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Category Archives for "Networking"

Startup says its chips handle HPC workloads better than GPUs

A semiconductor startup is targeting the high-performance computing (HPC), claiming that in some instances, GPUs aren’t the best fit for the task.The chip is known for now as Thunderbird but will get a formal name when it launches in Q1 of 2023, according to Doug Norton, vice president of business development at InspireSemi. Thunderbird is mounted on a PCI Express card that plugs into a server, just as GPU accelerators from Nvidia and AMD do.The Thunderbird chip contains 2,560 RISC-V cores, and there are two chips per card. GPUs also come with thousands of cores but CPUs have less than 100, except for the Ampere Altra Max, with 128 cores.To read this article in full, please click here

Startup says its chips handle HPC workloads better than GPUs

A semiconductor startup is targeting the high-performance computing (HPC), claiming that in some instances, GPUs aren’t the best fit for the task.The chip is known for now as Thunderbird but will get a formal name when it launches in Q1 of 2023, according to Doug Norton, vice president of business development at InspireSemi. Thunderbird is mounted on a PCI Express card that plugs into a server, just as GPU accelerators from Nvidia and AMD do.The Thunderbird chip contains 2,560 RISC-V cores, and there are two chips per card. GPUs also come with thousands of cores but CPUs have less than 100, except for the Ampere Altra Max, with 128 cores.To read this article in full, please click here

Hedge 151: Cecilia Testart and the Value of the RPKI

If you advertise routes through a provider to the global Internet, you might be wondering if you should go through the trouble of registering in the RPKI and advertising ROAs. What is the tradeoff for the work involved in what seems like a complex process? Cecelia Testart joins Jeremy White and Russ White to discuss recent work in measuring the value of the RPKI.

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It’s also worth reading Cecelia’s article on this topic.

Cloudflare Workers and micro-frontends: made for one another

Cloudflare Workers and micro-frontends: made for one another

To help developers build better web applications we researched and devised a fragments architecture to build micro-frontends using Cloudflare Workers that is lightning fast, cost-effective to develop and operate, and scales to the needs of the largest enterprise teams without compromising release velocity or user experience.

Here we share a technical overview and a proof of concept of this architecture.

Why micro-frontends?

One of the challenges of modern frontend web development is that applications are getting bigger and more complex. This is especially true for enterprise web applications supporting e-commerce, banking, insurance, travel, and other industries, where a unified user interface provides access to a large amount of functionality. In such projects it is common for many teams to collaborate to build a single web application. These monolithic web applications, usually built with JavaScript technologies like React, Angular, or Vue, span thousands, or even millions of lines of code.

When a monolithic JavaScript architecture is used with applications of this scale, the result is a slow and fragile user experience with low Lighthouse scores. Furthermore, collaborating development teams often struggle to maintain and evolve their parts of the application, as their fates are tied with fates of all the other Continue reading

Data Visualization Solutions for Small Businesses

Data visualization is the process of representing data in graphical or pictorial format. It helps to communicate complex information in a clear and concise way, allowing people to better understand the structure and meaning of data. Small businesses need data visualization solutions to gain valuable insights from their data, identify trends and patterns, make informed decisions and optimize processes. 

The best data visualization software for small businesses can help to make sense of large amounts of data quickly and easily. These tools provide powerful visuals with interactive features and allow users to create custom dashboards that represent their data in an easy-to-understand format. Visuals created using these tools are also sharable, so multiple people can access the same information at the same time. 

Data Visualization Software

Canva

Canva is a great tool for small businesses. It offers an intuitive interface and a wide variety of templates that enable users to create custom visuals with just a few clicks. Canva’s drag-and-drop features make it easy to quickly build data visualizations, such as graphs, charts, tables, infographics and more. 

Tableau

Tableau is another popular data visualization tool. It enables users to create complex visuals with ease and provides an Continue reading

New Webinar: Internet Routing Security

I’m always in a bit of a bind when I get an invitation to speak at a security conference (after all, I know just enough about security to make a fool of myself), but when the organizers of the DEEP Conference invited me to talk about Internet routing security I simply couldn’t resist – the topic is dear and near to my heart, and I planned to do a related webinar for a very long time.

Even better, that conference would have been my first on-site presentation since the COVID-19 craze started, and I love going to Dalmatia (where the conference is taking place). Alas, it was not meant to be – I came down with high fever just days before the conference and had to cancel the talk.

New Webinar: Internet Routing Security

I’m always in a bit of a bind when I get an invitation to speak at a security conference (after all, I know just enough about security to make a fool of myself), but when the organizers of the DEEP Conference invited me to talk about Internet routing security I simply couldn’t resist – the topic is dear and near to my heart, and I planned to do a related webinar for a very long time.

Even better, that conference would have been my first on-site presentation since the COVID-19 craze started, and I love going to Dalmatia (where the conference is taking place). Alas, it was not meant to be – I came down with high fever just days before the conference and had to cancel the talk.

What is SD-WAN, and what does it mean for networking, security, cloud?

