Murphy the Chaos Manager

I had the opportunity to sit in on a great briefing from Gremlin the other day about chaos engineering. Ken Nalbone (@KenNalbone) has a great review of their software and approach to things here. The more time I spent thinking about chaos engineering and IT, the more I realized that it has more in common with Murphy’s Law that we realize.

Anything That Can Go Wrong

If there’s more than one way to do a job and one of those ways will end in disaster, then somebody will do it that way. – Edward Murphy

 

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. – Major John Paul Stapp

We live by the adage of Murphy’s Law in IT. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. And usually it goes wrong at the worst possible time. Database query functions will go wrong when you need them the most. And usually at the height of something like Amazon Prime Day. Data center outages only seem to happen at 4 am on a Sunday during a holiday.

But why do things go wrong like this? Is it because the universe just has it out for IT people? Are we Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: France Approves Fake News Law, Looks to Regulate Further

France tackles the Internet: The French government has been making news in recent days for examining ways to regulate the Internet. Its parliament has passed a controversial new law that would allow judges to order the immediate removal of online articles they deem to be fake news, Euronews.com reports. Critics warned the law, which allows for jail sentences for fake news creators, could lead to censorship.

Regulation or autocracy? French President Emmanuel Macron pushed the fake news law, and he also called for more government regulation of the Internet at a recent Internet Governance Forum in Paris. Macron called for international cooperation on Internet issues, as a way to tame disinformation, with CFR.org suggesting governments must adapt to fight modern problems. But TechDirt suggested Macron was acting like an autocrat in his call for more regulation.

Broadband plan MIA: Canada’s government, meanwhile, has “no plan” to bring broadband to rural and remote areas, a government auditor said. Canada’s rural broadband efforts so far have led to “a series of moving targets, lofty proclamations, piecemeal programs, and ultimately big letdowns,” Motherboard says.

Where the money is: Research firm IDC expects investments in Artificial Intelligence to triple in the next three Continue reading

Selectively deploying your superpowers on Linux

The sudo command is very handy when you need to run occasional commands with superuser power, but you can sometimes run into problems when it doesn’t do everything you expect it should. Say you want to add an important message at the end of some log file and you try something like this:$ echo "Important note" >> /var/log/somelog -bash: /var/log/somelog: Permission denied OK, it looks like you need to employ some extra privilege. In general, you can't write to a system log file with your user account. Let’s try that again with sudo.$ sudo !! sudo echo "Important note" >> /var/log/somelog -bash: /var/log/somelog: Permission denied Hmm, that didn't work either. Let's try something a little different.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Getting smarter about managing the SD-WAN last-mile

Delivering global SD-WAN is very different from delivering local networks. Local networks offer complete control to the end-to-end design, enabling low-latency and predictable connections. There might still be blackouts and brownouts but you’re in control and can troubleshoot accordingly with appropriate visibility.With global SD-WANs, though, managing the middle-mile/backbone performance and managing the last-mile are, well shall we say, more challenging. Most SD-WAN vendors don’t have control over these two segments, which affects application performance and service agility.In particular, an issue that SD-WAN appliance vendors often overlook is the management of the last-mile. With multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), the provider assumes the responsibility, but this is no longer the case with SD-WAN. Getting the last-mile right is challenging for many global SD-WANs.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Getting smarter about managing the SD-WAN last-mile

Delivering global SD-WAN is very different from delivering local networks. Local networks offer complete control to the end-to-end design, enabling low-latency and predictable connections. There might still be blackouts and brownouts but you’re in control and can troubleshoot accordingly with appropriate visibility.With global SD-WANs, though, managing the middle-mile/backbone performance and managing the last-mile are, well shall we say, more challenging. Most SD-WAN vendors don’t have control over these two segments, which affects application performance and service agility.In particular, an issue that SD-WAN appliance vendors often overlook is the management of the last-mile. With multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), the provider assumes the responsibility, but this is no longer the case with SD-WAN. Getting the last-mile right is challenging for many global SD-WANs.To read this article in full, please click here

