Third Summit on Community Networks in Africa a Success

Last week was an exceptionally exciting week for the African Regional Bureau as we successfully held, in partnership with the Association for Progressive Community (APC), the 3rd Summit on Community Networks in Africa from 2-7 September 2018, at Wild Lubanzi Trail Lodge, Eastern Cape, South Africa.

The objective of the Summit was to promote the creation and growth of community networks, increase collaboration between community network operators in Africa and to provide an opportunity for them to engage with other stakeholders.

The event was attended by more than 100 participants from at least 18 countries worldwide, 13 from Africa (Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, DRC, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Namibia, Cameroon, Tanzania, Sudan, Egypt, and Ethiopia) and 5 from Spain, Germany, Argentina, India, and the U.S. The formal opening of the Summit was addressed by representatives from the Ministry of Telecommunications and Postal Services of South Africa.

This year’s Summit turned out to be very special as 12 established community networks in Africa and 18 other communities (particularly from rural South Africa interested to replicate initiatives) attended and contributed to the discussions held throughout the 6 days.

The week started with 2 days of training, which provided community network operators with clear Continue reading

AWS ABC’s – EC2 Instance Type Cheat Sheet

Continuing on with the theme of previous cheat sheet articles, this article will help decode the format for Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance types.

An EC2 instance type provides the definition for the size and certain capabilities of the instance:

• Amount of RAM
• Number of vCPUs
• Clock speed of the vCPUs
• Presence/absence of GPUs and FPGAs
• Network connectivity speed and capabilities
• Presence/absence of local storage

Some of this information can be gleaned from the instance type name. For the information that can’t, refer to the links below in the references section.

Here is an example of an instance type name: c5d.2xlarge

• Family – Each instance type belongs to a family of instance types where the family defines what the type is optimized for.
  • General compute: m, t
  • Compute optimized: c
  • Memory optimized: r, x, z
  • Storage optimized: d, h, i
  • Accelerated computing: f, g, p
• Generation – The generation provides distinction between instance types of the same family but where the technology used for that type has been modified. As an Continue reading

Expanding DNSSEC Adoption

Cloudflare first started talking about DNSSEC in 2014 and at the time, Nick Sullivan wrote: “DNSSEC is a valuable tool for improving the trust and integrity of DNS, the backbone of the modern Internet.”

Over the past four years, it has become an even more critical part of securing the internet. While HTTPS has gone a long way in preventing user sessions from being hijacked and maliciously (or innocuously) redirected, not all internet traffic is HTTPS. A safer Internet should secure every possible layer between a user and the origin they are intending to visit.

As a quick refresher, DNSSEC allows a user, application, or recursive resolver to trust that the answer to their DNS query is what the domain owner intends it to be. Put another way: DNSSEC proves authenticity and integrity (though not confidentiality) of a response from the authoritative nameserver. Doing so makes it much harder for a bad actor to inject malicious DNS records into the resolution path through BGP Leaks and cache poisoning. Trust in DNS matters even more when a domain is publishing record types that are used to declare trust for other systems. As a specific example, DNSSEC is helpful for preventing Continue reading

BrandPost: Where the Adaptive Network Is Headed in CALA

Ciena Fabio Medina, General Manager and Vice President of Sales – Latin America With the move toward autonomous networking underway across the CALA region, as well as the rest of the world, one thing is very clear—the current modes of operation won’t cut it in the future. Fabio Medina, Ciena's General Manager for Caribbean and Latin America explains how the Adaptive Network is the solution to remaining competitive and on the cutting-edge.To read this article in full, please click here

Self-Creating Neural Networks That Explain Themselves

On the hardware side, the next frontier for deep learning innovation will be in getting the performance, efficiency, and accuracy needed for inference at scale. …

Self-Creating Neural Networks That Explain Themselves was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .

10 hot hybrid-cloud startups to watch

As the cloud matures, many businesses are finding that not every application belongs in public clouds. Due to regulatory issues, security risks, data ownership concerns, and fears of cloud lock-in, many applications are stubbornly rooted in on-premises architectures.The startups in this roundup understand that, and rather than trying to sweet talk enterprises into forklift upgrades, these startups are willing to work under hybrid-cloud constraints.[ Now see After virtualization and cloud, what's left on premises?] The startups below federate data, making it available from any cloud to any application; provide application virtualization software, which enables enterprises to move workloads to and from various clouds at will; provide cloud file systems that optimize and mobilize data, and much more.To read this article in full, please click here

Hyped to Death: AI Must Avoid Becoming a Cliché

Data Point: Why Automation Won’t Replace Humans

Here’s a bit of good news for those of you scared of network automation replacing your jobs: even Elon Musk didn’t manage to pull it off, so I don’t think a networking vendor dabbling in intent will manage to do it (particularly considering the track record of networking vendors’ network management and orchestration systems).

