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Category Archives for "Networking"

NEON is the new black: fast JPEG optimization on ARM server

NEON is the new black: fast JPEG optimization on ARM server

As engineers at Cloudflare quickly adapt our software stack to run on ARM, a few parts of our software stack have not been performing as well on ARM processors as they currently do on our Xeon® Silver 4116 CPUs. For the most part this is a matter of Intel specific optimizations some of which utilize SIMD or other special instructions.

One such example is the venerable jpegtran, one of the workhorses behind our Polish image optimization service.

A while ago I optimized our version of jpegtran for Intel processors. So when I ran a comparison on my test image, I was expecting that the Xeon would outperform ARM:

vlad@xeon:~$ time  ./jpegtran -outfile /dev/null -progressive -optimise -copy none test.jpg

real    0m2.305s
user    0m2.059s
sys     0m0.252s
vlad@arm:~$ time ./jpegtran -outfile /dev/null -progressive -optimise -copy none test.jpg

real    0m8.654s
user    0m8.433s
sys     0m0.225s

Ideally we want to have the ARM performing at or above 50% of the Xeon performance per core. This would make sure we have no performance regressions, and net performance gain, since the ARM CPUs have double the core count as our current 2 socket setup.

In this case, however, I Continue reading

On Old Configs and Automation

I used to work with a guy that would configure servers for us and always include an extra SCSI card in the order. When I asked him about it one day, he told me, “I left it out once and it delayed the project. So now I just put them on every order.” Even after I explained that we didn’t need it over and over again, he assured me one day we might.

Later, when I started configuring networking gear I would always set a telnet password for every VTY line going into the switch. One day, a junior network admin asked me why I configured all 15 instead of just the first 5 like they learn in the Cisco guides. I shrugged my shoulders and just said, “That’s how I’ve always done it.”

The Old Ways

There’s no more dangerous phrase than “That’s the way it’s always been.”

Time and time again we find ourselves falling back on the old rule of thumb or an old working configuration that we’ve made work for us. It’s comfortable for the human mind to work from a point of reference toward new things. We find ourselves doing it all Continue reading

Finding what you’re looking for on Linux

It isn’t hard to find what you’re looking for on a Linux system — a file or a command — but there are a lot of ways to go looking.7 commands to find Linux files find The most obvious is undoubtedly the find command, and find has become easier to use than it was years ago. It used to require a starting location for your search, but these days, you can also use find with just a file name or regular expression if you’re willing to confine your search to the local directory.$ find e* empty examples.desktop In this way, it works much like the ls command and isn't doing much of a search.To read this article in full, please click here

Show 385: Getting Inside Cisco Tetration (Sponsored)

If you d heard of Cisco Tetration when it was first announced, you might have a vague memory of it being this huge rack of hardware at an eye-watering price that did some sort of analytics for massive data centers.

Tetration has evolved into a platform that meets needs for organizations of many sizes. Tetration also has a bunch of genuinely interesting use cases, as Cisco has become increasingly clever about what they can do with all of that data Tetration gathers.

For example, you can auto-implement a whitelist policy for application workloads. You can detect when your apps are deviating from their normal traffic patterns. You can detect software vulnerabilities. And depending on where you run Tetration, you can still get deep network performance insights, what I think of as the original Tetration value proposition.

Today on this sponsored episode, we delve into what Tetration does, explore use cases, and dive into how it fits into compute environments. Our guests from Cisco are Jason Gmitter, Principal Systems Engineer; and Yogesh Kaushik, Senior Director of Product Management for Tetration.

Show Links

Cisco Tetration – Cisco Systems

Cisco Tetration Workload Protection Extended with new Options: SaaS and Virtual Appliance – Cisco Continue reading

Is Networking Complex/Hard ?

