Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For April 20th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

Freeman Dyson dissects Geoffrey West's book on universal scaling laws, Scale. (Image: Steve Jurvetson)

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon. And I'd appreciate if you would recommend my new book—Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10—to anyone who needs to understand the cloud (who doesn't?). I think they'll learn a lot, even if they're already familiar with the basics. 

  • 5x: BPF over iptables; 51.21%: SSL certificates now issued by Let's Encrypt; 15,000x: acceleration from a genomics co-processor on long read assembly; 100 Million: Amazon Prime members; 20 minutes: time it takes a robot to assemble an Ikea chair; 1.7 Tbps: DDoS Attack; 200 Gb/sec: future network fabric speeds; $7: average YouTube earnings per 1000 views; 800 million: viruses cascading onto every square meter of the planet each day; <10m: error in  Uber's GPS enhancement; $45 million: total value of Bitcoin ransomware extortion; 

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • @sachinrekhi: Excited to read the latest Amazon shareholder letter. Amazing the scale they are operating at: 100M prime members, $20B AWS business, >50% of products sold from third-party sellers...Bezos Continue reading

Weekend Reads 042018: Mostly DNS Security Stuff

For many, the conversation about online privacy centers around a few high-profile companies, and rightly so. We consciously engage with their applications and services and want to know who else might access our information and how they might use it. But there are other, less obvious ways that accessing the World Wide Web exposes us. In this post we will look at how one part of the web’s infrastructure, the Domain Name System (DNS), “leaks” your private information and what you can do to better protect your privacy and security. Although DNS has long been a serious compromise in the privacy of the web, we’ll discuss some simple steps you can take to improve your privacy online. —Stan Adams @CDT

Cloudflare, the internet security and performance services company, announced a new service called “Spectrum.” The service gets its name from the fact that Cloudflare aims to offer DDoS protection for the whole “spectrum” of ports and protocols for its enterprise customers. @Tom’s Hardware

Security researchers have been warning about an ongoing malware campaign hijacking Internet routers to distribute Android banking malware that steals users’ sensitive information, login credentials and the secret code for two-factor authentication. In order to trick Continue reading

2018 Internet Society Board of Trustees Final Election Results & IETF Appointments

The Internet Society Elections Committee is pleased to announce the final results of the 2018 elections for the Board of Trustees. The voting concluded on 9 April 2018. The challenge period (for appeals) was opened on 11 April and closed on 18 April.

There were no challenges filed. Therefore the election results stand:

  • Walid Al-Saqaf has been re-elected to the board by Chapters, and
  • Robert Pepper has been elected by Organization members.

Also, following the process documented in RFC 3677, the Internet Architecture Board has selected and the IETF has confirmed:

  • Gonzalo Camarillo
  • John Levine

to each serve second terms on the board.

The term of office for all 4 of these Trustees will be 3 years, commencing with the 2018 Annual General Meeting of the Internet Society, 29 June – 1 July.

The Elections Committee congratulates all of the new and renewing Trustees. We also extend our thanks again to all the candidates and to everyone who participated in the process this year.

The post 2018 Internet Society Board of Trustees Final Election Results & IETF Appointments appeared first on Internet Society.

The Contradictions Of IBM’s Platform Strategy

The thing about platforms that have a wide adoption and deep history is that they tend to persist. They have such economic inertia that, so long as they can keep morphing and grafting on new technologies, that they persist long after alternatives have emerged and dominated data processing. Every company ultimately wants to build a platform for this reason, and has since the dawn of commercial computing, for precisely this reason, for this inertia – it takes too much effort to change or replace it – is what generates the profits.

It is with this in mind that we contemplate …

The Contradictions Of IBM’s Platform Strategy was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The architectural implications of autonomous driving: constraints and acceleration

The architectural implications of autonomous driving: constraints and acceleration Lin et al., ASPLOS’18

Today’s paper is another example of complementing CPUs with GPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs in order to build a system with the desired performance. In this instance, the challenge is to build an autonomous self-driving car!

Architecting autonomous driving systems is particularly challenging for a number of reasons…

  1. The system has to make “correct” operational decisions at all times to avoid accidents, and advanced machine learning, computer vision, and robotic processing algorithms are used to deliver the required high precision. These algorithms are compute intensive.
  2. The system must be able to react to traffic conditions in real-time, which means processing must always finish under strict deadlines (about 100ms in this work).
  3. The system must operate within a power budget to avoid negatively impacting driving range and fuel efficiency.

So how do you build a self-driving car?

There are several defined levels of automation, with level 2 being ‘partial automation’ in which the automated system controls steering and acceleration/deceleration under limited driving conditions. At level 3 the automated system handles all driving tasks under limited conditions (with a human driver taking over outside of that). By level 5 Continue reading

StayFocusd Extension For Chrome

During the last month or two, I’d gotten into a habit of trawling through Imgur, looking for memes I could spin into humorous tweets about networking. It became a game to see what tweets I could create that people would find funny.

