You know the world is a different place when shipping 2.58 million servers in a quarter feels like a slowdown, a disappointment, and perhaps a leading indicator of an overall economic slowdown in the world. …
A New Era In Servers Is Starting Now was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
Workflows vary from seriously simple to notoriously complex and as humans, we might not even consciously observe the subtleties of what a workflow comprises of. Workflows are the source of control semantics and comprise of many elements, some obvious some not so. This post is a primer to help you think about the kind of workflows you encounter drawn from my experiences. This post offers a view with conviction backed by experience.
To set the tone, workflows have logical flow, temporal behaviour, consume and transmit data, for processing triggers, acting on decision points and returning states. Since the 1970s, I believe we haven’t actually come that far from a workflow orchestration standpoint. Atomic units of code exist that do one thing well, a real win for the 1970s and good automation systems understand how to instantiate, feed these atomic blobs of logic data and grab their exit state and content. On a *nix system, it’s possible to use bash to create a single chain of tasks using the | operator. One blob of logic effectively feeds it’s output to the next blob of logic. Who needs an orchestrator? It’s sensible to include detection logic within each blob of code to Continue reading
Last week, Docker hosted our 4th annual Mid-Atlantic and Government Docker Summit, a one-day technology conference held on Wednesday, May 29 near Washington, DC. Over 425 attendees in the public and private sector came together to share and learn about the trends driving change in IT from containers, cloud and DeVops. Specifically, the presenters shared content on topics including Docker Enterprise, our industry-leading container platform, Docker’s Kubernetes Service, Container Security and more.
Attendees were a mix of technology users and IT decision makers: everyone from developers, systems admins and architects to Sr. leaders and CTOs.
Highlights include a keynote by Docker’s EVP of Customer Success, Iain Gray, and a fireside chat by the former US CTO and Insight Ventures Partner, Nick Sinai, and current Federal US CIO, Suzette Kent.
The fireside highlighted top of mind issues for Kent and how that aligns with the White House IT Modernization Report; specifically modernization of current federal IT infrastructure and preparing and scaling the workforce. Kent mentioned, “The magic of IT modernization is marrying the technology with the people and the Continue reading
Today's Heavy Networking examines packet analysis with sponsor ExtraHop. We drill into the company's marketing claims about deep analysis at line rate with Mike Ernst, VP of Sales Engineering. We also tackle how ExtraHop handles encrypted traffic, incuding TLS 1.3 and Perfect Forward Secrecy. Mike promises to keep his inner salesperson on mute for this conversation.
The post Heavy Networking 454: Analyzing Encrypted Traffic In The TLS 1.3 Era With ExtraHop (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.
On the one hand, testing is all too often the roadblock that stands between highly accelerated Dev processes and highly automated ops-driven delivery processes. But on the other hand, testing is essential for ensuring that the release doesn’t place the business at risk — undermining the very “customer experience” Continue reading
That victory came on the back of its applications business, which generated $8.5 billion in...
SDxCentral Weekly Wrap for June 7, 2019: Nutanix is the latest to lose an exec to Google; BT taps...
You’ve probably heard many horror stories by now about the crazy interviews that companies in Silicon Valley put you though. Sure, some of the questions are downright silly. How would I know how to weigh the moon? But the most insidious are the ones designed to look like skills tests. You may have to spend an hour optimizing a bubble sort or writing some crazy code that honestly won’t have much impact on the outcome of what you’ll be doing for the company.
Practical skills tests have always been the joy and the bane of people the world over. Many disciplines require you to have a practical examination before you can be certified. Doctors are one. The Cisco CCIE is probably the most well-known in IT. But what is the test really quizzing you on? Most people will admit that the CCIE is an imperfect representation of a network at best. It’s a test designed to get people to think about networks in different ways. But what about other disciplines? What about the ones where time is even more of the essence than it was in CCIE lab?
I was at Palo Alto Networks Ignite19 this past Continue reading
The tech industry in Hong Kong and across the world remains male dominated. Why aren’t there more women and what can be done to fix this?
To mark International Girls in ICT Day, which aims to encourage girls and young women to work in information and communications technology, the Internet Society Hong Kong Chapter organized an event to tackle these questions. Ladies X Tech X Gents: How Are the Three Compatible? brought together four successful developers to lead the dialogue:
Why are there so few women in the tech industry?
A common observation among the speakers was the high dropout rate of women developers in the tech industry – amid the already low women to men ratio. The speakers noted that it drops from roughly 3:7 at school to 1:10 at work.
One of the main reasons women leave the tech industry is the gender stereotype that it is a masculine profession. Continue reading
Probably you aren’t good enough
The post Where to find quality network engineers? appeared first on EtherealMind.
More and more of the networking that is done in the datacenter is performed on software-defined networking whiteboxes rather than on proprietary black box machinery that was controlled by one supplier. …
Getting Smart About Software-Defined Networks was written by Daniel Robinson at .
Roy Chua (SDx Central) published a blog post titled “Where Have All the SDN Controllers Gone” a while ago describing the gradual disappearance of SDN controller hype.
No surprise there - some of us were pointing out the gap between marketing and reality years ago.
It was evident to anyone familiar with how networking actually works that in a generic environment the drawbacks of orthodox centralized control plane SDN approach far outweigh its benefits. There are special use cases like intelligent patch panels where a centralized control plane makes sense.
Read more ...Towards federated learning at scale: system design Bonawitz et al., SysML 2019
This is a high level paper describing Google’s production system for federated learning. One of the most interesting things to me here is simply to know that Google are working on this, have a first version in production working with tens of millions of devices, and see significant future expansion for the technology (‘we anticipate uses where the number of devices reaches billions’).
So what exactly is federated learning?
Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning approach which enables training on a large corpus of decentralized data residing on devices like mobile phones. FL is one instance of the more general approach of “bringing the code to the data, instead of the data to the code” and addresses the fundamental problems of privacy, ownership, and locality of data.
Note that this beyond using an on-device model to make predictions based on local data. Here we’re actually training the model in a distributed fashion, using data collected on the devices, without the data ever leaving those devices. The FL system contains a number of privacy-enhancing building blocks, but the privacy guarantees of any end-to-end system Continue reading
The new PoE switch and WiFi access point bolster its software-led equipment products as it battles...
