The dramatic shift to remote work brought on two years ago by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced companies to almost overnight not only adapt their business models but also to focus on technologies that would allow them and their employees to operate productively and securely. That included embracing connectivity solutions to ensure access to the applications and data critical for getting the job done and collaboration tools to enable employees to more easily work together even if they were located many miles apart. All that has accelerated the growth in such markets at software-defined networking (SD-WAN) and video conferencing and remote communications offerings like Microsoft Teams, Cisco System’s Webex and Zoom. Reliance on such technologies will only grow, given that many companies expect to continue a hybrid work environment even after the pandemic lifts. blog post this week pointed to numbers from Gartner that showed that 48% of employees are expected to work remotely post-pandemic and that hybrid workplaces will become commonplace. “In this new norm, seamless communication and collaboration will be the bare minimum for enterprises to achieve workforce productivity Continue reading
Confluent says it will release a series of updates to its data streaming platform every quarter. In this quarter, the updates consist of a number of new features built from the Apache Kafka open source distributed event streaming platform. They include schema linking, new controls to shrink capacity for clusters on-demand and new fully managed Kafka connectors. The new capabilities “can make a huge difference in creating a data mesh versus a data mess,” Schema Linking gives organizations the freedom to develop without the risk of damaging production, Rosanova told The New Stack. “Dev and prod generally don’t talk to one another — because production environments are so sensitive, you don’t want to give everyone access,” Rosanova said. With Schema Linking, built on top of Cluster Linking, schemas can be shared that sync in real-time across teams, organizations and environments, such with hybrid and multicloud environments. “This is far more scalable and efficient compared to workarounds I’ve seen where people are literally sharing schemas through spreadsheets,” Rosanova said. Much verbiage is devoted to scaling, but how to dynamically adjust network resources for resource savings when needed to avoid redundancy is often not addressed. As Rosanova noted, organizations maintain high availability by beefing up their capacity to handle spikes in traffic and avoid downtime. “We added a simple, self-service way to scale back capacity so customers no longer have to worry about wasting resources on capacity they don’t use. These clusters also automatically rebalance your data every time you scale up or down,” Rosanova said. “This solves the really hard challenge of rebalancing workloads while they are running. It’s like changing the tires on a moving car. Now you can optimize data placement without disrupting the real-time flow of information.” New Connectors Confluent’s new release now features over 50 managed connectors for Confluent Cloud. The idea behind Confluent’s Apache Kafka connectors is to facilitate network connections for data streaming with data sources and sinks that organizations select. In the last six months, Confluent more than doubled the number of managed connectors it offers, Rosanova said. “Once one system is connected, two more need to be added, and so on,” he said. “We are bringing real-time data to traditional, non-real-time places to quickly modernize companies’ applications. This is a significant need that continues to grow.” Kafka has emerged as a leading data streaming platform and Confluent continues to evolve with it, Rosanova said. “We are improving what businesses can accomplish with Kafka through these new capabilities. Real-time data streaming continues to play an important role in the services and experiences that set organizations apart,” Rosanova said. “We want to make real-time data streaming within reach for any organization and are continuing to build a platform that is cloud native, complete, and available everywhere.” Confluent’s connector list now includes: Data warehouse connectors: Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Azure Synapse Analytics, Amazon Redshift. Database connectors: MongoDB Atlas, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Azure. Cosmos DB, Amazon DynamoDB, Oracle Database, Redis, Google BigTable. Data lake connectors: Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data. Lake Storage Gen 2, Databricks Delta Lake. Additionally, Confluent has improved access to popular tools for network monitoring. The platform now offers integrations with Datadog and Prometheus. “With a few clicks, operators have deeper, end-to-end visibility into Confluent Cloud within the monitoring tools they already use,”blog post. The post Confluent’s Q1 Updates: ‘Data Mesh vs. Data Mess’ appeared first on The New Stack.
