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Category Archives for "Networking"

How EVPN saved SDN from the brink of death

In 2010 and 2011, Software Defined Networking (SDN) was the hot new way of looking at architecture, and everyone had high hopes that it would reduce the stress of highly manual and complex operations. That was then, but now we’re in 2018 and it appears that SDN hasn’t quite fulfilled what it advertised, as many networks remain expensive, complex and proprietary. Some may claim that SDN is dead, but perhaps that’s not the case; maybe SDN has changed from its previous understanding and taken on a new definition. With solutions like EVPN and freedom from proprietary controllers bringing it back to life, SDN has risen like a phoenix from the ashes to finish the mission it started. How did we get here and what’s changed? You can check out our white paper for a more in-depth, technical look at SDN’s journey, or you can keep reading here for a CliffsNotes version of the information.

A link to the past: what SDN promised us

SDN promised to enable the network to behave like the server world, where resources could be virtualized and new environments could be deployed or decommissioned almost instantaneously. SDN sought to break-up the vertical stack by moving the Continue reading

Weekend Reads 022318: Copyright, walls, and botnets

Rejecting years of settled precedent, a federal court in New York has ruled [PDF] that you could infringe copyright simply by embedding a tweet in a web page. Even worse, the logic of the ruling applies to all in-line linking, not just embedding tweets. If adopted by other courts, this legally and technically misguided decision would threaten millions of ordinary Internet users with infringement liability. —Daniel Nazer @EFF

Security advances throughout the centuries have been mostly technical adjustments in response to evolving weaponry. Fortification — the art and science of protecting a place by imposing a barrier between you and an enemy — is as ancient as humanity. From the standpoint of theory, however, there is very little about modern network or airport security that could not be learned from a 17th century artillery manual. That should trouble us more than it does. —Jack Anderson

Akamai’s Fourth Quarter, 2017 State of the Internet, was released today in which it states that the analysis of more than 7.3 trillion bot requests per month has found a sharp increase in the threat of credential abuse, with more than 40 percent of login attempts being malicious. Additionally, the report warns DDoS attacks Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: The massive role of tiny antennas

The Shannon-Hartley theorem expresses “the maximum rate at which information can be transmitted over a communications channel of a specified bandwidth in the presence of noise.”Translation: wireless data can only travel so fast. But if data rates are finite, how can we support the rollout of Gigabit LTE, and one billion new 5G connections by 2025?Over the next few years, wireless connections will become ubiquitous – not only in our phones, tablets and PCs – but in our home, car and cities, thanks to an unglamorous and often-forgotten RF enabler: the antenna. Far from the laughably chunky antennas of early mobile phones, today’s nearly-invisible antenna systems make high-speed networking possible. They’re evolving as new wireless technologies emerge to satisfy our demand for content on the move.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The massive role of tiny antennas

The Shannon-Hartley theorem expresses “the maximum rate at which information can be transmitted over a communications channel of a specified bandwidth in the presence of noise.”Translation: wireless data can only travel so fast. But if data rates are finite, how can we support the rollout of Gigabit LTE, and one billion new 5G connections by 2025?Over the next few years, wireless connections will become ubiquitous – not only in our phones, tablets and PCs – but in our home, car and cities, thanks to an unglamorous and often-forgotten RF enabler: the antenna. Far from the laughably chunky antennas of early mobile phones, today’s nearly-invisible antenna systems make high-speed networking possible. They’re evolving as new wireless technologies emerge to satisfy our demand for content on the move.To read this article in full, please click here

What’s Your #TechConfession?

 

 

Think back to the first moment you fell in love with technology. Was it love at first deployment? What about developing code to trick your school’s bell system into letting your class out early? If you love all things technology, or you’re a technologist, then you should definitely put #TechConfessions, the podcast and YouTube playlist, on your radar.

#TechConfessions is a weekly podcast and web series that uncovers the deep, dark tech secrets of some of high tech’s finest minds. The series looks to expose the inner thoughts and forgotten stories of tech professionals. Hear from top tech pros as they divulge the early beginnings of their tech careers and proclaim their favorite software-defined moments. Get insights into what makes these tech leaders tick, and discover their long-burning passion for all things tech.