Its not complicated (natch). Its distributed. And we don’t have visibility to know. Distributed Systems What makes networking hard ? A network is a distributed system where state must be shared between devices that are unreliably connected. Its a fallacy that a network will ever be reliable or predictable. Skills Network technologies and their fundamentals […]

Software opens up new career opportunities for network professionals

The topic of network engineer re-skilling has been front and center for the past few years. Some network professionals have embraced the concept and are leading the network industry in a whole new direction. Others, though, are more resistant and show about as much enthusiasm for this new world as my wife does when I ask her to watch a Star Trek marathon with me.Network professionals need to become software-fluent Part of the resistance to re-skilling is that change is scary and often hard. Many network engineers have been working a certain way for years, possibly decades, and now they are asking, "Do I need to throw those skills away and learn new ones?" To those people, I say an emphatic YES! It’s absolutely critical to learn new skills today, or you could find yourself quickly looking for a job.To read this article in full, please click here

Software opens up new career opportunities for network professionals

The topic of network engineer re-skilling has been front and center for the past few years. Some network professionals have embraced the concept and are leading the network industry in a whole new direction. Others, though, are more resistant and show about as much enthusiasm for this new world as my wife does when I ask her to watch a Star Trek marathon with me.Network professionals need to become software-fluent Part of the resistance to re-skilling is that change is scary and often hard. Many network engineers have been working a certain way for years, possibly decades, and now they are asking, "Do I need to throw those skills away and learn new ones?" To those people, I say an emphatic YES! It’s absolutely critical to learn new skills today, or you could find yourself quickly looking for a job.To read this article in full, please click here

Security Research is Critical to Protect the Open Internet

On, April 10, 2018 I joined over fifty like-minded individuals signing a letter emphasizing the importance of security research. The letter renounces a number of recent lawsuits, such as Keeper v. Goodlin and River City Media v. Kromtech, against security researchers and journalists and highlights the importance of the work they are doing to defend against a rapidly increasing number of security threats.

Security research, sometimes called white-hat hacking, is a practice by ethical hackers whereby they legally find flaws in information systems and report them to the creators of those systems. The ability to find and report these vulnerabilities before other bad actors can manipulate them has become increasingly important, especially in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT).

As we discussed at Enhancing IoT Security in Ottawa, Canada this week, Internet-connected devices offer great promise, but they can also create a host of security issues. It is crucial that we continue to encourage individuals to seek out and correct flaws in these devices as their application and use grows.

As Olaf Kolkman, Chief Internet Technology Officer at the Internet Society, wrote recently, security researchers are helping to make the Internet more secure. Collaboration between those Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: 5G to become the catalyst for innovation in IoT

5G represents a fundamental shift in communication network architectures. It promises to accelerate future revenue generation through innovative services facilitated via 5G-enabled devices, including smartphones, tablets, laptops and Internet-of-Things (IoT). 5G deployments are envisioned as a complex amalgamation of next-generation technological enhancements to telecommunication networks, which will help 5G become the catalyst for next-generation IoT services.Examples of such innovations include: 1) advanced modulation schemes for wireless access, 2) network slicing capabilities, 3) automated network application lifecycle management, 4) software-defined networking and network function virtualization, and 5) support for cloud-optimized distributed network applications.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 5G to become the catalyst for innovation in IoT

5G represents a fundamental shift in communication network architectures. It promises to accelerate future revenue generation through innovative services facilitated via 5G-enabled devices, including smartphones, tablets, laptops and Internet-of-Things (IoT). 5G deployments are envisioned as a complex amalgamation of next-generation technological enhancements to telecommunication networks, which will help 5G become the catalyst for next-generation IoT services.Examples of such innovations include: 1) advanced modulation schemes for wireless access, 2) network slicing capabilities, 3) automated network application lifecycle management, 4) software-defined networking and network function virtualization, and 5) support for cloud-optimized distributed network applications.To read this article in full, please click here

What is hybrid cloud really, and what’s the best strategy?

Ask a group of IT leaders to define what a hybrid cloud is, and their answers are likely to be as diverse as the companies they work for. Once a black-and-white definition describing organizations with a mix of apps that reside in both the public cloud and in enterprise data centers, a hybrid cloud has now become much more complicated as the number of apps used in the enterprise grows and their integration requirements mount.  The average company uses more than 1,400 cloud services, according to Skyhigh Networks, often because lines of business are being pressured to innovate, leaving little time to develop a strategy for the most efficient and cost-effective way to run them.To read this article in full, please click here