Measurement Lab: How Do We Know If the Internet Is Open?

An open Internet is the foundation of access and innovation, where users can go where they want, when they want without discrimination. But how do we know if the Internet is truly open? As individuals, our Internet performance experience is mediated by our physical location, infrastructure, government, and Internet service providers. Yet we are largely blind to how our Internet is impacted by these systems. Without that knowledge, innovation stalls, disparity of access grows, and people become isolated from this critical piece of global infrastructure.

Measurement Lab (M-Lab), a fiscally sponsored project of Code for Science & Society, is a consortium of research, industry, and public interest partners focused on fostering, collecting, and publishing open Internet performance data. M-Lab was founded in 2008 to build a global platform designed to enable anyone to measure their Internet service using open source tools. Over ten years later, M-Lab collects over 2 million measurements per day worldwide and has become a trusted source of open data and tools to gather and understand Internet infrastructure from the consumer perspective. Cities and municipal governments; national regulators and government agencies; academics and researchers; ISPs, network operators, and companies; civil society and advocacy organizations; and the Continue reading

VMware Adds Containers to Its Cloud Provider Platform

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For August 23rd, 2019

Wake up! It's HighScalability time:

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? I'd love your support on Patreon. I wrote Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 for people who need to understand the cloud. And who doesn't these days? On Amazon it has 54 mostly 5 star reviews (125 on Goodreads). They'll learn a lot and likely add you to their will.

Number Stuff:

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge (which means this post has many more items to read so please keep on reading)...

AnsibleFest Atlanta – Getting Started

On Wednesday we took a closer look at the Networking Automation track. Soon you will be able to start building out your schedule for AnsibleFest, so we want to help you figure out what tracks and sessions will be best for you! We talked with Track Lead Jake Jackson to learn more about the Getting Started track and the sessions within it. 

Who is this track best for? 

This track is best for people who are new to Ansible, whether that is in application or in concept. Many of these breakout sessions are introductory in nature for people who want to learn more about Ansible and how it works.

What topics will this track cover? 

This track will cover several topics. It includes introductions to Ansible and Ansible Tower, and a deeper dive into Ansible inventories. It also discusses bite-size ways to automate and manage Windows the same way you would linux. There will also be a session that introduces using Ansible in CI and analyzing roles.

What should attendees expect to learn from this track? 

Attendees can expect to learn the basics of Ansible and Ansible Tower from this track. They Continue reading

Announcing a New Open Source Service Mesh Interoperation Collaboration

Service mesh is fast becoming such a vital part of the infrastructure underlying microservices and traditional applications alike that every industry player must have an offering in the space. Because a variety of differentiated service meshes and service mesh services are emerging, it has become clear that interoperability between them will be critical for customers seeking to interconnect a wide variety of workloads.

With that in mind, we are excited to share that VMware has partnered with Google Cloud, HashiCorp, and Pivotal on an open source project for service mesh interoperability. This initiative will facilitate federation of service discovery between different service meshes of potentially different vendors. Through an API, service meshes can be interconnected to deliver the associated benefits of observability, control, and security across different organizational unit boundaries, and potentially across different products and vendors. The project will soon be opened to the community, and anyone interested in contributing to this effort can do so on GitHub.

Partnering With Industry Leaders on Service Mesh Interoperation

Enterprises increasingly rely on APIs to coordinate business functions that span departmental, organization or vendor boundaries. This implies reliability, operability, security and access constraints on these API calls to ensure business Continue reading

VMware spends $4.8B to grab Pivotal, Carbon Black to secure, develop integrated cloud world

All things cloud are major topics of conversation at the VMworld user conference next week, ratcheded up a notch by VMware's $4.8 billion plans to acquire cloud development firm Pivotal and security provider Carbon Black.VMware said during its quarterly financial call this week it would spend about $2.7 billion on Pivotal and its Cloud Foundry hybrid cloud development technology, and about $2.1 billion for the security technology of Carbon Black, which includes its Predictive Security Cloud and other endpoint-security software.  Both amounts represent the enterprise value of the deals the actual purchase prices will vary, experts said.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware spends $4.8B to grab Pivotal, Carbon Black to secure, develop integrated cloud world

All things cloud are major topics of conversation at the VMworld user conference next week, ratcheded up a notch by VMware's $4.8 billion plans to acquire cloud development firm Pivotal and security provider Carbon Black.VMware said during its quarterly financial call this week it would spend about $2.7 billion on Pivotal and its Cloud Foundry hybrid cloud development technology, and about $2.1 billion for the security technology of Carbon Black, which includes its Predictive Security Cloud and other endpoint-security software.  Both amounts represent the enterprise value of the deals the actual purchase prices will vary, experts said.To read this article in full, please click here

Technology Short Take 118

Welcome to Technology Short Take #118! Next week is VMworld US in San Francisco, CA, and I’ll be there live-blogging and meeting up with folks to discuss all things Kubernetes. If you’re going to be there, look me up! Otherwise, I leave you with this list of links and articles from around the Internet to keep you busy. Enjoy!

