IPv6, Secure and Private AI are both upon us, and Cohesive Networks is delivering into those areas with the same practical approach we have used for Public and Private Cloud all these years.
Moving to IPv6 – herein lies madness (Part 1)
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Moving to IPv6 – herein lies madness (Part 1)
Well, it’s finally happened. It’s the “year of IPv6” for the enterprise.
With this transition will come a significant amount of “cognitive load” for enterprise application and infrastructure administrators.
After a decade or more, it appears there will finally be a broad-based move to Internet Protocol version 6. All it took was for Amazon to announce a price increase for the use of IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) addresses.
IPv6 has been being deployed incrementally since 2012 – but for many of us it has been via background adoption by consumer products that we may not even been aware of; cable companies and mobile phone vendors providing the infrastructure to our homes and devices.
For the b2b software and infrastructure technology used by the enterprise, it remains new and novel. For example, Amazon Cloud has supported some IPv6 for a number of years, both dual stack and single stack, whilst Microsoft Azure Cloud only began in earnest in 2023. Both platforms still have significant limitations and fragmentation of support across products.
So if the tech titans are just getting their heads around IPv6, what are us “normies” supposed to do?
At Cohesive Networks, our plan was to start slipping in support over the course of this year, finishing sometime in 2025 for an expected enterprise demand in 2026. Why haven’t we supported to date? Frankly, “no one uses it” – in that of the SaaS, PaaS, and BPaaS companies we support, none of them have asked for it……until the AWS price increase. Our metal-based competitors like Cisco and Palo Alto have supported it for years, but from our broad experience working with our customers, and our customer’s customers, and our customer’s customer’s outsourced network support people, the feature was a tree falling in the forest.
While there is a need to expand the available address pool, there is conflict and confusion between the “producer-centric” intelligence that created IPv6 and its revisions and implementations to date, and the practical needs, the “consumer-centric” needs, of the people just trying to get their jobs done.
There is a disconnect between the simple needs that we satisfy with IPv4; deploy a server, deploy 10 servers, deploy a cluster of a couple hundred servers; and the massive scale of IPv6 which immediately confronts its business consumers.
At Cohesive, we have done a decent job of reducing much of networking and security to “addresses, routes, and rules.” But even for us, helping customers deal with three hundred forty undecillion, two hundred eighty-two decillion, three hundred sixty-six nonillion, nine hundred twenty octillion, nine hundred thirty-seven septillion addresses is a challenge.
Ok, that number above is the whole space, so maybe I am being overly dramatic.
Let’s just get an AWS VPC or Azure VNET with a single IPv6 subnet; that should be easier to deal with.
Minimal size is a /64, that sounds better. Oops, that is 18,446,744,073,709,500,000 addresses! (For those of you speaking it aloud, that’s eighteen quintillion, four hundred forty-six quadrillion, seven hundred forty-four trillion, seventy-three billion, seven hundred nine million, five hundred thousand addresses).
And for every virtual network/subnet – another eighteen quintillion.
Now, if I have 10, 100 or 1000 servers to deploy – what does it matter? Just use some addresses and carry on.
True enough, but the fact that they come from a potential space of 1.8 x 10^19 is serious cognitive load that is presented to the infrastructure operators, and it is naive to think this doesn’t come at a cost. As computer memory went from 512k on a “FAT MAC” to 96G on my MacbookPro, I didn’t have to confront the gap between 524,288 bytes and 103,079,215,104 bytes in the normal course of my work.
So what do we do? Well for our part, as we release VNS3 6.6 (with IPv6), we are reducing some of this cognitive load and will be working with our customers to ever-simplify the move to IPv6.
In the meantime, here is a Google Spreadsheet we created for our internal use to help us get our heads around the magnitude of the IPv6 space. Feel free to share: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pIth3KJH1RbQFJvZmZmpBGq6rMMBhqEmfK-ouSNszNY/edit#gid=0
Stand Apart – but be Cohesive
I received a number of congratulations on the LinkedIn platform last month when apparently it let people know I have been with Cohesive Networks for 9 years.
As I reflected on this one thing stands out in relief, and that is Cohesive has always “stood apart” within the markets it serves.
