Worth Reading: Modern Babel in Network Coding

Automation is great. I happen to love coding and have been working with various API’s, getting some small but real problems solved. One of the factors I’m acutely aware of is right-sizing what I tackle. —Pete Welcher @Netcraftsmen

Gaming Company Replaces Cisco, F5, and Juniper With XCloud Networks

XCloud Networks taps SDN and NFV for custom networking. And the startup won Innova as its second customer to replace its existing data center infrastructure.

Nyansa Voyance Extends Monitoring to Aruba, Extreme Networks Wireless Systems

Nyansa Voyance already integrates and correlates data from a number of data sources and vendor systems including Cisco, GE, and Microsoft.

SUSE Builds a Custom Linux Kernel to Boost Microsoft Azure Performance

The custom kernel provides up to 25 percent faster network throughput and a 23 percent drop in average latency for on-demand instances.

Reaction: Nerd Knobs and Open Source in Network Software

This is an interesting take on where we are in the data networking world—

Tech is commoditizing, meaning that vendors in the space are losing feature differentiation. That happens for a number of reasons, the most obvious of which is that you run out of useful features. Other reasons include the difficulty in making less-obvious features matter to buyers, lack of insight by vendors into what’s useful to start off with, and difficulty in getting media access for any story that’s not a promise of total revolution. Whatever the reason, or combination of reasons, it’s getting harder for network vendors to promote features they offer as the reasons to buy their stuff. What’s left, obviously, is price. —Tom Nolle @CIMI

There are things here I agree with, and things I don’t agree with.

Tech is commoditizing. I’ve talked about this before; I think networking is commoditizing at the device level, and the days of appliance based networking are behind us. But are networks themselves a commodity? Not any more than any other system.

We are running out of useful features, so vendors are losing feature differentiation. This one is going to take a little longer… When I first started in Continue reading

Open19 Data Centers Pick Up Steam

The open data center effort added Packet’s CEO as a board member and will soon sell Open19 compliant servers on its online marketplace.

How Cloudflare protects customers from cache poisoning

A few days ago, Cloudflare — along with the rest of the world — learned of a "practical" cache poisoning attack. In this post I’ll walk through the attack and explain how Cloudflare mitigated it for our customers. While any web cache is vulnerable to this attack, Cloudflare is uniquely able to take proactive steps to defend millions of customers.

In addition to the steps we’ve taken, we strongly recommend that customers update their origin web servers to mitigate vulnerabilities. Some popular vendors have applied patches that can be installed right away, including Drupal, Symfony, and Zend.

How a shared web cache works

Say a user requests a cacheable file, index.html. We first check if it’s in cache, and if it’s not not, we fetch it from the origin and store it. Subsequent users can request that file from our cache until it expires or gets evicted.

Although contents of a response can vary slightly between requests, customers may want to cache a single version of the file to improve performance:

(See this support page for more info about how to cache HTML with Cloudflare.)

How do we know it’s the same file? We create something Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Security serves as an essential component to growing an enterprise with SD-WAN

As enterprises endeavor to expand domestic and global footprints, agile network infrastructure connectivity across geographies continues to prove an ongoing challenge. In particular, ensuring that data shared over these networks is protected from unauthorized access is a primary directive in today’s evolving cyber threat landscape. These often-contradictory demands call for IT decision makers to invest in innovation that will facilitate network flexibility and agility without compromising security, productivity or performance.This challenge begs a simple question. How can a WAN deliver the flexibility and agility necessary to help an organization grow without increasing exposure to data breaches and other security problems? After all, if the cost of convenience is increased network vulnerabilities, can it be considered a sound approach?To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Security serves as an essential component to growing an enterprise with SD-WAN

As enterprises endeavor to expand domestic and global footprints, agile network infrastructure connectivity across geographies continues to prove an ongoing challenge. In particular, ensuring that data shared over these networks is protected from unauthorized access is a primary directive in today’s evolving cyber threat landscape. These often-contradictory demands call for IT decision makers to invest in innovation that will facilitate network flexibility and agility without compromising security, productivity or performance.This challenge begs a simple question. How can a WAN deliver the flexibility and agility necessary to help an organization grow without increasing exposure to data breaches and other security problems? After all, if the cost of convenience is increased network vulnerabilities, can it be considered a sound approach?To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Security serves as an essential component to growing an enterprise with SD-WAN

As enterprises endeavor to expand domestic and global footprints, agile network infrastructure connectivity across geographies continues to prove an ongoing challenge. In particular, ensuring that data shared over these networks is protected from unauthorized access is a primary directive in today’s evolving cyber threat landscape. These often-contradictory demands call for IT decision makers to invest in innovation that will facilitate network flexibility and agility without compromising security, productivity or performance.This challenge begs a simple question. How can a WAN deliver the flexibility and agility necessary to help an organization grow without increasing exposure to data breaches and other security problems? After all, if the cost of convenience is increased network vulnerabilities, can it be considered a sound approach?To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: GitOps

You’ve written a new web application and would like it to be added to your organization’s web load balancer. The load balancer is complex; its configuration is maintained by highly trained experts on the network operations team. You file a ticket with the team, wait, wait, wait, have a discussion with the experts, wait, wait, wait, and finally your request is completed. Your application is now available, assuming they got it right on the first try. —Thomas A. Limoncelli @ACM

IDG Contributor Network: The state of the network is murky

Hybrid IT networking has come a long way in the past decade, as enterprises have gradually come to embrace and trust cloud computing. Yet, despite the growing popularity of both private and public clouds, many enterprise IT teams are still struggling with how to handle the resulting migration challenges.Originally envisioned as simply a way to reduce costs, migration to the cloud has escalated in large part due to a drive for greater agility and flexibility. In fact, according to a recent State of the Network global survey of more than 600 IT professionals, the top two reasons enterprises are moving to the cloud are to increase IT scalability and agility, and to improve service availability and reliability. The need to lower costs was ranked number four, tied with the desire to deliver new services faster.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The state of the network is murky

