building trust in our products is one critical component that allows Cloudflare’s mission of “Building a Better Internet” to succeed. We reaffirm our dedication to building trust in our products by obtaining industry standard security compliance certifications and complying with regulations.

Cloudflare is a Level 1 Merchant, the highest level, and also provides services to organizations to help secure their cardholder data environment. Maintaining PCI DSS compliance is important for Cloudflare because (1) we must ensure that our transmission and processing of cardholder data is secure for our own customers, (2) that our customers know they can trust Cloudflare’s products to transmit cardholder data securely, and (3) that anyone who interacts with Cloudflare’s services know that their information is Continue reading

Barbaric Balancing

Recently I stumbled upon the IETF draft about PIM Designated Router Load Balancing (DRLB) and it reminded me of something absolutely barbaric.

Introduction

In L3 multicast, load balancing is simple. If the RPF route is ECMP, the router can choose …

Video: IPv6 Security Overview

When I’ve seen my good friends Christopher Werny and Enno Rey talk about IPv6 security at RIPE78 meeting, another bit of one of my puzzles fell in place. I was planning to do an update of the IPv6 security webinar I’d done with Eric Vyncke, and always wanted to get it done by a security practitioner focused on enterprise networks, making Christopher a perfect fit.

As it was almost a decade since we did the original webinar, Christopher started with an overview of IPv6 security challenges (TL&DR: not much has changed).

Minimalist Hyperscale Servers For The Rest Of Us

Server component and system maker Supermicro is known for being out in front when any X86 processor comes to market and often shoots the gap between ODMs, who have a relatively small number of large customers, and OEMs, who have a large number of relatively small customers. …

Minimalist Hyperscale Servers For The Rest Of Us was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Mellanox Doubles Up Ethernet Bandwidth With Spectrum-3

The relentless need for bandwidth is probably something that all of us are well aware of these days in our home lives thanks to the coronavirus outbreak. …

Mellanox Doubles Up Ethernet Bandwidth With Spectrum-3 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Is 800G Enough to Scare Away the Optical Bogeyman?

Huawei Boosts 2020 R&D to $20B

Microsoft Digs Deeper Into 5G With Affirmed Acquisition

HA Kubernetes Clusters on AWS with Cluster API v1alpha3

A few weeks ago, I published a post on HA Kubernetes clusters on AWS with Cluster API v1alpha2. That post was itself a follow-up to a post I wrote in September 2019 on setting up HA clusters using Cluster API v1alpha1. In this post, I’ll follow up on both of those posts with a look at setting up HA Kubernetes clusters on AWS using Cluster API v1alpha3. Although this post is similar to the v1alpha2 post, be aware there are some notable changes in v1alpha3, particularly with regard to the control plane.

If you’re not yet familiar with Cluster API, take a look at this high-level overview I wrote in August 2019. That post will provide an explanation of the project’s goals as well as provide some terminology.

In this post, I won’t discuss the process of establishing a management cluster; I’m assuming your Cluster API management cluster is already up and running. (I do have some articles in the content pipeline that discuss creating a management cluster.) Instead, this post will focus on creating a highly-available workload cluster. By “highly available,” I mean a cluster with multiple control plane nodes that are distributed across multiple availability zones (AZs). Continue reading

What Social Media Theorists Say About The Impact of the Internet on our Relationships

Social media was completely unheard of two decades ago, but today it is an integral part of most people’s lives. Social media theorists have different opinions on how the internet affects our relationships. Some of these social media theorists claim that the internet has improved relationships while other theorists claim that that the internet has a negative effect on real world relationships.

The truth is that the theorists on both sides of the question are right. Here’s why.

How Social Media and the Internet Can Aid Relationships

Social media and the internet have the ability to aid relationships in the following ways. It helps family members and friends stay in touch, even when there is a huge gap in distance and time between them. Even for those people who live a busy life, staying in touch through emails and texts is a quick way to let those people you care about know that you are thinking of them, while connecting through social media means that you have a means of keeping up on what is going on in their life. While it may not be ideal, it is a way for people to be able to hold onto the bonds Continue reading

Virtual Data Centers, SDN, and Multitenancy

When you aren’t the size of Netflix, you may not be guaranteed dedicated infrastructure within a data center; you have to share. Even in larger organizations, multitenancy may be required to solve regulatory compliance issues. So what is multitenancy, how does it differ from other forms of resource division, and what role do networks play?