AWS ABCs — EC2 Instance Type Cheat Sheet

Continuing on with the theme of previous cheat sheet articles, this article will help decode the format for Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance types.

Oracle Cloud Disappoints, Execs Stick to Script on Kurian’s Departure

When asked about Kurian, who heads the company’s cloud business, Co-CEO Mark Hurd said “we expect him back.” But Hurd refused to say when that will happen.

Successful Telco and Startup Partnerships Highlighted at Telecom Council’s TC3 Summit 2018

Startups share their path to market with their global telecommunications providers at TC3 Summit 2018.

The Microserver, Redux And Reconsidered

If there is one rule of computing, is that it gets increasingly more expensive and more difficult to scale up performance within a single device or a single server node. …

The Microserver, Redux And Reconsidered was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Reflections on the Cloud Networking Decade

When I joined Arista ten years ago, we were in the midst of developing a novel purpose-built software architecture from a clean sheet of paper for networking. The financial services industry was in crisis, with the collapse of major banks like Lehman Brothers. In parallel, emerging slowly but surely, was a new breed of hyper-scale cloud operators. Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google GCP were in the early stages of shaping what was to become the public cloud. The requirements of these new titans provided a source of inspiration for the Arista founders and me. We couldn’t have predicted the pace nor the impact of this cloud fury; it came strongly and rapidly. As I reminisce over the past decade, it is clear that the cloud inflection has forever changed the face of enterprise IT for the better. Yet it is just the beginning, and there is much ahead.

Worth Reading: The Most Fragile Engineers I Know

I’ve decided to make my own list from an IT engineering perspective. And instead of listing the smartest traits, I’ll explore the characteristics of the most fragile. —Ethan Banks @Packet Pushers

Apple Watch 4 represents an epic fail for smartwatches in business

Remember when we thought smartwatches and wearable technology were going to change the world — and the enterprise? That doesn't seem to be happening quite yet.According to much of the consumer tech press, the new Apple Watch Series 4 stole the show from the iPhones announced in Apple’s big fall press event. Reviews were generally positive for the new wearable device, and along with the new edge-to-edge display and other improvements, much of the love centered around new heart-health monitoring features, including an electrocardiogram (ECG), low heart rate detection, and atrial fibrillation (AFib) detection. There’s also a new fall-detection feature designed to automatically summon help if needed.To read this article in full, please click here

The new Apple Watch 4 represents an epic fail for smartwatches

Remember when we thought smartwatches and wearable technology were going to change the world?According to much of the consumer tech press, the new Apple Watch Series 4 stole the show from the iPhones announced in Apple’s big fall press event. Reviews were generally positive for the new wearable device, and along with the new edge-to-edge display and other improvements, much of the love centered around new heart-health monitoring features, including an electrocardiogram (ECG), low heart rate detection, and atrial fibrillation (AFib) detection. There’s also a new fall-detection feature designed to automatically summon help if needed.To read this article in full, please click here

Juniper Brings Contrail to the Edge, Works Closely With Red Hat

Distributed computing with Red Hat OpenStack Platform allows the Contrail Edge Cloud to remotely manage the lifecycle of compute nodes and virtual machines (VMs) from a centralized data center without requiring co-located OpenStack control plane functions in each of these remote edge sites.

Is Hype the Real 5G Use Case?

I lived through the 3G and 4G hype but I don’t remember the breadth of hype being quite as insane as it is for 5G.

On the ‘net: Too Many Tools

Carpenters always remember one simple piece of advice when they are working on a job: Measure twice, cut once. It’s a little different in networking, though. In our industry, my advice is the following: Measure many times, but never cut. @Search Networking

Nokia, Ericsson Maintain Heated 5G Rivalry

Both vendors have scored significant 5G deals with all of the major U.S. operators but are not afraid to throw shade at each other.