Africa Needs Its Internet Institutions More Than Ever, Especially AFRINIC

At the recent African IGF in Khartoum, on November 5, participants of the workshop on “Strengthening the Institutional Capacity of Critical African Internet Institutions” hailed the achievements of African Internet institutions in bringing connectivity and broadening access in the last decades. They also recognized their shortcomings and stressed the need to address them so that they continue to serve the continent amidst the potential challenges that it will be facing in the future, as the African Internet grows and more users come online. The workshop was organized by AFTLD, the African Union Commission, and the Internet Society.

Fifteen years ago, Africa had less than 3% Internet penetration and was trailing far behind the rest of the world. Today, with a third of its population connected to the Internet, Africa’s connectedness is still behind but in a much better position than before, since the gap in Africa and the rest of the world has been shrinking. In fact, some countries in Africa have connectivity levels comparable to those of developed countries – something unimaginable fifteen years ago!

The progressive increase in Internet penetration in Africa could not happen without its regional Internet organizations, known as Af*, and the various NOGs (Network Continue reading

I’m back, again.


It’s been over 3 years since I last shared my thoughts here.  It’s been that long since I left an amazing 19 year journey at Bloomberg, at the helm of the team that developed the financial industry’s most prominent IP network.  A network that I took great pride in and gave so much of my personal life for.  I am grateful to have had the opportunity to build what I did there and learn many things along the way.

Three years ago I decided to go from building mission-critical global networks to building network technologies with the team at Juniper Networks.  Two very different worlds.  It wasn’t easy, but I have evolved.  For the record, my heart is still that of a network operator.  20+ years at the front lines doesn’t wash off Continue reading

Why did Oracle acquire an SDN firm?

Every now and then, the industry gets hit with a “huh?” acquisition, like Facebook buying virtual reality headset maker Oculus or chipmaker Broadcom acquiring mainframe software vendor CA.Last week’s news from Oracle was also up there, with the announcement it plans to acquire Talari Networks, a software-defined networking (SDN) specialist, by the end of the year.It would seem an odd pairing, but Oracle has a considerable communications software business of mostly brokers, controllers, and monitors. In announcing the deal, the company said Talari would complement Oracle’s Session Border Controller (SBC) and network management infrastructure by adding high availability, Quality-of-Experience (QoE) connectivity, and cloud application access across any IP network with the reliability and predictability of private networks.To read this article in full, please click here

Why did Oracle acquire an SDN firm?

Every now and then, the industry gets hit with a “huh?” acquisition, like Facebook buying virtual reality headset maker Oculus or chipmaker Broadcom acquiring mainframe software vendor CA.Last week’s news from Oracle was also up there, with the announcement it plans to acquire Talari Networks, a software-defined networking (SDN) specialist, by the end of the year.It would seem an odd pairing, but Oracle has a considerable communications software business of mostly brokers, controllers, and monitors. In announcing the deal, the company said Talari would complement Oracle’s Session Border Controller (SBC) and network management infrastructure by adding high availability, Quality-of-Experience (QoE) connectivity, and cloud application access across any IP network with the reliability and predictability of private networks.To read this article in full, please click here

History Of Networking – JR Rivers – Linux Routing

In this History of Networking episode, JR Rivers joins Network Collective to talk about the history of the open source/Linux based routing stack.

JR Rivers
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 – JR Rivers – Linux Routing appeared first on Network Collective.

Why disk beat tape in the backup wars

Any backup experts worth their salt switched to disk as the primary target for backups many years ago. Tape still reigns in long-term archival, for the reasons laid out here. But tape is also quite problematic when it comes to day-to-day operational backup and recovery.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Using VXLAN and EVPN to Build Active-Active Data Centers

Some (anti)patterns of network industry are way too predictable: every time there’s a new technology marketers start promoting it as the solution for every problem ever imagined. VXLAN was quickly touted as the solution for long-distance vMotion, and now everyone is telling you how to use VXLAN with EVPN to stretch VLANs across multiple data centers.

Does that make sense? It might… based on your requirements and features available on the devices you use to implement the VXLAN/EVPN fabric. We’ll cover the details in a day-long workshop in Zurich (Switzerland) on December 5th. There are still a few places left, register here.

My time as an intern (thus far)

My time as an intern (thus far)

It has been over three months since I started as a marketing intern at Cloudflare. Even before joining the Cloudflare team, I enjoyed reading the technical blog posts about Cloudflare’s use cases and solutions, as well as the inclusive and creative culture. Educating the world about the threats we face on the Internet is something that I found truly valuable. I figured that I would give my own spin on what it’s like to join and work at Cloudflare by writing a blog post too.

Chapter 1: The Path towards the Orange Cloud

My time as an intern (thus far)
Photo by alexander milo / Unsplash

Before starting as a freshman in university, I created an online portfolio for my photography. It has been a passion of mine for about 9 years. I tried a multitude of platforms but none afforded me the aesthetic control that I wanted. The only solution was to build and host my own site. I started learning HTML/CSS, a bit of JavaScript and jQuery and so on.

This led to me using the Koken CMS, and hosting it on DigitalOcean in a Docker container. What was left was SSL/TLS encryption and a CDN (my friends in Europe find the loading times unbearable). Continue reading

Continuum: a platform for cost-aware low-latency continual learning

Continuum: a platform for cost-aware low-latency continual learning Tian et al., SoCC’18

Let’s start with some broad approximations. Batching leads to higher throughput at the cost of higher latency. Processing items one at a time leads to lower latency and often reduced throughput. We can recover throughput to a degree by throwing horizontally scalable resources at the problem, but it’s hard to recover latency. In many business scenarios latency matters, so we’ve been seeing a movement overtime from batching through micro-batching to online streaming.

Continuum looks at the same issues from the perspective of machine learning models. Offline (batch) trained models can suffer from concept drift (loss of accuracy over time) as a result of not incorporating the latest data. I.e., there’s a business cost incurred for higher latency of update incorporation. Online models support incremental updates. Continuum determines the optimum time to retrain models in the presence of incoming data, based on user policy (best effort, cost-aware, or user-defined). There’s some great data here about the need for and benefit of continual learning, and a surprising twist in the tale where it turns out that even if you can afford it, updating the model on Continue reading

Cumulus Networks Open-Ended NCLU Net Example Command

NCLU is the always helpful Network Command Line Utility. It’s a command interface for our products and platforms that’s designed to provide direct, simple access to network configuration information. Thus, NCLU supports both inspection and modification of Cumulus Networks configuration data. Better yet, NCLU is easy to customize for local environments and naming conventions using its net example facility.

NCLU Overview

In general, NCLU enables users at the command line to learn about current configurations, and make changes or additions to such configurations. NCLU reports on Interfaces and can provide information about IP addresses, VLANs, Access controls, Trunking, STP, and more. At the routing level, NCLU provides information about Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing protocol settings and configurations. NCLU also offers information about services, including hostnames, NTP (Network Time Protocol), Timezone, and so on.

NCLU also includes comprehensive, context-sensitive help. Starting with the basic net command, users can learn about the various sub-commands available to them. Similarly, entering net <sub-command-name> provides help for that specific sub-command. This is how Cumulus (and other forms of) Linux delivers help information for users of complex commands like net.

In addition, NCLU commands provide control over configuration staging, Continue reading