The most important change to wide-area networking over the past few years has been the widespread deployment of software-defined WAN technology, (SD-WAN), which changes how networking professionals optimize and secure WAN connectivity.What is SD-WAN? SD-WAN uses software to control the connectivity, management and services between data centers, remote offices and cloud resources. Like its technology brother software-defined networking (SDN), SD-WAN works by decoupling the control plane from the data plane.To read this article in full, please click here

Automation: How to streamline a networkwide switch upgrade

Automation can make a big difference in repetitive networking tasks, and that’s just what we did to streamline an enterprise switch upgrade using scripts we created with Python and a set of open-source tools.The project reaped several benefits, three of which were eliminating much human error inherent in the manual process, faster deployment overall, and significant cost savings.Upgrading a large, switched network is always a challenge. The typical solution is to carefully document the old switch configurations and the wiring to the patch panel, then manually configure the new switches and replace the wiring. The endpoints must be carefully tracked so they are assigned to the appropriate VLAN and have the correct interface configuration.To read this article in full, please click here

Service Mesh And Ingress In Kubernetes Lesson 7: Create An Ingress Controller In The Cloud – Video

This video walks through how to set up an NGINX ingress controller in AWS and Azure. Michael Levan brings his background in system administration, software development, and DevOps to this video series. He has Kubernetes experience as both a developer and infrastructure engineer. He’s also a consultant and Pluralsight author, and host of the “Kubernetes […]

The post Service Mesh And Ingress In Kubernetes Lesson 7: Create An Ingress Controller In The Cloud – Video appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Day Two Cloud 168: Get Kubernetes Observability With AppDynamics Cloud (Sponsored)

Today's Day Two Cloud podcast, sponsored by AppDynamics, explores how AppDynamics Cloud brings observability to your Kubernetes deployments by ingesting and visualizing all metrics, events, log and trace data from across your cloud and on-prem landscapes.

The post Day Two Cloud 168: Get Kubernetes Observability With AppDynamics Cloud (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Making peering easy with the new Cloudflare Peering Portal

Making peering easy with the new Cloudflare Peering Portal
Making peering easy with the new Cloudflare Peering Portal

In 2018, we launched the Cloudflare Peering Portal, which allows network operators to see where your traffic is coming from and to identify the best possible places to interconnect with Cloudflare. We’re excited to announce that we’ve made it even easier to interconnect with Cloudflare through this portal by removing Cloudflare-specific logins and allowing users to request sessions in the portal itself!

We’re going to walk through the changes we’ve made to make peering easier, but before we do that, let’s talk a little about peering: what it is, why it’s important, and how Cloudflare is making peering easier.

What is peering and why is it important?

Put succinctly, peering is the act of connecting two networks together. If networks are like towns, peering is the bridges, highways, and streets that connect the networks together. There are lots of different ways to connect networks together, but when networks connect, traffic between them flows to their destination faster. The reason for this is that peering reduces the number of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) hops between networks.

What is BGP?

For a quick refresher, Border Gateway Protocol (or BGP for short) is a protocol that propagates instructions on how networks should Continue reading

Why Do We Need IBGP Full Mesh?

Here’s another question from the excellent list posted by Daniel Dib on Twitter:

BGP Split Horizon rule says “Don’t advertise IBGP-learned routes to another IBGP peer.” The purpose is to avoid loops because it’s assumed that all of IBGP peers will be on full mesh connectivity. What is the reason the BGP protocol designers made this assumption?

Time for another history lesson. BGP was designed in late 1980s (RFC 1105 was published in 1989) as a replacement for the original Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP). In those days, the original hub-and-spoke Internet topology with NSFNET core was gradually replaced with a mesh of interconnections, and EGP couldn’t cope with that.

Why Do We Need IBGP Full Mesh?

Here’s another question from the excellent list posted by Daniel Dib on Twitter:

BGP Split Horizon rule says “Don’t advertise IBGP-learned routes to another IBGP peer.” The purpose is to avoid loops because it’s assumed that all of IBGP peers will be on full mesh connectivity. What is the reason the BGP protocol designers made this assumption?

Time for another history lesson. BGP was designed in late 1980s (RFC 1105 was published in 1989) as a replacement for the original Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP). In those days, the original hub-and-spoke Internet topology with NSFNET core was gradually replaced with a mesh of interconnections, and EGP couldn’t cope with that.

Cisco launches 10-year plan to train 25 million people in IT skills

As Cisco celebrates the 25th anniversary of Cisco Networking Academy, the company on Tuesday announced two new certifications and a plan to provide networking, cybersecurity and general IT  training to 25 million people over the next 10 years.The training will be done through the company's networking academy, an IT skills-to-jobs program that provides IT courses, learning simulators, and hands-on learning opportunities, supporting instructors and learners in 190 countries. To date, Cisco says more than 17.5 million global learners have taken Cisco Networking Academy courses to gain IT skills, with 95% of students attributing their post-course job or education opportunity to Cisco Networking Academy.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco launches 10-year plan to train 25 million people in IT skills

As Cisco celebrates the 25th anniversary of Cisco Networking Academy, the company on Tuesday announced two new certifications and a plan to provide networking, cybersecurity and general IT  training to 25 million people over the next 10 years.The training will be done through the company's networking academy, an IT skills-to-jobs program that provides IT courses, learning simulators, and hands-on learning opportunities, supporting instructors and learners in 190 countries. To date, Cisco says more than 17.5 million global learners have taken Cisco Networking Academy courses to gain IT skills, with 95% of students attributing their post-course job or education opportunity to Cisco Networking Academy.To read this article in full, please click here