Don’t Let the Automation Snowflakes Stop You

You know that time of year when snowflakes mean more than description of uniqueness of your networking infrastructure? Some people love to complain about that season and how the weather hinders them, others put on sturdy winter boots and down jackets, change tires on their car, and have tons of fun.

Network automation is no different. Sometimes you can persuade your peers that it makes sense to simplify and standardize the infrastructure to make it easier to abstract and automate (consider that an equivalent of going to a tropic island with shiny beaches and everlasting summer), other times you have to take out your winter boots and make the best out of what you got.

Read more ...

Overload control for scaling WeChat microservices

Overload control for scaling WeChat microservices Zhou et al., SoCC’18

There are two reasons to love this paper. First off, we get some insights into the backend that powers WeChat; and secondly the authors share the design of the battle hardened overload control system DAGOR that has been in production at WeChat for five years. This system has been specifically designed to take into account the peculiarities of microservice architectures. If you’re looking to put a strategy in place for your own microservices, you could do a lot worse than start here.

WeChat

The WeChat backend at this point consists of over 3000 mobile services, including instant messaging, social networking, mobile payment, and third-party authorization. The platform sees between 10^{10} - 10^{11} external requests per day. Each such request can triggers many more internal microservice requests, such that the WeChat backend as a whole needs to handle hundreds of millions of requests per second.

WeChat’s microservice system accommodates more than 3000 services running on over 20,000 machines in the WeChat business system, and these numbers keep increasing as WeChat is becoming immensely popular… As WeChat is ever actively evolving, its microservice system has been undergoing fast iteration of service updates. For instance, Continue reading

Spectrum shake-up to deliver more Wi-Fi, connections

The United States' Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to expand available spectrum in order to increase bandwidth for connected devices, such as IoT and broadband data, including those communicating via Wi-Fi. One reason is because ISPs want to get into wireless, and they are putting pressure on. The expansion, however, will be good for all Internet of Things (IoT), too.A number of significant unlicensed bandwidth blocks are, or will be, available, including at 6GHz, 5.9GHz, and 3.5GHz. Potential stumbles include that interference mitigation needs to be resolved in a couple instances.[ Also read: Wi-Fi 6 is coming to a router near you. | Get regularly scheduled insights: Sign up for Network World newsletters. ] 6GHz In the first block, the FCC is proposing making available a large 1200 megahertz of spectrum in the 6GHz band for devices, including IoT sensors, and Wi-Fi, which predominantly uses 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz now.To read this article in full, please click here

China Navigating The Homegrown Waters For Exascale

A major part of China’s several initiatives to build an exascale-class supercomputers has been the country’s determination to rely mostly on homegrown technologies – from processors and accelerators to interconnects and software – rather than turn to vendors outside of its borders, particularly those from the United States. …

China Navigating The Homegrown Waters For Exascale was written by Jeffrey Burt at .

Bandwidth Alliance Partners – Exciting Choices

Bandwidth Alliance Partners - Exciting Choices
Bandwidth Alliance Partners - Exciting Choices

We are tremendously excited about the value our Bandwidth Alliance partner ecosystem adds to our customers. We’re on a mission to help make the internet a better place; and ensuring everyone can access cloud resources at zero-egress rates supports that mission in many ways. It’s an easy way for our clients to build modern, cloud-centric applications without the design constraint and financial burden of egress fees.

The cloudflare bandwidth alliance partner landscape continues to grow, and incorporate a diverse group of partners, with today’s second wave announcement.  With over a dozen different partners, the range of choices can quickly become overwhelming. And, while these are all high-quality platforms which we are happy to recommend to our clients - their important differences will help determine the best fit for you, the customer.

In this post, I’ll lay out some of Cloudflare’s approach to this solution design question through the lens of a large client we recently worked with. We apply this approach across our full range of products and services, including many use cases far different from the Storage need we’ll dig into in this post. I hope that this can help all of our clients, or anyone else interested, mirror Continue reading

Expanding the Bandwidth Alliance: sharing the benefits of interconnected networks

Expanding the Bandwidth Alliance: sharing the benefits of interconnected networks
Expanding the Bandwidth Alliance: sharing the benefits of interconnected networks

At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better Internet. That means making the Internet faster, smarter, safer, but also more cost efficient with the help of our partners. We are always on the lookout for ways to help save customers money. With that goal we announced the Bandwidth Alliance with our founding partners during our Birthday week.

