Meta-learning neural Bloom filters

Meta-learning neural bloom filters Rae et al., ICML’19

Bloom filters are wonderful things, enabling us to quickly ask whether a given set could possibly contain a certain value. They produce this answer while using minimal space and offering O(1) inserts and lookups. It’s no wonder Bloom filters and their derivatives (the family of approximate set membership algorithms) are used everywhere. Hash functions are the key to so many great algorithms, and Bloom filters are one of my favourite applications of them.

But Rae et al. think we can do even better, especially when it comes to the space required by an approximate set membership data structure. Being an ICLR paper of course, you won’t be surprised to learn that the solution involves neural networks. This puts us in the same territory as SageDB and ‘The case for learned index structures.’ Probably my favourite sentence in the whole paper is this one, which crisply sets out where machine learning might be able to find an advantage over traditional algorithms:

We build upon the recently growing literature on using neural networks to replace algorithms that are configured by heuristics, or do not take advantage of the data distribution.

Bloom Continue reading

Get Ready for the Tech Preview of Docker Desktop for WSL 2

Today at OSCON, Scott Hanselman, Kayla Cinnamon, and Yosef Durr of Microsoft demonstrated some of the new capabilities coming with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2, including how it will be integrated with Docker Desktop. As part of this demonstration, we are excited to announce that users can now sign up for the end of July Docker Desktop Technical Preview of WSL 2. WSL 2 is the second generation of a compatibility layer for running Linux binary executables natively on Windows. Since it was announced at Microsoft Build, we have been working in partnership with Microsoft to deliver an improved Linux experience for Windows developers and invite everyone to sign up for the upcoming Technical Preview release.

Improving the Linux Experience on Windows

There are over half a million active users of Docker Desktop for Windows today and many of them are building Java and Node.js applications targeting Linux-based server environments. Leveraging WSL 2 will make the Docker developer experience more seamless no matter what operating system you’re running and what type of application you’re building. And the performance improvements will be immediately noticeable.
WSL 2 introduces a significant architectural change as it is a full Linux kernel built Continue reading

Worst DNS attacks and how to mitigate them

The Domain Name System remains under constant attack, and there seems to be no end in sight as threats grow increasingly sophisticated.DNS, known as the internet’s phonebook, is part of the global internet infrastructure that translates between familiar names and the numbers computers need to access a website or send an email. While DNS has long been the target of assailants looking to steal all manner of corporate and private information, the threats in the past year or so indicate a worsening of the situation.To read this article in full, please click here

Worst DNS attacks and how to mitigate them

The Domain Name System remains under constant attack, and there seems to be no end in sight as threats grow increasingly sophisticated.DNS, known as the internet’s phonebook, is part of the global internet infrastructure that translates between familiar names and the numbers computers need to access a website or send an email. While DNS has long been the target of assailants looking to steal all manner of corporate and private information, the threats in the past year or so indicate a worsening of the situation.To read this article in full, please click here

The Field Guide to the Cloud Networking Sessions at VMworld 2019

Meet the expanded VMware NSX Product Family

Last year, we expanded the VMware NSX family of products to include NSX Data Center, NSX Cloud, AppDefense, VMware SD-WAN by Velocloud, NSX Hybrid Connect and NSX Service Mesh. This year, AVI Networks has joined our family. 

With the combined portfolio, we’re delivering on the Virtual Cloud Network vision of connecting, automating and protecting applications and data, regardless of where they are— from the data center, to the cloud and the edge. NSX delivers the full L2-7 services, enabling the public cloud experience for on-premises environments. 

Join us at VMworld US 2019

We will have an exciting line-up for VMworld US 2019. Our engineers, technologists and customers will be speaking on 80+ topics throughout the conference spanning beginner to advanced levels throughout the conference. Some session topics include:

  • Multi-cloud Networking
  • Container Networking
  • Multi-site Networking
  • Network Automation
  • Service Mesh 

Cloud Networking Sessions at VMworld

In this post, we will focus on our cloud networking sessions and showcase keynotes. Use this handy guide to begin planning your exciting week and bookmark the sessions you want to attend. 

If you’re interested in security focused sessions, read the blog Continue reading

Smart cities offer window into the evolution of enterprise IoT technology

Powering smart cities is one of the most ambitious use cases for the internet of things (IoT), combining a wide variety of IoT technologies to create coherent systems that span not just individual buildings or campuses but entire metropolises. As such, smart cities offer a window into the evolution of enterprise IoT technologies and implementations on the largest scale.And that’s why I connected with Christophe Fourtet, CSO and co-founder of Sigfox, a French global network operator, to learn more about using wireless networks to connect large numbers of low-power objects, ranging from smartwatches to electricity meters. (And I have to admit I was intrigued by the 0G network moniker, which conjured visions of weightless IoT devices floating in space, or maybe OG-style old-school authenticity. That’s not at all what it’s about, of course.)To read this article in full, please click here

A Tale of Two (APT) Transports

A Tale of Two (APT) Transports

Securing access to your APT repositories is critical. At Cloudflare, like in most organizations, we used a legacy VPN to lock down who could reach our internal software repositories. However, a network perimeter model lacks a number of features that we consider critical to a team’s security.

