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PlanAlyzer: assessing threats to the validity of online experiments

PlanAlyzer: assessing threats to the validity of online experiments Tosch et al., OOPSLA’19

It’s easy to make experimental design mistakes that invalidate your online controlled experiments. At an organisation like Facebook (who kindly supplied the corpus of experiments used in this study), the state of art is to have a pool of experts carefully review all experiments. PlanAlyzer acts a bit like a linter for online experiment designs, where those designs are specified in the PlanOut language.

We present the first approach for statically checking the internal validity of online experiments. Our checks are based on well-known problems that arise in experimental design and causal inference… PlanAlyzer checks PlanOut programs for a variety of threats to internal validity, including failures of randomization, treatment assignment, and causal sufficiency.

As well as pointing out any bugs in the experiment design, PlanAlyzer will also output a set of contrasts — comparisons that you can safely make given the design of the experiment. Hopefully the comparison you wanted to make when you set up the experiment is in that set!

Experimental design with PlanOut

PlanOut is a open source framework for online field experiments, developed by and extensively used at Facebook. To quote Continue reading

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Go Notes: Arrays

Arrays are a collection of values of the same type. go // create an array that can hold 2 elements var stuff [2]string // assign values to the array stuff[0] = "blah" stuff[1] = "bleh" // shortcut to create an array and assign values stuff := [2]string // let the go compiler dynamically...

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Go Notes: Arrays

All about arrays in Golang.

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Liqid, Western Digital Demo Composable NVMe-oF

Western Digital and Liqid demonstrated the ability to orchestrate NVMe over Fabrics across...

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KubeCon 2019 Day 3 and Event Summary

Keynotes

Bryan Liles kicked off the day 3 morning keynotes with a discussion of “finding Kubernetes’ Rails moment”—basically focusing on how Kubernetes enables folks to work on/solve higher-level problems. Key phrase from Bryan’s discussion (which, as usual, incorporated the humor I love to see from Bryan): “Kubernetes isn’t the destination. Kubernetes is the vehicle that takes us to the destination.” Ian Coldwater delivered a talk on looking at Kubernetes from the attacker’s point of view, and using that perspective to secure and harden Kubernetes. Two folks from Walmart also discussed their use case, which involves running Kubernetes clusters in retail locations to support a point-of-sale (POS) application at the check-out register. Finally, there was a discussion of chaos engineering from folks at Gremlin and Target.

No Breakout Sessions

Due to booth duty and my flight home, I wasn’t able to attend any breakout sessions today.

Event Summary

If I’m completely honest, I didn’t get as much out of the event as I’d hoped. I’m not yet sure if that is because I didn’t get to attend as many sessions as I’d hoped/planned (due to problems with sessions being moved/rescheduled or whatever), if my choice of sessions was just poor, Continue reading

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Extreme Embeds Fabric Automation on Broadcom-Based Switches

“Everybody does automation,” Extreme’s Dan DeBacker said. “But we believe we’re the only...

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Real-time monitoring at terabit speeds

The Flow Trend chart above shows a real-time, up to the second, view of nearly 3 terabits per second of traffic flowing across the SCinet network, described as the fastest, most powerful volunteer-built network in the world. The network is build each year to support The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis. The SC19 conference is currently underway in Denver, Colorado.
The diagram shows the Joint Big Data Testbed generating the traffic in the chart. The Caltech demonstration is described in NRE-19: SC19 Network Research Exhibition: Caltech Booth 543 Demonstrations Hosting NRE-13, NRE-19, NRE-20, NRE-22, NRE-23, NRE-24, NRE-35:

400GE First Data Networks: Caltech, Starlight/NRL, USC, SCinet/XNET, Ciena, Mellanox, Arista, Dell, 2CRSI, Echostreams, DDN and Pavilion Data, as well as other supporting optical, switch and server vendor partners will demonstrate the first fully functional 3 X400GE local ring network as well as 400GE wide area network ring, linking the Starlight and Caltech booths and Starlight in Chicago. This network will integrate storage using NVMe over Fabric, the latest high throughput methods, in-depth monitoring and realtime flow steering. As part of these demonstrations, we will make use of the latest DWDM, Waveserver Ai, and 400GE as Continue reading

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It Takes a Community: Kubernetes’ Long Road to Dual IPv4/IPv6 Support

Portworx sponsored The New Stack’s coverage of KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America 2019. While you may thinking of Kubernetes as the future of computing, but it was, until recently, still stuck in the past in one way, namely that it was built on IPv4, the widely-used, though a soon-to-be-legacy version of the Internet Protocol upon which the internet was built. The Internet Engineering Task Force has been long urging the internet service providers to move to IPv6, now that the world has exhausted the supply of 32-bit IPv4 addresses. With its 128-bit address space, IPv6 will offer an inexhaustibly supply of internet addresses. “We ignored it,” admitted KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019 conference he gave with

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The Latest in NetOps Monitoring for Cisco and Versa SD-WAN

CA’s NetOps 19.1 release simplifies Cisco Vipela and Versa SD-WAN management to help you optimize...

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VMware: 5G a ‘Fantastic and Interesting Challenge’ for Kubernetes

“It’ll be a fascinating test. It’s something we can’t control. I certainly have...

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Cisco Shakeup Hits Cloud, Networking Teams

The changes will "strongly position the company against our competitors," according to an internal...

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How to Get Famous in BitLife

BitLife: Life Simulator, also called BitLife for short, is digital-based, single player cartoon video game for Android / iOS released in 2018 by CandyWriter LLC. The game has become extremely popular, as people live the simulated digital life that they choose. Many players of this game want to become famous winning the “Famous Ribbon,” but becoming famous is no cake-walk, as you will have to spend years of your life working towards fame and fortune you want and feel you deserve. Still, for those brave souls with that much time on their hands, here are a few tips on how to get famous in BitLife.