Cohesive Networks exists at the confluence of virtualization, cloud, networking and security. We are of course a part of this commercial market but have not been re-directed by every twist and turn of these markets that have come and gone. Flavor and fashion are often the order of the day, and no doubt we have adopted some of the descriptive labels through time. But the labels have not swayed us from our essential mission, getting customers to, through and across the clouds safely.
If you look at the Gartner hype cycle for cloud networking it provides a gallery of differentiators through time: network observability, container/kubernetes networking, multicloud networking, SASE, SSE, Network-as-a-Service, SD-branch, network automation, network function virtualization, software defined networking, zero trust networks, software-defined WAN, micro-segmentation. If you look at these different facets, the tools, techniques, and knowledge to implement these are not that different. What is different is the packaging and the go-to-market.
Because we have been providing a virtual network platform since the clouds began, we have had customers use us for all of these functions. As a result the good news is we have been less “swayed” by flavor and fashion, which has done well for our existing customer. The bad news is we haven’t always best communicated our value to the potential new customer who may be thinking very much in the context of one of these re-packaged approaches.
Our usual inbound leads are “Hi, I think we need your stuff” or “Hi, we are using a lot of your stuff, can we discuss volume discounts and support plans”.
This communication posture stems from the fact that we have often been ahead of our competitors in either implementation or insight, or both. We were the first virtual network appliance in the EC2 cloud, IBM Cloud, many of the “clouds no-more”, and at later dates among the first network and security appliances in Azure and Google.
Cohesive’s patents are for “user controlled networking in 3rd party computing environments”. It is a subtle distinction – but powerful, between what an infrasturcture administrator, network administrator or hypervisor administrator could do at that time, and the freedom of our users on that infrastructure to create any network they wanted. These are encrypted, virtual networks that their infrastructure providers know nothing about, can not see, nor control. Our users in 2009 and beyond could create any secure, mesh, over-the-top network they wanted without the need or expense of the network incumbents who came before us. These customers find us significantly easier, significantly less expensive and made for the cloud without “metal” roots dragging them back to the ground.
When we showed this capability to investors, partners, infra providers, acquirerers – many of them said “I don’t get it” or “we’ll do better (someday)” or “you have to do all this in hardware” and more. By comparison, the customers who found us through web search, cloud conferences, and cloud marketplaces said “that’s what I need” and a subscription cloud networking company was born.
Looking back, it is shocking that our first offering was “virtual subnets”. It is amazing to think about it, but we sold subnets! At that time any cloud you used put your virtual instances in a very poorly segmented 10.0.0.0/8 subnet of the compute virtualization environment. People wanted to control addresses, routes, and rules, and our encrypted mesh overlay provided it. That was our first product-market fit, and of course that has evolved considerably.
This set us on the path of listening to our customers, and asking ourselves quite fundamentally what a network is, and what is it used for, and by whom?
So while we stood apart, of course we were Cohesive.
Networks are all about standards and interoperability, we just did it our own way.
The feedback from customers was “yes” and “more please”. The feedback from the experts often remained “huh”. So we pressed forward in our own autonomic and somewhat autistic manner, only listening to certain market signals and obsessively working to fulfill a vision of networking and security that says “networks are addresses, routes and rules, everything else is implementation detail the customers should rarely see.”
Now in 2024 and beyond, as the chaotic streams of the changing cloud markets, Internet Protocol v6, and the needs for secure AI and private AI collide, my guess is we will still stand apart while still being Cohesive.
Navigating the Cloud Transition: Simplified Solutions for Legacy Applications
 source:Dall-E
Overcoming the Complexities of Cloud Migration with Cohesive Networks’ VNS3 Plugin System
Transitioning legacy applications to the cloud can be a daunting task. The challenges are numerous: complex network reconfigurations, increased costs, extended downtimes, and potential security risks. These hurdles are particularly pronounced for applications that rely on broadcast functionality, a common feature in many legacy systems yet challenging to implement in cloud environments – and entirely missing from the offerings of today’s major cloud providers.
Addressing the Core Challenges:
Complex Network Reconfiguration:
Legacy applications often depend on specific network features, like Layer 2 broadcast, which aren’t natively supported in cloud environments. Reconfiguring these applications for cloud networks usually means extensive and costly alterations.
