HPE introduces hybrid cloud consulting business

Hybrid cloud is pretty much the de facto way to go, with only a few firms adopting a pure cloud play to replace their data center and only suicidal firms refusing to go to the cloud. But picking the right balance between on-premises and the cloud is tricky, and a mistake can be costly.Enter Right Mix Advisor from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a combination of consulting from HPE's Pointnext division and software tools. It draws on quite a bit of recent acquisitions. Another part of Right Mix Advisor is a British cloud consultancy RedPixie, Amazon Web Services (AWS) specialists Cloud Technology Partners, and automated discovery capabilities from an Irish startup iQuate.To read this article in full, please click here

What Is the Internet Model of Networking?

Fundamentally, the Internet model is that independent networks connect to one another and, all together, provide the global Internet.

The independent networks may be enterprises with business services and employees connected to them, they may be cloud service providers or residential Internet service providers. They are independent in the way that they choose their business models, build and manage their networks, and compete with their neighbors;  they offer, however, global connectivity by adhering (voluntarily) to a set of open Internet standards that enable interoperability. To connect on the Internet is inherently to do so voluntarily via open protocols.  A different architecture might use different choices, but these are the ones the Internet uses.

All these independent networks interoperate and form an Internet by participating in a global routing system, subject only to technical standards and agreements with neighbors (the technical terms here are peering and transit). The magic of the Internet is that in order to communicate between a mobile phone connected to a broadband provider in the Netherlands and a server in a data center in Kenya, the two networks at either end of the connection do not need a relationship with each other. The magic of the Continue reading

Social Media, Limits, and Productivity

If there is one question I get most often, it is “how do you get so much done?” One answer to this question is: I limit my use of social media. There is, another angle to social media use which is a bit more… philosophical.

Some of you might know that I am currently working on a PhD in Philosophy—which might seem like an odd thing to do for someone who has been in the engineering world for, well, pretty much my entire life. My particular area of study, however, is what might be called media ecology and humanness. How do these two interact? What impact does, for instance, social media have on things like human freedom and dignity?

Social media (and mediated reality in general) has a bad habit of making people into objects—objectification is just part of the mediation process. If you go “all in” to the mediated world, then you become wholly mediated. This is ultimately dehumanizing, and a very bad thing.

Returning to the first question I raised above: what impact does social media have on my use of time? Does it make me more or less productive?

If we think social media does have Continue reading

Cisco forms VC firm looking to weaponize fledgling technology companies

Cisco this week stepped deeper into the venture capital world by announcing Decibel, an early-stage investment firm that will focus on bringing enterprise-oriented startups to market.Veteran VC groundbreaker and former general partner at New Enterprise Associates Jon Sakoda will lead Decibel. Sakoda had been with NEA since 2006 and focused on startup investments in software and Internet companies. [ Now see 7 free network tools you must have. ] Of Decibel Sakoda said: “We want to invest in companies that are helping our customers use innovation as a weapon in the game to transform their respective industries.”To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco forms VC firm looking to weaponize fledgling technology companies

Cisco this week stepped deeper into the venture capital world by announcing Decibel, an early-stage investment firm that will focus on bringing enterprise-oriented startups to market.Veteran VC groundbreaker and former general partner at New Enterprise Associates Jon Sakoda will lead Decibel. Sakoda had been with NEA since 2006 and focused on startup investments in software and Internet companies. [ Now see 7 free network tools you must have. ] Of Decibel Sakoda said: “We want to invest in companies that are helping our customers use innovation as a weapon in the game to transform their respective industries.”To read this article in full, please click here

Nominations Open! Jonathan B. Postel Service Award 2019

We are pleased to announce that nominations for the 2019 Jonathan B. Postel Service Award are now open. Do you know someone who should be a recipient?

This annual award is presented to an individual or organization that has made outstanding contributions in service to the data communications community and places particular emphasis on those who have supported and enabled others.

Nominations are encouraged for individuals or teams of individuals from across the data communications industry around the world who are dedicated to the efforts of advancing the Internet for the benefit of everybody.

Past Postel award winners include Steven G. Huter for “his leadership and personal contributions at the Network Startup Resource Center that enabled countless others to develop the Internet in more than 120 countries,” kc claffy for her pioneering work on Internet measurement, Mahabir Pun for his key role in bringing the Internet to rural Nepal with the founding of the Nepal Wireless Networking Project, and Bob Braden and Joyce K. Reynolds for their stewardship of the RFC (Request for Comments) series.

