Scientists Create a Long-Distance Cryogenic Microwave Quantum Network

There’s been quite a bit of fanfare around quantum computing during the last few years, with experts predicting that quantum computers will help fuel the growing computational demands of artificial intelligence, as well as forming the backbone of an unhackable internet. But beyond the hype is the reality that quantum computers are still some ways from being commercially viable, as researchers continue to resolve issues like accuracy, size and how to build a superconducting electrical oscillators that are used in some quantum chips need to be cooled down to near-absolute zero temperatures, otherwise the problem of Quantum Device Lab at study co-author quantum entanglement, two particles become linked in a way so that whatever happens to one particle, it also immediately occurs to the other, no matter the distance. Having proven that a cryogenically based, long-distance quantum network is indeed possible, the team is now working to construct a 30-meter (98.4-foot) quantum link. See more over at ETH Zurich’s

Dragonfly Brings Peer-to-Peer Image Sharing to Kubernetes

Dragonfly, a peer-to-peer image and file-sharing technology developed by Cloud Native Computing Foundation. The software provides a way to quickly distribute images across large cloud native deployments, eliminating the dependency on a single registry to distribute all the copies of an image. “Dragonfly is one of the backbone technologies for container platforms within Alibaba’s ecosystem, supporting billions of application deliveries each year, and in use by many enterprise customers around the world,” said Dragonfly in 2015, originally to ease file distribution. By 2017, when it was adopted to share containers within Kubernetes environments, it was being used by the Chinese cloud service to share 3.4PB each month. It was originally accepted into the OCI (Open Container Initiative). It can work with CNCF’s Prometheus and display them on a Helm can be used to install Dragonfly within a Kubernetes cluster. Project maintainers come from Alibaba, ByteDance, eBay, and Meitu. Overall it has 67 contributors from 21 organizations. It has been downloaded over 100,000 times from Docker Hub and has massed 6,000 GitHub stars. Learn more about Dragonfly, visit liggraphy from 

SaltStack’s CTO on Pandemics, the End of Empires and Software’s Future

It is too early to determine to what extent our lives will change in the future once the Coronavirus pandemic has run its full course. However, in the software industry, some possible outcomes are beginning to emerge, including consolidation and the potential for great changes to take place — both good and bad. As a harbinger of what may come, SaltStack, a leading automation network infrastructure provider, evoked historical examples of pandemics and plagues in the past. He discussed what changes they wrought on ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire and the Renaissance era, while drawing parallels with the software industry. Patch also shared with The New Stack in this Q&A how software engineers’ lives have hardly changed, the folly of forcing workers to come to the office when they really do not need to and his observations of network infrastructure saturation in the wake of the

Istio 1.5 Brings Advanced Automation for Secure Performance

Istio has emerged as one of the most frequently utilized service mesh technologies for securing and controlling network traffic within containers and Kubernetes. Its powerful feature set makes it instrumental in solving a number of real issues users regularly encounter when running microservices. Following the standard three-month period since the release of Istio 1.4, Istio 1.5 introduces an impressive number of improvements that increase automation and provide tooling to help further operationalize the platform. With major architectural changes and several API updates under the hood, Istio 1.5 provides new capabilities that improve the user experience and functionality of the platform. The following highlights will help organizations optimize Istio for configuration management, architecture support, and overall performance. Configuration Management Karen Bruner Karen Bruner is a Principal DevOps Engineer for StackRox, where she drives automation and advocates for operationalizing the product. Previously, Karen has held DevOps and site reliability engineering roles at Clari, Ooyala, LinkedIn, and Yahoo. She started her career working in Hollywood in the digital effects industry and has a film credit in “Babe” for Internet Bandit. She spends her spare time rendering puns in yarn, learning obscure fiber crafts, and tripping over cats. Istioctl Istio 1. Continue reading

How to Protect Your Virtual Meetings from Zoombombing

Imagine, if you will, you’re participating in a Eric Yuan has put a freeze on feature updates, in order to address the security issues. Zoom’s promise was to address the problem within the next 90 days, when Yuan said, “Over the next 90 days, we are committed to dedicating the resources needed to better identify, address, and fix issues proactively. We are also committed to being transparent throughout this process. We want to do what it takes to maintain your trust.” Another writer for The New Stack, Jennifer Riggins Continue reading

