Cisco CEO: Webex service outage ‘unacceptable’

Cisco Webex users continue to experience intermittent problems today, some 24 hours after a complete outage of the collaboration system started – a situation that prompted company CEO Chuck Robbins to Tweet:“The @webex outage today is unacceptable, and we apologize for the disruption caused to you, our customers. Webex Meetings is now functional. Our engineers are working to restore Webex Teams and ensure this doesn’t happen again. Thank you for your patience & trust.”RELATED: 4 reasons Microsoft Teams will kill Slack… and 4 reasons it won’t According to the company’s website, a major outage began at 0122 GMT on Sept. 25, 2018, and shut down all Webex services, including Calling, Meetings, Control Hub, Hybrid Services, and Team.   To read this article in full, please click here

Docker Certified Storage Partners Review – Sept. 2018

Certified-Badges@2x.png

The Docker Certified Technology Program is designed for ecosystem partners and customers to recognize containers and plugins that excel in quality, collaborative support and compliance. Docker Certification gives organizations an easy way to run trusted software and components in containers on the Docker Enterprise container platform with support from both Docker and the publisher.  

In this review, we’re looking at Docker Volume Plugins. In any production Docker Enterprise  deployment, it is important to have the ability to manage storage for persistent applications. While it is  possible to use traditional SAN and NAS solutions directly with Docker Enterprise with Swarm orchestration, it is actually much easier and more convenient to manage volumes through the Docker CLI and management interfaces by specifying a Docker-native volume driver so users can manage volumes on demand.

Check out the latest certified Docker Volume Plugins that are now available from our partners on Docker Store:

Along with Docker Volume plugins, we also have partners with container-based storage solutions in Docker Store:

Learn More:

History Of Networking – John Fraizer – BGP Route Servers

In this History of Networking episode, John Fraizer joins the Network Collective crew to talk about his involvement in the first IX in the Chicago area and how that lead to the creation of an open source BGP route server.

John Fraizer
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 – John Fraizer – BGP Route Servers appeared first on Network Collective.

Large Scale Deployments Using Ansible

Ansible-Tower-Large-Scale-Deployment

 

Ansible-Simple-Powerful-AgentlessThis has been the Ansible messaging since the journey began. As time has gone on, the definition of simple we’re talking about may have been misunderstood...

Simple-Def

The Ansible simplicity is about being easy to understand, learn and share. It’s about people. The often peddled notion that “Ansible doesn’t scale past 500 hosts” is shadowed by the customers we have with over 100,000 nodes under management. But the idea that scale is purely about the number of hosts isn’t recognising the greater relevance. Scale is so much more, scale is about the context in your business.

What is scale?

Scale-Def

Technological Scale

When it comes to IT, conclusions about ‘scale’ usually equate to numbers of something technical. A frequent customer ask might go something like "We need Ansible to scale to 70,000 hosts".

Once we look into that number though, the reality is no technical operation will happen across them all at once. The jeopardy to a business of this size is too great to chance a failure of every system. Operations at large scale happen piecemeal for safety reasons – rolling updates are not only a safer way to operate, we see the results faster.

Business function, geography, application and Continue reading

The Best Practice Forum on Gender and Access: Empowering Women Online

A Need for More Gender-Disaggregated Data

While Internet access and use is rapidly growing all over the world, women still face several challenges that hinder them from benefiting meaningfully from it. The proportion of women able to access and use the Internet is 12% lower than the proportion of men accessing and using it worldwide. This gap is even bigger in developing countries where only one out of seven women use the Internet.

These numbers highlight some of the discrepancies that the digital gender gap is both producing and reproducing. However, understanding them and to what extent they affect women’s online lives requires more data. While many studies have been conducted in the last few years in order to gather evidence about the existing barriers, there are still many aspects of the phenomenon that need to be studied in-depth, particularly at grassroots levels.

Various recent efforts – including those of the W20, the UN Broadband Commission on Sustainable Development, the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI), the World Wide Web Foundation, the GSMA and Association for Progressive Communications – have expressed concerns about the paucity of gender-disaggregated data and insights on Internet access and use masks the true extent of Continue reading

Bandwidth Alliance: powered by smart routing on Cloudflare’s network

Bandwidth Alliance: powered by smart routing on Cloudflare’s network

Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of the Bandwidth Alliance, a group of cloud providers that have agreed to reduce data transfer fees for mutual customers.

