It’s The Change Freeze Season

Everyone’s favorite time of the year is almost here! Is it because it’s the holiday season? Perhaps it’s the magic that happens at the end of the year? Or maybe, it’s because there’s an even better reason to get excited!

Change Freeze Season!

That’s right. Some of you reading this started jumping up and down like Buddy the Elf at the thought of having a change freeze. There’s something truly magical about laying down the law about not touching anything in the system until after the end-of-year reports are run and certified. For some, this means a total freeze of non-critical changes from the first of December all the way through the New Year until maybe even February. That’s a long time to have a frozen network? But why?

The Cold Shoulder

Change freezes are an easy thing to explain to the new admins. You simply don’t touch anything in the network during the freeze unless it’s broken. No tweaking. No experimenting. No improvements. Just critical break/fix changes only. There had better be a ticket. There should be someone yelling that something’s not right. Otherwise you’re in for it.

There are a ton of reasons for this. The first is Continue reading

What is an SSD? How solid state drives work

That whirring you hear when you boot your computer or when it wakes from sleep mode is the sound of your hard drive’s magnetic disks beginning to spin. Conceptually not dissimilar to a record player, a hard disk drive (HDD) is an electromechanical device with an actuator arm that positions itself over spinning disks, called platters, in order to read or write information.While record players top out at 78 rpm, today’s enterprise-grade HDDs can spin at 15,000 rpm. Even at that speed, however, there are unavoidable delays associated with heads finding the spot on the drive that contains the data being requested. And sometimes a drive may need to read from multiple locations in order to complete a command, multiplying wait times.To read this article in full, please click here

What is an SSD? How solid state drives work

That whirring you hear when you boot your computer or when it wakes from sleep mode is the sound of your hard drive’s magnetic disks beginning to spin. Conceptually not dissimilar to a record player, a hard disk drive (HDD) is an electromechanical device with an actuator arm that positions itself over spinning disks, called platters, in order to read or write information.While record players top out at 78 rpm, today’s enterprise-grade HDDs can spin at 15,000 rpm. Even at that speed, however, there are unavoidable delays associated with heads finding the spot on the drive that contains the data being requested. And sometimes a drive may need to read from multiple locations in order to complete a command, multiplying wait times.To read this article in full, please click here

Using Virtual Labs When Developing Network Automation Solutions

One of the fundamentals I always emphasize in introductory parts of my network automation workshops and online courses is the fact that we’re about to develop software that will control the most-mission-critical part of IT infrastructure, and should therefore use software development methodologies like version control, testing…

However, there’s a “small” glitch. While it’s perfectly possible to test most software in some virtual environment you can spin up on-the-fly using Vagrant, Docker, Jenkins, Travis, or some other CI/CD tool, testing a network automation solution requires access to network devices.

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RapidChain: scaling blockchain via full sharding

RapidChain: scaling blockchain via full sharding Zamani et al., CCS’18

RapidChain is a sharding-based public blockchain protocol along the lines of OmniLedger that we looked at earlier in the year. RapidChain is resilient to Byzantine faults from up to 1/3 of its participants, requires no trusted setup, and can achieve more than 7,300 tx/sec with an expected confirmation latency of roughly 8.7 seconds in a network of 4,000 nodes with a time-to-failure of more than 4,500 years. Those are pretty interesting numbers!


(Enlarge)

RapidChain partitions the set of nodes into multiple smaller groups of nodes called committees that operate in parallel on disjoint blocks of transactions and maintain disjoint ledgers.

With n nodes, each committee is of size m = c \log n where c is a security parameter typically set around 20. E.g. with 1,000 nodes we’ll have around 17 committees of 60 nodes each. To make all these work we’ll need a number of different parts:

  • A way to bootstrap the initial system
  • A way of forming (and re-forming) committees, and allowing nodes to join and leave
  • A way of reaching consensus within a committee (shard)
  • A way of verifying transactions which cross-shards

Bootstrapping

The initial set of participants start Continue reading

BiB 066: Why Cloud Visibility Matters

Complex cloud applications need decent visualizations to help infrastructure engineers understand what's going on. For cloud visibility, Kentik absorbs AWS & GCP flow logs, with Azure support coming. Kubernetes & Istio are also data providers to Kentik. Using the Kubernetes API, Kentik correlates pod IPs to pod names and cluster namespaces. With that information, Kentik can visualize pod to pod and service to service traffic flows within a Kubernetes cluster.

