Interactive checks for coordination avoidance

Interactive checks for coordination avoidance Whittaker & Hellerstein et al., VLDB’19

I am so pleased to see a database systems paper addressing the concerns of the application developer!

To the developer, a strongly consistent system behaves exactly like a single-threaded system running on a single node, so reasoning about the behaviour of the system is simple¹. Unfortunately strong consistency is at odds with performance… On the other hand weak consistency models… put a tremendous burden on the application designer to reason about the complex interleavings of operations that are allowed by these weak consistency models.

To be able to reason effectively about a system, it’s tremendously helpful to be able to rely on some things that we know will always be true. The fancy word for those is invariants, because whatever happens they never vary. A example class of application invariants is database integrity constraints. Unfortunately, under weak consistency models finding solid ground to reason about invariants is really hard:

Even if every transaction executing in a weakly consistent system individually maintains an application invariant, the system as a whole can produce invariant-violating states.

In a distributed setting with weak consistency, an object is replicated across a Continue reading

Updated: Never-Ending Story of IP Fragmentation

In mid 2000s I wrote a number of articles describing various TCP/IP features. Most of them are a bit outdated, so I decided to clean up, update and repost the most interesting ones on ipSpace.net, starting with Never-Ending Story of IP Fragmentation.

The first part of that article is already online, covering MTU basics and drawbacks of IP fragmentation.

VMware boosts load balancing, security intelligence, analytics

SAN FRANCISCO – VMware has added new features to its core networking software that will let customers more securely control cloud application traffic running on virtual machines, containers or bare metal. At its VMworld event, the company announced a new version of the company’s NSX networking software with support for the cloud-based advanced load balancer technology it recently acquired from Avi Networks.[ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.] The load balancer is included in VMware vRealize Network Insight 5.0 and tied to NSX Intelligence software that lets customers optimize network performance and availability in virtual and physical networks. The load balancer includes a web application firewall and analytics features to help customers securely control and manage traffic. To read this article in full, please click here

VMware boosts load balancing, security intelligence, analytics

SAN FRANCISCO – VMware has added new features to its core networking software that will let customers more securely control cloud application traffic running on virtual machines, containers or bare metal. At its VMworld event, the company announced a new version of the company’s NSX networking software with support for the cloud-based advanced load balancer technology it recently acquired from Avi Networks.[ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.] The load balancer is included in VMware vRealize Network Insight 5.0 and tied to NSX Intelligence software that lets customers optimize network performance and availability in virtual and physical networks. The load balancer includes a web application firewall and analytics features to help customers securely control and manage traffic. To read this article in full, please click here

VMware boosts load-balancing, security intelligence, analytics

SAN FRANCISCO – VMware has added new features to its core networking software that will let customers more securely control cloud application traffic running on virtual machines, containers or bare metal. At its VMworld event, the company announced a new version of the company’s NSX networking software with support for the cloud-based advanced load balancer technology it recently acquired from Avi Networks.[ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.] The load balancer is included in VMware vRealize Network Insight 5.0 and tied to NSX Intelligence software that lets customers optimize network performance and availability in virtual and physical networks. The load balancer includes a web application firewall and analytics features to help customers securely control and manage traffic. To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: SD-WAN Offers Unprecedented Deployment Flexibility on the WAN

Deployment flexibility is one of the most interesting aspects of software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) technology. Some solution providers offer total flexibility, while others are quite prescriptive. EMA has studied SD-WAN deployment flexibility and found a wide variety of enterprise strategies in practice today. Individual network teams will have to decide for themselves what works for them. EMA identified several aspects of SD-WAN deployment flexibility that enterprises should consider when selecting a solution. Procurement Flexibility: Selecting Your Solution Provider First, there is the question of procurement strategy. Like many classes of technology, enterprises have many options for buying and installing SD-WAN technology. EMA found that the most popular approach (34%) is to buy SD-WAN from a WAN service provider or internet service provider. Many network providers offer managed SD-WAN services or simply resell SD-WAN technology.To read this article in full, please click here

Dell, VMware Unveil SD-WAN Hardware, SmartFabric Director

Customizing your network

Open networking is based on open standards, interoperability, and open source software such as Linux. One of the things that has made Linux so ubiquitous is the unparalleled control it offers to users in terms of customization and building intelligence into the network. Much of this advantage comes in the form of the automation and orchestration possible with Linux-based networking.