Gartner Inc. defines multitenancy as “a reference to the mode of operation of software where multiple independent instances of one or multiple applications operate in a shared environment. The instances (tenants) are logically isolated, but physically integrated.” This is basically a fancy way of saying “cutting up IT infrastructure so that more than one user/department/organization/and so on can share the same physical IT infrastructure, without being able to see one another’s data.”

That “without being able to see one another’s data” is the critical bit. Allowing multiple users to use a single computer has been possible for decades. Multi-user operating systems, for example, can allow multiple users to log in to a single computer at the same time. While this approach does allow multiple users to share a physical piece of IT infrastructure, it isn’t multitenancy.

In a multi-user OS, the multiple users Continue reading

BiB090 – Deploying a 10000 user VPN in a Month

BiB090 – Deploying a 10000 user VPN in a Month

Robin Gilijamse deployed a 10000 user remote working VPN in about 4 weeks. We briefly discuss the design and some lessions learned from the project.

The post BiB090 – Deploying a 10000 user VPN in a Month appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Truth Matters: Why Journalists Need Encryption Now More Than Ever

As COVID-19 spreads around the globe, so has misinformation about the virus. Log into any social media account and it’s easy to get confused by friends and family sharing contradictory messages on anything from infection rates, to local preventative measures, and what to do if we feel a dreaded cough coming on.

Truth matters – especially when public health is involved – and we often rely on journalists and news sources around the world to help us separate fact from fiction. And, whether we realize it or not, there’s a digital security tool that is a critical factor in the trust equation: encryption.

In a period that has seen various governments and law enforcement representatives propose laws that would weaken it, the pandemic is an important reminder of the role encryption plays to protect both journalists, their sources, and general news integrity.

End-to-end (E2E) encryption is a tool that keeps digital communications private by scrambling content so that only the sender and receiver have the keys to unscramble and read it.

This is crucial for journalists.

Journalists often rely on secure communication services like E2E messaging apps to connect with sources in a trustworthy way. With COVID-19 spreading, many organizations Continue reading

Migrating to React land: Gatsby

I am an engineer that loves docs. Well, OK, I don’t love all docs but I believe docs are a crucial, yet often neglected element to a great developer experience. I work on the developer experience team for Cloudflare Workers focusing on several components of Workers, particularly on the docs that we recently migrated to Gatsby.

Through porting our documentation site to Gatsby I learned a lot. In this post, I share some of the learnings that could’ve saved my former self from several headaches. This will hopefully help others considering a move to Gatsby or another static site generator.

Why Gatsby?

Prior to our migration to Gatsby, we used Hugo for our developer documentation. There are a lot of positives about working with Hugo - fast build times, fast load times - that made building a simple static site a great use case for Hugo. Things started to Continue reading

MUST READ: The World in Which IPv6 Was a Good Design

A lot of people are confused about the roles of network layers (some more than others), the interactions between MAC addresses, IP addresses, and TCP/UDP port numbers, the differences between routing and bridging… and why it’s so bad to bridge across large distances (or in large networks).

I tried to explain most of those topic in How Networks Really Work webinar (next session coming on April 2nd), but as is usually the case someone did a much better job: you MUST READ the poetic and hilariously funny World in which IPv6 was a good design by Avery Pennarun.

Survey: Most data centers don’t meet the needs of their users

A joint report released by Forbes Insights and Vertiv found that just 29% of data-center decision-makers say their current facilities are meeting their needs, and only 6% say their data centers are updated ahead of their needs.In yet another example of the disconnect between executives and people on the front lines, 11% of executives believe their data centers are updated ahead of current bandwidth needs, while just 1% of engineers feel the same way.Future data centers, the report says, will inevitably require adequate processing power – locally in the cloud and at the edge – to effectively manage new challenges around bandwidth, security and technologiesAI, advanced analytics, 5G, edge computing and more.To read this article in full, please click here