Data-Driven Global Traffic Steering Keeps Companies Streaming During Crisis

Q&A: Dynatrace on COVID-19 Effects and ‘Super Bowl’-Like Traffic Surges

Software intelligence company Alois Reitbauer, vice president and chief technology strategist for Dynatrace, shared his observations about what the company is seeing. While Reitbauer usually splits his time between living and working in the United States and Europe, Reitbauer spoke with The New Stack from his remote-location home in Austria. What traffic changes are your customers seeing due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic? It’s definitely important to know we’re experiencing a perfect storm scenario right now. We all need to be on the same page for what’s going to happen. We have certainly ramped up our monitoring of networks recently. So the way you can describe the situation for many websites now is it’s just like Black Friday, where all people go really wild on a certain number of sites. The only difference with Black Friday- or Super Bowl-like surges in traffic compared to the saturation COVID-19 might cause is that nobody knows when it’s happening. We Continue reading

Service Mesh Adds Security, Observability and Traffic Control to Kubernetes

This week and next, The News Stack will be running a series of posts on the value that a service mesh brings to Kubernetes deployments. Here is the first installment. Check back often for more updates. As we explore all the tools and additional infrastructure layers that complement Kubernetes, it’s important to remember: None of this is to imply that Kubernetes is lacking. Kubernetes is a powerful tool to dramatically simplify running containerized applications, but there are many things that it was simply never intended to do. Service meshes are an example of a complementary piece of the infrastructure, handling things that Kubernetes can not and was never intended to do.  “The Kubernetes team at Google and the Istio team at Google were neighbors and were discussing these things,” explained Tetrate and one of the original creators of the William Morgan, CEO of Linkerd. “It’s because Kubernetes is really good but it has a well-defined scope.” A service mesh is Continue reading

What Has COVID-19 Taught Us About Information Networks?

Niraj Tolia Niraj Tolia is the CEO and co-founder at Kasten and is interested in all things Kubernetes. He has played multiple roles in the past, including the Senior Director of Engineering for Dell EMC's CloudBoost family of products and the VP of Engineering and Chief Architect at Maginatics (acquired by EMC). Niraj received his Ph.D., MS, and BS in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. COVID-19 has been the most disruptive event in modern history, right up there with 9/11. But unlike a terrorist’s attack, this one has no geographic, ideological, or political boundaries. It’s been an equal opportunity pestilence, and there’s no way to downplay its impact. However, it may be comforting to know that if it had occurred as recently as 30 or 40 years ago, a coronavirus outbreak would have been a far greater disaster. That’s because, during the intervening decades, a robust global communication network infrastructure has emerged. Today, a significant portion of the world’s commerce, administrative, and productive work is routinely conducted through that network’s digital conduits, clouds, server farms, data centers, and privately owned user devices. As a result, even with a massive workforce quarantine in place, a lot of work Continue reading

Istio 1.5 Brings a Binary Installer, WASM-Based Extensibility for Envoy

The newest version of the open source version 1.5, comes with a fresh installer to simplify the deployment process, along with a new extension model, based on WebAssembly (WASM), to help proxy servers better filter traffic. The development team behind Istio mark the Envoy‘s, the data plane most frequently used with Istio. “WASM will give developers the ability to safely distribute and execute code in the Envoy proxy — to integrate with telemetry systems, policy systems, control routing and even transform the body of a message,” a web page Linkerd and HashiCorp’s istioctl configuration tool. Security has been enhanced through the support of Kyle Glenn on 

Beyond Kube-Proxy: Project Calico Harnesses eBPF for a Faster Data Plane

Thanks to the power of the newly-introduced Calico network management software with a new data plane mode, one that can speed pod-to-pod data communication and eliminate the dependency on Kubernetes’ kube-proxy for traffic management. Tigera had started releasing work with eBPF almost a year ago, but this is the first release of Calico that fully harnesses the power of the new Linux kernel technology, Tigera co-founder and chief technology officer, said. “We wanted to derive what we were doing from fundamentals, to be confident we were building the right thing for users,” said scale Continue reading

Stateless Rethinks Modern Networking

There’s a whole new realm that the network is expected to accomplish with the newest architectures, according toBarefoot Tofino P4 Ethernet switch with the Stateless Luxon software to provide programmability deeper into the switch. Intel acquired Barefoot Networks, the creator of the protocol-independent Murad Kablan has said. Stateless aims to change all that. Its customers are looking to provide multitenancy and multitiered multitenancy — hundreds of thousands Continue reading

NS1 Builds on DNS to Speed Traffic Management

When user experience is increasingly synonymous with speed and reliability, new traffic management sub-teams are appearing at elite digital enterprises. In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, we talk to NS1, the networking automation company or, as he calls it, “the system of record for many, many of the key domains and the applications on the internet today.” Subscribe: Fireside.fm | Stitcher | Overcast | TuneIn He says that each of us interacts with NS1 dozens of times a day, like when we are connecting on LinkedIn or sharing files on DropBox. NS1 sits at the base of this new traffic management stack, steering that traffic across our increasingly complex and distributed systems. This stack also includes content networking delivery networks (CDN), load-balancing tooling, edge networking footprints, service meshes, and software for service discovery and egress optimization. This new role isn’t just about measuring if traffic is working correctly, but really understanding both your users and systems Continue reading