Hybrid IT networking has come a long way in the past decade, as enterprises have gradually come to embrace and trust cloud computing. Yet, despite the growing popularity of both private and public clouds, many enterprise IT teams are still struggling with how to handle the resulting migration challenges.Originally envisioned as simply a way to reduce costs, migration to the cloud has escalated in large part due to a drive for greater agility and flexibility. In fact, according to a recent State of the Network global survey of more than 600 IT professionals, the top two reasons enterprises are moving to the cloud are to increase IT scalability and agility, and to improve service availability and reliability. The need to lower costs was ranked number four, tied with the desire to deliver new services faster.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Securing microservice environments in a hostile world

At the present time, there is a remarkable trend for application modularization that splits the large hard-to-change monolith into a focused microservices cloud-native architecture. The monolith keeps much of the state in memory and replicates between the instances, which makes them hard to split and scale. Scaling up can be expensive and scaling out requires replicating the state and the entire application, rather than the parts that need to be replicated.In comparison to microservices, which provide separation of the logic from the state, the separation enables the application to be broken apart into a number of smaller more manageable units, making them easier to scale. Therefore, a microservices environment consists of multiple services communicating with each other. All the communication between services is initiated and carried out with network calls, and services exposed via application programming interfaces (APIs). Each service comes with its own purpose that serves a unique business value.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Securing microservice environments in a hostile world

At the present time, there is a remarkable trend for application modularization that splits the large hard-to-change monolith into a focused microservices cloud-native architecture. The monolith keeps much of the state in memory and replicates between the instances, which makes them hard to split and scale. Scaling up can be expensive and scaling out requires replicating the state and the entire application, rather than the parts that need to be replicated.In comparison to microservices, which provide separation of the logic from the state, the separation enables the application to be broken apart into a number of smaller more manageable units, making them easier to scale. Therefore, a microservices environment consists of multiple services communicating with each other. All the communication between services is initiated and carried out with network calls, and services exposed via application programming interfaces (APIs). Each service comes with its own purpose that serves a unique business value.To read this article in full, please click here

Security in the New World of Containers and Serverless

This eBrief from SDxCentral takes a look at some of the security issues facing serverless and containers and delves into some of the tools and methodologies available to overcome these challenges.

The Week in Internet News: Malaysia Repeals Recently Passed Fake News Law

That was quick: The new Malaysian government has repealed a fake news law passed earlier this year, The Hill reports. The past government had used the law to charge several opposition leaders. The maximum penalty for violating the law was six years in prison and a fine of about US$128,000.

They love us: A community-run ISP in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is the highest-rated broadband provider in the United States in a Consumer Reports survey, notes Motherboard. The community-run service gets high ranks for speed, reliability, and value, the story says.

Legislating backdoors: The Australian government is targeting companies like Facebook, Google, and WhatsApp in a proposal that would require tech companies to decrypt customer communications on demand, CNet reports. The details of the draft proposal are unclear, but the government would require tech companies to provide more assistance to law enforcement agencies, The Register says.

AI doesn’t want your job: Workers don’t need to worry about Artificial Intelligence taking their jobs, Forbes says. AI will replace boring tasks, but generally not replace whole positions, according to one group of AI experts.

97 and counting: The Kashmir region of India has seen 97 Internet shutdowns in six years after and 11-hour Continue reading

Skills Network Managers Need in the Age of AI

Welcome to AfPIF and iWeek 2018!

A comprehensive view of Africa’s Internet peering and interconnection ecosystem from the region’s top networks and experts, opportunities to strengthen and build new peering relationships with over 300 attendees using an open to all “bilateral meeting” scheduling tool, insightful presentations, studies and reports delivered by a strong lineup of speakers, and a technical village are some of the interesting activities that participants to iWeek/AfPIF 2018 can expect.

The sessions have been spiced up to include a technical village, with vendors offering masterclasses, a super teachers award honoring Africa’s tech teachers, and a beers for peers session, to allow participants to network more.

“This year’s agenda reflects the growing interests from our rapidly evolving regional industry with an increased focus on regional networks, carrier-neutral data centers, cloud services, and regulation in addition to our traditional line-up of quality technical content,” said Kyle Spencer, Co-Coordinator of the African IXP Association.

This year, the Africa Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF) joined hands with the South Africa ISP Association to hold sessions during iWeek. This provides extensive training sessions and opportunities for participants.

“Participants will have opportunities to meet with industry leaders to discuss one on one or in groups the various issues around Continue reading

Edge-Side-Includes with Cloudflare Workers

At Cloudflare we’re accelerating web assets in a number of different ways. Part of this is caching, by storing the response given by the origin server directly within our 151+ global data centers. This will dramatically improve the delivery of the resources as the visitor will directly get them from the data center closest to them, instead of waiting for us to fetch the request from the origin web server.

The issue with dynamic (but not a lot) pages

The subject we’re gonna cover today is the concept of Edge-Side-Includes. And what’s better than a real use-case to introduce what it is used for? Let’s take a website where all pages are including advertisements at the head and bottom. Could we consider these pages static? We couldn’t as at least part of this page is dynamic. Could we consider caching it? That’s a no again as it would mean the first dynamic part rendered will be cached and served for the other visitors trying to get the page. It would be a catastrophe if the advertisements are user-specific.

So the issue here is that we can’t cache the page. That’s quite a shame as it means that we’ll fetch Continue reading