Hyperconvergence: Not just for specific workloads anymore

Hyperconvergence has come a long way in a relatively short time, and enterprises are taking advantage of the new capabilities.Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) combines storage, computing and networking into a single system; hyperconverged platforms include a hypervisor for virtualized computing, software-defined storage, and virtualized networking.HCI platforms were initially aimed at virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), video storage, and other discrete workloads with predictable resource requirements. Over time, they have advanced to become suitable platforms for enterprise applications, databases, private clouds, and edge computing deployments.To read this article in full, please click here

Hyperconvergence: Not just for specific workloads anymore

Hyperconvergence has come a long way in a relatively short time, and enterprises are taking advantage of the new capabilities.Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) combines storage, computing and networking into a single system; hyperconverged platforms include a hypervisor for virtualized computing, software-defined storage, and virtualized networking.HCI platforms were initially aimed at virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), video storage, and other discrete workloads with predictable resource requirements. Over time, they have advanced to become suitable platforms for enterprise applications, databases, private clouds, and edge computing deployments.To read this article in full, please click here

How to tell which IoT predictions to pay attention to

It happens every year around this time – every IoT company on the planet, whether it’s a giant platform company, an old-school manufacturing player, or a teeny startup making Internet-enabled baby monitors issues its predictions about the market in the years to come, in the hope that IoT reporters looking for a quick story will write something with a headline like “Internet-enabled baby monitor market to reach $250 billion by 2040, according to cool company.” More on IoT: What is the IoT? How the internet of things works What is edge computing and how it’s changing the network Most powerful Internet of Things companies 10 Hot IoT startups to watch The 6 ways to make money in IoT What is digital twin technology? [and why it matters] Blockchain, service-centric networking key to IoT success Getting grounded in IoT networking and security Building IoT-ready networks must become a priority What is the Industrial IoT? [And why the stakes are so high] Yet those predictions are, to put it kindly, all over the map. A McKinsey & Company estimate suggests that the economic impact of the IoT will reach $11 trillion by 2025. IDC estimates that total spending on IoT will Continue reading

Gartner’s top 10 IoT trends for 2019 and beyond

At Gartner’s Symposium/ITExpo in Barcelona, Spain, earlier this month, the research firm shared a report on 10 strategic trends affecting the Internet of Things (IoT) from 2019 to 2023. In the report, titled Top Strategic IoT Trends and Technologies Through 2023, according to multiple published reports, the firm identified the following as the 10 most impactful IoT trends:To read this article in full, please click here

A critical look at Gartner’s top 10 IoT trends

At Gartner’s Symposium/ITExpo in Barcelona, Spain, earlier this month, the research firm shared a report on 10 strategic trends affecting the Internet of Things (IoT) from 2019 to 2023. In the report, titled Top Strategic IoT Trends and Technologies Through 2023, according to multiple published reports, the firm identified the following as the 10 most impactful IoT trends:To read this article in full, please click here

Cybersecurity, Data Protection, and IoT Events in November & December

The end of the year has been very busy, with Internet Society staff members speaking at many events on data protection, security-by-design, and the Internet of Things (IoT). First, to recap the last month, you might want to read the Rough Guide to IETF 103, especially Steve Olshansky’s Internet of Things post. Dan York also talked about DNSSEC and the Root KSK Rollover at ICANN 63, and there were several staff members involved in security, privacy, and access discussions at the Internet Governance Forum. In addition, we submitted comments on NIST’s white paper on Internet of Things (IoT) Trust Concerns; the NTIA RFC on Developing the Administration’s Approach to Consumer Privacy; and the NIST draft “Considerations for Managing Internet of Things (IoT) Cybersecurity and Privacy Risks”.

We also have several speaking engagements coming up in the next few weeks. Here’s a quick rundown of the events.

