The ease and importance of scaling in the enterprise

Networks are growing, and growing fast. As enterprises adopt IoT and mobile clients, VPN technologies, virtual machines (VMs), and massively distributed compute and storage, the number of devices—as well as the amount of data being transported over their networks—is rising at an explosive rate. It’s becoming apparent that traditional, manual ways of provisioning don’t scale. Something new needs to be used, and for that, we look toward hyperscalers; companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft, who’ve been dealing with huge networks almost since the very beginning.

The traditional approach to IT operations has been focused on one server or container at a time. Any attempt at management at scale frequently comes with being locked into a single vendor’s infrastructure and technologies. Unfortunately, today’s enterprises are finding that even the expensive, proprietary management solutions provided by the vendors who have long supported traditional IT practices simply cannot scale, especially when you consider the rapid growth of containerization and VMs that enterprises are now dealing with.

In this blog post, I’ll take a look at how an organization can use open, scalable network technologies—those first created or adopted by the aforementioned hyperscalers—to reduce growing pains. These issues are increasingly relevant as new Continue reading

Watson IoT chief: AI can broaden IoT services

IBM thrives on the complicated, asset-intensive part of the enterprise IoT market, according to Kareem Yusuf, GM of the company’s Watson IoT business unit. From helping seaports manage shipping traffic to keeping technical knowledge flowing within an organization, Yusuf said that the idea is to teach artificial intelligence to provide insights from the reams of data generated by such complex systems.Predictive maintenance is probably the headliner in terms of use cases around asset-intensive IoT, and Yusuf said that it’s a much more complicated task than many people might think. It isn’t simply a matter of monitoring, say, pressure levels in a pipe somewhere and throwing an alert when they move outside of norms. It’s about aggregate information on failure rates and asset planning, that a company can have replacements and contingency plans ready for potential failures.To read this article in full, please click here

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Full Stack Journey 035: Testing And Validation For Infrastructure As Code

Today's episode of Full Stack Journey focuses on the benefits of testing and validation for Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC). We discuss types of testing, available tools, and why IaC has value even for smaller shops. My guest is Gareth Rushgrove.

The post Full Stack Journey 035: Testing And Validation For Infrastructure As Code appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Full Stack Journey 035: Testing And Validation For Infrastructure As Code

Viewing network bandwidth usage with bmon

Bmon is a monitoring and debugging tool that runs in a terminal window and captures network statistics, offering options on how and how much data will be displayed and displayed in a form that is easy to understand.To check if bmon is installed on your system, use the which command:$ which bmon /usr/bin/bmon [Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Getting bmon On Debian systems, use sudo apt-get install bmon to install the tool.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: JEDI award signals a critical ‘perception of parity’ in the cloud wars

AWS, Amazon’s cloud business, has enjoyed a long run as undisputed heavyweight champion of the cloud wars. With revenue run rate nearing 36 Billion and continuous double-digit market growth it was difficult to see anyone catching up. Until just like that, in the blink of an eye, a $10 Billion Federal cloud contract for the DoD known as JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) was awarded to Amazon’s crosstown rival, Microsoft. With this award, I believe the game has changed, and the market perception of such a substantial win will provide Microsoft the opportunity to apply significant pressure to AWS’s number one market position.This week’s earnings may have been the first domino Microsoft has been on an unparalleled run, and this past week the company delivered well above expectations on earnings coming in at $1.38 per share vs. $1.25 expected while also substantially beating revenue targets by nearly $800 million at $33.06 Billion. The cloud business, Azure, grew 59%*, which was actually viewed as a mooted result compared to previous quarters in the 60-70% range, but with margins up, revenues up and earnings up, Microsoft is flying high.To read this article in full, please click here

DNS Encryption Explained

The Domain Name System (DNS) is the address book of the Internet. When you visit cloudflare.com or any other site, your browser will ask a DNS resolver for the IP address where the website can be found. Unfortunately, these DNS queries and answers are typically unprotected. Encrypting DNS would improve user privacy and security. In this post, we will look at two mechanisms for encrypting DNS, known as DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH), and explain how they work.

Applications that want to resolve a domain name to an IP address typically use DNS. This is usually not done explicitly by the programmer who wrote the application. Instead, the programmer writes something such as fetch("https://example.com/news") and expects a software library to handle the translation of “example.com” to an IP address.

