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Episode 23 – Cloud Connectivity Part II

Miguel Villareal and Scott Wheeler come back and join Network Collective for a second episode, discussing the complexities involved in connecting to cloud infrastructure services and some strategies on how to mitigate them.

 


 

We would like to thank Cumulus Networks for sponsoring this episode of Network Collective. Cumulus invites you to find out more about how Linux is changing the data center networking space by downloading their free ebook “Linux Networking 101” here: http://cumulusnetworks.com/NetworkCollectiveLinux

 


Miguel Villareal
Guest
Scott Wheeler
Guest

Jordan Martin
Host
Eyvonne Sharp
Host
Russ White
Host


Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post Episode 23 – Cloud Connectivity Part II appeared first on Network Collective.

New Spectre derivative bug haunts Intel processors

Intel just can’t catch a break these days. Researchers at Ohio State University have found a way to use the Spectre design flaw to break into the SGX secure environment of an Intel CPU to steal information.SGX stands for Software Guard eXtensions. It was first introduced in 2014 and is a mechanism that allows applications to put a ring around sections of memory that blocks other programs, the operating system, or even a hypervisor from accessing it.To read this article in full, please click here

New Spectre derivative bug haunts Intel processors

Intel just can’t catch a break these days. Researchers at Ohio State University have found a way to use the Spectre design flaw to break into the SGX secure environment of an Intel CPU to steal information.SGX stands for Software Guard eXtensions. It was first introduced in 2014 and is a mechanism that allows applications to put a ring around sections of memory that blocks other programs, the operating system, or even a hypervisor from accessing it.To read this article in full, please click here

Shine the Light: Six Women Making a Difference

This International Women’s Day, we’re boosting the profiles of incredible women around the world who are pushing boundaries using technology – and we encourage you to do the same!

Last month, during Safer Internet Day – a call to action for everyone to play their part in creating a better Internet for everyone – women in the Internet Society’s 25 Under 25 group, using just their smartphones to record video, answered the question, “What does a safer Internet mean to me?”

Watch the videos, explore the different ways these young women are using technology to shape tomorrow, then Shine The Light on some of the incredible women you know who are making an impact. Join the #ShineTheLight tweet chat with @SIGWomenISOC on March 8th… then join SIG Women!

Poornima Meegammana (Sri Lanka)
“A safer Internet to me is a place where a girl’s voice can be heard without harassment.”

Mary Helda Akongo (Uganda)
“To me, a safer Internet would be a place that is free and safe for me to have my voice heard, a place where I can share my creative content, share my opinions and my thoughts without ridicule, backlash and hate from different people Continue reading

Reykjavík, Cloudflare’s northernmost location

Reykjavík, Cloudflare’s northernmost location

Iceland is a small country in Northern Europe, a land of active volcanoes and boiling hot geysers. The geology and climate creates unique conditions for running compute power. With an abundance of green electricity and natural cooling, many companies are placing high power machines in Iceland to run power intensive, heat generating operations. Reykjavík is our 125th location globally.

Reykjavík, Cloudflare’s northernmost location

Connecting to the rest of the world

A unique aspect about Iceland relates to how it connects to the Internet, being situated on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge means submarine cables are necessary to reach networks in other countries. Iceland has three active fibre optic submarine cables that land on its shores: FARICE-1, DANICE and Greenland Connect. Due to the distance, latency to the nearest Cloudflare locations in London and Copenhagen starts at 35 milliseconds. By deploying in Reykjavík, we're able to drive down latency even further to a minimum of under 1 millisecond.

Iceland is unique in many ways, but is no different from other countries when it comes to exchanging internet traffic. ISNIC, Iceland's Network Information Centre runs RIX, the Reykjavík Internet Exchange. Cloudflare is the only CDN network connected to RIX, allowing traffic to flow directly to Continue reading

Cisco bolsters Tetration for better cloud, workload security

Cisco this week expanded its Tetration Analytics system to let users quickly detect software vulnerabilities and more easily manage the security of the key components in their data centers.Introduced in 2016, the Cisco Tetration Analytics system gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data analytics and machine learning to offer IT managers a deeper understanding of their data center resources. The idea behind Tetration includes the ability to dramatically improve enterprise security monitoring, simplify operational reliability and move along application migrations to Software Defined Networking.To read this article in full, please click here

EdgeMicro announces 30-city edge-network deployment

There is quite a rush on to build out edge computing networks, that vital link between the massive amount of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and data centers. One of the companies involved is newcomer EdgeMicro, which announced plans to deploy micro-data centers in 30 cities around the U.S. for an unnamed cellular partner.EdgeMicro said “a leading North American mobile network operator” has begun verification tests of its technology. It did not name the operator, but if it’s a national operator covering 30 major cities, there are only four obvious candidates — Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco bolsters Tetration for better cloud, workload security

Cisco this week expanded its Tetration Analytics system to let users quickly detect software vulnerabilities and more easily manage the security of the key components in their data centers.Introduced in 2016, the Cisco Tetration Analytics system gathers information from hardware and software sensors and analyzes the information using big data analytics and machine learning to offer IT managers a deeper understanding of their data center resources. The idea behind Tetration includes the ability to dramatically improve enterprise security monitoring, simplify operational reliability and move along application migrations to Software Defined Networking.To read this article in full, please click here

EdgeMicro announces 30-city edge-network deployment

There is quite a rush on to build out edge computing networks, that vital link between the massive amount of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and data centers. One of the companies involved is newcomer EdgeMicro, which announced plans to deploy micro-data centers in 30 cities around the U.S. for an unnamed cellular partner.EdgeMicro said “a leading North American mobile network operator” has begun verification tests of its technology. It did not name the operator, but if it’s a national operator covering 30 major cities, there are only four obvious candidates — Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile.To read this article in full, please click here

Who’s Pushing Layer-2 VPN Services?

