Announcing the General Availability of API Tokens

APIs at Cloudflare

Today we are announcing the general availability of API Tokens - a scalable and more secure way to interact with the Cloudflare API. As part of making a better internet, Cloudflare strives to simplify manageability of a customer’s presence at the edge. Part of the way we do this is by ensuring that all of our products and services are configurable by API. Customers ranging from partners to enterprises to developers want to automate management of Cloudflare. Sometimes that is done via our API directly, and other times it is done via open source software we help maintain like our Terraform provider or Cloudflare-Go library. It is critical that customers who are automating management of Cloudflare can keep their Cloudflare services as secure as possible.

Least Privilege and Why it Matters

Securing software systems is hard. Limiting what a piece of software can do is a good defense to prevent mistakes or malicious actions from having greater impact than they could. The principle of least privilege helps guide how much access a given system should have to perform actions. Originally formulated by Jerome Saltzer, “Every program and every privileged user of the system should operate using Continue reading

One Way Delay Measurements and NetFlow

The post One Way Delay Measurements and NetFlow appeared first on Noction.

Choosing a cloud DBMS: architectures and tradeoffs

Choosing a cloud DBMS: architectures and tradeoffs Tan et al., VLDB’19

If you’re moving an OLAP workload to the cloud (AWS in the context of this paper), what DBMS setup should you go with? There’s a broad set of choices including where you store the data, whether you run your own DBMS nodes or use a service, the kinds of instance types to go for if you do run your own, and so forth. Tan et al. use the TPC-H benchmark to assess Redshift, Redshift Spectrum, Athena, Presto, Hive, and Vertica to find out what works best and the trade-offs involved.

We focused on OLAP-oriented parallel data warehouse products available for AWS and restricted our attention to commercially available systems. As it is infeasible to test every OLAP system runnable on AWS, we chose widely-used systems that represented a variety of architectures and cost models.

My key takeaways as a TL;DR:

• Store your data in S3
• Use portable data format that gives you future flexibility to process it with multiple different systems (e.g. ORC or Parquet)
• Use Athena for workloads it can support (Athena could not run 4 of the 22 TPC-H queries, and Spectrum could not run Continue reading

Video: Introducing Transmission Technologies

After discussing the challenges one encounters even in the simplest networking scenario connecting two computers with a cable we took a short diversion into an interesting complication: what if the two computers are far apart and we can’t pull a cable between them?

Trying to answer that question we entered the wondrous world of transmission technologies. It’s a topic one can spent a whole life exploring and mastering, so we were not able to do more than cover the fundamentals of modulations and multiplexing technologies.

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

IBM, Orange Top UK’s SDN Market, Says ISG Report

Rating IoT devices to gauge their impact on your network

One difficulty designing IoT implementations is the large number of moving parts. Most IoT setups are built out of components from many different manufacturers – one company’s sensors here, another’s there, someone else handling the networking and someone else again making the backend.To help you get a ballpark sense of what any given implementation will demand from your network, we’ve come up with a basic taxonomy for rating IoT endpoints. It’s got three main axes: delay tolerance, data throughput and processing power. Here is an explainer for each. (Terminology note: We’ll use “IoT setup” or “IoT implementation” to refer to the entirety of the IoT infrastructure being used by a given organization.)To read this article in full, please click here

Quest Levels Up, Announces Foglight Evolve Platform

Data center-specific AI completes tasks twice as fast

Data centers running artificial intelligence (AI) will be significantly more efficient than those operating with hand-edited algorithm schedules, say experts at MIT. The researchers there say they have developed an automated scheduler that speeds cluster jobs by up to 20 or 30 percent, and even faster (2x) in peak periods.The school’s AI job scheduler works on a type of AI called “reinforcement learning” (RL). That’s a trial-and-error-based machine-learning method that modifies scheduling decisions depending on actual workloads in a specific cluster. AI, when done right, could supersede the current state-of-the-art method, which is algorithms. They often must be fine-tuned by humans, introducing inefficiency.To read this article in full, please click here