Networking

• Networking guru Ivan Pepelnjak has migrated his online presence to AWS; read more here.

Servers/Hardware

• Interesting (but otherwise not terribly useful) article on how to turn a MacBook into a touchscreen. Lack of a touch screen remains the MacBook line’s second most egregious shortcoming against competing products (the first being the awful keyboard).

Security

• I came across this article on tools and methods for auditing Kubernetes RBAC policies, which had some new tools I hadn’t seen before.
• This web developer security checklist has a nice list of some “current recommended practices” for properly securing web applications/sites.
• Daniele Antonioli, Nils Ole Tippenhauer, and Kasper Rasmussen discuss the KNOB attack (a Bluetooth vulnerability).

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

• My teammate John Harris has a great post on ensuring least privilege in Kubernetes using impersonation. Good stuff here.
• Alex Brand (also a teammate!) Continue reading

Red Hat Creates Service Mesh for OpenShift

Red Hat is unveiling its own service mesh for Jaeger project for tracing, and service mesh typically runs as a sidecar as a communication layer between services for microservices-based application architectures. It handles traffic management, policy enforcement and service identity and security. “We have taken the upstream Istio and written an Operator that handles the deployment and management of Istio itself. With the upstream version, you have to run all the sidecar containers with an escalated level of privilege — the Kubernetes equivalent of running things as a root user,” explained OpenShift Service Mesh, through having the Operator there and a CNI (container networking interface) plugin we wrote, you can run Istio and bring up those sidecar components without providing additional privileges to the application components of Istio itself,” he added. Its features include: Tracing and measurement: using Jaeger, developers can track a request between services from start to finish. Visualization and observability: Kiali Continue reading

Looking for the Ultimate Phone Holder? Here are Your Best Bets.

While it may seem like people have their cellphones glued to their hand or to their ear, the truth is that there are times when you need your hands free to attend to other tasks or activities (like driving). Having a great phone holder in your car, for instance, allows you to still use your phone even when your hands may be occupied. If you are looking for the ultimate phone holder, here are some of your best bets.

The Ultimate Phone Holder for Your Home or Desk

Making or taking a phone call when you are cooking, typing at your desk, or eating is something that happens on a regular basis. Having a cellphone phone holder for in your home can make multi-tasking, whether talking on the phone, doing research, or following a recipe, much easier. 

We recommend the Lamicall phone holder, which comes with the Lamicall phone dock. It has a low center of gravity (so your smartphone won’t tip over), rubber cushions to protect your phone from scratches, holds all phones 14mm or less, and is compatible with all phones 6 to 8 inches. The phone stand comes in black, red, silver, or gray. 

Continue reading

Video: Networking Challenges

Whenever you’re discussing a complex topic it’s worth adhering to two principles: (A) identify the challenges you’re trying to solve and (B) start as simple as you can and add complexity later.

We did exactly that in the Introducing Networking Challenges part of How Networks Really Work webinar. We started with the simplest possible case of two computers connected with a cable… and even there identified a plethora of challenges that had to be solved more than half a century ago (and still have to be solved today no matter what magic software-defined technology someone pulls out of their wizard hat).

You need free ipSpace.net subscription to watch the video, or a paid ipSpace.net subscriptions to watch the rest of the webinar.

Learning to prove theorems via interacting with proof assistants

Learning to prove theorems via interacting with proof assistants Yang & Deng, ICML’19

Something a little different to end the week: deep learning meets theorem proving! It’s been a while since we gave formal methods some love on The Morning Paper, and this paper piqued my interest.

You’ve probably heard of Coq, a proof management system backed by about 30 years of research and developed out of INRIA. Here’s how the Coq home page introduces it:

Coq is a formal proof management system. It provides a formal language to write mathematical definitions, executable algorithms and theorems together with an environment for semi-interactive development of machine-checked proofs.

Certified programs can then be extracted to languages like OCaml, Haskell, and Scheme.

In fully automated theorem proving (ATP), after providing a suitable formalism and a theorem, the goal is to be able to push a button and have the system prove that the theorem is true (or false!). The state-of-the-art in ATP is still some way behind human experts though it two key areas: the scale of systems it can tackle, and the interpretability of the generated proofs.

