BrandPost: Edge Computing is Here to Unlock the Power of your IOT Applications

Gartner defines edge computing as “solutions that facilitate data processing at or near the source of data generation,” a nice, succinct explanation of this booming technology. If you don’t need it already, you most likely will soon as it’s a key enabler of cloud-based applications, including Internet of Things (IoT) applications and others supporting the digital transformation of business.“Organizations that have embarked on a digital business journey have realized that a more decentralized approach is required to address digital business infrastructure requirements,” says Santhosh Rao, principal research analyst at Gartner. “As the volume and velocity of data increases, so too does the inefficiency of streaming all this information to a cloud or data center for processing.”To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Edge Computing is Here to Unlock the Power of your IOT Applications

Gartner defines edge computing as “solutions that facilitate data processing at or near the source of data generation,” a nice, succinct explanation of this booming technology. If you don’t need it already, you most likely will soon as it’s a key enabler of cloud-based applications, including Internet of Things (IoT) applications and others supporting the digital transformation of business.“Organizations that have embarked on a digital business journey have realized that a more decentralized approach is required to address digital business infrastructure requirements,” says Santhosh Rao, principal research analyst at Gartner. “As the volume and velocity of data increases, so too does the inefficiency of streaming all this information to a cloud or data center for processing.”To read this article in full, please click here

Learn More about IXPs at the Middle East Network Operators Group

Internet Exchange Points are now considered to be an integral part of the Internet infrastructure worldwide. In very simple terms they are layer 2 switches that are used to route traffic that can be kept local instead of sending that traffic to the nearest major Internet node (usually located in Europe) and back. None of the countries of the Middle East contain enough globally-connected major Internet infrastructure so basically, all Internet traffic generated and terminated in the same country has to be routed through Europe. With well-implemented Internet Exchange Points, local Internet traffic stays local. Examples of local Internet traffic are financial transactions with your bank through online banking, requesting copies of your birth record from an e-government service, or any interaction with locally-hosted content.

Internet Exchange Points have three main benefits: lower latency, better cost efficiency, and control-of-traffic-sovereignty.

In the day and age of instant gratification and communications through social media and videos, latency, or the time it takes to fetch a web page, needs to be minimal and under 10ms as per industry standard (every 100km causes 1ms delay). In order to optimize the user experience, content providers have built their own global networks and spread their servers Continue reading

Introducing Cf-Terraforming

Ever since we implemented support for configuring Cloudflare via Terraform, we’ve been steadily expanding the set of features and services you can manage via this popular open-source tool.

If you're unfamiliar with how Terraform works with Cloudflare, check out our developer docs.

We are Terraform users ourselves, and we believe in the stability and reproducibility that can be achieved by defining your infrastructure as code.

What is Terraform?

Terraform is an open-source tool that allows you to describe your infrastructure and cloud services (think virtual machines, servers, databases, network configurations, Cloudflare API resources, and more) as human-readable configurations.

Once you’ve done this, you can run the Terraform command-line tool and it will figure out the difference between your desired state and your current state, and make the API calls in the background necessary to reconcile the two.

Unlike other solutions, Terraform does not require you to run software on your hosts, and instead of spending time manually configuring machines, creating DNS records, and specifying Page Rules, you can simply run:

terraform apply

and the state described in your configuration files will be built for you.

Enter Cloudflare Terraforming

Terraform is a tremendous time-saver once you have your configuration files Continue reading

Weekend Reads 021519

How many tabs do you have open in your web browser right now? Be honest. A dozen? Two dozen? It’s okay, I’m no better. If you’re like me, you blame yourself for your horrible habit of leaving tabs open forever. —Luke Larsen

C-level executives often don’t have a clue when it comes to IT and application development. I’ve been analyzing survey data from IT end users for over 15 years, and responses received from business managers and even CIOs are often drastically different than what actual practitioners say. —Lawrence Hecht

If it’s now difficult to simply transport data from one place to the next, it’s humanly impossible to monitor and manage the data produced from distributed, hybrid, multicloud applications and environments. —Bhanu Singh

