Intro to Redis Cluster Sharding – Advantages, Limitations, Deploying & Client Connections

Intro to Redis Cluster Sharding – Advantages, Limitations, Deploying & Client Connections

Redis Cluster is the native sharding implementation available within Redis that allows you to automatically distribute your data across multiple nodes without having to rely on external tools and utilities. At ScaleGrid, we recently added support for Redis Clusters on our platform through our fully managed Redis hosting plans. In this post, we’re going to introduce you to the advanced Redis Cluster sharding opportunities, discuss its advantages and limitations, when you should deploy, and how to connect to your Redis Cluster.

Sharding with Redis Cluster

Why predictive maintenance hasn’t taken off as expected

“Two years ago, predictive maintenance was forecast to be one of the most promising uses of the industrial Internet of Things (IoT).”That’s the lead of report based on a recent Bain & Company survey of more than 600 high-tech executives (Beyond Proofs of Concept: Scaling the Industrial IoT, by Bain partners Michael Schallehn, Christopher Schorling, Peter Bowen and Oliver Straehle). The report goes on to note that identifying precisely when equipment might fail “seemed like a no-brainer.” And yet, the report concludes, “predictive maintenance has failed to take off as broadly as expected.” In fact, industrial leaders were not as excited about predictive maintenance as they were back in a 2016 survey.To read this article in full, please click here

Why predictive maintenance hasn’t taken off as expected

“Two years ago, predictive maintenance was forecast to be one of the most promising uses of the industrial Internet of Things (IoT).”That’s the lead of report based on a recent Bain & Company survey of more than 600 high-tech executives (Beyond Proofs of Concept: Scaling the Industrial IoT, by Bain partners Michael Schallehn, Christopher Schorling, Peter Bowen and Oliver Straehle). The report goes on to note that identifying precisely when equipment might fail “seemed like a no-brainer.” And yet, the report concludes, “predictive maintenance has failed to take off as broadly as expected.” In fact, industrial leaders were not as excited about predictive maintenance as they were back in a 2016 survey.To read this article in full, please click here

Announcing workers.dev

Announcing workers.dev

We are working really hard to allow you to deploy Workers without having a Cloudflare domain. You will soon be able to deploy your Cloudflare Workers to a subdomain-of-your-choice.workers.dev, which you can go claim now on workers.dev!

Why are we doing this?

You may have read the announcement blog post for Workers (or one of the many tutorials and guest posts), and thought “let me give this a try!”. If you’re an existing Cloudflare customer, you logged into the dashboard, and found a new icon called “Workers”, paid $5 and were on your way. If you’re not, you clicked “Sign Up”, but instead of getting to create and deploy a Worker, we asked you for your domain (if you didn’t have one, we had you register one), and move your nameservers.

Since launch, we have had tons of people who wanted to build a new serverless project from scratch or just try Workers out, but found it difficult to get started. We want to make it easier for anyone to get started building and deploying serverless applications.

How did we get here?

The way you get started on Workers today reflects our journey as a company. Continue reading

BrandPost: Moving Beyond Orchestration to Full Transformation

Adan K. Pope, Chief Information Technology Officer, Ciena Adan K. Pope, Chief Information Technology Officer and CSO, Ciena Blue Planet, shares his views on how combining orchestration and federation accelerates digital transformation.Service providers are on the path to digital transformation. The key to achieving an efficient, profitable business is seamless, automation-assisted operations. Getting to that desired state is no small feat for service providers whose networks and processes have evolved over time.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Moving Beyond Orchestration to Full Transformation

Adan K. Pope, Chief Information Technology Officer, Ciena Adan K. Pope, Chief Information Technology Officer and CSO, Ciena Blue Planet, shares his views on how combining orchestration and federation accelerates digital transformation.Service providers are on the path to digital transformation. The key to achieving an efficient, profitable business is seamless, automation-assisted operations. Getting to that desired state is no small feat for service providers whose networks and processes have evolved over time.To read this article in full, please click here

DNS Privacy & IPv6 Security @ APTLD 75

The Internet Society will be actively contributing to the APTLD 75 meeting on 20-21 February 2019 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Our colleague Jan Žorž will not only be presenting on DNS-over-TLS (DoT) and DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) during the DNS Operations, Security, and Privacy session (20 February, 11.30-12.30 UTC+4), but will then be presenting on IPv6 connectivity issues during the Security in IPv6-enabled TLDs session (20 February, 14.30-15.30 UTC+4).

