The whole point of our beloved networks is to deliver applications and services to real people sitting at computers. So, as network engineers, monitoring the performance and efficiency of our networks is a crucial part of our job. Flow data, in particular, is a powerful tool that provides valuable insights into what’s happening in our networks for ongoing monitoring and troubleshooting poor-performing applications.

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.

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.

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.”

For the last few years, the entire networking industry has focused on analytics and mining more and more information out of the network. This makes sense because of all the changes in networking over the last decade. Changes like network overlays, public cloud, applications delivered as a service, and containers mean we need to pay attention to much more diverse information out there.

This past year was another busy one for the internet. In this blog post, I will highlight some of the top pieces of analysis that we published in the past 12 months. This analysis employs Kentik’s data, technology, and expertise to inform the industry and the public about issues involving the technical underpinnings of the global internet and how global events can impact connectivity. These posts are organized into two broad categories: major internet disruptions and BGP routing security.

As today’s enterprises shift to the cloud, Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto platform for running containerized microservices. And while Kubernetes operates as a single cluster, enterprises inevitably run their applications on a complex, often confusing, architecture of multiple clusters deployed to a hybrid of multiple cloud providers and private data centers. This approach creates a lot of problems. How do your services find each other? How do they communicate securely?

How many applications do you use that exist only on the computer in front of you? Two? One? None at all? I occasionally use two applications that live locally on my computer, but all the rest, including every application I use for personal and professional work, are delivered over the internet. That’s pretty much where we are these days, isn’t it?

In today’s digital landscape, application demands such as scalability, performance, and reliability push many IT organizations toward cloud-based networks. Initially, cloud providers’ main offering was managed, virtualized data storage and services, or cloud computing. As cloud ecosystems have matured, so have the tools, services, and use cases available to their customers.