Cost and Resource Allocation:
Moving to the cloud shouldn’t mean breaking the bank or pushing back deadlines. Traditional methods involve hiring specialists or investing in extensive development work, leading to spiraling costs and repeated delays.
Downtime and Operational Delays:
Every minute your application isn’t fully operational impacts your business. Lengthy transitions and testing periods are common with traditional cloud migration methods. The more your application has to change to fit a new environment, the greater the chances for costly mistakes.
Security Concerns:
Adapting legacy applications to the cloud can introduce vulnerabilities, especially when modifying network architectures. New code means new bugs, and new configuration introduces opportunities for human error.
The VNS3 Solution
At Cohesive Networks, we’ve developed a new plugin for our VNS3 software that specifically addresses these issues for applications requiring broadcast functionality. Our solution allows for a seamless and efficient transition to the cloud, without the need for extensive network reconfiguration or application rewriting.
Ease of Use:
With our plugin, most broadcast-dependent applications can be migrated to the cloud with minimal setup and no changes to the existing code or application workflow.
Cost-Effective:
Our approach significantly reduces the need for expensive network specialists, extensive redevelopment, offering a more budget-friendly solution.
Minimized Downtime:
Our streamlined process ensures a faster and smoother transition, reducing operational disruptions. HA and failover options mean that you won’t sacrifice the inherent reliability of cloud environments.
Secure Transition:
VNS3 maintains a strong security posture throughout the migration process, ensuring your data and applications are protected.
Your Path to Cloud Efficiency
Embrace the future of cloud networking with Cohesive Networks. VNS3 isn’t just a tool; it’s a comprehensive solution that makes your cloud networking efficient, secure, and cost-effective. Experience a smoother transition and enable your applications to thrive in a new cloud environment with ease and confidence.
Contact a Cohesive Networks expert today for real solutions that provide real value.
Apple VisionPro – No security issues yet!
This front image of the Apple VisionPro augmented reality headset is apt at the moment.
It is dark and we can’t see clearly yet, which is OK, because it allows us the opportunity to prognosticate.
In addition, no network or security issues yet!
We still have time to panic.
Although devices are not a normal topic for us at Cohesive Networks, as CTO, I thought I would ruminate a bit at LinkedIn in a post on The Apple Impact (2023).
Whilst the future is a bit murky, the AI breakout and VisionPro for AR (augmented reality) will combine in interesting ways: compelling, practical, frightening, and unanticipated.
From a Cohesive point of view, as we provide over-the-top networks and security to, through and across the clouds, both of these trends are going to have an impact with Large Language Models deep in the clouds, and augmented reality as the lens from below, piercing the cloud cover.
From a personal point of view:
“Vision Pro emerges at the same time as the artificial intelligence breakout. What will these gods of unknown intention be whispering in our ears? I can’t quite yet imagine these two emergent technologies combined and how it could bring about completely new social environments – with all the good and all the terrible amplified.”
We would love to hear what you think.
Enterprise WireGuard® with Cohesive VPN Client
VNS3 6.0 Beta3 will be available in cloud marketplaces or upon request this week (contactme@www.cohesive.net).  In our last post we showed how easy it is to connect your native WireGuard® clients to VNS3 6.0.  In this post we show you how to use the Cohesive VPN Client to achieve the same goals like connecting to data centers or cloud VPCs/VNETs, and managing your own WireGuard® network connecting multiple people and devices.  In addition, we will show an overview of using our enterprise capabilities like dynamic route updates, easy tunneling of all traffic with local subnet exceptions, and OIDC integration so you can authenticate your vpn users with Google Authentication, Okta, Auth0 and more.
The screen shots throughout show three windows; upper left the Cohesive VPN client, bottom left a command line from the same Mac, and to the right the cloud-based VNS3 server.
VNS3 Network Platform has the concept of “clientpacks” – basically the credentials needed to connect a machine or a person to the network via a VPN client. Â Historically “clientpacks” have been “openvpn” by default. Â Starting in 6.0 clientpacks are WireGuard by default. In a future release we will support a dual stack with both “ovpn” and “wg” connections simultaneously, and a goal of IPsec clients as well.
