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Firecracker: lightweight virtualization for serverless applications

Firecracker: lightweight virtualisation for serverless applications, Agache et al., NSDI’20

Finally the NSDI’20 papers have opened up to the public (as of last week), and what a great looking crop of papers it is. We looked at a couple of papers that had pre-prints available last week, today we’ll be looking at one of the most anticipated papers of this year’s crop: Amazon’s Firecracker.

Firecracker is the virtual machine monitor (VMM) that powers AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate, and has been used in production at AWS since 2018. Firecracker is open source, and there are a number of projects that make it easy to work with outside of the AWS environment too, including Weave Firekube (disclaimer: Accel is an investor in Weaveworks). Firekube exists because none of the existing alternatives (virtualisation, containers or language-specific vms) met the combined needs of multi-tenant efficiency and strong isolation in the AWS environment.

The traditional view is that there is a choice between virtualization with strong security and high overhead, and container technologies with weaker security and minimal overhead. This tradeoff is unacceptable to public infrastructure providers, who need both strong security and minimal overhead.

Approaches to isolation

The first version of Continue reading

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8 reasons to consider hyperconverged infrastructure for your data center

Demand for on-premises data center equipment is shrinking as organizations move workloads to the cloud. But on-prem is far from dead, and one segment that’s thriving is hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).HCI is a form of scale-out, software-integrated infrastructure that applies a modular approach to compute, network and storage capacity. Rather than silos with specialized hardware, HCI leverages distributed, horizontal blocks of commodity hardware and delivers a single-pane dashboard for reporting and management. Form factors vary: Enterprises can choose to deploy hardware-agnostic hyperconvergence software from vendors such as Nutanix and VMware, or an integrated HCI appliance from vendors such as HP Enterprise, Dell, Cisco, and Lenovo.To read this article in full, please click here

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Eight reasons to consider hyperconverged infrastructure for your data center

Demand for on-premises data center equipment is shrinking as organizations move workloads to the cloud. But on-prem is far from dead, and one segment that’s thriving is hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).HCI is a form of scale-out, software-integrated infrastructure that applies a modular approach to compute, network and storage capacity. Rather than silos with specialized hardware, HCI leverages distributed, horizontal blocks of commodity hardware and delivers a single-pane dashboard for reporting and management. Form factors vary: Enterprises can choose to deploy hardware-agnostic hyperconvergence software from vendors such as Nutanix and VMware, or an integrated HCI appliance from vendors such as HP Enterprise, Dell, Cisco, and Lenovo.To read this article in full, please click here

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Why edge computing needs open networking

Edge computing deployments need to be compact, efficient, and easy to administer. Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) has proven to be a natural choice for handling compute and storage at the edge, but what considerations are there for networking?

To talk about edge computing it helps to define it. Edge computing is currently in a state very similar to “cloud computing” in 2009: If you asked five different technologists to define it, you’d get back eight different answers. Just as cloud computing incorporated both emerging technologies and a limited set of established practices, edge computing does the same.

The broadest definition of edge computing is that it’s any situation in which an organization places workloads inside someone else’s infrastructure, but isn’t at one of the major public clouds. This comes with the caveat that the major public cloud providers are, of course, heavily investing in edge computing offerings of their own, muddying the waters.

Traditional IT practices that fall into the realm of edge computing today include colocation, content delivery networks (CDNs), most things involving geographically remote locations and so forth—the “edge” of modern networks. But edge computing also covers the emerging practices of using mobile networks (among others) for Internet of Continue reading

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CEX (Code EXpress) 05. From lists to separate variables and back.

Hello my friend,

So far, we have covered the separate variables and the list variables in the Python 3.8. Before we go further, it makes sense how you can convert one type of the variables to another. Therefore, we discuss this topic today.  

Network automation training – boost your career

Don’t wait to be kicked out of IT business. Join our network automation training to secure your job in future. Come to NetDevOps side.

How does the training differ from this blog post series? Here you get the basics and learn some programming concepts in general, whereas in the training you get comprehensive set of knowledge with the detailed examples how to use Python for the network and IT automation. You need both.

What are we going to do today?

Working with variables is an essential part of any programming language including Python. Part of such a work is a conversion of a variable of one type to another and back. That’s why we will explore today the following functions:

• split() function, which transforms a string value into a list of variables based on a defined separator;
• join() function, which transforms a list into a string value using Continue reading

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SDxCentral’s Top 10 Articles — February 2020

SAP revamps organizational structure, exits 2 board members; coronavirus kills MWC Barcelona; and...

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Technical Details of Why Cloudflare Chose AMD EPYC for Gen X Servers

From the very beginning Cloudflare used Intel CPU-based servers (and, also, Intel components for things like NICs and SSDs). But we're always interested in optimizing the cost of running our service so that we can provide products at a low cost and high gross margin.

We're also mindful of events like the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities and have been working with outside parties on research into mitigation and exploitation which we hope to publish later this year.

We looked very seriously at ARM-based CPUs and continue to keep our software up to date for the ARM architecture so that we can use ARM-based CPUs when the requests per watt is interesting to us.

