BrandPost: Empowering Charitable Work with Scalable Cloud Networking Technology

Like most charitable organizations, The Salvation Army relies on volunteer help. Volunteers around the world serve people in need at service centers, retail stores, and satellite offices in metropolitan cities, rural communities, and at the scene of disaster areas. All of these locations have to stay online, connected, and sharing data, but with such a wide range of sites, networking is a challenge. Add in staff with varying levels of expertise and locations ranging in size from with one person at a small satellite office to hundreds at international headquarters, and you quickly have a very complicated situation on your hands.The wide variety of spaces and available talent to manage IT infrastructure has created a nightmare for network administrators trying to keep data flowing where it needs to go. That is, until the organization began upgrading to next-level networking, making configuration, setup, and maintenance of networks at each location far easier, and freeing up personnel—volunteer and otherwise—for more productive work.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Building the Network to Grow a Global Virtual Reality Company

This decade saw the spectacular rise of mobile devices as the platform of choice for everything from social media and gaming to customer service and online payments. Now it’s time for a new platform to revolutionize the way consumers and businesses engage with digital content. It’s time for the world to be introduced to the next generation of entertainment, shopping, healthcare, and more: augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR).According to research firm McKinsey, immersive computing could actually replace mobile devices. While it’s difficult to imagine anything approaching today’s ubiquity of smartphones, Goldman Sachs estimates that the emerging AR and VR industry could see up to $182 billion in annual revenue by 2025 –  a figure that far surpasses the current $88 billion in combined in-home entertainment and movie box office revenues.To read this article in full, please click here

Reaction: Overly Attached

In a recent edition of ACM Queue, Kate Matsudaira has an article discussing the problem of being overly attached to a project or solution.

The longer you work on one system or application, the deeper the attachment. For years you have been investing in it—adding new features, updating functionality, fixing bugs and corner cases, polishing, and refactoring. If the product serves a need, you likely reap satisfaction for a job well done (and maybe you even received some raises or promotions as a result of your great work).

Attachment is a two-edged sword—without some form of attachment, it seems there is no way to have pride in your work. On the other hand, attachment leads to poorly designed solutions. For instance, we all know the hyper-certified person who knows every in and out of a particular vendor’s solution, and hence solves every problem in terms of that vendor’s products. Or the person who knows a particular network automation system and, as a result, solves every problem through automation.

The most pernicious forms of attachment in the network engineering world are to a single technology or vendor. One of the cycles I have seen play out many times across the last Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Better Broadband Boosts Employment

High-speed jobs: A new study suggests that better broadband service lowers unemployment rates, Vice.com reports. Researchers from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and Oklahoma State University tracked broadband availability and unemployment rates in Tennessee and found that counties with access to high-speed broadband had a slightly lower unemployment rate than those with slower service.

More moderation: YouTube plans to remove white supremacist, hate speech and hoax videos, the Washington Post reports. The new policy will go farther than YouTube’s former prohibition on videos that promote violence or hatred against people based on their age, religious beliefs, gender, religion, immigration status and sexual orientation.

Encryption fight: Yandex, a provider of Internet-related services in Russia and the former Soviet Union, has reached an agreement with the Russian FSB security service on handing over encryption keys, Reuters reports. Details of the agreement weren’t immediately available. Yandex had originally resisted the FSB’s demand for encryption keys, Reuters says.

Bigger than the weather: U.S. residents believe fake news is a bigger problem than climate change or racism, according to a new survey detailed at Business Insider. Half of those surveyed said made-up news is a major problem, while just 46 said the Continue reading

Repost: Automation Without Simplification

The No Scripting Required to Start Your Automation Journey blog post generated lively discussions (and a bit of trolling from the anonymous peanut gallery). One of the threads focused on “how does automation work in real life IT department where it might be challenging to simplify operations before automating them due to many exceptions, legacy support…”

Here’s a great answer provided by another reader:

Read more ...

PyTorch-BigGraph: a large-scale graph embedding system

PyTorch-BigGraph: a large-scale graph embedding system Lerer et al., SysML’19

We looked at graph neural networks earlier this year, which operate directly over a graph structure. Via graph autoencoders or other means, another approach is to learn embeddings for the nodes in the graph, and then use these embeddings as inputs into a (regular) neural network:

Working with graph data directly is difficult, so a common technique is to use graph embedding methods to create vector representations for each node so that distances between these vectors predict the occurrence of edges in the graph.

When you’re Facebook, the challenge in learning embeddings is that the graph is big: over two billion user nodes, and over a trillion edges. Alibaba’s graph has more than one billion users and two billion items; Pinterest’s graph has more than 2 billion entities and over 17 billion edges. At this scale we have to find a way to divide-and-conquer. We’ll need to find some parallelism to embed graphs with trillions of edges in reasonable time, and a way of partitioning the problem so that we don’t need all of the embeddings in memory at each node (‘many standard methods exceed the memory Continue reading

BrandPost: Digital Transformation: IT Leaders Discuss SD-WAN’s Emerging Role

The digital economy is here, and the ability to innovatively meet ever evolving customer expectations has become the new reality.  For most organizations accomplishing this goal starts with digital transformation.In order to realize digital transformation benefits, companies need to move beyond a legacy network and invest in next generation components, according to participants in a recent IDG TechTalk Twitter chat.Unfortunately, past investments in legacy technology are still serving as a significant road block. A1) Issues such as technical debt, legacy security problems, poor/inconsistent Ops & maintenance, and a long list of infrastructure/bandwidth inadequacies can hold back #DigitalTransformation. #IdgTechTalkTo read this article in full, please click here

Automation Workflow Patterns

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

At A Glance: The Mid-Atlantic + Government Docker Summit

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.

Summit Recap by the Numbers:
  • 428 Registrations
  • 16 sessions
  • 7 sponsors
  • 3 Tracks (Tech, Business and Workshops)
Keynotes

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

Heavy Networking 454: Analyzing Encrypted Traffic In The TLS 1.3 Era With ExtraHop (Sponsored)

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.

1 … 1,213 1,214 1,215 1,216 1,217 … 3,841