Data center-specific AI completes tasks twice as fast

Data centers running artificial intelligence (AI) will be significantly more efficient than those operating with hand-edited algorithm schedules, say experts at MIT. The researchers there say they have developed an automated scheduler that speeds cluster jobs by up to 20 or 30 percent, and even faster (2x) in peak periods.The school’s AI job scheduler works on a type of AI called “reinforcement learning” (RL). That’s a trial-and-error-based machine-learning method that modifies scheduling decisions depending on actual workloads in a specific cluster. AI, when done right, could supersede the current state-of-the-art method, which is algorithms. They often must be fine-tuned by humans, introducing inefficiency.To read this article in full, please click here

CNCF Project Journey Proves Kubernetes Is Everywhere

Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey: ‘We Don’t Sell Vaporware’

T-Mobile US Taps the Brakes on 5G Amid Merger Delays

OnX Adds Cisco SD-WAN to Its Managed Service Portfolio

AnsibleFest Atlanta – Ansible Integrations

With AnsibleFest less than a month away we wanted to take a closer look at each of the session tracks to help you make your experience as personalized as possible. We talked with Track Lead Bill Nottingham and asked him a few questions about the Ansible Integrations Track and sessions within the track. 

Who is this track best for? 

In Ansible Integrations, we’re highlighting integrations of Ansible with other technologies. This track is best for people who manage a large variety of varied infrastructure, and are interested in how Ansible can help manage in new areas. It’s also useful for those interested in building integrations with Ansible for their own platforms.

What topics will this track cover? 

In Ansible Integrations, we’ll highlight the impact of Ansible combined with a variety of technologies and use cases. We will highlight how Ansible allows easy management of application lifecycles, how Ansible helps enable management of containers in the public cloud, how XLAB worked to build certified collections for Ansible, how to customize your base operating system image and much more! 

What should attendees expect to learn from this track? 

Attendees should expect to learn Continue reading

The Myth Of Peak Performance

High performance computing isn’t what it used to be. Performance, in particular, has become a slippery metric as a result of the design constraints of modern clustered systems.  …

The Myth Of Peak Performance was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.

HPE Takes VMware Cloud Users On Its Synergy Journey To Greenlake

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has been aggressive in extending the tentacles of its GreenLake cloud-like IT consumption model since announcing the technology in mid-2018. …

HPE Takes VMware Cloud Users On Its Synergy Journey To Greenlake was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

3 leading network access control products reviewed

Real IT users evaluate network access control solutions: Cisco Identity Services Engine, Aruba ClearPass and ForeScout CounterACT. (Download the 27-page comparison.)

3 leading network access control products reviewed

Real IT users evaluate network access control solutions: Cisco Identity Services Engine, Aruba ClearPass and ForeScout CounterACT. (Download the 27-page comparison.)

Celebrating Linux’s 28 years

Linux just turned 28 years old. From its modest beginnings as an interesting project to the OS that now empowers all 500 of the top 500 supercomputers, along with a huge variety of tiny embedded devices, its place in today's computing world is unparalleled.I was still working with SunOS at the time that Linux was announced — a couple years before it evolved into the System V based Solaris. The full ramifications of what it would mean to be "open source" weren't clear at the time. I was in love with Unix, and this clearly related newborn was of some interest, but not enough to draw me away from the servers I was managing and articles I was writing in those days.To read this article in full, please click here

Impostor Syndrome and Loser DNA

Most of you are probably already familiar with impostor syndrome. Wikipedia defines it as:

Despite external evidence of their competence, those experiencing this phenomenon remain convinced that they are frauds, and do not deserve all they have achieved. Individuals with impostorism incorrectly attribute their success to luck, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent than they perceive themselves to be.

Basically, it’s the feeling that you don’t really know how things work and one day you’ll get caught, your lies will be exposed, and the world will come crashing down.

Let me let you in on a secret, all people has likely felt as an impostor at times. Even the people you look up to the most. Lately, there has been a lot of tweets and blog posts on impostor syndrome, and that is great. Raising awareness is the first step. However, not many people are saying what to do about it or how to prevent you from developing a “loser DNA”. What is loser DNA?

My Friend Nick Russo wrote about it after listening to Gary Vaynerchuck. Loser DNA is when you compare yourself to others that are, at least according to you, a lot more advanced Continue reading