In the picture above and those below we show the “Clientpacks” page. From this you can perform key administrative functions like disabling addresses, re-generating credentials, updating pre-shared keys, and getting access URLs for secure and easy distribution of VPN credentials.
Access URL
Above shows the results of choosing “Access URL” and displaying its result. This is a secure, one-time, timed URL allowing users to copy/paste the clientpack, download it for import, or use via a QR code on mobile devices.
It has all the necessary information to make a connection using the Cohesive VPN Client – with or without PSKs.
The commented lines are used by CNVPN CLI and GUI for additional enterprise support; failover, dynamic route updates, and OIDC authentication.
Copy/paste the clientpack into the Cohesive client via the “Paste” option, and choose Save.
Connect
Next choose “Connect” from the Cohesive Client’s “Actions” menu – Â and the VPN connection is created. Â The VNS3 Clientpacks page then shows the status as “connected”.
Below shows access to the VPN network by successfully pinging the VNS3 controller’s VPN address. Â (By default, this connection can access other addresses on the VPN. If that’s not desired it is easily changed via the Firewall page.) Â
You can use the Action menu on the VNS3 Clientpacks page to perform administrative operations. Â For example, if you select “Disable” on the connection, the client is dropped from the VPN. Â
Similar operations can be performed to re-new or re-secure a connection by adding a PSK or re-generating keys (both of which require the clientpack to be redistributed to the user or device). Â As expected, when you enable a PSK for the connection, the user is unable to access the network. Â With the credential re-deployed with the appropriate clientpack containing the PSK, they are back on the net!
To see some of those operations in action, take a look at our previous post. Â Cohesive’s target is to provide organizations the ability to deploy their own enterprise VPN infrastructure. Â This could be managed by Cohesive via our SecurePass offering, or self-managed. Â Regardless, our initial focus for 6.0 is managed, enterprise WireGuard.
Dynamic Route Updates
One of our key enterprise features is dynamic route updates. Â For “people vpns” you can usually just tunnel all traffic through the VPN – making the VPN adapter the default gateway. Â However, for IoT and machine2machine vpns, dynamic routing is a critical capability. Â You allow the device to have its own local gateway but when routes arrive dynamically, the traffic begins to follow that path. Â If the route is removed from the network, the default gateway is used.
In the example below the configuration is changed to have “RoutePolling = True”, and on the VNS3 controller a route to 55.55.55.55 has been advertised through the VPN. Â In the terminal window route display there is not yet a specific route to that public IP.
Once re-connected, the route to 55.55.55.55 through the VPN is visible on the client as a result of the dynamic route updating.
If that route is disabled or removed from the VPN network, then it is removed from the client.
Tunnel All Traffic
Tunneling all traffic through the VPN to the Internet is a snap with the Cohesive VPN Client.
Set the client parameter “TunnelAllTraffic” to “True” AND make sure you have enabled firewall directives on the VNS3 Server to send all VPN traffic out to the Internet.
VNS3 Free edition comes with a default set of rules in a group called “VPN2Internet. Â Go to the Groups view on the Firewall page and enable these rules.
This will direct all traffic from your VPN client to the Internet, getting its address translated to the Public IP of the VNS3 controller.
What if you still want to be able to access local network resources like a printer or file server? Â In that case, use the “LocalRoutes” option to enter a comma delimited list of the network CIDRs you want to exempt from the VPN so they can be reached locally.
Now that all traffic is being tunneled, from the command line the public IP 8.8.8.8 can be successfully pinged.  To “prove” this traffic is going into the VPN we show it via our Network Sniffer.
VPN User Authentication
So far the examples have just used WireGuard protocol with unique keys and pre-shared key (PSK) for the connections. Â What about more specific user authentication? Â For WireGuard in VNS3 6.0 we use OIDC (Open ID Connect), and will add LDAP support in future. Â (Our dual stack offering in future will allow simultaneous use of OpenVPN and WireGuard clients, with your choice of LDAP/AD or OIDC).
With OIDC support you create a VPN users and/or admins application in your OIDC provider and then configure VNS3 integration.
Once the OIDC configuration has been saved you can login. In this case we are using our Google Apps login. Â When “Connect” is chosen, a login screen pops up in the default browser.
Upon entering the correct password the login panel indicates success and the VPN client connects!