First adopted by hobbyists, widespread use of Linux in production environments only started to take off in the mid-1990s in the supercomputing field, where organizations such as NASA started to replace their overly expensive hardware with clusters of inexpensive commodity computers running Linux. Today, Linux systems are used throughout computing.

Linux can be found in servers, clouds, and network equipment. Linux is ubiquitous in the embedded systems space, and is the operating system upon which virtually all modern supercomputers are built. Even Microsoft (which once derided Linux as “a cancer”) now champions Linux, building its own Linux distributions for its Azure cloud networking and making it possible to run Linux on top of Windows.

Linux offers organizations numerous ways to automate devices and workloads. This includes task scheduling, scripting, automation, and policy management. Because Linux is used widely in so Continue reading

Improving Internet Trust: Ironing out the Details

We all can make some pretty rash decisions under stress. I once burned a hole through my undershirt instead of ironing my button-down shirt because I was so nervous before a presentation.

The Internet has its challenges and sometimes can seem like a scary place. In the 2019 survey, the CIGI-Ipsos Global Survey on Internet Security and Trust, 62% of respondents who said they distrust the Internet cited a lack of Internet security as a reason why.

When it comes to facing challenges on the Internet, everyone, from average Internet users to government officials, tends to act the same way I do before presentations – frantically and with questionable results.

In pursuit of security, some governments are making decisions that could harm the Internet as we know it. They’ve taken actions that could weaken digital security, have the potential to fracture the Internet, and some have even shut the Internet down in their country. Like burning a hole through an undershirt and having to wear a wrinkled button-down shirt to a presentation, these actions do little, and make things worse.

The survey results highlighted in our report, “The State of User Privacy and Trust Online,” tell a Continue reading

VMware Adds Load Balancer, Analytics Engine to NSX

Rackspace Targets Hybrid-Cloud Adoption With New Services

AnsibleFest Atlanta – Security Automation

Security Automation seems to be a growing topic of interest. This year at AnsibleFest we will have a track for Security Automation. We talked with Track Lead Massimo Ferrari to learn more about the Security Automation track and the sessions within it. 

Who is this track best for? 

This track is intended for professionals in security operations and vulnerability management who want to learn how Ansible can support and simplify their activities, and automation experts tasked to expand the footprint of their automation practice and support security teams in their organization.

What topics will this track cover? 

Sessions included in this track cover how to introduce and consume Ansible Automation in different stages of maturity of a security or cross-functional organization. They include guidance from Red Hat subject matter experts, customer stories and technical deep downs from partners that are suitable for both automation veterans and security professionals looking at automation for the first time.

What should attendees expect to learn from this track? 

People attending the sessions in this track will learn how Ansible can be leveraged in security environments to support activities like incident investigation and response, compliance enforcement and Continue reading

How to build a startup evaluation toolkit

In the first installment of our startup evaluation guide, we cover five essential tools you need to ensure you are heading in the right direction.

Qualcomm Links WiFi 6 to 5G in New Products

Bootstrapping a Kubernetes Cluster on AWS with Cluster API

Yesterday I published a high-level overview of Cluster API (CAPI) that provides an introduction to some of the concepts and terminology in CAPI. In this post, I’d like to walk readers through actually using CAPI to bootstrap a Kubernetes cluster on AWS.

It’s important to note that all of the information shared here is also found in the “Getting Started” guide in the AWS provider’s GitHub repository. My purpose here is provide an additional walkthrough that supplements that official documentation, not to supplant the official documentation, and to spread the word about how the process works.