He’ll be in good company in what’s shaping up to be a great programme featuring a number of DNS luminaries covering technical, policy, internationalisation and data protection issues, as well as abuse handling and registry and registrar training. Other sessions of particular interest include 5G mobile networks, the implications of Alternative DNS Root Servers, and emerging trends in the DNS.

The Asia-Pacific Top-Level Domain (APTLD) Association is a non-profit organisation of ccTLD (Country Code Top-Level Domains) registries in the Asia-Pacific region that was founded in 1998. It organises two meetings each year for its members, with APTLD 75 being held in conjunction with the 6th Middle East DNS Forum.

If you’re interested in attending then you can register at http://www.aptld75.ae/reg/end.php

Further Information

Cross-Data-Center L4-7 Services with Cisco ACI

Craig Weinhold sent me his thoughts on using Cisco ACI to implement cross-data-center L4-7 services. While we both believe this is not the way to do things (because you should start with proper application architecture), you might find his insights useful if you have to deal with legacy environments that believe in Santa Claus and solving application problems with networking infrastructure.

An “easy button” for multi-DC is like the quest for the holy grail. I explain to my clients that the answer is right in front of them – local IP addressing, L3 routing, and DNS. But they refuse to accept that, draw their swords, and engage in a fruitless war against common sense. Asymmetry, stateful inspection, ingress routing, split-brain, quorums, host mobility, cache coherency, non-RFC complaint ARP, etc.  

Read more ...

Research: Service Fabric

Microservices architectures probably will not “take over the world,” in terms of solving every application you can throw at them, but they are becoming more widespread. Microservices and related “staged” design patterns are ideal for edge facing applications, where the edge facing services, in particular, need to scale quickly across broad geographical regions. Supporting microservices using a standard overlay model can be challenging; somehow the network control plane, container placement/spinup/cleanup, and service discovery must be coordinated. While most networks would treat each of these as a separate problem, service fabrics are designed to either interact with, or even replace, each of the systems involved with a single, unified overlay construct.

Kakivaya, Gopal, Lu Xun, Richard Hasha, Shegufta Bakht Ahsan, Todd Pfleiger, Rishi Sinha, Anurag Gupta, et al. “Service Fabric: A Distributed Platform for Building Microservices in the Cloud.” In Proceedings of the Thirteenth EuroSys Conference, 33:1–33:15. EuroSys ’18. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1145/3190508.3190546.

Kakivaya, et al., begin by considering the five major design principles of a service fabric: modular and layered design; self-* properties; decentralized operation; strong consistency; and support for stateful services. They then introduce Microsoft’s Service Fabric (SF) service, which they Continue reading

Tech Bytes: Thousand Eyes Shares Lessons Learned From A CenturyLink Outage (Sponsored)

CenturyLink suffered a major outage in December 2018 that affected services in large swathes of North America. On today's Tech Bytes episode, sponsored by ThousandEyes, we look at the causes of the outage and lessons learned, including the importance of ISP redundancy and why management networks are critical.