Bandwidth Alliance: powered by smart routing on Cloudflare’s network

Three things were required to make the Bandwidth Alliance a reality:

  1. An ecosystem of like-minded companies who want to provide reduced data transfer fees to their customers.
  2. A large global and well-connected network (Cloudflare has 150+ points of presence around the world and multiple peered and paid links at each location). Our network is connected to thousands of partners through transit providers, Internet exchanges, peering interconnects, and private network interconnects. Having a large network footprint allows us to meet our partners where their infrastructure is and exchange traffic with them over low-cost or free connections, instead of expensive paid transit.
  3. Argo, our sophisticated traffic routing engine. Argo allows us to make decisions on how to carry traffic across our network in ways that optimize for a number of factors: latency, throughput, jitter, or in the case of the Bandwidth Alliance, cost to our partners to exchange traffic. This routing engine is the technical underpinning of the Bandwidth Alliance.


Typically, as traffic moves across the Internet, packets are exchanged between multiple networks as they Continue reading

Introducing the Bandwidth Alliance: sharing the benefits of interconnected networks

Introducing the Bandwidth Alliance: sharing the benefits of interconnected networks
Introducing 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, safer and smarter, but also more efficient alongside our cloud partners. As such, wherever we can, we're on the lookout for ways to help save our common customers money. That got us looking into why and how much cloud customers pay for bandwidth.

If you're hosting on most cloud providers, data transfer charges, sometimes known as "bandwidth” or “egress” charges, can be an integral part of your bill. These fees cover the cost of delivering traffic from the cloud all the way to the consumer. However, if you’re using a CDN such as Cloudflare, the cost of data transfer comes in addition to the cost of content delivery.

In some cases, charging makes sense. If you're hosted in a facility in Ashburn, Virginia and someone visits your service from Sydney, Australia there are real costs to moving traffic between the two places. The cloud provider likely hands off traffic to a transit provider or uses its own global backbone to carry the traffic across the United States and then across the Pacific, potentially handing off to other transit providers along the way, until Continue reading

Edge computing is the place to address a host of IoT security concerns

Edge computing can greatly improve the efficiency of gathering, processing and analyzing data gathered by arrays of IoT devices, but it’s also an essential place to inject security between these inherently vulnerable devices and the rest of the corporate network.First designed for the industrial IoT (IIoT), edge computing refers places placing an edge router or gateway locally with a group of IIoT endpoints, such as an arrangement of connected valves, actuators and other equipment on a factory floor.To read this article in full, please click here

Infrastructure-as-Code Tools

This is the fourth blog post in “thinking out loud while preparing Network Infrastructure as Code presentation for the network automation course” series. Previous posts: Network-Infrastructure-as-Code Is Nothing New, Adjusting System State and NETCONF versus REST API.

Dmitri Kalintsev sent me a nice description on how some popular Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools solve the challenges I described in The CRUD Hell section of Infrastructure-as-Code, NETCONF and REST API blog post:

Read more ...

The design and implementation of modern column-oriented database systems

The design and implementation of modern column-oriented database systems Abadi et al., Foundations and trends in databases, 2012

I came here by following the references in the Smoke paper we looked at earlier this week. “The design and implementation of modern column-oriented database systems” is a longer piece at 87 pages, but it’s good value-for-time. What we have here is a very readable overview of the key techniques behind column stores.

What is a column store?

Column stores are relational databases that store data by column rather than by row. Whereas a traditional row-based store stores all attributes of one row together, followed by the attributes of the next row, and so on, a column-based stored uses one logical file per attribute (column). The column-oriented layout makes it efficient to read just the columns you need for a query, without pulling in lots of redundant data.

Data for a column may be stored in an array with implicit ids (a), or in some format with explicit ids (b).

Since data transfer costs from storage (or through a storage hierarchy) are often the major performance bottlenecks in database systems, while at the same time database schemas are becoming more and Continue reading

Measuring the KSK Roll

It has been a trade-off between waiting long enough to have the key sentinel mechanism deployed in sufficient volume in resolvers to generate statistically valid outcomes and yet start this measurement prior to the planned roll of the KSK on 11th October 2018. These are early results, and reflect less than one week of measurement, but some strong signals are evident in the data.

BrandPost: Malicious Tactics Have Evolved: Your DNS Needs to, Too

Unfortunately, as cyberthreats have evolved, over 86% of companies that leave DNS unmonitored have not modernized their DNS to help thwart malware before malicious adversaries exploit the glaring hole on the network. This blog looks at the ways threats have evolved to take advantage of legacy DNS, and what organizations should do now to increase their defenses and reduce their attack surface.Remember when cyberattacks were delivered via faxes from Nigerian princes? Although the objective – separating a business from its money – hasn’t changed much, the methodologies certainly have. In the 80s and 90s, when enterprise networks were beginning to connect to the internet, DNS was simply the phone book that translated domain name to IP address. Soon enough, bad actors evolved from phreaking to phishing, dropping telephone scams in favor of the rapidly spreading internet, bombarding users with seemingly innocuous emails whose goal was to harvest network account and password information to gain inside access to applications, data, and ultimately money.To read this article in full, please click here