What the IoT industry can learn from Apple’s revival of the Mac

This post is an excerpt from a talk I gave at the Reality Virtually Hackathon that makes a similar comparison between virtual reality and augmented reality and the Mac. It holds true for the Internet of Things (IoT) and every emerging technology.Many IoT devices makers build on proprietary platforms. Proprietary hardware is an advantage during the emergence of a new platform — until it is not. A proprietary platform protects intellectual property from reverse engineering because the software is tied to the hardware and it can be tuned for performance.Custom-designed hardware performs better — until it doesn’t. For example, when supercomputers, video bridges and CAD simulators were first introduced, all took advantage of custom, proprietary hardware to gain time to market. Now mature products, almost all the supercomputer, video bridge and CAD simulator suppliers use x86 and Nvidia platforms because these they have open ecosystems that add capabilities and value while reducing cost. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloudflare London Meetup Recap

Cloudflare helps make over 6 million websites faster and more secure. In doing so, Cloudflare has a vast and diverse community of users throughout the world. Whether discussing Cloudflare on social media, browsing our community forums or following Pull Requests on our open-source projects; there is no shortage of lively discussions amongst Cloudflare users. Occasionally, however, it is important to move these discussions out from cyberspace and take time to connect in person.

A little while ago, we did exactly this and ran a meetup in the Cloudflare London office. Ivan Rustic from Hardenize was our guest speaker, he demonstrated how Hardenize developed a Cloudflare App to help build a culture of security. I presented two other talks which included a primer on how the Cloudflare network is architected and wrapped up with a discussion on how you can build and monetise your very own Cloudflare App.

Since we presented this meet-up, I've received a few requests to share the videos of all the talks. You can find all three of the talks from our last London office meet-up in this blog post.

How Cloudflare Works

App Highlight: Hardenize by Ivan Ristić

Introduction to Building with Cloudflare Apps

Learn More...

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Response: Network Management: Why the CLI?

PQ 131: Whitebox At LinkedIn – IETF 99

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IDG Contributor Network: Mixing and matching massively hybrid applications: the future of cloud

A year ago, IDC told us that 68 percent of organizations have adopted cloud for enterprise applications—and that it’s not just about cost, but about revenue increases as well. That study also says that 73 percent of respondents, who spanned both IT and line-of-business users, have a hybrid cloud strategy in place.But when you dig further into those numbers, you’ll find that to most those respondents, “hybrid” means “subscribing to multiple external cloud services.” This can mean some applications in a portfolio run on one cloud while others run on a different cloud. To another 47 percent of those surveyed, “hybrid” means “using a mix of public cloud services and dedicated assets,” which conjures an image of a database running on-site sending data to a web or application server on a public cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: SD-WAN will fix business VoIP

“I don’t drink water, period. I live in Los Angeles and the water I get from the tap is lackluster, in terms of quality.”If someone said this, what is the first thought that comes to mind (assuming the person isn’t wearing hemp clothing and has their hair in dreadlocks)?“Have you tried using a water filter?” … is what you and I would probably ask, right?After you read below, this will be the same thing you say when you hear someone say, “VoIP isn’t a good fit for our company because we only have one ISP in the area, and the connection is shaky, at best.”Your response will be “Have you tried using SD-WAN to fix your call quality?”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cultural Challenges of Network Automation

Cultural Challenges of Network Automation

IDG Contributor Network: SD-WAN will fix business VoIP

“I don’t drink water, period. I live in Los Angeles and the water I get from the tap is lackluster, in terms of quality.”If someone said this, what is the first thought that comes to mind (assuming the person isn’t wearing hemp clothing and has their hair in dreadlocks)?“Have you tried using a water filter?” … is what you and I would probably ask, right?After you read below, this will be the same thing you say when you hear someone say, “VoIP isn’t a good fit for our company because we only have one ISP in the area, and the connection is shaky, at best.”Your response will be “Have you tried using SD-WAN to fix your call quality?”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Private networks still the best option for global companies

The rise of SD-WANs has raised an interesting debate. Is the internet good enough to replace a private network for an enterprise WAN?A decade ago, no one would have even considered this, but broadband speeds have increased and more things have moved to the cloud. Also, SD-WAN technology allows for dynamic path selection, which protects the WAN from outages so companies can use multiple broadband connections instead of something like MPLS.Global SD-WAN vendor Aryaka recently examined this question in its “State of SD-WAN Connectivity” report (registration required), which measured and compared data transport from the same pairs of locations using both the internet and over Aryaka’s own global private network. The test run was a randomly created 100 KB file, and connect time and transfer time were captured. The application response time was then calculated as the sum of these two metrics.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Private networks still the best option for global companies

