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AutoMirror v0.4 aka The Load-Balancing Release


AutoMirror keeps improving, with valuable feedback from users and from better testing it out in the field. In this post we'll highlight a few important and new features.

If you haven't yet, we encourage you to check out the article where we presented the 3CS AWS Mirror Toolkit. You can find the blog post here.

As a follow up to that post, and after getting a lot of valuable feedback from clients and the overall community, we're really excited to release a new version of 3CS AWS AutoMirror.

Even though you can can keep an eye on the Changelog, and see screenshots of new features that we include on all opened issues, this post will add a bit more context to the features we added since we first talked about it.

By writing about use cases we also intend to provide the community with ideas to make better deployments by adopting more resilient architectures. Hopefully the features we add to AutoMirror and the use cases behind them will help you do that!

So, if traffic mirroring automation is something that interests you, buckle in and let's take a look at the awesomeness of 3CS AutoMirror v0.4!

Easy identification of sessions and its sources



We added this feature quickly after our first release, but didn't add a lot of context on why we wanted to do this. Since the 0.2 release, all Mirror Sessions created by AutoMirror will be named after the instance ID for which the session was created.

When dealing with mirrored traffic in AWS, instances identifiers are not really relevant. The network cards attached to the instances are the parts we focus on. With this feature, we give a visual representation that directly associates a mirror session with an instance, giving the user a visual aid regarding which instances are involved in a particular mirror session.

OCD-Approved tagging 

When AutoMirror was first released, conditions for setting tags, either for execution of AutoMirror or as a way to interact with it, were hardcoded and case sensitive. We now transform all tags and you are free to tag them in the way that makes the most sense to you, as long as you don't change the tags themselves. 😌 Whether you'd like to use mirror or Mirror, it's up to you. 

The same for the controlling tags. Mirror-Filter/Target, mirror-Filter/Target or mirror-filter/target. 

Report on active sessions

AutoMirror will now use the existing logging structure to provide a count of active mirror sessions. For invoicing or just to keep an eye out for what's going on, you'll now find the following information in your logs:

Screenshot from 2019-11-06 14-38-06

We added Mirror Filter creation!

There are several situations where creating a Traffic Mirror Filter might not be something you want to do manually. Because of that, AutoMirror will now create a Filter for you if one does not exist. 

You can read the characteristics of this feature in Github, but in summary, if you're running in an account where a Mirror Filter is not available, AutoMirror will create a filter that copies all the traffic on all protocols:

69461486-8e1c3b80-0d6e-11ea-924c-e122d8164939.png (988×227)

AI-powered Load Balancing!

Ah! You really thought we'd go down that route? Not yet (sorry sales)!

AutoMirror now has a Load Balancing capability that makes it perfect for deployments in environments with more than one Traffic Mirror Target.

AutoMirror will first check the load of each Traffic Mirror Target and distribute the creation of sessions amongst them! How cool is that?! 😍


AutoMirror + High Availability = 🏆

Stay tuned!

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