Next up we will show using the Cohesive CNVPN CLI on a Linux machine. Â For cloud overlay networks and over-the-top cloud networking, the CLI is a powerful way to bring your enterprise feature set to your cloud and multi-cloud deployments.Â
(“WireGuard” and the “WireGuard” logo are registered trademarks of Jason A. Donenfeld.)
Native WireGuard® Clients and VNS3 6.0 Beta2
VNS3 6.0 Beta2 is now available.
You can find the Free edition in both the Amazon and Azure marketplaces (GCP coming soon).
It is an easy way to get a server up and running that can connect you to data centers, cloud VPCs/VNETs, has a super firewall, straightforward support of even difficult things like “source based routing”, and most of all a quick way to run and manage your own WireGuard® network connecting multiple people, devices, or both.
This post will show you how to use the standard Mac Appstore WireGuard client built and delivered by the WireGuard team with Cohesive Networks VNS3 6.0 network controllers. (Of course similar capability is available using the same app from the Windows/iPhone/Android “app stores” as well.)
In future posts we will show the Cohesive CLI (cnvpn) at work, and the Cohesive WG GUI working with VNS3 6.0. And then we will follow up by showing how the different connection options work with a distributed VPN cluster where you can spread a VNS3 controller mesh across regions and clouds with ease, yet have a unified VPN system for management of credentials, pre-shared keys, OIDC sessions and more.
In the screen shots throughout we have three windows; upper left the Mac OS WG client, bottom left a command line from the same Mac, and to the right the cloud-based VNS3 server supporting a wide range of cloud networking use-cases, and here specifically WireGuard VPN connections.
VNS3 Network Platform has the concept of “clientpacks” – basically the credentials needed to connect a machine or a person via a VPN client to the network. Â Historically they have been “openvpn” by default – and starting in 6.0 they are WireGuard by default. In a future release we will support a dual stack with both “ovpn” and “wg” connections simultaneously, and a goal of IPsec clients as well.
In the picture above and those below we see the “Clientpacks” page. From here you can perform key administrative functions like disabling addresses, re-generating credentials, updating pre-shared keys, and getting access URLs for secure and easy distribution of VPN credentials.
Above shows the results of choosing “Access URL” and displaying its result. This is a secure, one-time, timed URL which allows users to copy/paste the clientpack, download it for import, or for mobile clients use a QR code for import.
It has all the necessary information to make a connection using the standard WG Client – with or without PSKs.
There is also a series of commented lines which are used by CNVPN CLI and GUI for additional enterprise support (failover, dynamic route updates, OIDC authentication) to be discussed in future. For now we just want to focus on how easy it is to connect native WG clients.
Copy/paste the clientpack into the Mac OS client, and click SAVE/ACTIVATE.
Voilà – you are connected to the VPN.  The VNS3 Clientpacks page shows the status as “connected”.
The WG Client now shows its statistics about the connection, and below we are pinging the VNS3 controller’s VPN address to show access to the VPN network.
(By default, this connection can access other addresses on the VPN. If that’s not desired it is easily changed via the Firewall page.) Â
If needed you can use the Action menu to perform administrative operations. Â For example, if you select “Disable” on the connection, the client is dropped from the VPN. Â Below, we see the client set to disabled state by the Admin, and we see the “pings” begin to fail.
Then we “Enable” – and the client is back on the network and packets begin to flow.
And of course similar operations can be performed to re-new or re-secure a connection by adding a PSK or re-generating keys – both of which require the clientpack to be redistributed to the user or device. Â But as expected, when you enable a PSK for the connection, the user is unable to access the network. Â With the credential re-deployed with the appropriate clientpack containing the PSK, they are back on the net!
Accessing the other devices on the VPN network is one use, what about getting to the Internet?
This requires a couple configuration elements on the client side which requires a little bit of operating system knowledge on the client side and a of couple firewall rules on the VNS3 Controller. Â We won’t go into those specifics here.
But, if you look at the Cohesive-specific directives used by the CNVPN CLI and GUI – one of them is “TunnelAllTraffic” – and when this is set to “true” – all the client side magic is done for you! Â But that is for another day.
(“WireGuard” and the “WireGuard” logo are registered trademarks of Jason A. Donenfeld.)
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