Akamai: The Financial Sector Is Seeing More APIs-Based Attacks

Cyberattackers are now increasingly targeting APIs, especially in the financial sector, according to content delivery network Akamai’s between 15% and 30% of all web traffic. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company hAndy Ellis neatly summarized the resultsemail to VentureBeat, Akamai explained some of the advantages of automation: criminals “use bots and tools that allow threading, or multiple simultaneous connections, to attempt multiple logins at once.” And by targeting APIs, “they hope to avoid some front-end defenses and speed up their validation times.” A recent Franck V. on 

How Much Will App Services Like Service Mesh Grow?

Network management services for modern architectures, such as the service mesh and the API gateway, are increasingly on IT professionals’ roadmaps, especially within public cloud environments. Notably, 37% of IT professionals expect to start using service meshes in the public cloud in the next year, but actual adoption rates may be significantly lower if the technology’s hype bubble bursts. Those are two of our takeaways from F5 Networks’ “

Cisco Previews Managed HyperFlex Application Platform for Kubernetes

AppDynamics Customer Journey Map, HyperFlex Application Platform for Kubernetes, and it has said that all three are expected to be generally available sometime within the next few months. The first two products are meant to provide insight into and optimization of application performance, and even target business metrics such as cost. The HyperFlex Application Platform for Kubernetes, meanwhile, is Cisco’s new managed Kubernetes product, which will not only provide a “turnkey” Kubernetes platform, but also a number of other managed services, including container networking, container storage, ingress and L7 load balancer, logging, monitoring, a container registry, and service mesh. Gerd Altmann from 

How to Manage a Home Network with Infrastructure as Code

Unifi Dream Machine home management device because, in addition to my personal and guest SSIDs, there is an apartment in my house for which I wanted to segment traffic. I also wanted to add an extra layer of security around some of the home automation and IoT devices that were being added to our home network with a fourth SSID. I started to configure the new network, I had started a spreadsheet of VLANs, subnet CIDRs and mappings of those to SSIDs. Additionally, I needed to track firewall rules, port forwards and other settings and configurations. Needless to say, this was a lot of information to maintain and manage. My day job is working on the Infrastructure-as Code (IaC) product

Part 4: When a ‘Service Mesh Lite’ Proxy Is Right for Your Organization

Prometheus, Spinnaker, Fluentd  and Pixabay. The post Part 4: When a ‘Service Mesh Lite’ Proxy Is Right for Your Organization appeared first on The New Stack.

WireGuard VPN Protocol Coming to a Linux Kernel Near You

The coming to the Linux kernel, much to the delight of Linux creator “Can I just once again state my love for it and hope it gets merged soon? Maybe the code isn’t perfect, but I’ve skimmed it, and compared to the horrors that are OpenVPN and IPSec, it’s a work of art,” Torvalds enthused, on the OpenVPN). Another reason WireGuard is special is how it functions. Unlike the more complex competition, WireGuard functions in a similar fashion to SSH — by exchanging public keys. Once the keys have been exchanged and the connection made, there’s no need to manage connections or daemons, or be concerned about state or what’s going on under the hood. For those that are interested in what’s going on under the hood, WireGuard makes use of the Curve25519, Poly1305, SipHash24, Jason Donenfeld’s prettysleepy1 from 

Apstra’s Intent-Based Networking Brings Enterprises to Cloud Parity

For some companies, things like cloud native deployments on Kubernetes with microservices is a given. For others, those technologies comprise a still distant future, and contemporary complexities include the stuff of network switches, proprietary, vendor-specific configurations, and on-prem networks that require manual operations to manage. For companies in the latter category, intent-based networking (IBN), which means to replace the manual processes of configuring networks and reacting to network issues with a system that responds to a system administrator’s outcome-focused requests. Apstra has been in the business of delivering intent-based networking since 2014, emerging from stealth in 2016. Apstra CEO and co-founder SONiC network operating system, which is based on Linux and is meant to run on switches from various vendors. Much like Apstra’s initial intention of providing a singular, automated entry point to manage a variety of different network components, SONiC provides “a full-suite of network functionality, like BGP and RDMA” that functions regardless of proprietary hardware. Feature image by Pixabay. The post Apstra’s Intent-Based Networking Brings Enterprises to Cloud Parity appeared first on The New Stack.