6th National Cybersecurity Conference
27-28 November
Mona, Jamaica

The Mona ICT Policy Centre at CARIMAC, University of the West Indies is hosting the 6th National Cyber Security Conference. The Conference theme this year is “Data Protection – Securing Big Data, Understanding Biometrics and Protecting National ID Systems.” Continue reading

BEAT: asynchronous BFT made practical

BEAT: asynchronous BFT made practical Duan et al., CCS’18

Reaching agreement (consensus) is hard enough, doing it in the presence of active adversaries who can tamper with or destroy your communications is much harder still. That’s the world of Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT). We’ve looked at Practical BFT (PBFT) and HoneyBadger on previous editions of The Morning Paper. Today’s paper, BEAT, builds on top of HoneyBadger to offer BFT with even better latency and throughput.

Asynchronous BFT protocols are arguably the most appropriate solutions for building high-assurance and intrusion-tolerant permissioned blockchains in wide-are (WAN) environments, as these asynchronous protocols are inherently more robust against timing and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks that can be mounted over an unprotected network such as the Internet.

The best performing asynchronous BFT protocol, HoneyBadger, still lags behind the partially synchronous PBFT protocol in terms of throughput and latency. BEAT is actually a family of five different asynchronous BFT protocols that start from the HoneyBadger baseline and make improvements targeted at different application scenarios.

Unlike HoneyBadgerBFT, which was designed to optimize throughput only, BEAT aims to be flexible and versatile, providing protocol instances optimized for latency, throughput, bandwidth, or scalability (in terms of the number Continue reading

Working out Backend Knots and Building Routers (Austin Real World Serverless Video Recap)

Working out Backend Knots and Building Routers (Austin Real World Serverless Video Recap)

I work in Developer Relations at Cloudflare and I'm fortunate to have top-notch developers around me who are willing to share their knowledge with the greater developer community. I produced a series of events this autumn called Real World Serverless at multiple locations around the world and I want to share the recorded videos from these events.

Our Austin Real World Serverless event (in partnership with the ATX Serverless User Group Meetup) included two talks about Serverless technology featuring Victoria Bernard and Preston Pham from Cloudflare. They spoke about working out backend knots with Workers and building a router for the great good.

About the talks

Working out Backend Knots with Workers - Victoria Bernard (0:00-15:19)

Cloudflare Workers is a platform the makes serverless development and deployment easier than ever. A worker is a script running between your clients' browsers and your site's origin that can intercept requests. Victoria went over some popular use cases of how proxy workers can dramatically improve a site's performance and add functionality that would normally require toying with complicated back-end services.

Build a Router for Great Good - Preston Pham (15:20-33:53)

Serverless computing is great, but requires routing or some kind of API Continue reading

My Second Cloudflare Company Retreat

My Second Cloudflare Company Retreat

Last week, 760 humans from Singapore, London, Beijing, Sydney, Nairobi, Austin, New York, Miami, Washington DC, Warsaw, Munich, Brussels, and Champaign reunited with their San Francisco counterparts for our 9th annual Cloudflare company retreat in the San Francisco Bay Area. The purpose of the company retreat is to bring all global employees together under one roof to bond, build bridges, have fun, and learn – all in support of Cloudflare’s mission to help build a better Internet.

It’s easy to write off corporate retreats as an obligatory series of meetings and tired speeches, but Cloudflare’s retreats are uniquely engaging, personalized, fun, and inspiring. Having grown with Cloudflare over the last year (I started just before our 2017 retreat), I wanted to share some of my experiences to highlight Cloudflare’s incredible culture.

The office was buzzing with different languages and laughter as people hugged and shook hands for the first time after working online together for a year or more. Everyone’s Google calendar looked like a rainbow as we each mined for white space to squeeze in those coveted 1:1s, all-hands presentations, and bowling offsites with our global colleagues.  The buses and Google chats felt like summer camp, with people claiming Continue reading

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