Technology

If you or your team is trying to adopt CI/CD and struggling to understand what CI/CD is all about, then you are not alone. CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. In a cloud environment CD also encompasses Continuous Deployment because you deploy code as soon as it is ready. If you aspire to be agile, then you need to embrace CI/CD wholeheartedly.

I will share a couple of great articles that introduce CI/CD. Instead of me providing yet another definition, I recommend that you read these articles. But here is what I will do. Using a series of blogs, I will take you through a journey of CI and CD. I will use my blog as an example to show various technologies like Jenkins and Docker and their role in CI and CD.

In an earlier blog, I have talked about Linux bridge based virtual networking. Recently as part of a comment on my blog, I learnt how to view and interpret the MAC table of Linux bridge. In this installment of WILT (What I Learnt Today) series, I will share how MAC Table can be used for troubleshooting Linux bridges.

In the next installment of “What I learnt today” or WILT, I briefly touch upon Network Namespace. I came across Namespace as part of my ongoing study of OpenStack networking. Namespaces are powerful constructs in Linux that allows you to create a copy of the TCP/IP network stack -all the way from the Ethernet interfaces (L2), routing tables etc.

This is a guest post by Suryanarayana M N V. Having led teams working on Networking protocols, Surya has in-depth knowledge of networking. He has keen interest in the areas of Network Virtualization and NFV.

The most common NFV product that I had come across is in security domain viz., firewalls. To get an idea on how good they are, I checked the Juniper, PaloAlto & Fortinet Virtual Firewall products.

If you were to ask someone “what is the most popular open source hypervisor” chances are that the answer will be KVM. Indeed KVM (or Kernel-based Virtual Machine) has played a key role in the open source Linux based virtualization environment. However is it really a hypervisor? Moreover, can KVM by itself run virtual machines? We will delve more into such questions in this blog. We will also understand the relationship between KVM and QEMU (Quick EMUlator).

In the previous blog of this series we saw that using Linux bridge we can connect a virtual Ethernet port of a VM to the physical Ethernet port of the hypervisor server. Let us now focus a bit more on these virtual ports to see what happens behind the scenes to make virtual networking actually work.

Software defined networking (SDN) is the current wave sweeping the networking industry. And one of the key enablers of SDN is virtual networking. While SDN and virtual networking are in vogue these days, the support for virtual networking is not a recent development. And Linux bridge has been the pioneer in this regard.