The post Tech Bytes: Thousand Eyes Shares Lessons Learned From A CenturyLink Outage (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

NSX-T Integration with Openshift

I am sometimes being approached with questions about NSX-T integration details for Openshift. It seems people are well aware how NSX-T works and integrates with Pivotal Container Service (aka PKS), Pivotal Application Service (PAS formerly known as PCF), and even with vanilla Kubernetes but there is no much information how we integrate with Redhat’s Openshift. This post aims to throw some light on the integration with this platform. In the examples below I am using Openshift Origin (aka OKD) but for a supported solution you need to go with Openshift Enterprise Platform. The same NSX-T instance can be used for providing networking, security, and visibility to multiple Openshift clusters.

 

Example Topology

 

In this topology we have a T0 router that connects physical with virtual world. We also have T1 router acting as a default gateway for the Openshift VMs. Those VMs have two vNICs each. One vNIC is connected to Management Logical Switch for accessing the VMs. The second vNIC is connected to a disconnected Logical Switch and is used by nsx-node-agent to uplink the POD networking. The LoadBalancer used for configuring Openshift Routes plus all project’s T1 routers and Logical Switches are created automatically later when we Continue reading

SOCKMAP – TCP splicing of the future

SOCKMAP - TCP splicing of the future

Recently we stumbled upon the holy grail for reverse proxies - a TCP socket splicing API. This caught our attention because, as you may know, we run a global network of reverse proxy services. Proper TCP socket splicing reduces the load on userspace processes and enables more efficient data forwarding. We realized that Linux Kernel's SOCKMAP infrastructure can be reused for this purpose. SOCKMAP is a very promising API and is likely to cause a tectonic shift in the architecture of data-heavy applications like software proxies.

SOCKMAP - TCP splicing of the future

Image by Mustad Marine public domain

But let’s rewind a bit.

Birthing pains of L7 proxies

Transmitting large amounts of data from userspace is inefficient. Linux provides a couple of specialized syscalls that aim to address this problem. For example, the sendfile(2) syscall (which Linus doesn't like) can be used to speed up transferring large files from disk to a socket. Then there is splice(2) which traditional proxies use to forward data between two TCP sockets. Finally, vmsplice can be used to stick memory buffer into a pipe without copying, but is very hard to use correctly.

Sadly, sendfile, splice and vmsplice are very specialized, synchronous and solve only one part Continue reading

Kubernetes, Kubeadm, and the AWS Cloud Provider

Over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed quite a few questions appearing in the Kubernetes Slack channels about how to use kubeadm to configure Kubernetes with the AWS cloud provider. You may recall that I wrote a post about setting up Kubernetes with the AWS cloud provider last September, and that post included a few snippets of YAML for kubeadm config files. Since I wrote that post, the kubeadm API has gone from v1alpha2 (Kubernetes 1.11) to v1alpha3 (Kubernetes 1.12) and now v1beta1 (Kubernetes 1.13). The changes in the kubeadm API result in changes in the configuration files, and so I wanted to write this post to explain how to use kubeadm 1.13 to set up a Kubernetes cluster with the AWS cloud provider.

I’d recommend reading the previous post from last September first. In that post, I listed four key configuration items that are necessary to make the AWS cloud provider work:

  1. Correct hostname (must match the EC2 Private DNS entry for the instance)
  2. Proper IAM role and policy for Kubernetes control plane nodes and worker nodes
  3. Kubernetes-specific tags on resources needed by the cluster
  4. Correct command-line flags added to the Kubernetes API server, controller Continue reading

Like 4G before it, 5G is being hyped

Just as it did with 4G, AT&T has once again jumped the gun and announced that it was deploying 5G (actually, they’re calling it 5G+) in 12 cities, while deploying so-called “5GE” in other cities, only to be challenged by its three major competitors, who claim that AT&T was merely re-branding a faster version of 4G as 5G and misleading the public about the technology.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Like 4G before it, 5G is being hyped

Just as it did with 4G, AT&T has once again jumped the gun and announced that it was deploying 5G (actually, they’re calling it “5G E”) in twelve cities, only to be challenged by its three major competitors, who claim that AT&T was merely re-branding a faster version of 4G as 5G and misleading the public about the technology.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

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