Announcing deeper insights and new monitoring capabilities from Cloudflare Analytics

This week we’re excited to announce a number of new products and features that provide deeper security and reliability insights, “proactive” analytics when there’s a problem, and more powerful ways to explore your data.

If you’ve been a user or follower of Cloudflare for a little while, you might have noticed that we take pride in turning technical challenges into easy solutions. Flip a switch or run a few API commands, and the attack you’re facing is now under control or your site is now 20% faster. However, this ease of use is even more helpful if it’s complemented by analytics. Before you make a change, you want to be sure that you understand your current situation. After the change, you want to confirm that it worked as intended, ideally as fast as possible.

Because of the front-line position of Cloudflare’s network, we can provide comprehensive metrics regarding both your traffic and the security and performance of your Internet property. And best of all, there’s nothing to set up or enable. Cloudflare Analytics is automatically available to all Cloudflare users and doesn’t rely on Javascript trackers, meaning that our metrics include traffic from APIs and bots and are not skewed Continue reading

Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling

5G promises super-fast connections, low latency and better coverage. In the manufacturing realm, early adopter Whirlpool is deploying a private 5G network in one its Ohio factories to solve a major problem: Driverless vehicles inside the plant rely on Wi-Fi to navigate, and they stop dead when the factory environment causes the signal to degrade. The sidelined vehicles create traffic jams, slow down production, and require hands-on attention before they can resume delivering parts.To read this article in full, please click here

Brief Briefing: Public Clouds Are Aggressively Proprietary

Packet Pushers has a podcast channel, Briefings in Brief, dedicated to shorter shows that focus on a single topic. It struck me that I haven’t mentioned it here. In this Brief I’m highlighting the lack of interoperability between clouds. When thinking more deeply, I realised that there is an aggressive lack of co-operation between cloud […]

The post Brief Briefing: Public Clouds Are Aggressively Proprietary appeared first on EtherealMind.

BGP- and Car Safety

The Facts and Fiction: BGP Is a Hot Mess blog post generated tons of responses, including a thoughtful tweet from Laura Alonso:

Is your argument that the technology works as designed and any issues with it are a people problem?

A polite question like that deserves more than 280-character reply, but I tried to do my best:

BGP definitely works even better than designed. Is that good enough? Probably, and we could politely argue about that… but the root cause of most of the problems we see today (and people love to yammer about) is not the protocol or how it was designed but how sloppily it’s used.

Laura somewhat disagreed with my way of handling the issue:

A persistent problem: managing pointers in NVM

What’s hot for Cisco in 2020

As the industry gets ready to gear up for 2020 things have been a  little disquieting in networking land.That’s because some key players – Arista and Juniper in particular – have been reporting business slowdowns as new deals have been smaller than expected and cloud providers haven’t been as free-spending as in the past.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Worldwide IT spending has been on the slow side, Gartner said in October that worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.7 trillion in 2019, an increase of 0.4% from 2018, the lowest growth forecast so far in 2019. The good news: global IT spending is expected to rebound in 2020 with forecast growth of 3.7%, primarily due to enterprise software spending, Gartner stated.To read this article in full, please click here

Google Cloud bare-metal initiative targets migrating legacy apps from on-prem

In the cloud-services market, bare metal offerings have lagged behind virtualized ones, mostly because the use of the cloud for things like elastic apps and developer environments are better suited to instances with a native operating system.The term “bare metal” simply means no software of any kind, not even a hypervisor. Customers provide their own operating environments, and the provider offers nothing more than CPUs, memory, and storage. Up to now, IBM has led the charge with bare-metal services because SoftLayer, the major data-center provider it acquired in 2014, was heavily involved in that business.To read this article in full, please click here

What’s hot for Cisco in 2020

As the industry gets ready to gear up for 2020 things have been a  little disquieting in networking land.That’s because some key players – Arista and Juniper in particular – have been reporting business slowdowns as new deals have been smaller than expected and cloud providers haven’t been as free-spending as in the past.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Worldwide IT spending has been on the slow side, Gartner said in October that worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.7 trillion in 2019, an increase of 0.4% from 2018, the lowest growth forecast so far in 2019. The good news: global IT spending is expected to rebound in 2020 with forecast growth of 3.7%, primarily due to enterprise software spending, Gartner stated.To read this article in full, please click here

Counting down the days using bash

With some pretty important holidays right around the corner, you might need to be reminded how much longer you have to prepare.Fortunately, you can get a lot of help from the date command. In this post, we’ll look at ways that date and bash scripts can tell you how many days there are between today and some event that you’re anticipating.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] First a couple hints at how this is going to work. The date command’s %j option is going to show you today’s date as a number between 1 and 366. January 1st, as you’d expect, will be displayed as 1 and December 31st will be 365 or 366 depending on whether it’s leap year. Go ahead and try it. You should see something like this:To read this article in full, please click here

What’s big in IT tech for the coming year

As the year winds down it's a good time to take a quick look ahead at what the new year might bring in order to be better prepared to make smart decisions.Nowhere is that more important than in IT, where the choices enterprise leaders make will have implications not only for themselves and their customers, but also for the overall economy, which depends more and more on corporate networks delivering business-critical services reliably.Here, we take a look how some of the most critical technologies will fare in 2020.What’s hot for Cisco in 2020 IDG Cisco is expected to continue its cloud, security, and SD-WANefforts in 2020, but there are hurdles to overcome. “Overall, I think it’s clear that Cisco needs to get into the cloud in a more effective way," said analyst Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. "I think their recent reorg shows they understand that. Cloud Interconnect is a sideshow. What’s needed is infrastructure-independent development and deployment, which would relegate Cloud Interconnect to nothing but a network gateway.” (Read more.)To read this article in full, please click here

