Argo and the Cloudflare Global Private Backbone

Argo and the Cloudflare Global Private Backbone
Argo and the Cloudflare Global Private Backbone

Welcome to Speed Week! Each day this week, we’re going to talk about something Cloudflare is doing to make the Internet meaningfully faster for everyone.

Cloudflare has built a massive network of data centers in 180 cities in 75 countries. One way to think of Cloudflare is a global system to transport bits securely, quickly, and reliably from any point A to any other point B on the planet.

To make that a reality, we built Argo. Argo uses real-time global network information to route around brownouts, cable cuts, packet loss, and other problems on the Internet. Argo makes the network that Cloudflare relies on—the Internet—faster, more reliable, and more secure on every hop around the world.

We launched Argo two years ago, and it now carries over 22% of Cloudflare’s traffic. On an average day, Argo cuts the amount of time Internet users spend waiting for content by 112 years!

As Cloudflare and our traffic volumes have grown, it now makes sense to build our own private backbone to add further security, reliability, and speed to key connections between Cloudflare locations.

Today, we’re introducing the Cloudflare Global Private Backbone. It’s been in operation for a while now and links Continue reading

HPE’s CEO lays out his technology vision

Like Microsoft's Satya Nadella, HPE CEO Antonio Neri is a technologist with a long history of leading initiatives in his company. Meg Whitman, his former boss at HPE, showed her appreciation of Neri’s acumen by promoting him to HPE Executive Vice President in 2015 – and gave him the green light to acquire Aruba, SimpliVity, Nimble Storage, and Plexxi, all of which added key items to HPE’s portfolio.To read this article in full, please click here

HPE’s CEO lays out his technology vision

Like Microsoft's Satya Nadella, HPE CEO Antonio Neri is a technologist with a long history of leading initiatives in his company. Meg Whitman, his former boss at HPE, showed her appreciation of Neri’s acumen by promoting him to HPE Executive Vice President in 2015 – and gave him the green light to acquire Aruba, SimpliVity, Nimble Storage, and Plexxi, all of which added key items to HPE’s portfolio.To read this article in full, please click here

Automating Brownfield Environments (Using an 802.1x Example)

This is a guest blog post by Albert Siersema, senior network and cloud engineer at Mediacaster.nl. He’s always busy broadening his horizons and helping his customers in (re)designing and automating their infrastructure deployment and management.

This is the second post in a series focused primarily on brownfield automation principles using 802.1x deployments as an example (you might want to read part 1 first).

Before diving into the specifics of the next 802.1x automation phase, let’s take a step back and think about why we’re going through this effort. Automation is a wonderful tool, but it’s not a goal… and neither is 802.1x a goal - it’s just another tool that can help us realize business benefits like:

Read more ...

An open-source benchmark suite for microservices and their hardware-software implications for cloud & edge systems

An open-source benchmark suite for microservices and their hardware-software implications for cloud & edge systems Gan et al., ASPLOS’19

Microservices are well known for producing ‘death star’ interaction diagrams like those shown below, where each point on the circumference represents an individual service, and the lines between them represent interactions.

Systems built with lots of microservices have different operational characteristics to those built from a small number of monoliths, we’d like to study and better understand those differences. That’s where ‘DeathStarBench’ comes in: a suite of five different microservices-based applications (one of which, a drone coordination platform called Swarm has two variations – one doing most compute in the cloud, and one offloading as much as possible to the edge). It’s a pretty impressive effort to pull together and make available in open source (not yet available as I write this) such a suite, and I’m sure explains much of the long list of 24 authors on this paper.

The suite is built using popular OSS applications and representative technologies, deliberately using a mix of languages (C/C++, Java, Javascript, node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, Scala, …) and both RESTful and RPC (Thrift, gRPC) style service interfaces. There’s a nice Continue reading

Welcome to Speed Week!

Welcome to Speed Week!
Welcome to Speed Week!

Every year, we celebrate Cloudflare’s birthday in September when we announce the products we’re releasing to help make the Internet better for everyone. We’re always building new and innovative products throughout the year, and having to pick five announcements for just one week of the year is always challenging. Last year we brought back Crypto Week where we shared new cryptography technologies we’re supporting and helping advance to help build a more secure Internet.

Today I’m thrilled to announce we are launching our first-ever Speed Week and we want to showcase some of the things that we’re obsessed with to make the Internet faster for everyone.

How much faster is faster?