What a typical theorem prover does… is to prove by resolution refutation: it Continue reading

Semiconductor startup Cerebras Systems launches massive AI chip

There are a host of different AI-related solutions for the data center, ranging from add-in cards to dedicated servers, like the Nvidia DGX-2. But a startup called Cerebras Systems has its own server offering that relies on a single massive processor rather than a slew of small ones working in parallel.Cerebras has taken the wraps off its Wafer Scale Engine (WSE), an AI chip that measures 8.46x8.46 inches, making it almost the size of an iPad and more than 50 times larger than a CPU or GPU. A typical CPU or GPU is about the size of a postage stamp.Now see how AI can boost data-center availability and efficiency. Cerebras won’t sell the chips to ODMs due to the challenges of building and cooling such a massive chip. Instead, it will come as part of a complete server to be installed in data centers, which it says will start shipping in October.To read this article in full, please click here

Semiconductor startup Cerebras Systems launches massive AI chip

There are a host of different AI-related solutions for the data center, ranging from add-in cards to dedicated servers, like the Nvidia DGX-2. But a startup called Cerebras Systems has its own server offering that relies on a single massive processor rather than a slew of small ones working in parallel.Cerebras has taken the wraps off its Wafer Scale Engine (WSE), an AI chip that measures 8.46x8.46 inches, making it almost the size of an iPad and more than 50 times larger than a CPU or GPU. A typical CPU or GPU is about the size of a postage stamp.Now see how AI can boost data-center availability and efficiency. Cerebras won’t sell the chips to ODMs due to the challenges of building and cooling such a massive chip. Instead, it will come as part of a complete server to be installed in data centers, which it says will start shipping in October.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware spends $4.2B to grab Pivotal, Carbon Black to secure, develop integrated cloud world

All things cloud are major topics of conversation at the VMworld user conference next week, ratcheded up a notch by VMware's $4.2 billion plans to acquire cloud development firm Pivotal and security provider Carbon Black.VMware said during its quarterly financial call this week it would spend about $2.7 billion on Pivotal and its Cloud Foundry hybrid cloud development technology, and about $2.1 billion for the security technology of Carbon Black, which includes its Predictive Security Cloud and other endpoint-security software.[ Check out What is hybrid cloud computing and learn what you need to know about multi-cloud. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] VMware has deep relationships with both companies. Carbon Black technology is part of VMware’s AppDefense endpoint security. Pivotal has a deeper relationship in that VMware and Dell, VMware’s parent company, spun out Pivotal in 2013.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware spends $4.2B to grab Pivotal, Carbon Black to secure, develop integrated cloud world

All things cloud are major topics of conversation at the VMworld user conference next week, ratcheded up a notch by VMware's $4.2 billion plans to acquire cloud development firm Pivotal and security provider Carbon Black.VMware said during its quarterly financial call this week it would spend about $2.7 billion on Pivotal and its Cloud Foundry hybrid cloud development technology, and about $2.1 billion for the security technology of Carbon Black, which includes its Predictive Security Cloud and other endpoint-security software.[ Check out What is hybrid cloud computing and learn what you need to know about multi-cloud. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] VMware has deep relationships with both companies. Carbon Black technology is part of VMware’s AppDefense endpoint security. Pivotal has a deeper relationship in that VMware and Dell, VMware’s parent company, spun out Pivotal in 2013.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware Buys Carbon Black for $2.1B and Pivotal for $2.7B

Big Cloud Fabric: Ideal Underlay for VMware NSX-T

Texas ransomware attacks: to pay or not to pay? | TECH(feed)

Nearly two dozen cities in Texas have been hit by a ransomware attack executed by a single threat actor. These attacks beg the question: Is it ever worth it to pay a cyber attacker’s ransom? In this episode of TECH(feed), Juliet discusses the pattern of ransomware attacks on local governments, how municipalities have responded and how to prevent a ransomware attack in the first place.

AfPIF Day Three: A Record Number of Women

It’s been a record-breaking year: 97 women attended AfPIF 2019, the highest ever, showing the fruits of diversity efforts from organizers and sponsors.

In the last three years, there have been fellowships targeting women in engineering, supported by organizations like Workonline, Google, LINX, and Akamai. There’s also been a working lunch, where participants discuss the best way AfPIF can be more inclusive to women.

As the curtains fell on the tenth edition of AfPIF, it was clear that the future is looking bright, with 367 men and women attending, representing 59 countries: 202 from Africa, 36 from Europe, 16 from America, and 13 from Asia.

The first panel of the day was dedicated to looking back at the challenges in the last ten years, identifying the opportunities going forward, and what we all must do in order to guarantee business growth and better connectivity for the region.

One of the key points was that the traditional telco model is changing, and companies will have to adapt in order to stay relevant. Seacom, for instance is exploring other business opportunities as the demand for traditional infrastructure falls and local content grows, leading to formation of ISPs that can survive largely Continue reading