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Category Archives for "Networking"

Bringing New Engineers into Networking on Software Gone Wild

As I started Software Gone Wild podcast in June 2014, I wanted to help networking engineers grow beyond the traditional networking technologies. It’s only fitting to conclude this project almost seven years and 116 episodes later with a similar theme Avi Freedman proposed when we started discussing podcast topics in late 2020: how do we make networking attractive to young engineers.

Elisa Jasinska and Roopa Prabhu joined Avi and me, and we had a lively discussion that I hope you’ll find interesting.

How Your Network Impacts User Experience in a COVID-19 World

Before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, massive-scale remote connections over the Internet to households largely consisted of connections to entertainment services, such as Netflix. For those types of symmetric connections, fast download times ensure a good service. However, once the pandemic started, users working from home lacked sufficient upload times that could be at least 10 times slower for uploading data. This quickly became problematic for work-related connections, such as video and even audio connections for web meetings, said

Microsoft documents its liquid-immersion cooling efforts

Last week I told you about an immersion-cooling firm called LiquidStack being spun off from its parent company, the China-based server vendor Wiwynn. The story mentioned how Microsoft was experimenting with immersion cooling, and now Microsoft has pulled back the curtain on the whole show.It’s been trying out immersion cooling for two years but is now going full throttle, at least at its Quincy, Washington, data center. Situated in the middle of the state, the city of Quincy is tiny—just 6,750 as of 2010—but the Columbia River cuts through it, making it ideal for a hydropower-based data center, and there are several data centers in this tiny town.To read this article in full, please click here

Microsoft documents its liquid-immersion cooling efforts

Last week I told you about an immersion-cooling firm called LiquidStack being spun off from its parent company, the China-based server vendor Wiwynn. The story mentioned how Microsoft was experimenting with immersion cooling, and now Microsoft has pulled back the curtain on the whole show.It’s been trying out immersion cooling for two years but is now going full throttle, at least at its Quincy, Washington, data center. Situated in the middle of the state, the city of Quincy is tiny—just 6,750 as of 2010—but the Columbia River cuts through it, making it ideal for a hydropower-based data center, and there are several data centers in this tiny town.To read this article in full, please click here

New Video Course: How Networks Really Work

Those who follow my work know I’ve been focused on building live webinars for the last year or two, but I am still creating pre-recorded material for Pearson. The latest is built from several live webinars which I no longer give; I’ve updated the material and turned them into a seven-hour course called How Networks Really Work. Although I begin here with the “four things,” the focus is on a problem/solution view of routed control planes. From the description:

There are many elements to a networking system, including hosts, virtual hosts, routers, virtual routers, routing protocols, discovery protocols, etc. Each protocol and device (whether virtual or physical) is generally studied as an individual “thing.” It is not common to consider all these parts as components of a system that works together to carry traffic through a network. To show how all these components work together to form a complete system, this video course presents a series of walk throughs showing the processing involved in various kinds of network events, and how control planes use those events to build the information needed to carry traffic through a network.

You can find this How Networks Really Work here.

This course is Continue reading

IPv6 Buzz 073: Exploring Microsoft’s IPv6 History

This week's IPv6 Buzz episode features Justine Vick, network architect and engineer and Microsoft veteran whose IPv6 work dates back to the earliest inclusion of the protocol in Windows.We talk about why Microsoft supported and deployed IPv6 early, support challenges in-house and externally, how IPv6 affects software development, and more.

The post IPv6 Buzz 073: Exploring Microsoft’s IPv6 History appeared first on Packet Pushers.

IPv6 Buzz 073: Exploring Microsoft’s IPv6 History

This week's IPv6 Buzz episode features Justine Vick, network architect and engineer and Microsoft veteran whose IPv6 work dates back to the earliest inclusion of the protocol in Windows.We talk about why Microsoft supported and deployed IPv6 early, support challenges in-house and externally, how IPv6 affects software development, and more.

Creative Virtual Team Building Ideas

Handling a remote team is not the easiest task. They have fewer opportunities to socialize and they don’t have a way to get to know new members. Such remoteness in work can lead to feelings of disconnection and isolation.

That is why your business needs virtual team building activities. It will allow the workers to get to know each other and feel more connected. They will drive a sense of belonging and community that everyone needs.

Here are our top choices for creative virtual team building activities.

1. Weekly Trivia Contest

People love trivia. Jeopardy is a big example of how much people love taking part in trivia contests. So, you can create such a contest for your virtual team as well.

You can decide:

  • Categories (Current events, entertainment, science, etc.)
  • Timing (Day the contest will take place)
  • Difficulty (Beginner, intermediate, or advanced)
  • Region (Do you want to include your global teammates or just the ones in your state?)

If you want a platform for automated weekly trivia quizzes for your remote team, then you can opt for Water Cooler Trivia. It is a platform that will automate the entire process to make things seamless. It is one Continue reading

Dynamic URL Rewriting at the edge with Cloudflare

Dynamic URL Rewriting at the edge with Cloudflare
Dynamic URL Rewriting at the edge with Cloudflare

URLs are ugly. They are hard to read, difficult to memorise and often auto-generated for the benefit of the origin server - not the user.

Today we are announcing the immediate availability of Transform Rules for all Cloudflare plans. Transform Rules provide Cloudflare administrators with the ability to create URL rewrite rules. These rules transform HTTP requests as they flow through Cloudflare providing an interpretation layer between the human friendly and the computer friendly.

Ease of understanding

Imagine you are going on a much needed around-the-world trip and want to buy a copy of John Graham-Cumming’s book The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive to use as inspiration. Would the link https://www.travelbooks247.com/dp/0596523203/ make sense to you? Chances are the answer is no. It's hard for humans to understand these complex, contextless URLs.