When we built the software stack that runs our network, we knew that both security and speed are important to our customers, and they should never have to compromise one for the other. All of the products we’re announcing this week will help our customers have a better experience on the Internet with as much as a 50% improvement in page load times for websites, getting the  most out of HTTP/2’s features (while only lifting a finger to click the button that enables them), finding the optimal route across Continue reading

The Linux Migration: Preparing for the Migration

As far back as 2012, I was already thinking about migrating away from Mac OS X (now known as macOS). While the migration didn’t start in earnest until late 2016, a fair amount of work happened in advance of the migration. Since I’ve had a number of folks ask me about migrating to Linux, I thought I’d supplement my Linux migration series with a “prequel” about some of the work that happened to prepare for the migration.

In the end—and I imagine some folks may get upset or offended at this—an operating system (OS) is really just a vehicle to deliver applications to the user. While users like myself have strong preferences about their OS and how their OS works, ultimately it is the ability to “get things done” that really matters. This is why I ended up suspending my Linux migration in August 2017; I didn’t have access to the applications I needed in order to do what I needed to do. (Though, to be fair, part of that was a lack of growth on my part, though that’s a different blog post for a different day.)

To that end, most of the work I did in Continue reading

Worth Reading: Nothing Fails Like Success

I hope I'm still allowed to quote a paragraph from someone else's article (thank you, EU, you did a great job). Here's what Jeffrey Zeldman wrote about startup business models:

A family buys a house they can’t afford. They can’t make their monthly mortgage payments, so they borrow money from the Mob. Now they’re in debt to the bank and the Mob, live in fear of losing their home, and must do whatever their creditors tell them to do.

Read the article and think about how it applies to unicorn-based networking technologies ;)

Vortex Race3 Key Remap

I recently purchased the Vortex Race3 mechanical keyboard. I really love this keyboard, it has Cherry MX brown switches with 4 layers of arbitrary key programming. I like this board because its almost as compact as a 60% keyboard but has almost the same number of keys as a ten key less...

5 Reasons to Containerize Production Windows Apps on Docker Enterprise

We started working with Microsoft five years ago to containerize Windows Server applications. Today, many of our enterprise customers run Windows containers in production. We’ve seen customers containerize everything from 15 year old Windows .NET 1.1 applications to new ASP.NET applications.

If you haven’t started containerizing Windows applications and running them in production, here are five great reasons to get started:

1. It’s time to retire Windows Server 2008

Extended Support ends in January 2020. Rewriting hundreds of legacy applications to run on Windows Server 2016 or 2019 is a ridiculously expensive and time-consuming headache, so you’ll need to find a better way — and that’s Docker Enterprise.

2. It’s much easier than you think to containerize legacy Windows apps

You can containerize legacy Windows applications with Docker Enterprise without needing to rewrite them. Once containerized, these applications are easier to modernize and extend with new services.

3. Both Swarm and Kubernetes will support Windows nodes

The recently announced Kubernetes 1.14 includes support for Windows nodes. With Docker Enterprise, you will soon be able to use either orchestrator to run Windows nodes.

4. Your Windows apps become fully portable to the cloud

Once you Continue reading

Heavy Networking 448: An Inside Look At What’s New In Juniper’s Contrail SD-WAN (Sponsored)

Today's Heavy Networking podcast is a sponsored conversation with Juniper Networks on what's new in its Contrail SD-WAN, including a cloud-managed option. We also examine competitive differentiators such as scale, and how Juniper is integrating Mist with Contrail SD-WAN to enable SD-Branch.

The post Heavy Networking 448: An Inside Look At What’s New In Juniper’s Contrail SD-WAN (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Supermicro moves production from China

Server maker Supermicro, based in Fremont, California, is reportedly moving production out of China over customer concerns that the Chinese government had secretly inserted chips for spying into its motherboards.The claims were made by Bloomberg late last year in a story that cited more than 100 sources in government and private industry, including Apple and Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, Apple CEO Tim Cook and AWS CEO Andy Jassy denied the claims and called for Bloomberg to retract the article. And a few months later, the third-party investigations firm Nardello & Co examined the claims and cleared Supermicro of any surreptitious activity.To read this article in full, please click here

Supermicro moves production from China

Server maker Supermicro, based in Fremont, California, is reportedly moving production out of China over customer concerns that the Chinese government had secretly inserted chips for spying into its motherboards.The claims were made by Bloomberg late last year in a story that cited more than 100 sources in government and private industry, including Apple and Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, Apple CEO Tim Cook and AWS CEO Andy Jassy denied the claims and called for Bloomberg to retract the article. And a few months later, the third-party investigations firm Nardello & Co examined the claims and cleared Supermicro of any surreptitious activity.To read this article in full, please click here

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