Rant: Some Internet Service Providers Should Really Know Better…

I was listening to a nice podcast with Nick Buraglio discussing the recent BGP hijack SNAFU impacting Cloudflare (and their reaction) and while I usually totally agree with Nick, I think that he tried to be way too nice when saying (paraphrasing) “I think Cloudflare was a bit harsh - I would prefer a more community-oriented approach along the lines of how could we help you do your job better

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Heavy Networking 460: Extending The Life Of Your Cabling Plant With InterOptic (Sponsored)

On today's Heavy Networking, sponsored by InterOptic, we explore how to extend the life of your cabling plant as you grow to 100G Ethernet. We get very nerdy on cabling, modules, lasers, and more with guests Robert Coenen, VP of Business Development at Interoptic; and Alex Latzko, lead network architect at Server Central Turing Group.

The post Heavy Networking 460: Extending The Life Of Your Cabling Plant With InterOptic (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

RightsCon 2019: Human Rights in the Digital Age

Since its creation in 2011, RightsCon has gathered people from different sectors to discuss human rights in the digital age. It started as an event with a few hundred experts, but has become a major conference, with nearly 3000 participants in 2019. The 2019 program consisted of 17 tracks focusing on major issues, which totalized more than 450 sessions held in a period of four days.

As the conference started to attract a wider group of people, it adopted a series of measures to increase its diversity. The recent host countries, including Tunisia and Costa Rica, reflect the worldwide nature of the event, which now gathers individuals from all over the globe.

RightsCon has also gathered a considerable number of young people. They’ve had the opportunity to connect not only through regular conference activities, but during a summit on Day Zero. The summit aimed to engage youth and also brief them on the discussions taking place during the  rest of RightsCon.

The sessions at RightsCon were designed with different formats, which was reflected in the physical structure of the meeting rooms. They were organized not just in an audience format, but also roundtables, allowing for people to feel equal footing Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For July 19th, 2019

Wake up! It's HighScalability time—once again:

 

XKCD

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? I'd greatly appreciate 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 52 mostly 5 star reviews (118 on Goodreads). They'll learn a lot and hold you in even greater awe.

 

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)...

10x Engineers – Don’t Believe The Hype

The idea of a 10x engineer is just too good to be true. In this Short Take I take a look at the recent controversy and share my thoughts about the twitter thread that sparked it all. Here’s a hint, there’s no such thing as a 10x engineer but there are some things to be learned from what the author had to say.

Jordan Martin
Host

The post 10x Engineers – Don’t Believe The Hype appeared first on Network Collective.

Ansible + ServiceNow Part 2: Parsing facts from network devices using PyATS/Genie

blog_ansible-and-service-now-part2

This blog is part two in a series covering how Red Hat Ansible Automation can integrate with ticket automation. This time we’ll cover dynamically adding a set of network facts from your switches and routers and into your ServiceNow tickets. If you missed Part 1 of this blog series, you can refer to it via the following link: Ansible + ServiceNow Part 1: Opening and Closing Tickets.

Suppose there was a certain network operating system software version that contained an issue you knew was always causing problems and making your uptime SLA suffer. How could you convince your management to finance an upgrade project? How could you justify to them that the fix would be well worth the cost? Better yet, how would you even know?

A great start would be having metrics that you could track. The ability to data mine against your tickets would prove just how many tickets were involved with hardware running that buggy software version. In this blog, I’ll show you how to automate adding a set of facts to all of your tickets going forward. Indisputable facts can then be pulled directly from the device with no chance of mistakes or accidentally being overlooked Continue reading

Securing infrastructure at scale with Cloudflare Access

Securing infrastructure at scale with Cloudflare Access

I rarely have to deal with the hassle of using a corporate VPN and I hope it remains this way. As a new member of the Cloudflare team, that seems possible. Coworkers who joined a few years ago did not have that same luck. They had to use a VPN to get any work done. What changed?

Cloudflare released Access, and now we’re able to do our work without ever needing a VPN again. Access is a way to control access to your internal applications and infrastructure. Today, we’re releasing a new feature to help you replace your VPN by deploying Access at an even greater scale.

Access in an instant

Access replaces a corporate VPN by evaluating every request made to a resource secured behind Access. Administrators can make web applications, remote desktops, and physical servers available at dedicated URLs, configured as DNS records in Cloudflare. These tools are protected via access policies, set by the account owner, so that only authenticated users can access those resources. These end users are able to be authenticated over both HTTPS and SSH requests. They’re prompted to login with their SSO credentials and Access redirects them to the application or server.

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TOGAF 9 Certified

After passing more technical certification tests than I care to count, the concept of studying for a non-technical exam seemed surreal. Studying for exam that was not going to teach or test me about protocols, signals, or configurations just sounded so foreign. I do have to admit that there were doubts, the thought of studying […]

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