Service Mesh Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

NS1 Shows How DNS Technology Can Speed VPN Connections

The need for faster and more reliable VPN connections has certainly spiked recently in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the massive shift of workers away from office hubs to home locations. For developers who must rely on VPNs for data transfers, the act of loading code on git and other more mundane tasks can obviously take much longer depending on network saturation from remote locations. Productivity is obviously lost, as well as time, which is in short supply for so many these days. Managed DNS support for VPNs can help to boost both network data transfer rates and robustness for VPNs, as well as other network infrastructure for any user, in addition to developers working remotely. To that end, DNS solutions provider Terry Bernstein, NS1 director of product management, said. The end result is improved VPN connectivity, which through load-balancing and steering connections at the DNS layer, are connected to the best performing endpoint. NS1’s DNS Continue reading

Q&A with Accedian: How Remote Work Stresses the Company VPN

Mike Canney, client solution architect at network and application monitoring company Gerd Altmann from 

The New Stack Context: Stress, Resilience and the Network Effects of COVID-19

Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with The New Stack correspondent Jennifer Riggins about all of the reporting she and others on the TNS team have been doing recently on the effects that the COVID-19 global pandemic is having on the tech industry. TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson. Subscribe: Fireside.fm | Stitcher | Overcast | TuneIn For this episode, we wanted to look at and not only discuss the changing patterns in network traffic that the global COVID-19 pandemic has wrought, due to factors such as people staying at home and working from home, and the sudden acceleration of e-learning. As Riggins writes in a recent post: For a lot of tech and infrastructure teams, they not only are going through the stress of the collective trauma we’re sharing in, but they are struggling to keep up with ever-scaling, extreme strains on their systems. Simply put, Continue reading

Portworx Essentials: A Free Cloud Native Storage Engine for Kubernetes

If you deal with Kubernetes, you know that storage is one of the core building blocks of the cluster infrastructure. It is as important as the compute building block delivered by the worker nodes. Since the power of the cluster is always measured in terms of the number of worker nodes and their configuration, storage doesn’t get its share of attention. Imagine this: you configured a powerful bare-metal cluster and want to run a highly available and mission-critical workload on it. Without a solid storage engine, your cluster is only good for running stateless and ephemeral workloads that don’t need persistence. But any enterprise application is a combination of both — stateless and stateful services. You wouldn’t be able to justify the investment made in the brand new Kubernetes cluster if you are unable to run end-to-end applications on it. When you install the open source, up-steam Kubernetes distribution, it doesn’t come with a high-performance storage engine. Unlike managed Kubernetes services in the public cloud that come with default storage classes mapped to their respective block storage services, your cluster doesn’t have any storage class. A persistent volume is to storage what a node is to compute. Just like the Continue reading

New Relic’s Ambitious Plan to Apply AI and ML to Incident Response

Application performance management company Michael Olson, director of product marketing at New Relic, said. “It’s very difficult to be able to quickly diagnose quickly detect, diagnose and ultimately Continue reading

Q&A with Devo: COVID-19 Is Changing the Cloud Conversation

How do companies manage the security implications of working from home, in a country where remote work has generally been frowned on? Devo, a data analytics and security platform with headquarters in Madrid, helps companies get visibility into their networks — something that has become even more critical as more companies rely on virtual private network (VPNs) to security connect team members working from home.  We spoke with Devo, and carloyuen from 

The Network Impact of the Global COVID-19 Pandemic

With so many countries in lockdown and so many people working (and learning) from home, online usage has risen significantly but so far, the internet is holding up well. Internet traffic is generally to 25% to 30% higher than usual, and what we do online is also changing. Internet usage often increases goes up in a typical month; for Akamai that’s usually 3% growth, in the last month it’s been 30%. In March 2019 their peak traffic was 82Tbps; this March it was 167Tbps and the sustained daily traffic rate is higher than last year’s peak for March. Internet exchanges in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London saw 10-20% increases in traffic around March 9th, which the exchange in Milan had a 40% increase the day Italy was quarantined. Disturbingly, attacks are up too: Akamai Cloudflare tracks varies by city; it’s only up 11% in Berlin and 22% in London between early January and late March (and 17% up for the UK as whole), but it’s grown by 40% in New York and 48% in San Francisco and Silicon Continue reading

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