Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Picture a network—any enterprise network. What do you see? In almost every case, in almost every environment, you’ll find hubs and spokes of hubs and spokes all the way down. For network engineers, their focus may be even more narrow: innumerable clients, lots of switches, and fewer routers connected to a core. This classic on-prem topology has served reliably since the dawn of Unix time.

Installing a firewall onto your network is “good network firewall security”, right? Let’s be clear, it’s not – it’s the start to good security. While installing a firewall is an important component of security in a network firewall security posture, there’s much more to the process than just dropping in a piece of hardware, or enabling some new software.

When it comes to connecting to AWS, using a direct connect through a Software Defined Interconnection® platform like Console Connect can really help your business improve speed, security and control when accessing one of the world’s most popular cloud platforms.

ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) is the protocol that bridges Layer 2 and Layer 3 of the OSI model, which in the typical TCP/IP stack is effectively gluing together the Ethernet and Internet Protocol layers. This critical function allows for the discovery of a devices’ MAC (media access control) address based on its known IP address. By extension, an ARP table is simply the method for storing the information discovered through ARP.

Your network relies on reliable data transmission. Not only could troublesome connections yield negative results for customers, but connectivity issues could also indicate deeper problems within your network. However, if you monitor your bandwidth consistently and carefully, you can maintain your network’s health and solve issues as they arise.

DigitalOcean is a cost-effective virtual private server (VPS) provider popular among the developer community. The platform also offers services for rapid development, deployment, testing, and maintaining modern distributed applications. One of these services is a managed firewall solution that allows blocking unwanted traffic. It’s relatively easy to manage and deploy as an infrastructure component. Sometimes, however, operations teams need to dig deeper when the firewall blocks network traffic.

When you’re in the networking technology field, you’re going to find that there are many different types of “monitors” (like router monitoring) that you need to stay on top of, from throughput to application performance and device health. And as you become more knowledgeable, you’re going to start to understand these diverse types of traffic and equipment. It’ll become more important to you to be able to understand concepts like where traffic is flowing.

For the first time, a software load balancer exceeds 2-million RPS on a single Arm instance. A few weeks ago, while I was working on an HAProxy issue related to thread locking contention, I found myself running some tests on a server with an 8-core, 16-thread Intel Xeon W2145 processor that we have in our lab. Although my intention wasn’t to benchmark the proxy, I observed HAProxy reach 1.03 million HTTP requests per second.