A Step Further in Making Pakistan Digitally Accessible

In a bid to improve digital accessibility in Pakistan – a country with about 30 million persons with disability (PWDs), according to the World Health Organization –  we recently partnered with the Ministry of IT (MoIT) and the National IT Board (NITB) so that more existing government websites could include accessibility features and future websites could incorporate such designs. We set out to make five websites more accessible – as a start – and are already seeing encouraging results.

According to local study and research paper, a majority of websites in Pakistan, including government, are not accessible for PWDs. PWDs face various challenges in using websites based on their impairment.

For example, persons with visual impairments can face compatibility challenges when screen reader software is used to access visual displays that are not labelled or hyperlinks that do not make sense when read out of context. Those with low vision are not able to access websites that cannot be adjusted for font type and size, contrast, and use of colors, and individuals who are deaf are not able to understand the narration in an online video if it is not properly captioned.

As part of this commitment given by Continue reading

Day Two Cloud 022: Day Two Cloud Scales Out And Up!

Day Two Cloud 022: Day Two Cloud Scales Out And Up!

The Day Two Cloud podcast is getting a new co-host, Ethan Banks; and becoming a weekly show! Now you can get deep dives on cloud and infrastructure topics including Kubernetes, cloud security, design and deployment, and more every week.

The post Day Two Cloud 022: Day Two Cloud Scales Out And Up! appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Fortinet Locks SD-WAN, WAF Into Azure

Attacking The Datacenter From The Edge Inward

For much of the decade, a debate around Arm was whether it would fulfill its promise to become a silicon designer with suppliers of any significance to datacenter hardware. …

Attacking The Datacenter From The Edge Inward was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

What’s new with Workers KV?

The Storage team here at Cloudflare shipped Workers KV, our global, low-latency, key-value store, earlier this year. As people have started using it, we’ve gotten some feature requests, and have shipped some new features in response! In this post, we’ll talk about some of these use cases and how these new features enable them.

New KV APIs

We’ve shipped some new APIs, both via api.cloudflare.com, as well as inside of a Worker. The first one provides the ability to upload and delete more than one key/value pair at once. Given that Workers KV is great for read-heavy, write-light workloads, a common pattern when getting started with KV is to write a bunch of data via the API, and then read that data from within a Worker. You can now do these bulk uploads without needing a separate API call for every key/value pair. This feature is available via api.cloudflare.com, but is not yet available from within a Worker.

For example, say we’re using KV to redirect legacy URLs to their new homes. We have a list of URLs to redirect, and where they should redirect to. We can turn this list into JSON that Continue reading

29 top cloud certifications

When it comes to the most in-demand skills, the cloud is the place to be. Our guide to top cloud certifications looks at programs designed for AWS, Google and Microsoft services -- as well as vendor-neutral certifications.

Cisco Meraki ups security with new switch, software

Cisco Meraki has introduced new hardware and software the company says will help customers more effectively support and secure a wide variety of distributed network resources.The new products, which include a raft of new security features as well a new class of switches and a cellular gateway will help Meraki address customers who perhaps don’t have the IT expertise nor staffing to support the increasing number of devices that need to be managed, said Lawrence Huang, vice president of product management at Cisco Meraki.Network pros react to new Cisco certification curriculum “Threat vectors are evolving and the way customers need to protect themselves need to evolve as well – how customers support applications and IoT devices exemplify the idea its not just one perimeter that needs protecting but a collection of micorperimenters,” Huang said.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco Meraki ups security with new switch, software

Cisco Meraki has introduced new hardware and software the company says will help customers more effectively support and secure a wide variety of distributed network resources.The new products, which include a raft of new security features as well a new class of switches and a cellular gateway will help Meraki address customers who perhaps don’t have the IT expertise nor staffing to support the increasing number of devices that need to be managed, said Lawrence Huang, vice president of product management at Cisco Meraki.Network pros react to new Cisco certification curriculum “Threat vectors are evolving and the way customers need to protect themselves need to evolve as well – how customers support applications and IoT devices exemplify the idea its not just one perimeter that needs protecting but a collection of micorperimenters,” Huang said.To read this article in full, please click here