The key concept of the Bandwidth Alliance is to help reduce and in many cases waive data transfer charges, sometimes known as "bandwidth” or “egress” charges, for our mutual customers. We achieve this in partnership with the founding partners through strongly interconnected networks over peered connections. These connections typically occur within the same facility with no middleman. So, neither Cloudflare nor the cloud provider bears incremental costs. Further, we will also use our smart routing system (read details in this technical blog post) to ensure that all our customers’ traffic on participating cloud providers, once their systems are set up, qualify for this offer.

Expanding the Bandwidth Alliance: sharing the benefits of interconnected networks

Expanding the Alliance: new Partners Committed to Discounting Data Transfer Fees

We are proud to announce the following cloud providers and hosting companies have joined the Bandwidth Alliance in committing to zero data transfer fees for Continue reading

Route Leak Causes Major Google Outage

Google recently faced a major outage in many parts of the world thanks to a BGP leak. This incident that was caused by a Nigerian ISP – Mainone – occurred on 12 November 2018 between 21.10 and 22.35 UTC, and was identified in tweets from the BGP monitoring service BGPMon, as well as the network monitoring provider Thousand Eyes.

Google also announced the problem through their status page:

We’ve received a report of an issue with Google Cloud Networking as of Monday, 2018-11-12 14:16 US/Pacific. We have reports of Google Cloud IP addresses being erroneously advertised by internet service providers other than Google. We will provide more information by Monday, 2018-11-12 15:00 US/Pacific.

In order to understand this issue, MainOne Inc (AS37282) is peering at IXPN (Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria) in Lagos where Google (AS151169) and China Telecom (AS4809) are also members.

Google (AS15169) advertise their prefixes (more than 500) through the IXPN Route Server, where PCH (Packet Clearing House) collects a daily snapshot of BGP announcements of IXPN. Unfortunately, 212 prefixes (aggregates of those 500+ announcements) from Google were leaked, which was recorded by BGPMon and RIPEstat.

Looking at the RIPE stats it is evident Continue reading

BrandPost: Monetizing OTT Cloud Connect with SD-WAN

I’ve been spending some time the past few weeks researching the potential role of SD-WAN in enabling service providers to augment existing managed private cloud connect services with a “managed Over-The-Top (OTT) cloud connect service.”What if managed service providers could expand their managed cloud connect service offers to include an OTT Cloud Connect service powered by SD-WAN?Today, most managed service providers offer a private cloud connect service that enables enterprises to securely connect their on-net sites to their cloud-destined application traffic, leveraging the provider’s MPLS or Ethernet network. The applications are then backhauled to the closest provider PoP, where the service provider has “direct connects” to each of the major IaaS (AWS, Azure & Google Cloud) and some SaaS providers (SFDC, Oracle, SAP).To read this article in full, please click here

How a Nigerian ISP Accidentally Knocked Google Offline

How a Nigerian ISP Accidentally Knocked Google Offline

Last Monday evening — 12 November 2018 — Google and a number of other services experienced a 74 minute outage. It’s not the first time this has happened; and while there might be a temptation to assume that bad actors are at work, incidents like this only serve to demonstrate just how much frailty is involved in how packets get from one point on the Internet to another.

Our logs show that at 21:12 UTC on Monday, a Nigerian ISP, MainOne, accidentally misconfigured part of their network causing a "route leak". This resulted in Google and a number of other networks being routed over unusual network paths. Incidents like this actually happen quite frequently, but in this case, the traffic flows generated by Google users were so great that they overwhelmed the intermediary networks — resulting in numerous services (but predominantly Google) unreachable.

You might be surprised to learn that an error by an ISP somewhere in the world could result in Google and other services going offline. This blog post explains how that can happen and what the Internet community is doing to try to fix this fragility.

What Is A Route Leak, And How Does One Happen?

Continue reading

1 … 1,398 1,399 1,400 1,401 1,402 … 3,841