On today’s Tech Bytes, sponsored by Silver Peak, we talk with homeware retailer Dunelm about how they rearchitected their WAN to improve the in-store experience for customers, lower IT costs and boost the bottom line.
The post Tech Bytes: UK Retailer Revitalizes In-Store Experience With Silver Peak SD-WAN Platform (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.
After a few weeks of venting my frustrations on Twitter I finally completed Microsoft Azure Networking slide deck last week and published the related demos on GitHub.
I will use the slide deck in a day-long workshop in Zurich (Switzerland) on June 12th and run a series of live webinar sessions in autumn. If you’re a (paid) subscriber you can already download the slides and it would be great if you’d have time to attend the Zurich workshop – it’s infinitely better to discuss interesting challenges face-to-face than to type questions in a virtual classroom.
RPCValet: NI-driven tail-aware balancing of µs-scale RPCs Daglis et al., ASPLOS’19
Last week we learned about the [increased tail-latency sensitivity of microservices based applications with high RPC fan-outs. Seer uses estimates of queue depths to mitigate latency spikes on the order of 10-100ms, in conjunction with a cluster manager. Today’s paper choice, RPCValet, operates at latencies 3 orders of magnitude lower, targeting reduction in tail latency for services that themselves have service times on the order of a small number of µs (e.g., the average service time for memcached is approximately 2µs).
The net result of rapid advancements in the networking world is that inter-tier communications latency will approach the fundamental lower bound of speed-of-light propagation in the foreseeable future. The focus of optimization hence will completely shift to efficiently handling RPCs at the endpoints as soon as they are delivered from the network.
Furthermore, the evaluation shows that “RPCValet leaves no significant room for improvement” when compared against the theoretical ideal (it comes within 3-15%). So what we have here is a glimpse of the limits for low-latency RPCs under load. When it’s no longer physically possible to go meaningfully faster, further application-level performance Continue reading

Recently at Netdev 0x13, the Conference on Linux Networking in Prague, I gave a short talk titled "Linux at Cloudflare". The talk ended up being mostly about BPF. It seems, no matter the question - BPF is the answer.
Here is a transcript of a slightly adjusted version of that talk.

At Cloudflare we run Linux on our servers. We operate two categories of data centers: large "Core" data centers, processing logs, analyzing attacks, computing analytics, and the "Edge" server fleet, delivering customer content from 180 locations across the world.
In this talk, we will focus on the "Edge" servers. It's here where we use the newest Linux features, optimize for performance and care deeply about DoS resilience.

Our edge service is special due to our network configuration - we are extensively using anycast routing. Anycast means that the same set of IP addresses are announced by all our data centers.
This design has great advantages. First, it guarantees the optimal speed for end users. No matter where you are located, you will always reach the closest data center. Then, anycast helps us to spread out DoS traffic. During attacks each of the locations receives a small fraction of Continue reading
“We expect more people to build frameworks on top of Kubernetes,” said Janet Kuo, a software...

Are you based in Moscow? Cloudflare is partnering with Yandex to produce a meetup this month in Yandex's Moscow headquarters. We would love to invite you to join us to learn about the newest in the Internet industry. You'll join Cloudflare's users, stakeholders from the tech community, and Engineers and Product Managers from both Cloudflare and Yandex.
Tuesday, May 30, 2019: 18:00 - 22:00
Location: Yandex - Ulitsa L'va Tolstogo, 16, Moskva, Russia, 119021
Talks will include "Performance and scalability at Cloudflare”, "Security at Yandex Cloud", and "Edge computing".
Speakers will include Evgeny Sidorov, Information Security Engineer at Yandex, Ivan Babrou, Performance Engineer at Cloudflare, Alex Cruz Farmer, Product Manager for Firewall at Cloudflare, and Olga Skobeleva, Solutions Engineer at Cloudflare.
Agenda:
18:00 - 19:00 - Registration and welcome cocktail
19:00 - 19:10 - Cloudflare overview
19:10 - 19:40 - Performance and scalability at Cloudflare
19:40 - 20:10 - Security at Yandex Cloud
20:10 - 20:40 - Cloudflare security solutions and industry security trends
20:40 - 21:10 - Edge computing
Q&A
The talks will be followed by food, drinks, and networking.
View Event Details & Register Here »
We'll Continue reading
Following on the heels of DockerCon SF, the team is packing their bags and heading to Barcelona for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU from May 20- 23. Docker employees, community members and Docker captains will be there speaking about and demonstrating Docker and Kubernetes.
Stop by Booth G14 to learn more about our Docker Kubernetes Services (DKS), which is part of the recently announced Docker Enterprise 3.0. Docker Enterprise 3.0 is the only container platform that provides a simple and integrated desktop-to-cloud experience for both Docker and Kubernetes.
Get involved in and learn more about some of the projects Docker has been working on with the Kubernetes community:
Also, there is an opportunity to join Docker and Microsoft in contributing to the Cloud Native Application Bundle (CNAB) specification – an Continue reading
Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm blames European government officials and regulators for letting Europe...
Cray recently won a portion of the U.S. Department of Energy’s $600 million exascale...
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has reached the top of the HPC sector in an unconventional way, but one that could prove truly transformative for its new acquisition, legendary supercomputer maker Cray. …
With Cray Deal, HPE Finally Enters The HPC Big Leagues was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
LF Edge announced the Edge Virtualization Engine (EVE) as a new open source project when it...