Virtual Extensible LAN – VXLAN: Book Updates and Errata

AMD Epyc processors continue to gain momentum

Sales of AMD's Epyc server processors grew more than 50% over the second quarter of this year, thanks in part to the second-generation “Rome” platform in August.Q3 was a bang-up quarter for the rebounding company, with third-quarter revenue of $1.8 billion, a 9.1% year-over-year increase, and net income of 18 cents per share, in line with analyst projections. This was AMD's best quarter for revenue since 2005, when AMD was super hot and Intel was spinning its wheels.More importantly, CEO Lisa Su, in reporting the company's third quarter earnings, said AMD is on track to reach double-digit server CPU share by the middle of next year. Just a few years ago, Mercury Research, which tracks semiconductor market share, estimated Opteron market share at below one percent.To read this article in full, please click here

AMD Epyc processors continue to gain momentum

Sales of AMD's Epyc server processors grew more than 50% over the second quarter of this year, thanks in part to the second-generation “Rome” platform in August.Q3 was a bang-up quarter for the rebounding company, with third-quarter revenue of $1.8 billion, a 9.1% year-over-year increase, and net income of 18 cents per share, in line with analyst projections. This was AMD's best quarter for revenue since 2005, when AMD was super hot and Intel was spinning its wheels.More importantly, CEO Lisa Su, in reporting the company's third quarter earnings, said AMD is on track to reach double-digit server CPU share by the middle of next year. Just a few years ago, Mercury Research, which tracks semiconductor market share, estimated Opteron market share at below one percent.To read this article in full, please click here

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VMware NSX-T and Geneve Q&A

A Network Artist left a lengthy comment on my Brief History of VMware NSX blog post. He raised a number of interesting topics, so I decided to write my replies as a separate blog post.

Using Geneve is an interesting choice to be made and while the approach has it’s own Pros and Cons, I would like to stick to VXLAN if I were to recommend to someone for few good reasons.

The main reason I see for NSX-T using Geneve instead of VXLAN is the need for additional header fields to carry metadata around, and to implement Network Services Header (NSH) for east-west service insertion.

File systems unfit as distributed storage backends: lessons from ten years of Ceph evolution

File systems unfit as distributed storage backends: lessons from 10 years of Ceph evolution Aghayev et al., SOSP’19

Ten years of hard-won lessons packed into just 17 pages (13 if you don’t count the references!) makes this paper extremely good value for your time. It’s also a fabulous example of recognising and challenging implicit assumptions. In this case, the assumption that a distributed storage backend should clearly be layered on top of a local file system. Breaking that assumption allowed Ceph to introduce a new storage backend called BlueStore with much better performance and predictability, and the ability to support the changing storage hardware landscape. In the two years since it’s release, 70% of all Ceph users had switched to running BlueStore in production.

Ceph is a widely-used, open-source distributed file system that followed this convention [of building on top of a local file system] for a decade. Hard lessons that the Ceph team learned using several popular file systems led them to question the fitness of file systems as storage backends. This is not surprising in hindsight.

Sometimes, things that aren’t surprising in hindsight can be the very hardest of things to spot!

What is a distributed Continue reading

Notes from OARC 31

Pica8’s Threshold Guns for Cisco, Legacy Vendors

Cumulus content roundup: October 2019

What could be scarier than non-scalable networking systems, outdated solutions and slow deployment time? Nothing. Luckily for you, there’s none of that in this months content roundup.

We kept busy with a very exciting announcement (hint: it has to do with campus networks) and we think you’ll be excited about it too. Read October’s content roundup to catch up with all the latest Cumulus news, releases, and what’s to come. Happy reading!

From Cumulus Networks:

The ease and importance of scaling in the enterprise: Out with the old and in with the new. Check out this blog by Finn Turner to find out how flexible, scalable network technologies are helping organizations smoothly take their network to the next level.

Securing open source: a brief look at dependency management: Ready to dive into dependency management? This post will cover three categories of dependency management, and which one is the right fit for your project.

How inspiration from your data center can modernize your campus network: While we originally designed Cumulus Linux for data center networking, we’ve now entered into the campus network. Not sure what that entails? Read this informative post by Scott Ciccone to find out about all Continue reading