This week marks a decade since the ALBA-1 submarine cable began carrying traffic between Cuba and the global internet. On 20 January 2013, I published the first evidence of this historic subsea cable activation which enabled Cuba to finally break its dependence on geostationary satellite service for the country’s international connectivity. ALBA-1 was one of my first lessons on how geopolitics can shape the physical internet.

The threat landscape that organizations faced in 2022 and continue to face in 2023 is large, complex, and continuously changing. Defense requires a multi-layered approach that delivers monitoring, detection, and response at many points within on-premise and cloud-based infrastructure and systems. A Network Detection and Response (NDR) solution is critical to a modern cybersecurity defense strategy.

There are many factors making networking both more complicated and more critical than ever. The advent of cloud infrastructure, web-based applications, and increasingly diverse network environments demand a new approach to network operations, or NetOps, as it’s referred to in the industry. Networks are bigger than ever: they now connect everything ranging from automobiles to cloud servers.

I spent the last few months of 2022 sharing my experience transitioning networks to the cloud, with a focus on spotting and managing some of the associated costs that aren’t always part of the “sticker price” of digital transformation.

Only two days into the new year, and we had our first BGP routing leak. It was followed by a couple more in subsequent days. Although these incidents were brief with marginal operational impact on the internet, they are still worth analyzing because they shed light on the cracks in the internet’s routing system.

The office network has been in a near-constant state of evolution since dumb terminals and token rings. MPLS unlocked the ability to connect LANs. VPNs allowed end-users to work remotely while still being behind the firewall. Wi-Fi made intra-office travel easy and lessened reliance on extensive cabling. The WAN is slowly giving way to SD-WAN. New software and cloud-based networking componentry are allowing vendors to reimagine firewalls and routing.

HAProxy Technologies is proud to unveil the 2.7 release of HAProxy Data Plane API. This release was a huge undertaking, and as with the 2.6 release, we focused on extending support for configuration keywords. We are happy to announce that with this release we support all HAProxy configuration keywords in the Data Plane API. Along with enhanced keyword coverage, we’ve added the ability to specify multiple named defaults sections through the API.

The best thing about moving into a new home is getting to call it your own. But the second-best thing is coming up with a funny wifi name you can tell your friends about. As people say, “home is where the wifi connects automatically!” And you certainly shouldn't leave its name up to chance. While setting up your internet is one of the first things you do after moving, simply connecting to a random scramble of characters does not feel very personal, does it?

Kubernetes is a game-changer for enterprise organizations. Automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications allows organizations to embrace a cloud-native paradigm at scale and more easily employ best practices, such as microservices and DevSecOps. But as with all tech, Kubernetes has its limits. Kelsey Hightower famously tweeted that “Kubernetes is a platform for building platforms. It’s a better place to start; not the endgame.”