Four basic steps are involved in bootstrapping a Kubernetes cluster on AWS using CAPI:

1. Installing the necessary tools (a one-time task)
2. Preparing the AWS account with the correct IAM roles and policies (this is a one-time task)
3. Creating a management cluster (not required every single time)
4. Creating a workload cluster

The following sections take a look at each of these steps in a bit more detail. First, though, I think it’s important to mention that CAPI is still in its early days (it’s currently at v1alpha1). As such, it’s possible that commands may (will) change, and API specifications may (will) change as further development Continue reading

5 Things That Happen When You Get Locked In to an Application Platform

The Consequences of Application Platform Lock-in 

If you’ve worked in IT for a few years, you’ve seen it happen. You select an application framework, operating system, database platform, or other infrastructure because it meets the checklist, the price is right, or sometimes because of internal politics. You quickly discover that it doesn’t play well with other solutions or across platforms — except of course it’s “easy and seamless” when used with offerings from the same vendor.

But try telling your developers that they can’t use their favorite framework, development toolset, or have to use a specific operating system for everything they do. If developers feel like they don’t have flexibility, they quickly adopt their own tools, creating a second wave of shadow IT.

And it doesn’t just affect developers. IT operations and security get bogged down in managing multiple systems and software sprawl. The business suffers because efficiency and innovation lag when teams get caught up in fighting fires.

Below are 5 things that can go wrong when you get locked in to an infrastructure platform:

#1 Other Platforms Become Inaccessible

Will the platform you pick work with any combination of public and private clouds? Will you get cornered into Continue reading

How “Fresh” is That Privacy Statement?

One of the best practices we advocate and measure in our Online Trust Audit is that privacy statements should have a date stamp visible at the top of the page. This is an issue of transparency and lets readers know when the statement was last updated. Combined with another advocated best practice – access to prior versions of the privacy statement, which unfortunately is offered by only 3% of sites – readers get a sense of what changed between versions and when those changes happened.

For the first time this year, we captured the actual date stamps of more than 1,000 privacy statements across the audited sectors, and though we made some high level comments in the Audit, we thought it would be insightful to show another layer of detail. One of the reasons we captured specific dates was the fact that many privacy statements were updated in the months prior to (or shortly after) May 25, 2018, when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in the European Union.

The graph below shows the date stamps from most to least recent (ending with those that have no date stamp) across the audited sectors. The green bars represent Continue reading

Microsoft’s Albert Greenberg, Fellow Networking Wizards Unite at Future:Net

VMware fortifies its hybrid-cloud portfolio with management, automation, AWS and Dell offerings

SAN FRANCISCO—VMware has uncorked a variety of software products and services aimed at letting customers more quickly and securely build and manage hybrid-cloud environments.More apps will be built and deployed in the next five years than in the last 40 to support workloads including analytics and connecting IoT devices, said Kip Colbert, vice president and cloud CTO for VMware, and that will require more expansive hybrid-cloud platform.RELATED: How Notre Dame is going all in with Amazon’s cloud VMware used its VMworld customer event here to expand its cloud role to Dell/EMC and broadened its role with Amazon Web Services (AWS). VMware's Cloud portfolio, its underlying hybrid-cloud platform, already supports Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud services, plus more than 60 VMware Cloud Verified partners. More than 70 million workloads run on VMware. Of these, 10 million are in the cloud, Colbert said.To read this article in full, please click here

Avi Networks — Same Team, Same Mission, New Home

Avi Networks is now part of VMware and our product is now called VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer. You can read about it here in our press release from VMworld.

But our story is far from over.

The acquisition marked VMware’s official entry into the ADC (Application Delivery Controller) space. The Avi team, which remains intact, is at the helm of delivering the world’s leading software-defined load balancing solution for VMware — both as a standalone platform for on-prem and multi-cloud environments and as an integrated VMware NSX solution.

We originally founded Avi Networks because we believed that the traditional ADC industry had failed its customers. Hardware and virtual appliances are rigid, cumbersome, and offer little automation or application insight. As enterprises re-architect applications as microservices, re-define the data center through software, and re-build infrastructure as hybrid and multi-cloud environments, ADC appliances work against the goals of modernizing enterprises.

This belief is shared by hundreds of the world’s largest companies that have decided to replace load balancing appliances with the Avi solution. VMware also believed this, which is why we are a part of the company today.

Avi re-imagined the ADC as a distributed Continue reading