How to Get Famous in BitLife in 4 Steps

Start Out Good Looking

Being good looking is extremely important in your effort to becoming famous. So, you may want to keep resetting your character until you score at 80% in the looks department. The better looking you are and become throughout your life, the easier it may be to become famous. Later, in life you can choose to have plastic surgery or other procedures in order to help you become better looking. Remember, we’re talking about a video game life simulator here, not Continue reading

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Verizon Drives SDP Into Its Zero Trust Architecture

The new Zero Trust Architecture blocks connectivity to servers and applications from unknown...

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42 – LISP Network Deployment and Troubleshooting

Good day Network experts

It has been a great pleasure and an honor working with Tarique Shakil and Vinit Jain on this book below, deep-diving on this amazing LISP protocol.

I would like also to take this opportunity to thank Max Ardica, Victor Moreno and Marc Portoles Comeras for their invaluable help. I wrote the section on LISP Mobility deployment with traditional and modern data center fabrics (VXLAN EVPN based as well as ACI Multi-Pod/Multi-Site), however this could not have been done without the amazing support of these guys.

Available from Cisco Press
or from Safari book Online

Implement flexible, efficient LISP-based overlays for cloud, data center, and enterprise

The LISP overlay network helps organizations provide seamless connectivity to devices and workloads wherever they move, enabling open and highly scalable networks with unprecedented flexibility and agility.

LISP Network Deployment and Troubleshooting is the definitive resource for all network engineers who want to understand, configure, and troubleshoot LISP on Cisco IOS-XE, IOS-XR and NX-OS platforms. It brings together comprehensive coverage of how LISP works, how it integrates with leading Cisco platforms, how to configure it for maximum efficiency, and how to address key issues such Continue reading

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Extreme targets data center automation with software, switches

Extreme this week took the wraps off new automation software and switches aimed at helping customers quickly turn-up and manage new data-center networking segments.Key to the network vendor’s data-center plans is an upgraded version of its Extreme Data Center Fabric, which has been available for over a year and is now upgraded to let customers deploy a fabric in minutes. Once  devices are cabled togtther and powered on,  customers run the Extreme Fabric Automation application from any Extreme SLX spine or leaf switch, which then confirms configuations, validates and tests the network to ensure it is set up and operating correctly.To read this article in full, please click here

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Extreme targets data center automation with software, switches

Extreme this week took the wraps off new automation software and switches aimed at helping customers quickly turn-up and manage new data-center networking segments.Key to the network vendor’s data-center plans is an upgraded version of its Extreme Data Center Fabric, which has been available for over a year and is now upgraded to let customers deploy a fabric in minutes. Once  devices are cabled togtther and powered on,  customers run the Extreme Fabric Automation application from any Extreme SLX spine or leaf switch, which then confirms configuations, validates and tests the network to ensure it is set up and operating correctly.To read this article in full, please click here

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Rachel Player Honored by Internet Security Research Group with Radiant Award

Internet security is accomplished by many unsung heroes. People who put their talent and passion into improving the Internet, making it secure and trustworthy. This is a feature of the Internet: security isn’t achieved through a central mandate but through the hard work and tenacity of individuals working across the globe.

Rachel Player, a cryptographic researcher, is one of those unsung heroes. She’s just been awarded the Radiant Award from the Internet Security Research Group, the folks behind Let’s Encrypt, for her work in post-quantum cryptography and homomorphic encryption. Homomorphic encryption allows people to do computations on encrypted data, so that information can remain private and still be worked with. This is a highly-relevant field in any area that deals with sensitive and personal data, such as medicine and finance. Player is also interested in lowering the barriers for young people – young women, especially – to work professionally on topics like cryptography.

To learn more, read the announcement by the Internet Security Research Group and Rachel Player’s blog post about her work and her interest in making the profession more accessible.

Want to know more about Let’s Encrypt? Read a comprehensive overview of the initiative – from inspiration to Continue reading

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Learn how R is used in machine learning with this $29 training

Machine learning is a powerful tool for statistical analysis that allows businesses to gain valuable insights, and many companies are catching on. As such, the demand for programmers who have R environment skills is quickly growing, and with this certification course bundle, you too can learn statistical analysis with R for $29.The Complete R Programming Certification Bundle features 6 courses on how to apply the R programming language to data visualization, social media mining, and more. If you have zero R experience, the first course you should take is Statistics & Machine Learning for Regression Modeling with R. This course will introduce you to the OLS regression and how to create regression models for machine learning.To read this article in full, please click here

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The Road Ahead for Cloud Area Network Migration

CIOs today mandate a ‘Cloud First’ or a ‘Cloud Only’ model for new IT investments with three different cloud models. 

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Introducing Flan Scan: Cloudflare’s Lightweight Network Vulnerability Scanner

Today, we’re excited to open source Flan Scan, Cloudflare’s in-house lightweight network vulnerability scanner. Flan Scan is a thin wrapper around Nmap that converts this popular open source tool into a vulnerability scanner with the added benefit of easy deployment.

We created Flan Scan after two unsuccessful attempts at using “industry standard” scanners for our compliance scans. A little over a year ago, we were paying a big vendor for their scanner until we realized it was one of our highest security costs and many of its features were not relevant to our setup. It became clear we were not getting our money’s worth. Soon after, we switched to an open source scanner and took on the task of managing its complicated setup. That made it difficult to deploy to our entire fleet of more than 190 data centers.

We had a deadline at the end of Q3 to complete an internal scan for our compliance requirements but no tool that met our needs. Given our history with existing scanners, we decided to set off on our own and build a scanner that worked for our setup. To design Flan Scan, we worked closely with our auditors to understand Continue reading