Formal foundations of serverless computing

Formal foundations of serverless computing Jangda et al., OOPSLA’19

Jangda et al. won a distinguished paper award at OOPSLA this year for their work on ‘Formal foundations of serverless computing.’ Central to the paper is their observation that the serverless execution environment has a number of unique properties (such as warm starting / reuse of execution environments) that can make it harder to build correct applications. They show the conditions under which a serverless function can safely ignore these peculiarities, and thus become much simpler to reason about. They also introduce a composition language based on arrows for function composition.

Things to be aware of when going serverless

The serverless computing abstraction, despite its many advantages, exposes several low-level operational details that make it hard for programmers to write and reason about their code. For example, to reduce latency, serverless platforms try to reuse the same function instance to process multiple requests. However, this behaviour is not transparent and it is easy to write a serverless function that produces incorrect results or leaks confidential data when reused. A related problem is that serverless platforms abruptly terminate function instances when they are idle…

These first problems are related to Continue reading

Digital Realty jumps into interconnection business

Data center provider Digital Realty Trust isn't resting after its massive EMEA push via the acquisition of Interxion. The company unveiled PlatformDIGITAL, an initiative designed to provide interconnections to customers and manage big data. Digital Realty made the announcement at its MarketplaceLIVE conference. At the heart of the PlatformDIGITAL strategy is Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx), which offers "fit-for-purpose" data center designs meant to solve scale, configuation and connectivity issues faced by enterprise colocation customers.To read this article in full, please click here

Digital Realty jumps into interconnection business

Data center provider Digital Realty Trust isn't resting after its massive EMEA push via the acquisition of Interxion. The company unveiled PlatformDIGITAL, an initiative designed to provide interconnections to customers and manage big data. Digital Realty made the announcement at its MarketplaceLIVE conference. At the heart of the PlatformDIGITAL strategy is Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx), which offers "fit-for-purpose" data center designs meant to solve scale, configuation and connectivity issues faced by enterprise colocation customers.To read this article in full, please click here

Digital Reality jumps into interconnection business

Data center provider Digital Realty Trust isn't resting after its massive EMEA push via the acquisition of Interxion. The company unveiled PlatformDIGITAL, an initiative designed to provide interconnections to customers and manage big data. Digital Realty made the announcement at its MarketplaceLIVE conference. At the heart of the PlatformDIGITAL strategy is Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx), which offers "fit-for-purpose" data center designs meant to solve scale, configuation and connectivity issues faced by enterprise colocation customers.To read this article in full, please click here

White-box switches yield initial savings but pose challenges

Despite the clear cost benefits, white-box switches outfitted with independent network operating systems (NOS) solutions have seen only limited adoption in leading enterprise IT shops.  That’s due to the lack of a clear market leader, implementation challenges and concerns about service and support that have steered IT pros toward traditional, branded-box Ethernet switches instead.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] But maturing technology and new support alliances are making white-box switches an attractive alternative for greenfield deployments and for infrastructure that’s being upgraded to give performance boosts to data centers, campuses and branch offices.To read this article in full, please click here

5 disruptive storage technologies for 2020

For decades, storage technology progress was measured primarily in terms of capacity and speed. No longer. In recent times, those steadfast benchmarks have been augmented, and even superseded, by sophisticated new technologies and methodologies that make storage smarter, more flexible and easier to manage.Next year promises to bring even greater disruption to the formerly staid storage market, as IT leaders seek more efficient ways of coping with the data tsunami generated by AI, IoT devices and numerous other sources. Here's a look at the five storage technologies that will create the greatest disruption in 2020, as enterprise adoption gains ground.To read this article in full, please click here

5 disruptive storage technologies for 2020

For decades, storage technology progress was measured primarily in terms of capacity and speed. No longer. In recent times, those steadfast benchmarks have been augmented, and even superseded, by sophisticated new technologies and methodologies that make storage smarter, more flexible and easier to manage.Next year promises to bring even greater disruption to the formerly staid storage market, as IT leaders seek more efficient ways of coping with the data tsunami generated by AI, IoT devices and numerous other sources. Here's a look at the five storage technologies that will create the greatest disruption in 2020, as enterprise adoption gains ground.To read this article in full, please click here

Digital Reality jumps into interconnection business

Data center provider Digital Realty Trust isn't resting after its massive EMEA push via the acquisition of Interxion. The company unveiled PlatformDIGITAL, an initiative designed to provide interconnections to customers and manage big data. Digital Realty made the announcement at its MarketplaceLIVE conference. At the heart of the PlatformDIGITAL strategy is Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx), which offers "fit-for-purpose" data center designs meant to solve scale, configuation and connectivity issues faced by enterprise colocation customers.To read this article in full, please click here

White-box switches yield initial savings but pose challenges

Despite the clear cost benefits, white-box switches outfitted with independent network operating systems (NOS) solutions have seen only limited adoption in leading enterprise IT shops.  That’s due to the lack of a clear market leader, implementation challenges and concerns about service and support that have steered IT pros toward traditional, branded-box Ethernet switches instead.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] But maturing technology and new support alliances are making white-box switches an attractive alternative for greenfield deployments and for infrastructure that’s being upgraded to give performance boosts to data centers, campuses and branch offices.To read this article in full, please click here

The Four Workhorses Of The Data Apocalypse

The days when the X86 processor could do just about every kind of processing in the datacenter are gone. …

The Four Workhorses Of The Data Apocalypse was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Log every request to corporate apps, no code changes required

When a user connects to a corporate network through an enterprise VPN client, this is what the VPN appliance logs:

The administrator of that private network knows the user opened the door at 12:15:05, but, in most cases, has no visibility into what they did next. Once inside that private network, users can reach internal tools, sensitive data, and production environments. Preventing this requires complicated network segmentation, and often server-side application changes. Logging the steps that an individual takes inside that network is even more difficult.