Behind the scenes, the software library is responsible for discovering and connecting to the external recursive DNS resolver and speaking the DNS protocol (see the figure below) in order to resolve the name requested by the application. The choice of the external DNS resolver and whether any privacy and security is provided at all is outside the control of the application. It depends on Continue reading

The Invisible Internet

Editor’s Note: Fifty years ago today, on October 29th, 1969, a team at UCLA started to transmit five letters to the Stanford Research Institute: LOGIN. It’s an event that we take for granted now – communicating over a network – but it was historic. It was the first message sent over the ARPANET, one of the precursors to the Internet. UCLA computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock and his team sent that first message. In this anniversary guest post, Professor Kleinrock shares his vision for what the Internet might become.

On July 3, 1969, four months before the first message of the Internet was sent, I was quoted in a UCLA press release in which I articulated my vision of what the Internet would become. Much of that vision has been realized (including one item I totally missed, namely, that social networking would become so dominant). But there was a critical component of that vision which has not yet been realized. I call that the invisible Internet. What I mean is that the Internet will be invisible in the sense that electricity is invisible – electricity has the extremely simple interface of a socket in the wall from which something called Continue reading

Saved: TCP Is the Most Expensive Part of Your Data Center

Years ago Dan Hughes wrote a great blog post explaining how expensive TCP is. His web site is long gone, but I managed to grab the blog post before it disappeared and he kindly allowed me to republish it.

If you ask a CIO which part of their infrastructure costs them the most, I’m sure they’ll mention power, cooling, server hardware, support costs, getting the right people and all the usual answers. I’d argue one the the biggest costs is TCP, or more accurately badly implemented TCP.

50 Years of The Internet. Work in Progress to a Better Internet

It was fifty years ago when the very first network packet took flight from the Los Angeles campus at UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) building in Palo Alto. Those two California sites had kicked-off the world of packet networking, of the Arpanet, and of the modern Internet as we use and know it today. Yet by the time the third packet had been transmitted that evening, the receiving computer at SRI had crashed. The “L” and “O” from the word “LOGIN” had been transmitted successfully in their packets; but that “G”, wrapped in its own packet, caused the death of that nascent packet network setup. Even today, software crashes, that’s a solid fact; but this historic crash, is exactly that — historic.

So much has happened since that day (October 29’th to be exact) in 1969, in fact it’s an understatement to say “so much has happened”! It’s unclear that one blog article would ever be able to capture the full history of packets from then to now. Here at Cloudflare we say we are helping build a “better Internet”, so it would make perfect sense for us to Continue reading

Fifty Years Ago

This is a guest post by Steve Crocker of Shinkuro, Inc. and Bill Duvall of Consulair. Fifty years ago they were both present when the first packets flowed on the Arpanet.

On 29 October 2019, Professor Leonard (“Len”) Kleinrock is chairing a celebration at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).  The date is the fiftieth anniversary of the first full system test and remote host-to-host login over the Arpanet.  Following a brief crash caused by a configuration problem, a user at UCLA was able to log in to the SRI SDS 940 time-sharing system.  But let us paint the rest of the picture.

The Arpanet was a bold project to connect sites within the ARPA-funded computer science research community and to use packet-switching as the technology for doing so.  Although there were parallel packet-switching research efforts around the globe, none were at the scale of the Arpanet project. Cooperation among researchers in different laboratories, applying multiple machines to a single problem and sharing of resources were all part of the vision.  And over the fifty years since then, the vision has been fulfilled, albeit with some undesired outcomes mixed in with the enormous benefits.  However, in this blog, we Continue reading

As the internet turns 50, experts weigh future advances and emerging issues

As the internet turns 50, the technology is only picking up steam and continuing to reinvent many aspects of our lives, from the way we do business, and the way we find dates and jobs, to the way we run for political office.  The internet was born when the first Arpanet link was established between the University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute at 22:30 hours on October 29, 1969. UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock and his student Charley Kline sent the first message to Bill Duval, a programmer at Stanford University. That first communication was the spark that ignited the growth of the internet and everything it has brought with it – email, sharing pictures on Facebook, buying books and toasters on Amazon, watching movies on Netflix, cat videos, mean-spirited memes and election-tampering bots.To read this article in full, please click here

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