The rise of SD-WANs has raised an interesting debate. Is the internet good enough to replace a private network for an enterprise WAN?A decade ago, no one would have even considered this, but broadband speeds have increased and more things have moved to the cloud. Also, SD-WAN technology allows for dynamic path selection, which protects the WAN from outages so companies can use multiple broadband connections instead of something like MPLS.Global SD-WAN vendor Aryaka recently examined this question in its “State of SD-WAN Connectivity” report (registration required), which measured and compared data transport from the same pairs of locations using both the internet and over Aryaka’s own global private network. The test run was a randomly created 100 KB file, and connect time and transfer time were captured. The application response time was then calculated as the sum of these two metrics.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to speed up IoT deployment: Give each device an identity

Most enterprises are in the process of evaluating how the Internet of Things (IoT) will affect their organization, especially how devices targeted at the Enterprise of Things (EoT) will be deployed.Indeed, companies that deploy “things” need to worry about security, manageability, longevity/availability and robustness — unlike consumers who generally don’t concern themselves with such things. I recently discussed what I see as a real lack of focus on IoT security from a device perspective. What I’d like to discuss now is the need make it easier to deploy and manage devices, especially those focused on enterprise deployments. This can be relatively easily accomplished by creating a unique unalterable identity for each device.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to speed up IoT deployment: Give each device an identity

Most enterprises are in the process of evaluating how the Internet of Things (IoT) will affect their organization, especially how devices targeted at the Enterprise of Things (EoT) will be deployed.Indeed, companies that deploy “things” need to worry about security, manageability, longevity/availability and robustness — unlike consumers who generally don’t concern themselves with such things. I recently discussed what I see as a real lack of focus on IoT security from a device perspective. What I’d like to discuss now is the need make it easier to deploy and manage devices, especially those focused on enterprise deployments. This can be relatively easily accomplished by creating a unique unalterable identity for each device.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Turn Your Ansible Playbook into a Bash Command

In one of the previous blog posts I described the playbook I use to collect SSH keys from network devices. As I use it quite often, it became tedious to write ansible-playbook path-to-playbook every time I wanted to run the collection process.

Ansible playbooks are YAML documents, and YAML documents use # to start comments, so I thought “what if I’d use a YAML comment to add shebang and turn my YAML document into a script”

TL&DR: It works. Now for the longer story…

Discussion about SFP, SFP+, QSFP, QSFP+, XFP and CFP Modules/Connectors

Today I am going to talk about the hardware generally used in many of the devices for the fiber/copper connectivity with the devices in the network.

I will talk about the various kinds of modules which includes the following types

• SFP
• SFP+
• QSFP, QSFP+, QSFP14, QSFP28
• XFP
• CFP

Fig 1.1- Sample QSFP+ to SFP+ Connectivity

Lets start with the SFP module discussion, then we will go with the SFP+, QSFP, QSFP+, XFP and then CFP modules. I will talk about the usage, Wavelength, data rate speed and so many factors which describe these modules in details. I hope with this article you will easily understand the various types of modules uses in industries now a days with the capacity and the data rate speed of these different modules.


SFP: SFP stands for small form factor pluggable, With the help of SFP you can extend the switching capability by connecting the fiber/copper cable between two devices. SFP is the way of technology to connect the devices. You can use as a Single fiber, Dual Fiber, DWDM, WDM. It can support maximum of 150 Km. SFP is based on IEEE802.3 and SFF-8472. SFP transceivers are designed to support Continue reading

Linux Networking

Linux Networking

Sorry, Network Jobs Are Changing

There’s a lot of angst in the networking community about programming, SDN, automation, and what it means for networking careers. Plenty of people will tell you don’t worry about it, focus on the fundamentals, there’s plenty of work, you will be fine.

There is some truth in that. There are still lots of jobs in networking. People with solid skillsets should have no problem finding a good job.

But.

Don’t fool yourself. Things are changing.

I’ve seen some research from Gartner that indicates that organisations have been steadily decreasing their Network Operations teams over the last five years. They have also been reducing their Data Networks spend. (Sadly I don’t have publication rights for this research, so you’ll just have to take my word for it).

This is going to put pressure on networking engineers. Your role will be forced to change, if for no other reason than that you are going to have less budget, and fewer people to do the work.

So you’d better think about what that means for how your role might change.

Do you need to change jobs today? No. You don’t have to outrun the lion’ - but you do want to make Continue reading