This is why companies instead provide user friendly alternatives such as: https://www.travelbooks247.com/Geek-Atlas-Places-Science-Technology/dp/0596523203/ and use web servers as the interpreter. This interpretation is known as URL rewriting.

Large ecommerce retailers take HTTP requests to these human-friendly URLs and rewrite them using a simple pattern that strips the content Geek-Atlas-Places-Science-Technology/ before sending the HTTP request to the backend. The human readable hyperlink Continue reading

Claim: You Don’t Have to Be a Networking Expert to Do Kubernetes Network Security

I was listening to an excellent container networking podcast and enjoyed it thoroughly until the guest said something along the lines of:

With Kubernetes networking policy, you no longer have to be a networking expert to do container network security.

That’s not even wrong. You didn’t have to be a networking expert to write traffic filtering rules for ages.

Claim: You Don’t Have to Be a Networking Expert to Do Kubernetes Network Security

I was listening to an excellent container networking podcast and enjoyed it thoroughly until the guest said something along the lines of:

With Kubernetes networking policy, you no longer have to be a networking expert to do container network security.

That’s not even wrong. You didn’t have to be a networking expert to write traffic filtering rules for ages.

Jonathon Dixon: Why I joined Cloudflare

Jonathon Dixon: Why I joined Cloudflare
Jonathon Dixon: Why I joined Cloudflare

I’m excited to announce that on March 1, I joined Cloudflare as Vice President and GM, Asia Pacific (including Japan and Greater China) to help build and expand Cloudflare’s growing customer and partner base and presence in the region. We currently have over 200 passionate and customer-focused employees in APAC, with offices in Beijing, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo.

A little about me

Singapore is where I’m based. Melbourne is home with my early years spent in Country Victoria. I love the outdoors, sports, travelling and spending time with family and friends. I am naturally intrigued by interesting people and different perspectives. I have a thirst for learning and understanding why people act and behave the way they do, and believe that understanding more about different cultures makes me a better person/leader. And what better way to do so than by being in the most diverse region in the world — Asia Pacific is home to 60% of the world’s population, with thousands of languages spoken, spanning multiple time zones. With the rise of innovation and technology adoption in the region, growth and expansion opportunities are endless.

My journey to Cloudflare

Throughout my 20-year career, I have been extremely fortunate to Continue reading

Visualise and Analyse Your Data Centre Fabric with HAWK

Hello my friend,

Some time ago in LinkedIn we announced that we are working on the tool, which will allows you to model and analyse your network. As one of our primary focuses is data centres, we started from there. Despite it is an early stages, but we are happy and proud to introduce you HAWK: Highly-efficient Automated Weapon Kit. For now, this is a collection of the tools for the network management and analysis, but probably later we will put it under a joint hoot of some front-end, who knows…


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Where is the the border between network automation and software development?

In order to automate any network operation, you need to write a script, even if that is a simple one. On the other hand, any script is a program or software. This means that the creating of the scripts for the network automation is a form of the software development. And it is fun. Continue reading

Arista adds cloud, automation features

Arista Networks has added intelligent features to its core CloudVision management platform to help manage and automate distributed workloads.CloudVision provides wired and wireless visibility, orchestration, provisioning, telemetry, and analytics across the data center, campus, and more recently, IoT devices on edge networks. CloudVision’s network information can be utilized by Arista networking partners such as VMware and Microsoft.To read this article in full, please click here

Arista adds cloud, automation features

Arista Networks has added intelligent features to its core CloudVision management platform to help manage and automate distributed workloads.CloudVision provides wired and wireless visibility, orchestration, provisioning, telemetry, and analytics across the data center, campus, and more recently, IoT devices on edge networks. CloudVision’s network information can be utilized by Arista networking partners such as VMware and Microsoft.To read this article in full, please click here

Sarantaporo.gr Community Network: Connecting Communities Is a Marathon, Not a Race

Last week we shared the story of how the Sarantaporo.gr Community Network worked with the community of Sykea to help with a pressing problem. Like many other villages in the Thessaly region in central Greece, it lacked access to the Internet. When an alternative solution to Sykea’s connectivity challenges was found, an opportunity opened up […]

The post Sarantaporo.gr Community Network: Connecting Communities Is a Marathon, Not a Race appeared first on Internet Society.

Gartner: Worldwide IT outlay to hit $4T in 2021

Researchers at Gartner said that all IT spending segments—from data center to enterprise software—are forecast to have positive growth through 2022 with overall IT spending projected to hit $4.1 trillion in 2021, an increase of 8.4% from 2020.Gartner forecasts the highest growth will come from devices such as laptops, desktops, tablets, and mobile phones (up 14%) and enterprise software (up 10.8%) as organizations shift their focus to providing a more comfortable, innovative and productive environment for their workforce, said John-David Lovelock, distinguished research vice president at Gartner.To read this article in full, please click here

Gartner: Worldwide IT outlay to hit $4T in 2021

Researchers at Gartner said that all IT spending segments—from data center to enterprise software—are forecast to have positive growth through 2022 with overall IT spending projected to hit $4.1 trillion in 2021, an increase of 8.4% from 2020.Gartner forecasts the highest growth will come from devices such as laptops, desktops, tablets, and mobile phones (up 14%) and enterprise software (up 10.8%) as organizations shift their focus to providing a more comfortable, innovative and productive environment for their workforce, said John-David Lovelock, distinguished research vice president at Gartner.To read this article in full, please click here