Data centers in 2020: Automation, cheaper memory

It’s that time of year again when those of us in the press make our annual prognostications for the coming year. Some things we saw coming; the rise of the cloud and the advance of SSD. Others, like the return of many cloud migrations to on-premises or the roaring comeback of AMD, went right by us. We do our best but occasionally there are surprises.So with that, let’s take a peek into the always cloudy (no pun intended) crystal ball and make 10 data-center-oriented predictions.IoT spawns data-center growth in urban areas This isn’t a hard prediction to make since it’s already happening. For the longest time, data centers were placed in the middle of nowhere near renewable energy (usually hydro), but need is going to force more expansion in major metro areas. IoT will be one driver but so will the increasing use of data center providers like Equinix and DRT as interconnection providers.To read this article in full, please click here

5G in 2020: Still just a private party

To hear the major mobile carriers talk about it, 5G is here. They’ve deployed it, it works, and it’s ready to start changing the world just about right away, with ultra-fast connectivity, low latency and a dramatically improved ability to handle huge numbers of different connections at once.Eventually, that will all be true – but, according to experts in the field, it isn’t yet, and most of it won’t take place within the coming calendar year. The 3GPP standards that will underpin all new-radio 5G technology are still not yet finalized, although that is expected to happen in early 2020, which means the much-touted 5G deployments in the U.S. are based partially on pre-standard technology.To read this article in full, please click here

What’s hot for Cisco in 2020

As the industry gets ready to gear up for 2020 things have been a  little disquieting in networking land.That’s because some key players – Arista and Juniper in particular – have been reporting business slowdowns as new deals have been smaller than expected and cloud providers haven’t been as free-spending as in the past.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Worldwide IT spending has been on the slow side, Gartner said in October that worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.7 trillion in 2019, an increase of 0.4% from 2018, the lowest growth forecast so far in 2019. The good news: global IT spending is expected to rebound in 2020 with forecast growth of 3.7%, primarily due to enterprise software spending, Gartner stated.To read this article in full, please click here

What’s big in IT tech for the coming year

As the year winds down it's a good time to take a quick look ahead at what the new year might bring in order to be better prepared to make smart decisions.Nowhere is that more important than in IT, where the choices enterprise leaders make will have implications not only for themselves and their customers, but also for the overall economy, which depends more and more on corporate networks delivering business-critical services reliably.Here, we take a look how some of the most critical technologies will fare in 2020.What’s hot for Cisco in 2020 IDG Cisco is expected to continue its cloud, security, and SD-WANefforts in 2020, but there are hurdles to overcome. “Overall, I think it’s clear that Cisco needs to get into the cloud in a more effective way," said analyst Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. "I think their recent reorg shows they understand that. Cloud Interconnect is a sideshow. What’s needed is infrastructure-independent development and deployment, which would relegate Cloud Interconnect to nothing but a network gateway.” (Read more.)To read this article in full, please click here

Data centers in 2020: Automation, cheaper memory

It’s that time of year again when those of us in the press make our annual prognostications for the coming year. Some things we saw coming; the rise of the cloud and the advance of SSD. Others, like the return of many cloud migrations to on-premises or the roaring comeback of AMD, went right by us. We do our best but occasionally there are surprises.So with that, let’s take a peek into the always cloudy (no pun intended) crystal ball and make 10 data-center-oriented predictions.IoT spawns data-center growth in urban areas This isn’t a hard prediction to make since it’s already happening. For the longest time, data centers were placed in the middle of nowhere near renewable energy (usually hydro), but need is going to force more expansion in major metro areas. IoT will be one driver but so will the increasing use of data center providers like Equinix and DRT as interconnection providers.To read this article in full, please click here

Weekly Top Posts: 2019-12-08

1. The Latest Release of CA NetOps Delivers Superior SD-WAN Fault Management
2. Aviatrix CEO: SD-WAN Is Dead. AWS Killed It
3. Amazon CTO Details Virtualization Journey
4. Fortinet Extends Cloud Security Into AWS CloudFormation
5. Weekly Wrap: Juniper CTO Bikash Koley Calls It Quits

SD-WAN Squares and Perplexing Planes

The latest arcane polygon is out in the SD-WAN space. Normally, my fortune telling skills don’t involve geometry. I like to talk to real people about their concerns and their successes. Yes, I know that the gardening people do that too. It’s just that no one really bothers to read their reports and instead makes all their decisions based on boring wall art.

Speaking of which, I’m going to summarize that particular piece of art here. Note this isn’t the same for copyright reasons but close enough for you to get the point:

So, if you can’t tell by the colors here, the big news is that Cisco has slipped out of the top Good part of the polygon and is now in the bottom Bad part (denoted by the red) and is in danger of going out of business and being the laughing stock of the networking community. Well, no, not so much that last part. But their implementation has slipped into the lower part of the quadrant where first-stage startups and cash-strapped companies live and wish they could build something.

Cisco released a report rebutting those claims and it talks about how Viptela is a huge part of Continue reading

VMware, Silver Peak Lead SD-WAN Pack; Cisco, Riverbed Lose Ground

Update: Using pyATS in Network Automation

A month ago I described how Paddy Kelly used pyATS to get VRF data from a Cisco router to create per-VRF connectivity graphs.

Recently he also wrote a short article describing how to get started with pyATS and Ansible. Thank you, Paddy!

Amazon CTO Details Virtualization Journey