Are Your Virtual Meetings Accessible for People with Disabilities? Start with This Checklist

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way humans interact with one another. With an emphasis on less physical interaction and more social distancing, institutions and organizations are moving their work and meetings online.

People with disabilities form about 15 percent of world population, so it is all the more important these online meetings are made accessible.

The Internet Society Accessibility Special Interest Group (Accessibility SIG) aims to make the Internet and its attendant technologies accessible to the largest audience possible, regardless of disabilities. The digital divide is not just about having the access to digital technology, it could also be about having the access to technology and not being able to use it. Our digital products must be usable by all. Many laws and the Internet Society’s vision – the Internet is for everyone – demand that we provide everyone with an equal experience.

The Accessibility SIG is planning a series of seven webinars discussing this very topic. Our first one was titled When Rhetoric Meets Reality: Digital Accessibility, Persons With Disabilities and COVID-19 and was held on May 28.

The way we design and build can make it hard – and sometimes impossible – for people with disabilities to access Continue reading

Cumulus content roundup: June 2020

June seems like a lifetime ago but there was so much content we wanted to make sure was on your radar. We know you may be thinking but wait, didn’t something big happen to Cumulus Networks in June? You would be right! We’re excited to share that we are now officially NVIDIA®.  Along with the news, we kept very busy with fresh podcast episodes, informative blog posts and much more so take a minute to dive on in and catch up on it all here.

From Cumulus Networks, now NVIDIA

Cumulus Networks’ President and Chief Product Officer, Partho Mishra, on the NVIDIA-Cumulus acquisition.: Partho Mishra answers your questions regarding the strategic focus of the new networking business unit at NVIDIA & the future of open networking.

Open source — the great equalizer.: Technology is a great equalizer and the open source movement has played a huge role in making this true and accelerating the process.

Remote work makes network visibility more critical than ever: We’re living through a major shift in the way employees work, extending the boundaries of what was once a tightly controlled environment.

Kernel of Truth season 3 episode 8: Cumulus Linux in action Continue reading

Containerized Python Development – Part 1

Developing Python projects in local environments can get pretty challenging if more than one project is being developed at the same time. Bootstrapping a project may take time as we need to manage versions, set up dependencies and configurations for it. Before, we used to install all project requirements directly in our local environment and then focus on writing the code. But having several projects in progress in the same environment becomes quickly a problem as we may get into configuration or dependency conflicts. Moreover, when sharing a project with teammates we would need to also coordinate our environments. For this we have to define our project environment in such a way that makes it easily shareable. 

A good way to do this is to create isolated development environments for each project. This can be easily done by using containers and  Docker Compose to manage them.  We cover this in a series of blog posts, each one with a specific focus.

This first part covers how to containerize a Python service/tool and the best practices for it.

Requirements

To easily exercise what we discuss in this blog post series, we need to install a minimal set Continue reading

Cloudflare Network expands to more than 100 Countries

2020 has been a historic year that will forever be associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past six months, we have seen societies, businesses, and entire industries unsettled. The situation at Cloudflare has been no different. And while this pandemic has affected each and every one of us, we here at Cloudflare have not forgotten what our mission is: to help build a better Internet.

We have expanded our global network to 206 cities across more than 100 countries. This is in addition to completing 40+ datacenter expansion projects and adding over 1Tbps in dedicated “backbone” (transport) capacity connecting our major data centers so far this year.

Pandemic times means new processes

There was zero chance that 2020 would mean business as usual within the Infrastructure department. We were thrown a curve-ball as the pandemic began affecting our supply chains and operations. By April, the vast majority of the world’s passenger flights were grounded. The majority of bulk air freight ships within the lower deck (“belly”) of these flights, which saw an imbalance between supply and demand with the sudden 74% decrease in passenger belly cargo capacity relative to the same period last year.

We were fortunate to have Continue reading

Day Two Cloud 057: See Your Data With Grafana

Day Two Cloud 057: See Your Data With Grafana

Day Two Cloud gets into data visualization with the open-source Grafana project. Grafana helps you visualize, alert on, and query all kinds of data and metrics. We look at how Grafana works, how it manipulates and stores data, and common use cases. Our guest is Ryan McKinley, VP of Applications at Grafana.

The post Day Two Cloud 057: See Your Data With Grafana appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Introduction to Segment Routing

Jeff Tantsura and Nick Buraglio bring a wealth of knowledge to this Network Collective Introduction to Segment Routing webinar. In this webinar we cover the fundamental SR technologies and how they work, as well as some of the practical implementation details that can only be learned by working with the technology directly.

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post Introduction to Segment Routing appeared first on Network Collective.

BGP EVPN Underlay Network with BGP (Multi-AS)

Introduction

Infrastructure AS Numbering and IP Addressing Scheme

Worth Reading: Working with TC on Linux systems

Here’s one of the weirdest ideas I’ve found recently: patch together two dangling ends of virtual Ethernet cables with PBR.

To be fair, Jon Langemak used that example to demonstrate how powerful tc could be. It’s always fun to see a totally-unexpected aspect of Linux networking… even though it looks like the creators of those tools believed in Perl mentality of creating a gazillion variants of line noise to get the job done.