In the meantime, we've deployed AMD's EPYC processors as part of Gen X server platform and for the first time are not using any Intel components at all. This week, we announced details of this tenth generation of servers. Below is a recap of why we're excited about the design, specifications, and performance of our newest hardware.

Servers for an Accelerated Future

Every server can run every service. This architectural decision has helped us achieve higher efficiency across the Cloudflare network. It has also given us more Continue reading

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How much network automation stuff should I learn as a network engineer? & Passing the DevNet Associates Exam

It is important to note that the question is not "should I learn any?" but rather "how much should I learn?". The new Cisco DevNet Certifications help us answer that question. Let me share my journey to that conclusion. In early February I decided to take the DevNet Associates Exam. I scheduled it for the READ MORE

The post How much network automation stuff should I learn as a network engineer? & Passing the DevNet Associates Exam appeared first on The Gratuitous Arp.

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Going Beyond Black History Month

Around this time of year in the United States, African-Americans are often tasked with explaining why we spend 28 (or in the case of a leap year 29) days celebrating the contributions our ancestors made to this country. It may come in the form of responding to ignorant questions posed in learning environments or expressed in well-crafted articles lauding the relevancy of Black history in our modern time.

Black history is not only relevant, it is how we ensure that our heroes are not forgotten and that we have a viable future in our respective industries. As Carter G. Woodson famously said, “If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.”

As the US leaders of Afroflare, Cloudflare’s employee resource group (ERG) for employees of African descent, we made a personal commitment this month and beyond to effectively represent, build, and grow at Cloudflare and in the tech industry.

To honor that commitment, we decided to tackle some commonly asked questions about the state of African-Americans in tech.

How many African-Americans work in tech?

The latest Continue reading

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AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile Tied to GSMA Net-Zero Emission Pact

Designed to reduce emissions trajectories for mobile, fixed, and data center operators, the SBT...

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Worth Reading: Do We Need Regulation for IoT Security?

A pretty good summary of the topic by Drew Conry-Murray: the market is not going to correct itself, it’s very hard to hold manufacturers or developers accountable for security defects in their products, and nothing much will change until someone dies.

And just in case you wonder how "innovative forwarding-looking disruptive knowledge-focused" companies could produce such ****, I can highly recommend The Stupidity Paradox.

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Worth Reading: Do We Need Regulation for IoT Security?

A pretty good summary of the topic by Drew Conry-Murray: the market is not going to correct itself, it’s very hard to hold manufacturers or developers accountable for security defects in their products, and nothing much will change until someone dies.

And just in case you wonder how "innovative forwarding-looking disruptive knowledge-focused" companies could produce such ****, I can highly recommend The Stupidity Paradox.

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DNSSEC Validation (Revisited)

One year ago, I looked at the state of adoption of DNSSEC validation in DNS resolvers and the answer was not unreservedly optimistic. Instead of the “up and to the right” curves that show a momentum of adoption, there was a pronounced slowing down aof the momentum of DNSSEC adoption. The current picture of DNSSEC adoption is certainly far more heartening, and I would like to update this earlier article on DNSSEC with more recent data.

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Pure Storage Pops New FlashArray Controller

Pure Storage capped off the year with an update to its flagship FlashArray line hours head of...

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VMware Suffers Operational Indigestion

The company began to lose momentum coming out of its latest fiscal year in which it made 10...

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Daily Roundup: Huawei CSO Mocks US Security Policy

Huawei CSO mocked US security policy; Palo Alto Networks added X factor to $560M Demisto buy; and...

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Fortinet CEO: SD-WAN, Edge, Automation Key to Next-Gen Security

Perimeter-based security is no longer sufficient, security surfaces and compute demands are...

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Sticking With Both The Pure And The Storage Strategy

The best technology companies have always taken something that was complex and done a whole lot of engineering or in many cases re-engineering of it to make it usable and consumable – with the right pricing – so it can go mainstream. …

Sticking With Both The Pure And The Storage Strategy was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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Is the Internet Resilient Enough to Withstand Coronavirus?

It’s being called the world’s biggest work-from-home experiment. With concerns growing over the spread of the Coronavirus, schools and businesses around the world are implementing contingency plans that encourage distance learning and work from home. Usage of e-learning, messaging, and videoconferencing tools is also growing rapidly, placing additional load on these Internet-based applications and platforms and generating additional traffic. And with more people staying at home, online media consumption is poised to increase as well.

Many are wondering if the Internet can handle the strain of rapid traffic growth and increased latency. Will it cause a catastrophic failure of the Internet? The answer: not likely.

Core Internet infrastructure providers should be able to easily absorb the increase in traffic and demand, especially if the growth is gradual over a period of days, weeks, or months. Cloud infrastructure providers should also have sufficient additional compute, storage, and bandwidth capacity to enable their customers, including the e-learning, messaging, and videoconferencing tool providers, to scale their systems as necessary. In order to keep traffic local, content delivery infrastructure from companies including Akamai, Cloudflare, Google, Netflix, and Apple is deployed in many last-mile networks. Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) can also help keep traffic local, Continue reading

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Palo Alto Networks Adds X Factor to $560M Demisto Buy

Palo Alto Network’s product announcement coincided with its quarterly earnings report, which fell...

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