Here’s another great point Tiziano Tofoni raised in his comment to my EVPN in small data center fabrics blog post:

I cannot understand the usefulness of L2 services. I think that the preference for L2 services has its origin in the enterprise world (pushed by well known $vendors) while ISPs tend to work at Layer 3 (L3) only, even if they are urged to offer L2 services by their customers.

Some (but not all) ISPs are really good at offering IP transport services with fixed endpoints. Some Service Providers are good at offering per-tenant IP routing services required by MPLS/VPN, but unfortunately many of them simply don’t have the skills needed to integrate with enterprise routing environments.

Read more ...

Chatbots Gone Wild

I am pleased to publish an infographic called "Conquering The World - Chatbots Gone Wild". This infographic contains statistics that highlight the impact of Artificial Inteligence (AI) chatbots on business and other sectors. In online business they interact with customers and boost sales by saving time and cost. They become more and more useful as the customers are getting more comfortable with technology through voice commands.  According to the graphic, the business trust in chatbots is going to grow as the 80% of businesses claimed they already used or plan to use chatbots by 2020.

I am glad to thank BestVPNs for kind permission to republish the original infographic on my blog.

Note: Click image to enlarge.

 

Chatbots Gone Wild

I am pleased to publish a link to infographic called "Conquering The World - Chatbots Gone Wild". This infographic contains statistics that highlight the impact of Artificial Inteligence (AI) chatbots on business and other sectors. In online business they interact with customers and boost sales by saving time and cost. They become more and more useful as the customers are getting more comfortable with technology through voice commands.  According to the graphic, the business trust in chatbots is going to grow as the 80% of businesses claimed they already used or plan to use chatbots by 2020.

The link below is published with the kind permission of 16best.net.

Conquering The World – Chatbots Gone Wild (Infographic)

https://www.16best.net/blog/chatbots-gone-wild/

HTTP Analytics for 6M requests per second using ClickHouse

HTTP Analytics for 6M requests per second using ClickHouse

One of our large scale data infrastructure challenges here at Cloudflare is around providing HTTP traffic analytics to our customers. HTTP Analytics is available to all our customers via two options:

In this blog post I'm going to talk about the exciting evolution of the Cloudflare analytics pipeline over the last year. I'll start with a description of the old pipeline and the challenges that we experienced with it. Then, I'll describe how we leveraged ClickHouse to form the basis of a new and improved pipeline. In the process, I'll share details about how we went about schema design and performance tuning for ClickHouse. Finally, I'll look forward to what the Data team is thinking of providing in the future.

Let's start with the old data pipeline.

Old data pipeline

The previous pipeline was built in 2014. It has been mentioned previously in Scaling out PostgreSQL for CloudFlare Analytics using CitusDB and More data, more data blog posts from the Data team.
HTTP Analytics for 6M requests per second using ClickHouse
It had following components:

  • Log forwarder - collected Cap'n Proto formatted logs from the edge, notably DNS and Nginx logs, Continue reading

BrandPost: Your Roadblock to Becoming Digital: A 1990s Server Room

Digital transformation is fundamentally changing businesses of every size. Larger enterprises no longer have a unique advantage based purely on their scale. Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) can utilize new applications and services that allow them to compete toe to toe against a business or organization of any size. Not only do your customers want the latest and greatest, but employees demand it as well. If your employees can’t get the digital tools they need to be successful, they’ll go where they’re available.The focus of management and employees today is on exciting new apps and services. However, without the appropriate IT infrastructure to support them, an organization will not be able to move forward on the digital transformation journey. New apps and new devices are dependent on the servers, storage, and network gear that provide the data and back-end services.  Unfortunately for many SMBs, IT equipment is stored in a 1990s server room that may be a repurposed conference room, cubicle, or spare office that cannot provide the physical environment the IT hardware needs to support a 21st century organization.To read this article in full, please click here

Startup ZincFive makes old battery technology new again

A startup called ZincFive is set to launch a modular uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for data center computers using the venerable nickel-zinc technology, which it claims is more efficient than lithium-ion.Nickel-zinc batteries were invented by Thomas Edison in 1901 but fell out of favor to newer designs due to their limitations, such as a low number of charge cycles and their inability to hold a charge for long.On the plus side, the batteries could hold a stronger charge and didn’t use toxic metals like other batteries that make them difficult to recycle. And they are not flammable, something lithium-ion batteries certainly can’t claim.To read this article in full, please click here