The Elegance (And Limitations Of) Precisely Engineered Accelerators

Let’s leave aside all the questions about the long-term viability of AI ASICs and appliances and focus instead on the beauty of a good architecture. …

The Elegance (And Limitations Of) Precisely Engineered Accelerators was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Squeezing Every Drop Of Value Out Of Data

To Patricia Harris – like most people in the rapidly changing worlds of IT and business – data is central to what she does. …

Squeezing Every Drop Of Value Out Of Data was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Heavy Networking 529: Demystifying Automation With Low-Code Workflows (Sponsored)

Heavy Networking 529: Demystifying Automation With Low-Code Workflows (Sponsored)

Today's Heavy Networking explores a partnership between Juniper Networks and Anuta Networks to bring low-code network automation to service providers and enterprises. In this sponsored show, we'll dive into how Anuta's ATOM platform integrates with Juniper's NorthStar SDN controller and HealthBot diagnostic software to automate and orchestrate common networking tasks. Our guests are Peter Weinberger, Principal Product Manager at Juniper Networks; and Kiran Sirupa, Head of Marketing at Anuta Networks.

The post Heavy Networking 529: Demystifying Automation With Low-Code Workflows (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Next Platform TV for July 14, 2020

A wide-ranging program for you today with everything from neuromorphic hardware and software research; some impressive FPGA acceleration for Caffe from Samsung AI Research; why the datacenter industry is booming (the answers might surprise you); the state of Lustre and OpenSFS; and where some unique opportunities are in HPC on the pandemic modeling front. …

Next Platform TV for July 14, 2020 was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

MANRS Welcomes Three New CDN and Cloud Participants

The MANRS Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Cloud Program continues to grow in numbers and in strength with three new participants.

Hostmein, Verisign, and Vultr have deepened their commitment to strengthening the security and resilience of the Internet’s global routing system. Participants of this program, which launched in March 2020, implement important practices for mitigating common routing security threats.

Joining means committing to taking five mandatory, and one optional, security-strengthening actions. These include preventing propagation of incorrect routing information and traffic with illegitimate source IP addresses, and facilitating global operational communication and coordination. Read the full list of actions.

“MANRS is more an idea than a framework, and it is a tremendous idea,” said Hostmein CTO Alexander Stamatis. “It raises awareness, it raises new checks to be implemented in the industry, and it keeps us more in line with the primary mission: keeping the network clean, keeping it safe.

“[MANRS] is better because it was built by engineers for engineers. We discovered issues no other initiatives could detect.”

“MANRS is the best implementation that we have done to date. We have found it to be more effective than other specialised IT certifications. And it is better because it Continue reading

Bringing Order to the Cloud: Day 2 Operations in AWS with Ansible

Cloud environments do not lend themselves to manual management or interference, and only thrive in well-automated environments. Many cloud environments are created and deployed from a known definition/template, but what do you do on day 2? In this blog post, we will cover some of the top day 2 operations use cases available through our Red Hat Certified Ansible Content Collection for AWS (requires a Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform subscription) or from Ansible Galaxy (community supported).

Let’s manage some clouds!

No matter the road that led you to managing a cloud environment, you’ll likely have run into the ever-scaling challenge of maintaining cloud-based services over time. Cloud environments do not operate the same ways the old datacenter-based infrastructures did. Coupled with the ease of access for just about anyone to deploy services, you’ll have a potential recipe for years of unlimited maintenance headaches.

The good news is that there is one way to bring order to all the cloud-based chaos: Ansible. In this blog post we will explore common day 2 operations use cases for Amazon Web Services using the amazon.aws Ansible Certified Content Collection. For more information on how to use Ansible Content Collections, check out Continue reading

flowtrackd: DDoS Protection with Unidirectional TCP Flow Tracking

Magic Transit is Cloudflare’s L3 DDoS Scrubbing service for protecting network infrastructure. As part of our ongoing investment in Magic Transit and our DDoS protection capabilities, we’re excited to talk about a new piece of software helping to protect Magic Transit customers: flowtrackd. flowrackd is a software-defined DDoS protection system that significantly improves our ability to automatically detect and mitigate even the most complex TCP-based DDoS attacks. If you are a Magic Transit customer, this feature will be enabled by default at no additional cost on July 29, 2020.

TCP-Based DDoS Attacks

In the first quarter of 2020, one out of every two L3/4 DDoS attacks Cloudflare mitigated was an ACK Flood, and over 66% of all L3/4 attacks were TCP based. Most types of DDoS attacks can be mitigated by finding unique characteristics that are present in all attack packets and using that to distinguish ‘good’ packets from the ‘bad’ ones. This is called "stateless" mitigation, because any packet that has these unique characteristics can simply be dropped without remembering any information (or "state") about the other packets that came before it. However, when attack packets have no unique characteristics, then "stateful" mitigation is required, because whether a Continue reading

In defense of open debate

How To Deploy Containers to Azure ACI using Docker CLI and Compose

Running containers in the cloud can be hard and confusing. There are so many options to choose from and then understanding how all the different clouds work from virtual networks to security. Not to mention orchestrators. It’s a learning curve to say the least.

At Docker we are making the Developer Experience (DX) more simple. As an extension of that we want to provide the same beloved Docker experience that developers use daily and integrate it with the cloud. Microsoft’s Azure ACI provided an awesome platform to do just that.

In this tutorial, we take a look at running single containers and multiple containers with Compose in Azure ACI. We’ll walk you through setting up your docker context and even simplifying logging into Azure. At the end of this tutorial, you will be able to use familiar Docker commands to deploy your applications into your own Azure ACI account.

Prerequisites

To complete this tutorial, you will need:

• Docker installed on your development machine. You can download and install Docker Desktop Edge version 2.3.3.0 or later from the links below:
  • Docker Desktop for Mac
  • Docker Desktop for Windows
• Docker Hub account. Get your free account here.
• An Azure Continue reading

Network Break 292: Nokia Debuts SR Linux Network OS; AT&T, Cisco Team Up On SD-WAN