The SuperNet is an important resource in Alberta. This high-speed fibre-optic and microwave network, built by the Government of Alberta in 2005, connects over 400 communities across the province. Its purpose is to serve as a digital highway, and is often the only link between some urban and rural areas, thus acting as a vital […]
Expanding our SuperNet Connectivity Read More »
Cybera had been using a network management system called CMDB for over a decade. This is where we keep track of the network connection details for each of our members and upstream providers. CMDB originated at BCNET, our National Research and Education Network (NREN) partner next door. Cybera’s NREN architecture was based on BCNET’s architecture,
Cybera’s new portal to the future Read More »
This summer, Cybera’s network team replaced our Calgary router (which had tirelessly served us and our members for over a decade) with a new one, effectively doubling our network capacity, increasing throughput, and creating a more orderly network system. But getting to this moment has been a looooong time coming. Our Calgary router has been
Long awaited router change doubles Cybera’s network capacity Read More »
It’s hard to believe, but students are now in their third year of schooling while dealing with COVID-19. During each year – and each interruption – Cybera has seen wildly different network traffic patterns. While I do plan to write about our experience as a whole, I’ll save that for the post-new normal. For now,
Network use jumps in 2021-22 school year Read More »
Picture this scenario: It’s a few days before Christmas. You awaken in a panic and rush to the airport. While running through the terminals, you unknowingly take a wrong turn, and instead of boarding a plane to Miami, you instead board a plane to New York City. Is this the plot to Home Alone 2:
Global validation (on the networking scale) Read More »
Public clouds, such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, are increasingly becoming a popular choice for hosting an organization’s IT infrastructure and services. They can often provide managed and semi-managed services more efficiently than an average in-house IT department. With more Cybera members leveraging public cloud services such as these, we are looking at ways
Piloting a Canadian route to Microsoft Azure: lessons learned Read More »
Introduction In the last installment of this series, I demonstrated how to use Terraform and the Rapid Access Cloud to create a multi-tier virtual network environment. In this part, I’ll show how Virtual Routers can be used to extend that environment. Virtual Routers In the last blog post, we created a virtual machine that was
Using Terraform Part 6: Virtual Routers Read More »
Introduction The previous blog posts in this series focused on creating “compute”-based resources in Cybera’s Rapid Access Cloud — that is, services focused around virtual machines. The Rapid Access Cloud recently implemented OpenStack Neutron, which provides virtual networking services. Let’s see how Terraform can take advantage of these new services. Virtual Networks and Subnets Just
Using Terraform Part 5: Virtual Networks Read More »
As other blog posts on our site have mentioned, IPv4 addresses are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. To make the situation more difficult, most communications on the internet is done through IPv4. Cybera’s Rapid Access Cloud provides each project with one public IPv4 address, known as a “Floating IP”. We call them this because they’re
Port Forwarding with gobetween Read More »
Introduction Part 3 of this series showed how to create multiple virtual servers in Terraform. We also used Terraform to configure the servers so that they are aware of each other. This allows the two servers to act as failover / highly available pairs. In this blog post, we’ll look at how to leverage multiple providers in
Using Terraform: Part 4 Read More »
Introduction Part 1 of this series gave a high-level overview of what Terraform is. Part 2 showed how to use Terraform to deploy a single virtual machine inside an OpenStack cloud. This blog post will show how to deploy multiple virtual machines inside an OpenStack cloud to act as a highly-available (HA) pair. High Availability means the
Using Terraform: Part 3 Read More »
Introduction Part 1 of this series gave a high-level overview of what Terraform is. Today’s post will demonstrate how to use Terraform to build out actual cloud resources using Cybera’s Rapid Access Cloud. Preparation If you’d like to follow along, you’ll need two things Terraform Access to a Rapid Access Cloud account (or any other OpenStack cloud)
Using Terraform: Part 2 Read More »
Introduction Terraform is a tool from Hashicorp, the same startup responsible for Vagrant and Consul, that enables users to “declaratively design” infrastructure and have those designs materialize into working components. This series will cover what exactly that means, why Terraform is so interesting, and how to use it. Declarative Configuration Declarative Configuration is a way of describing the state
Introducing Terraform: Part 1 Read More »