What could be more frightening than a service informing you that all your data is gone—every file and every backup servers are entirely wiped out? —Swati Khandelwal

The consolidation trend also has the potential to affect who participates in the IETF and how those in the industry view the value of standardization. Larger, more prosperous companies tend to have a greater ability to support standardization work, which is often paid for out of R&D or innovation budgets. Continue reading

Ansible Community Update — February 2019

Ansible-Blog-PR-Day

Ansible is a popular project by many metrics, including over 42,000 commits on GitHub. Our community contributes a lot of pull requests (PRs) every month. Unfortunately, the volume of incoming PRs means contributors often have to wait days, weeks, or months for PRs to be merged. Sometimes it takes that long for a cursory review. We want to change that, but we need your help!

The Core team and community at large are kicking off new initiatives under the contributor experience umbrella. The idea is to help address causes that slow down quality PRs from being merged into Ansible's codebase.

To help with this, we are dedicating one day a month to doing a community review. The goals we are setting for these meetings are:

  • Give potential new community members a place to learn and experiment with Ansible's review process and exchange feedback

  • Identify process and documentation improvements via feedback provided from the Ansible community

  • Give PRs needed attention; remove blockers where necessary

  • Identify PRs that could be merged or closed

We’re particularly interested in feedback from people starting their journey with open source as it helps us to improve our processes and documentation. It’s helpful to have new contributors Continue reading

SEO Best Practices with Cloudflare Workers, Part 2: Implementing Subdomains

Recap

SEO Best Practices with Cloudflare Workers, Part 2: Implementing Subdomains

In Part 1, the merits and tradeoffs of subdirectories and subdomains were discussed.  The subdirectory strategy is typically superior to subdomains because subdomains suffer from keyword and backlink dilution.  The subdirectory strategy more effectively boosts a site's search rankings by ensuring that every keyword is attributed to the root domain instead of diluting across subdomains.

Subdirectory Strategy without the NGINX

In the first part, our friend Bob set up a hosted Ghost blog at bobtopia.coolghosthost.com that he connected to blog.bobtopia.com using a CNAME DNS record.  But what if he wanted his blog to live at bobtopia.com/blog to gain the SEO advantages of subdirectories?

A reverse proxy like NGINX is normally needed to route traffic from subdirectories to remotely hosted services.  We'll demonstrate how to implement the subdirectory strategy with Cloudflare Workers and eliminate our dependency on NGINX. (Cloudflare Workers are serverless functions that run on the Cloudflare global network.)

Back to Bobtopia

Let's write a Worker that proxies traffic from a subdirectory – bobtopia.com/blog – to a remotely hosted platform – bobtopia.coolghosthost.com.  This means that if I go to bobtopia.com/blog, I should see the content of Continue reading

SEO Best Practices with Cloudflare Workers, Part 1: Subdomain vs. Subdirectory

Subdomain vs. Subdirectory: 2 Different SEO Strategies

SEO Best Practices with Cloudflare Workers, Part 1: Subdomain vs. Subdirectory

Alice and Bob are budding blogger buddies who met up at a meetup and purchased some root domains to start writing.  Alice bought aliceblogs.com and Bob scooped up bobtopia.com.

Alice and Bob decided against WordPress because its what their parents use and purchased subscriptions to a popular cloud-based Ghost blogging platform instead.

Bob decides his blog should live at at blog.bobtopia.com – a subdomain of bobtopia.com. Alice keeps it old school and builds hers at aliceblogs.com/blog – a subdirectory of aliceblogs.com.

SEO Best Practices with Cloudflare Workers, Part 1: Subdomain vs. Subdirectory

Subdomains and subdirectories are different strategies for instrumenting root domains with new features (think a blog or a storefront).  Alice and Bob chose their strategies on a whim, but which strategy is technically better?  The short answer is, it depends. But the long answer can actually improve your SEO.  In this article, we'll review the merits and tradeoffs of each. In Part 2, we'll show you how to convert subdomains to subdirectories using Cloudflare Workers.