Director of Influence Marketing at VMware, Amy Lewis, one of the hosts of #TechConfessions, gives a voice to the professionals witnessing industry changes. Going from a hardware to a software state of mind happens differently for everyone. As the host of #TechConfessions, Amy digs deep to get the real backstory behind each individual’s transition into the world of software.

 

So far, season one Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Why is tape declining in the backup world?

The numbers don’t look good My favorite source of numbers for the tape industry used to be the Santa Clara Consulting Group.  They’d been tracking the use of tape in the backup and recovery industry since 2008 and had been a great go-to for such data. They showed a steady decline in number of units shipped, both in terms of drives and media.  Unfortunately, it looks like they stopped doing these services in 2014.Gartner’s most recent report on what media types people are using to do their backups is a pretty solid source of data, though. They’ve got data going back to 2009 that shows the percentage of people that are backing up directly to tape (D2T), backing up to disk then copying to tape (D2D2T), backing up to disk with no tape component (D2D/D2D2D), or backing up to the cloud (D2C/D2D2C).  While tape is used in most datacenters in one way or another, the percentage of companies using tape in any way is steadily declining. Companies are clearly moving to D2D or D2C techniques.  What are the reasons behind this trend?To read this article in full, please click here

Creating a single pane of glass for your multi-cloud Kubernetes workloads with Cloudflare

Creating a single pane of glass for your multi-cloud Kubernetes workloads with Cloudflare

(This is a crosspost of a blog post originally published on Google Cloud blog)

One of the great things about container technology is that it delivers the same experience and functionality across different platforms. This frees you as a developer from having to rewrite or update your application to deploy it on a new cloud provider—or lets you run it across multiple cloud providers. With a containerized application running on multiple clouds, you can avoid lock-in, run your application on the cloud for which it’s best suited, and lower your overall costs.

If you’re using Kubernetes, you probably manage traffic to clusters and services across multiple nodes using internal load-balancing services, which is the most common and practical approach. But if you’re running an application on multiple clouds, it can be hard to distribute traffic intelligently among them. In this blog post, we show you how to use Cloudflare Load Balancer in conjunction with Kubernetes so you can start to achieve the benefits of a multi-cloud configuration.

To continue reading follow the Google Cloud blog here or if you are ready to get started we created a guide on how to deploy an application using Kubernetes on GCP and AWS Continue reading

The Cost of Cybercrime

Most people paying attention would expect that the cost of cybercrime has gone up in recent years. But a new report has put a number on it: Worldwide cybercrime costs an estimated $600 billion USD a year.

That’s up from $500 billion USD in 2014, the last time security vendor McAfee and think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies released a similar study. The new estimate amounts to 0.8 percent of global GDP, up from 0.7 percent in 2014.

“Cybercrime is relentless, undiminished, and unlikely to stop,” writes report author James Lewis, senior vice president at CSIS. “It is just too easy and too rewarding, and the chances of being caught and punished are perceived as being too low.”

Lewis points to poorly-protected IoT devices as a particular problem. Insecure IoT devices “provide new, easy approaches to steal personal information or gain access to valuable data or networks,” he writes. They also power botnets that can create massive denial-of-service attacks.

Among the other reasons for the growth in the cost of cybercrime:

  • Cybercriminals are embracing new attack technologies.
  • Many new Internet users come from countries with weak cybersecurity.
  • Online crime is becoming easier through cybercrime-as-a-service Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: It’s time to start thinking differently about IoT

A steady churn of stunningly useless consumer devices has turned IoT into a running joke in the tech community. Worse yet, some applications have gone beyond the silly and into the realm of scary – like internet-connected teddy bears that record your kids (and skimp on security). But there’s a whole other side to IoT. Far removed from the world of consumer gadgetry, IoT is being used behind the scenes to solve real problems and create real value across a wide variety of applications and industries.To read this article in full, please click here

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