Want an easy way to get started in Web3? Download a Dietrich Ayala, IPFS Ecosystem Growth Engineer, Rowland Graus, head of product for Marko Baricevic, software engineer for Cosmos Network. an open source technology to help blockchains interoperate. Each participant describes the role in the Web3 ecosystem where their respective technologies play. These technologies are often used together, so they represent an emerging blockchain stack of sorts. TNS editor-in-chief Joab Jackson hosted the Continue reading
Margaret Lee Margaret is senior vice president and general manager of digital service and operations management for BMC Software, Inc. She has P&L responsibility for the company’s full suite of BMC Helix solutions for IT service management and IT operations management. Big data and the internet-of-things go hand in hand. With the continued proliferation of IoT devices — one prognosticator estimates there will be
Pavel (Xemul) Emelyanov Pavel is a principal engineer at ScyllaDB. He is an ex-Linux kernel hacker now speeding up row cache, tweaking the IO scheduler and helping to pay back technical debt for component interdependencies. Scheduling requests of any kind always serves one purpose: gain control over the priorities of those requests. In the priority-less system, there’s no need to schedule; just putting whatever arrives into the queue and waiting until it finishes is enough. I’m a principal engineer for
Despite the term async and its association with asynchronous network I/O, this blog post argues that the Tokio.rs describes it as: “an asynchronous runtime for the Rust programming language. It provides the building blocks needed for writing network applications.” While this description emphasizes Tokio’s use for network communications, the runtime can be used for other purposes, as we will explore below. Why Use Tokio for CPU tasks? It turns out that modern analytics engines invariably need to Continue reading
Service mesh integration software provider BumbleBee, a new open source project that it extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) in order to “shortcut the HTTP stack,” said Solo.io CEO and founder BPF Type Format (BTF), explained Levine, “(along with some smarts added to clang) enables the BPF program loader to fix the BPF byte code to work correctly on different versions of the kernel. For example, if a BPF program accesses a struct, clang now stores all these struct access in a special location in the BPF program binary. libbpf can go to each of these struct accesses, and use BTF information from the current kernel (obtained at runtime) to fix these accesses to the correct offset.” BumbleBee to the Rescue With the addition of BTF, Solo.io created BumbleBee, which not only uses BTF to parse and bring to the user space the maps of eBPF programs, but also uses the get started.
Redis is the “Swiss Army knife” of it’s often used for caching, but it does even more. It can also function as a loosely coupled distributed message broker, so in this article, we’ll have a look at the original Redis messaging approach, Redis Pub/Sub, explore some use cases and compare it with Apache Kafka. 1. Redis Pub/Sub A Beatles-inspired submarine cocktail. Evlakhov Valerii The theme of “pub” pops up frequently in my articles. In a previous article, I wrote about a conversation in an outback pub, “
Well before launching their company, the founders of problems with VPN security had already emerged before the pandemic. Since then, the big jump in remote work sparked by lockdowns has only revealed just how vulnerable they can be. Even enterprise-grade VPNs are riddled with security problems. In fact, a Zscaler David Cranshaw and Chief Operating Officer Avery Pennarun wanted to give developers a secure, scalable alternative to traditional VPNs. “Our big vision is to help developers be reasonable about scale,” said Pennarun, a former Google engineer. Although Continue reading
As organizations expand their cloud adoption and business-critical use cases, security of their cloud infrastructure often becomes more complex. For this reason, analysts and advisors recommend that organizations take a unified, multilayer approach to protect their cloud deployments and ensure a robust cloud security posture. Approaches like the one just mentioned have eased security concerns, as cited in a shared responsibility model, at the infrastructure layer (IaaS), cloud providers are responsible for securing their compute-network-storage infrastructure resources. This leaves cloud users responsible for protecting the data, apps and other assets deployed on the infrastructure. Cloud providers offer a number of tools and services to help users uphold their end of the shared responsibility model, and they are important elements Continue reading
Jason Myers Jason is a technical marketing writer at InfluxData. In public transportation, there’s little room for error when it comes to passenger safety. At the same time, rail operators don’t have bottomless financial resources to oversee their rail system. The team at BAI Communications in Toronto faced these two, diametrically opposed realities. Fortunately, by using their existing network infrastructure, a time-series platform and a sizable helping of ingenuity, the BAI team was able to close that gap between their technical needs and cost. Here’s how they did it. Background BAI Communications is a global company and a leader in providing communications infrastructure, pioneering the future of advanced connectivity and delivering the ubiquitous coverage that can transform lives, power business ambitions and shape the future of our cities. The company focuses on three key verticals: broadcast, neutral host and 5G, and transit. It seeks to enrich lives by connecting communities and advancing economies. BAI manages and operates the networking infrastructure for T-Connect, the wireless network used by the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC). T-Connect averages over 200,000 daily sessions, and over 5 million every month from approximately 100,000 unique devices every weekday. The T-Connect network consists of more than 1,000 access Continue reading