Setting Up Subdomains and Subdirectories

Setting up subdirectories is trivial on basic websites.  A web server treats its subdirectories (aka subfolders) the same as regular old folders in a Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 15th, 2019

Wake up! It's HighScalability time:

 

Opportunity crossed over the rainbow bridge after 15 years of loyal service. "Our beloved Opportunity remains silent." 

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? I'd greatly appreciate your support on Patreon. Know anyone who needs cloud? I wrote Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 just for them. It has 39 mostly 5 star reviews. They'll learn a lot and love you forever.

 

  • 200 million: per day YouTube videos recommended on home page; $9.3 billion: 27% increase in AI funding; 70%: Microsoft security bugs are memory safety issues; 11: new version of Perl; 24%: serverless users are new to cloud computing; 1 million: SpaceX satellite uplinks; $500K: ticket to mars; $13 billion: Google's new datacenter construction; 59%: increase in Tesla Autosteer accidents; $.30: reddit per user revenue; 38%: Airbnb bugs preventable by using types; 60K: data breaches reported since GDPR; 350: theoretical max rock stone skips;

  • Quoteable Quotes:
    • @gchaslot: Brian's hyper-engagement slowly biases YouTube: 1/ People who spend their lives on YT affect recommendations more 2/ So the content they watch gets more views 3/ Continue reading

SSH to all of the serial ports

This is just a quick-and-dirty script for logging into every serial port on an Opengear box, one in each tab of a MacOS terminal.

Used it just recently because I couldn't remember where a device console was connected.

Don't change mouse focus while it's running: It'll wind up dumping keystrokes into the wrong window.

for i in $(seq 48)
do
  port=$(expr 3000 + $i)
  sshcmd="ssh -p $port terminalserver"
  osascript \
    -e 'tell application "Terminal" to activate' \
    -e 'tell application "System Events" to tell process "Terminal" to keystroke "t" using command down' \
    -e "tell application \"System Events\" to tell process \"Terminal\" to keystroke \"$sshcmd\"" \
    -e "tell application \"System Events\" to tell process \"Terminal\" to key code 36"
done


Leaving it here in case somebody (probably me) finds it useful in the future.

Heavy Networking 430: The Future Of Networking With Guido Appenzeller

Today in our Future of Networking series I speak with Guido Appenzeller. He's been deeply involved in SDN and held key roles at Big Switch Networks and VMware, and now a new job at Yubico. We talk about the role of public cloud in IT, where the industry is with the adoption of "software-defined," the rise of whitebox, the P4 programming language, and more.

The post Heavy Networking 430: The Future Of Networking With Guido Appenzeller appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Loop Avoidance in VXLAN Networks

Antonio Boj sent me this interesting challenge:

Is there any way to avoid, prevent or at least mitigate bridging loops when using VXLAN with EVPN? Spanning-tree is not supported when using VXLAN encapsulation so I was hoping to use EVPN duplicate MAC detection.

MAC move dampening (or anything similar) doesn’t help if you have a forwarding loop. You might be able to use it to identify there’s a loop, but that’s it… and while you’re doing that your network is melting down.

Read more ...

A survey on dynamic and stochastic vehicle routing problems

A survey on dynamic and stochastic vehicle routing problems Ritzinger et al., International Journal of Production Research

It’s been a while since we last looked at an overview of dynamic vehicle routing problems: that was back in 2014 (See ‘Dynamic vehicle routing, pickup, and delivery problems’). That paper has fond memories for me, I looked at it while doing diligence for our investment in Deliveroo, and my how they’ve grown since then! With vehicle routing problems popping up in a number of interesting businesses, it’s time to take another look! Today’s paper choice is a more recent survey, focusing in on DSVRP problems.

So what exactly is a DSVRP problem? The VRP part stands for vehicle routing problems, typically you have a fleet of vehicles, and you need to use them to make a set of deliveries from point A to point B. How you assign pick-ups and deliveries to vehicles, and the routes those vehicles take, is the the VRP problem. Historically the VRP problem would be solved statically (we know up front the set of vehicles, pick-up and drop-off locations, etc.). Much more interesting (and much more realistic for many companies) is when we Continue reading

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