The post BiB 066: Why Cloud Visibility Matters appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Edge-chips could render some networks unnecessary

Hardware processing should replace a device’s dependency on networks, some scientists say. Making machines more efficient, saving power and resilience are behind the reasoning.“Devices like drones depend on a constant Wi-Fi signal. If the Wi-Fi stops, the drone crashes,” an article about researchers at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, says.[ Now read: What is quantum computing (and why enterprises should care) ] But if you make a device independent of any linking, it could become more resilient, the researchers say. Plus, the more processing work one can do on the machine the more energy you’ll save because you won’t have to come up with power to communicate.To read this article in full, please click here

Edge-chips could render some networks unnecessary

Hardware processing should replace a device’s dependency on networks, some scientists say. Making machines more efficient, saving power and resilience are behind the reasoning.“Devices like drones depend on a constant Wi-Fi signal. If the Wi-Fi stops, the drone crashes,” an article about researchers at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, says.[ Now read: What is quantum computing (and why enterprises should care) ] But if you make a device independent of any linking, it could become more resilient, the researchers say. Plus, the more processing work one can do on the machine the more energy you’ll save because you won’t have to come up with power to communicate.To read this article in full, please click here

Edge-chips could render some networks unnecessary

Hardware processing should replace a device’s dependency on networks, some scientists say. Making machines more efficient, saving power and resilience are behind the reasoning.“Devices like drones depend on a constant Wi-Fi signal. If the Wi-Fi stops, the drone crashes,” an article about researchers at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, says.[ Now read: What is quantum computing (and why enterprises should care) ] But if you make a device independent of any linking, it could become more resilient, the researchers say. Plus, the more processing work one can do on the machine the more energy you’ll save because you won’t have to come up with power to communicate.To read this article in full, please click here

Edge-chips could render some networks useless

Hardware processing should replace a device’s dependency on networks, some scientists say. Making machines more efficient, saving power and resilience are behind the reasoning.“Devices like drones depend on a constant Wi-Fi signal. If the Wi-Fi stops, the drone crashes,” an article about researchers at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, says.[ Now read: What is quantum computing (and why enterprises should care) ] But if you make a device independent of any linking, it could become more resilient, the researchers say. Plus, the more processing work one can do on the machine the more energy you’ll save because you won’t have to come up with power to communicate.To read this article in full, please click here

Edge-chips could render some networks useless

Hardware processing should replace a device’s dependency on networks, some scientists say. Making machines more efficient, saving power and resilience are behind the reasoning.“Devices like drones depend on a constant Wi-Fi signal. If the Wi-Fi stops, the drone crashes,” an article about researchers at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, says.[ Now read: What is quantum computing (and why enterprises should care) ] But if you make a device independent of any linking, it could become more resilient, the researchers say. Plus, the more processing work one can do on the machine the more energy you’ll save because you won’t have to come up with power to communicate.To read this article in full, please click here

Edge-chips could render some networks useless

Hardware processing should replace a device’s dependency on networks, some scientists say. Making machines more efficient, saving power, and resilience is behind the reasoning.“Devices like drones depend on a constant Wi-Fi signal. If the Wi-Fi stops, the drone crashes,” an article about researchers at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, says.But if you make a device independent of any linking, it could become more resilient, the researchers say. Plus, the more processing work one can do at the source — in other words on the machine — the more energy you’ll save because you won’t have to come up with power to communicate.To read this article in full, please click here

Jason Donenfeld Honored with the ISRG’s Radiant Award

Earlier this week Jason Donenfeld received the Radiant Award from the Internet Security Research Group. Jason is an accomplished engineer and a creative thinker, which makes his work clean, simple, and takes it a step beyond – most notably in WireGuard, an open-source secure VPN tunnel.

We are proud to have enabled this award. Let me explain why.

At the Internet Society we care a great deal about the technologies that help to establish trust between people around the globe, while those people may have never interacted before.

One of the groups we proudly partner with is the Internet Security Research Group, the non-profit behind the Let’s Encrypt initiative. In the 4 years since Let’s Encrypt was launched, it has changed the landscape of web traffic encryption. Whereas in 2014 around 30% of pages loaded by Firefox where loaded over a secure channel, that number has increased to over 75% by now. I believe that rise in secure web traffic is in large part the result of the work by Let’s Encrypt.

Before 2014 it was somewhat costly to get a web certificate, a critical piece of authentication material that is the basis of establishing global trust. Both Continue reading

PQ 160: Inside ArcOS®: The Internet-Scale, Carrier-Grade Network OS (Sponsored)

On today's Priority Queue we dive into ArcOS®, a new network OS designed for whitebox routing and switching from our sponsor Arrcus. We examine how the OS was designed, how it differentiates itself from competitors, and explore key use cases.

The post PQ 160: Inside ArcOS®: The Internet-Scale, Carrier-Grade Network OS (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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