The signature crystal globe and a USD 20,000 prize will be presented at the IETF 105 in Montreal, Canada (20-26 July 2019) to the chosen Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Identifying exceptional user experience (UX) in IoT platforms

Enterprises are inundated with information about IoT platforms’ features and capabilities. But to find a long-lived IoT platform that minimizes ongoing development costs, enterprises must focus on exceptional user experience (UX) for 5 types of IoT platform users.Marketing and sales literature from IoT platform vendors is filled with information about IoT platform features. And no doubt, enterprises choosing to buy IoT platform services need to understand the actual capabilities of IoT platforms – preferably by testing a variety of IoT platforms – before making a purchase decision.To read this article in full, please click here

Datanauts 161: Building Application Resilience On Azure

Just because your application is in the cloud doesn't mean you can forget about resiliency. On today's Datanauts episode, guest Tom Vachon shares insights and tips on how to design a resilient infrastructure in Azure. We discuss availability zones, availability sets, paired regions, and more, as well as how to balance cost against resilience, and the role of DNS.

The post Datanauts 161: Building Application Resilience On Azure appeared first on Packet Pushers.

History Of Networking – OpenConfig – Anees Shaikh and Rob Shakir

OpenConfig is an effort amongst many cooperative network operators to define vender-neutral data models for configuring and managing networks programatically. In this episode we talk with Anees Shaikh and Rob Shakir about the roots of the OpenConfig project and where it’s at currently.
Anees Shaikh
Guest
Rob Shakir
Guest
Russ White
Host
Donald Sharp
Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post History Of Networking – OpenConfig – Anees Shaikh and Rob Shakir appeared first on Network Collective.

BoringTun, a userspace WireGuard implementation in Rust

Today we are happy to release the source code of a project we’ve been working on for the past few months. It is called BoringTun, and is a userspace implementation of the WireGuard® protocol written in Rust.

boring-tun-logo

A Bit About WireGuard

WireGuard is relatively new project that attempts to replace old VPN protocols, with a simple, fast, and safe protocol. Unlike legacy VPNs, WireGuard is built around the Noise Protocol Framework and relies only on a select few, modern, cryptographic primitives: X25519 for public key operations, ChaCha20-Poly1305 for authenticated encryption, and Blake2s for message authentication.

Like QUIC, WireGuard works over UDP, but its only goal is to securely encapsulate IP packets. As a result, it does not guarantee the delivery of packets, or that packets are delivered in the order they are sent.

The simplicity of the protocol means it is more robust than old, unmaintainable codebases, and can also be implemented relatively quickly. Despite its relatively young age, WireGuard is quickly gaining in popularity.

Starting From Scratch

While evaluating the potential value WireGuard could provide us, we first considered the existing implementations. Currently, there are three usable implementations

Stateful Firewalls: When You Get to a Fork in the Road, Take It

If you’ve been in networking long enough you’d probably noticed an interesting pattern:

  • Some topic is hotly debated;
  • No agreement is ever reached even though the issue is an important one;
  • The debate dies after participants diverge enough to stop caring about the other group.

I was reminded of this pattern when I was explaining the traffic filtering measures available in private and public clouds during the Designing Infrastructure for Private Clouds workshop.

Read more ...

Amazon Aurora: on avoiding distributed consensus for I/Os, commits, and membership changes

Amazon Aurora: on avoiding distributed consensus for I/Os, commits, and membership changes, Verbitski et al., SIGMOD’18

This is a follow-up to the paper we looked at earlier this week on the design of Amazon Aurora. I’m going to assume a level of background knowledge from that work and skip over the parts of this paper that recap those key points. What is new and interesting here are the details of how quorum membership changes are dealt with, the notion of heterogeneous quorum set members, and more detail on the use of consistency points and the redo log.

Changing quorum membership

Managing quorum failures is complex. Traditional mechanisms cause I/O stalls while membership is being changed.

As you may recall though, Aurora is designed for a world with a constant background level of failure. So once a quorum member is suspected faulty we don’t want to have to wait to see if it comes back, but nor do we want throw away the benefits of all the state already present on a node that might in fact come back quite quickly. Aurora’s membership change protocol is designed to support continued processing during the change, to tolerate additional failures while Continue reading

A First Peek At Cascade Lake Xeons Ahead Of Launch

It is no secret that Intel has been working to get its “Cascade Lake” processors, the second generation of its Xeon SP family to market as early as possible this year and to ramp sales at the same time that X86 server rival AMD is expected to get its second generation “Rome” Epyc processors in the field. … “A First Peek At Cascade Lake Xeons Ahead Of Launch”

A First Peek At Cascade Lake Xeons Ahead Of Launch was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

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