As a company, we’ve been moving our internal infrastructure to our own zero-trust platform, Cloudflare Access. Access added SaaS-like convenience to the on-premise tools we managed. We started with web applications and then moved resources we need to reach over SSH behind the Access gateway, for example Git or user-SSH access. However, we still needed to handle how services communicate with our internal APT repository.

We recently open sourced a new APT transport which allows customers to protect their private APT repositories using Cloudflare Access. In this post, we’ll outline the history of APT tooling, APT transports and introduce our new APT transport for Cloudflare Access.

A brief history of APT

Advanced Package Tool, or APT, simplifies the installation and removal of software on Debian and related Linux distributions. Originally released in 1998, APT was to Debian what the App Store was to modern smartphones - a decade ahead of its time!

Continue reading

BrandPost: Assessing Your Current WAN State is Key to Making Effective Changes

If your wide-area network (WAN) has been with you for many years, it may be time to think about an upgrade, especially given the emergence of technologies such as software-defined WANs (SD-WAN). But rather than just dive in, assuming SD-WAN will be a good fit, it’s helpful to perform an assessment of your current situation and what outcomes you’d like to see out of an upgrade.Making this type of assessment means asking a series of questions, the answers to which may – or may not – lead you toward adopting SD-WAN technology. To learn what sort of questions to ask, I talked with Mike Lawson, Manager of SD-WAN/NFV Solutions Architecture for CenturyLink, a global network provider.Lawson spends his time in the trenches with network architects and customers, accumulating an excellent sense of whether a company is a good candidate for SD-WAN.To read this article in full, please click here

I Was A 10x Engineer. And I’m Sorry.

You probably saw the big discussion this past weekend on Twitter about 10x Engineers. It all started with a tweet about how to recognize a 10x Engineer, followed by tons of responses about how useless they were and how people that had encountered them were happy to be rid of them. All that discussion made me think back to my old days as a Senior Network Rock Star. As I reminisced I realized that I was, in fact, a 10x Engineer. And I was miserable.

Pour Some Work On Me

I wasn’t always the epitome of engineering hatred. I used to be a wide-eyed technician with a hunger to learn things. I worked on a variety of systems all over the place. In fact, I was rising through the ranks of my company as a Novell Engineer in an environment with plenty of coverage. I was just learning the ropes and getting ready to take my place in a group of interchangeable people.

Then I started getting into networking. I spent more time learning about routers and switches and even firewalls. That meant that my skill set was changing from servers to appliances. It also meant that I was Continue reading

Campus design feature set-up : Part 6

I’ve been going through how to set up the CL 3.7.5 campus feature: Multi-Domain Authentication in a 6-part blog series and I’m happy to say we’ve made it to the last one.

If you’ve stuck with me through this series, you’d know that in blogs 1-5 we had guides for Wired 802.1x using Aruba ClearPass, Wired MAC Authentication using Aruba ClearPass, Multi-Domain Authentication using Aruba ClearPass, Wired 802.1x using Cisco ISE and Wired MAC Authentication using Cisco ISE

Now that we’re at the end of the road, this final guide will enable Multi-Domain Authentication in Cumulus Linux 3.7.5+ using Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine) 2.4, Patch 8.

Keep in mind that this step-by-step guide assumes that you have already performed an initial setup of Cisco ISE and read part four and part five of this blog series.

Over the past year, Cumulus Networks has made a concerted effort to expand the breadth and scope of the campus features within Cumulus Linux. Hot off the press in 3.7.5 is one of those features, Multi-Domain Authentication (MDA).

Classically, MDA allows for a Voice VLAN and Data VLAN to be configured Continue reading

Docker’s Contribution to Authentication for Windows Containers in Kubernetes

When Docker Enterprise added support for Windows containers running on Swarm with the release of Windows Server 2016, we had to tackle challenges that are less pervasive in pure Linux environments. Chief among these was Active Directory authentication for container-based services using Group Managed Service Accounts, or gMSAs. With nearly 3 years of experience deploying and running Windows container applications in production, Docker has solved for a number of complexities that come with managing gMSAs in a container-based world. We are pleased to have contributed that work to upstream Kubernetes.

Challenges with gMSA in Containerized Environments

Aside from being used for authentication across multiple instances, gMSAs solves for two additional problems: 
  1. Containers cannot join the domain, and;
  2. When you start a container, you never really know which host in your cluster it’s going to run on. You might have three replicas running across hosts A, B, and C today and then tomorrow you have four replicas running across hosts Q, R, S, and T. 
One way to solve for this transience is to place the gMSA credential specifications for your service on each and every host where the containers for that service might run, and then repeat that for Continue reading

Public internet should be all software-defined

The public internet should migrate to a programmable backbone-as-a-service architecture, says a team of network engineers behind NOIA, a startup promising to revolutionize global traffic. They say the internet will be more efficient if internet protocols and routing technologies are re-worked and then combined with a traffic-trading blockchain.It’s “impossible to use internet for modern applications,” the company says on its website. “Almost all global internet companies struggle to ensure uptime and reliable user experience.”That’s because modern techniques aren’t being introduced fully, NOIA says. The engineers say algorithms should be implemented to route traffic and that segment routing technology should be adopted. Plus, blockchain should be instigated to trade internet transit capacity. A “programmable internet solves the web’s inefficiencies,” a representative from NOIA told me.To read this article in full, please click here

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