The challenge is clear: How to offer real- or near real-time access to data that is continually refreshed across a number of different distributed environments. With different types of data streaming from various sources such as multicloud and on-premises environments, the data, often in shared digital layers such as so-called digital information hubs (DIHs), must be updated asynchronously. This is necessary in order to maintain a consistent user experience. To that end, data streaming platform provider Apache Kafka, hundreds of different applications and data systems can use it to migrate to the cloud or share data between their data center and the public cloud, Confluent says. Traditionally, syncing data between multiple clouds or between on-premises and the cloud was “like a bad game of telephone,”
The latest release of the list of the fastest supercomputers in the world showed little movement for an HPC industry that is anxiously waiting for long-discussed exascale systems to come online. Japan’s massive Top500 list of the world’s fastest systems, a position it first reached in the summer of 2020. The latest list was released this week at the start of the
The Let’s Encrypt certificate authority, but it has also turned its hand to fixing memory problems. It sponsors, via Google, so Rust in Linux in no small part to fix its built-in C memory problems. And, it also has a whole department, Rustls, a safer memory-safe code. Memory-safe programs are written in languages that avoid the usual use after free problems. C, C++, and Assembly, for all their speed, make it all too easy to make these kinds of mistakes. Languages such as Rust, Go, and C#, however, Continue reading
There are several service mesh products and projects today, promising simplified connectivity between application microservices, while at the same time offering additional capabilities like secured connections, observability, and traffic management. But as we’ve seen repeatedly over the last few years, the excitement about service mesh has been tempered by practical additional overhead. Let’s explore how Envoy or wrote about his experiences configuring Istio to reduce consumption from around 1GB per proxy (!) to a much more reasonable 60-70MB each. But even in our Continue reading
Andy Idsinga Andy Idsinga is a Cloud Engineering Manager and senior Cloud Solutions Architect at cPacket Networks. Andy has been a software engineer and architect since 1994 at Symantec, Intel and other technology companies. He’s worked on firmware for smart watches, RFID transceiver chipsets, and led a team in developing a new smart bracelet as part of Intel’s internal startup incubator. He lives in Portland, OR. The 2021 Verizon
Hai Huang Hai is a research scientist at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. He is a contributing member of Kubernetes, Istio, Iter8 and TPM. We are accustomed to having high expectations of our apps. We want a constant stream of new features and bug fixes, and yet, we don’t want these updates to affect our user experience adversely. As a result, these expectations put a tremendous amount of pressure on developers. This is where
When DevOps was coined around 2009, its purpose was to break down silos between development and IT operations. DevOps has since become a game of tug-of-war between the reliability needs of the operations team and the velocity goals on the developer side. Site reliably engineering became that balancer. As Benjamin Treynor Sloss, designer of Google’s SRE program, puts it: “SRE is what happens when you ask a software engineer to design and run operations.” The SRE team has emerged as the answer to how you can build systems at scale, striking that balance between velocity, maintainability and efficiency. It was only logical that this year’s books on site reliability engineering. Of course, almost everyone outside of Google will probably not work on anything at this scale, but, because increasingly distributed systems are constantly integrating with others, Continue reading
As the internet fills every nook and cranny of our lives, it runs into greater complexity for developers, operations engineers, and the organizations that employ them. How do you reduce latency? How do you comply with the regulations of each region or country where you have a virtual presence? How do you keep data near where it’s actually used? For a growing number of organizations, the answer is to use the edge. In this episode of the New Stack Makers podcast, Sheraline Barthelmy, head of product, marketing and customer success for Cox Edge, were joined by The Advantages and Challenges of Going ‘Edge Native’ Also available on Google Podcasts, PlayerFM, Spotify, TuneIn The edge is composed of servers that are physically located close to the customers who will use them — the “last Continue reading
Dana Nehama Dana is product management director for Cloud Networks at Intel. She has deep technical experience in the wireless and telecom networking arenas and collaborates with communities on technology initiatives such as SDN/NFV, cloud native, LTE, WiMAX, VoIP, DOCSIS and more. With core network infrastructure on a rapid path to becoming fully virtualized with cloud native practices, it’s critical for systems developers to be able to efficiently design, produce and deploy reliable applications and services from myriad software, networking and hardware components. I’ve been developing networking products for the telecommunications sector for most of my career, starting in Israel and then immigrating to the United States two decades ago. I’ve always had a systems engineering perspective and a passion for helping service providers better understand how they can more easily consume the latest technologies to build their applications and services. In my most recent role, I was faced with the challenge of how to help communication service providers (CoSPs) accelerate the design and deployment of applications and services running on virtualized, multi-vendor solutions tailored for their unique operating environments. These service providers want to take advantage of the latest-generation platforms and open source software innovations. Collaborating with the CNCF Continue reading