Cloudflare Access does not improve VPN logging; it replaces this model. Cloudflare Access secures internal sites by evaluating every request, not just the initial login, for identity and permission. Instead of a private network, administrators deploy corporate applications behind Cloudflare using our authoritative DNS. Administrators can then integrate their team’s SSO and build user and group-specific rules to control who can reach applications behind the Access Gateway.

When a request is made to a site behind Access, Cloudflare prompts the visitor to login with an identity provider. Access then checks that user’s identity against the configured rules and, if permitted, allows the request to proceed. Access performs these checks on each request a user Continue reading

Dell Technologies CTO: Why AI Needs Empathy

Writing userspace USB drivers for abandoned devices

Writing userspace USB drivers for abandoned devices

Weekly Top Posts: 2019-11-17

1. Headcount: Firings, Hirings, and Retirings — October 2019
2. Analysts Debate SASE’s Merits as Vendors Board Hype Train
3. Google Killed Chronicle, Report Claims
4. AT&T Sounds Alarm on 5G Security
5. Juniper Targets VMware, Data Center Complexity With Contrail Insights

Palo Alto Networks Leaps Into SASE Market

Monitoring for High Performance Networks at 400G scale

IoT in 2020: The awkward teenage years

Much of the hyperbole around the Internet of Things isn’t really hyperbole anymore – the instrumentation of everything from cars to combine harvesters to factories is just a fact of life these days. IoT’s here to stay.Yet despite the explosive growth – one widely cited prediction from Gartner says that the number of enterprise and automotive IoT endpoints will reach 5.8 billion in 2020 – the IoT market’s ability to address its known flaws and complications has progressed at a far more pedestrian pace. That means ongoing security woes and a lack of complete solutions are most of what can be safely predicted for the coming year.To read this article in full, please click here

IoT in 2020: The awkward teenage years

Much of the hyperbole around the Internet of Things isn’t really hyperbole anymore – the instrumentation of everything from cars to combine harvesters to factories is just a fact of life these days. IoT’s here to stay.Yet despite the explosive growth – one widely cited prediction from Gartner says that the number of enterprise and automotive IoT endpoints will reach 5.8 billion in 2020 – the IoT market’s ability to address its known flaws and complications has progressed at a far more pedestrian pace. That means ongoing security woes and a lack of complete solutions are most of what can be safely predicted for the coming year.To read this article in full, please click here

Carrier supporting Carrier with BGP-LU

In our last post we talked about the less used method of deploying CsC where we ran OSPF and LDP inside the CSC-PE routing-instance.

Note: I can’t help myself apparently so be aware that Carrier of Carriers (CoC) is the same as Carrier supporting Carrier (CsC)

This required some changes to be made to our default LDP export policy as well as how we moved routes between the inet.3 and inet.0 tables. That being said, if you’re a single org it might make good sense to run things that way. I liked how you were able to see all of the remote LDP domain loopbacks in your local inet.3 table which in my mind made it easier to imagine the LSP paths.

That being said, it is clearly not the preferred deployment methodology. Most examples you’ll find leverage BGP (BGP-LU specifically) for the CSC-CE to CSC-PE connections as well as within the local label domains. So in this example, we’ll do just that. Larges chunks of the base configuration will be the same as they were in the previous post but for the sake of clarity I’ll post our starting post the starting configurations and diagrams here Continue reading

IETF 106 Begins Nov 16 in Singapore – Here is how you can participate remotely in building open Internet standards

Starting Saturday, November 16, 2019, the 106th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) will begin in Singapore. Over 1,000 engineers from around the world will gather in the convention center to join together in the debates and discussions that will advance the open standards that make the Internet possible. They are gathered, in the words of the IETF mission, “to make the Internet work better“.

Pick your protocol – the future of DNS, DOH, TLS, HTTP(S), QUIC, SIP, TCP, IPv6, ACME, NTP… and many, many more will be debated in the rooms and hallways over the next week.

What if you cannot be IN Singapore?

If you are not able to physically be in Singapore this week, the good news is you can participate remotely! The IETF website explains the precise steps you need to do. To summarize quickly:

1. Register as a remote participant. There is no cost.
2. Review the agenda to figure out which sessions you want to join. (I will note that there are some very interesting (to me!) Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions at IETF 106.)
3. Choose the channel(s) you will use to participate, including:
   • Meetecho (video, slides, audio, and chat)
   • Audio Continue reading