That game was successful, in that I had many tweets that were liked and/or retweeted dozens or, in a few cases, hundreds of times. But there was a downside. I was spending a lot of time on Imgur seeking inspiration. I was also spending a lot of time composing tweets and checking reactions.

I Hurt Myself Today

This led to the familiar cycle of Internet addiction. I was hooked on Twitter…again. I’ve been through this with Twitter off and on for many years now. My use of Imgur was also obsessive, opening the app on my phone multiple times per day and scrolling, scrolling, scrolling while looking for new fodder.

Using social media in the context of addiction is subtly different from simply wasting time. Addiction, for me, means using social media when I didn’t plan to. There’s a compulsion that would drive me to fire up Tweetdeck and check out all of my carefully curated columns, review Continue reading

StayFocusd Extension For Chrome

During the last month or two, I’d gotten into a habit of trawling through Imgur, looking for memes I could spin into humorous tweets about networking. It became a game to see what tweets I could create that people would find funny.

That game was successful, in that I had many tweets that were liked and/or retweeted dozens or, in a few cases, hundreds of times. But there was a downside. I was spending a lot of time on Imgur seeking inspiration. I was also spending a lot of time composing tweets and checking reactions.

I Hurt Myself Today

This led to the familiar cycle of Internet addiction. I was hooked on Twitter…again. I’ve been through this with Twitter off and on for many years now. My use of Imgur was also obsessive, opening the app on my phone multiple times per day and scrolling, scrolling, scrolling while looking for new fodder.

Using social media in the context of addiction is subtly different from simply wasting time. Addiction, for me, means using social media when I didn’t plan to. There’s a compulsion that would drive me to fire up Tweetdeck and check out all of my carefully curated columns, review Continue reading

Porting Ansible Network Playbooks with New Connection Plugins

The Ansible Networking Team is excited about the release of Ansible 2.5. Back in February, I wrote about new Networking Features in Ansible 2.5, and one of the biggest areas of feedback was around the network_cli connection plugin. For more background on this connection plugin, please refer to the previous blog post. 

In this post, I convert existing networking playbooks that use connection: local to use connection: network_cli. Please note that the passwords are in plain text for demonstration purposes only. Refer to the following Ansible Networking documentation page recommendation for using Ansible Vault for secure password storage and usage.

To demonstrate, let’s use an existing GitHub repository with working playbooks using the legacy connection local method. NOTE: The connection local method will continue to be supported for quite some time, and has not been announced as deprecated yet. This repository has several examples using Ansible and NAPALM but we are highlighting the Ansible Playbooks in this post.  The GitHub repository can be found here. 

Example 1 - Backing Up a Configuration

Networking platforms use their specific *_config platform module for easy backups within Ansible. For this playbook we are running the Ansible Playbook Continue reading

Worth Reading: DevOps and component chaos

Modern software development is trending more toward a componentized approach because developers would rather assemble something using a variety of well-built pieces of third-party code than reinvent the wheel every time they create something new. The approach has done wonders for speed and agility, but it’s increasing a lot of enterprise attack surfaces because too few organizations are keeping up with the vulnerabilities these components pose. —Ericka Chickowski @Dark Reading

Why Enterprise IT Customers Are Stupid

There are many ways that buyers of Enterprise IT are stupid. Mostly its bad leadership and poor management that leads to poor decisions and processes like ITIL. Sometimes its pride preventing you from admitting failure, or the allure of a free steak lunch (putting one over your salary owner by paying for it with overpriced […]

Cray’s Ever-Expanding Compute For HPC

With choice comes complexity, and the Cambrian explosion in compute options is only going to make this harder even if it is a much more satisfying intellectual and financial challenge. This added complexity is worth it because companies will be able to more closely align the hardware to the applications. This is why search engine giant Google has been driving compute diversity and why supercomputer maker Cray has been looking forward to it as well.

This expanding of the compute ecosystem is also necessary because big jumps in raw compute performance for general purpose processors are possible as they were …

Cray’s Ever-Expanding Compute For HPC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Is Facebook looking to build its own data center chips?

A job posting on Facebook has led to speculation that the company is building a team to design its own semiconductors, thus ending their reliance on Intel. If so, it would be another step in the trend of major firms building their own silicon.Bloomberg was the first to note a job opening, titled “Manager, ASIC Development,” that sought a manager to help build an "end-to-end SoC/ASIC, firmware and driver development organization." There is also an opening for an “ASIC & FPGA Design Engineer,” which seems an unusual position for a social network website to need.To read this article in full, please click here

Is Facebook looking to build its own data center chips?

A job posting on Facebook has led to speculation that the company is building a team to design its own semiconductors, thus ending their reliance on Intel. If so, it would be another step in the trend of major firms building their own silicon.Bloomberg was the first to note a job opening, titled “Manager, ASIC Development,” that sought a manager to help build an "end-to-end SoC/ASIC, firmware and driver development organization." There is also an opening for an “ASIC & FPGA Design Engineer,” which seems an unusual position for a social network website to need.To read this article in full, please click here

1 … 1,412 1,413 1,414 1,415 1,416 … 3,613