Making the Case for Community Networks at Africa IGF

Who supplies your Internet? If you live in urban Africa, you probably get Internet access through your mobile phone or through fibre at the office or home. When you travel to rural or underserved areas, there is probably limited or no Internet because mobile network operators and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have yet to reach these areas. But what if people in rural and underserved areas could build their own networks to provide the telecommunications services that they need?

This notion has been tried successfully in several African countries. In Kenya, Tunapanda Institute has built TunapandaNET a wireless network connecting schools and youth centres in Kibera, Kenya’s largest slum. Bosco is a solar-powered wireless network that connects community ICT centres in Gulu, Northern Uganda. PamojaNet operates a wireless network to the community in Idjwi Island on lake Kivu, Eastern DRC, close to the border with Rwanda. Others such as Machaworks in rural Zambia and Zenzeleni Networks in Eastern Cape of South Africa provide similar services. These networks have been built by local communities to provide access to both offline content and Internet access where possible to the communities that they serve.

During a session at the 2018 Africa Internet Governance Continue reading

Cloud Computing without Containers

Cloud Computing without Containers

Cloudflare has a cloud computing platform called Workers. Unlike essentially every other cloud computing platform I know of, it doesn’t use containers or virtual machines. We believe that is the future of Serverless and cloud computing in general, and I’ll try to convince you why.

Isolates

Cloud Computing without Containers

Two years ago we had a problem. We were limited in how many features and options we could build in-house, we needed a way for customers to be able to build for themselves. We set out to find a way to let people write code on our servers deployed around the world (we had a little over a hundred data centers then, 155 as of this writing). Our system needed to run untrusted code securely, with low overhead. We sit in front of ten million sites and process millions and millions of requests per second, it also had to run very very quickly.

The Lua we had used previously didn’t run in a sandbox; customers couldn’t write their own code without our supervision. Traditional virtualization and container technologies like Kubernetes would have been exceptionally expensive for everyone involved. Running thousands of Kubernetes pods in a single location would be resource intensive, doing it in Continue reading

Technology Short Take 106

Welcome to Technology Short Take #106! It’s been quite a while (over a month) since the last Tech Short Take, as this one kept getting pushed back. Sorry about that, folks! Hopefully I’ve still managed to find useful and helpful links to include below. Enjoy!

Networking

Servers/Hardware

  • The Intel Management Engine (ME) has received a bit of attention as a potential security vulnerability; in this article, authors Maxim Goryachy and Mark Ermolov expose some new concerns around the Intel ME and its undocumented Manufacturing Mode.
  • Serve The Home takes a critical look at the Bloomberg Supermicro stories, debunking or at least calling into question many details of the Continue reading

ApproxJoin: approximate distributed joins

ApproxJoin: approximate distributed joins Le Quoc et al., SoCC’18

GitHub: https://ApproxJoin.github.io

The join is a fundamental data processing operation and has been heavily optimised in relational databases. When you’re working with large volumes of unstructured data though, say with a data processing framework such as Flink or Spark, joins become distributed and much more expensive. One of the reasons for this is the amount of data that needs to be moved over the network. In many use cases, approximate results would be acceptable, and as we’ve seen before, likely much faster and cheaper to compute. Approximate computing with joins is tricky though: if you sample datasets before the join you reduce data movement, but also sacrifice up to an order of magnitude in accuracy; if you sample results after the join you don’t save on any data movement and the process is slow.

This paper introduces an approximate distributed join technique, ApproxJoin, which is able to sample before data shuffling without loss of end result accuracy. Compared to unmodified Spark joins with the same sampling ratio it achieves a speedup of 9x while reducing the shuffled data volume by 82x.

The following charts show ApproxJoin’s latency Continue reading

Cisco-AWS marriage simplifies hybrid-cloud app development

Cisco and Amazon Web Services (AWS) will soon offer enterprise customers an integrated platform that promises to help them more simply build, secure, and connect Kubernetes clusters across private data centers and the AWS cloud.The new package, Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS, combines Cisco, AWS and open-source technologies to simplify complexity and helps eliminate challenges for customers who use Kubernetes to enable deploying applications on premises and across the AWS cloud in a secure, consistent manner said David Cope, senior director of Cisco Cloud Platform & Solutions Group (CPSG).[ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.] “The significance of Amazon teaming with Cisco means  more integration between product lines from AWS and Cisco, thus reducing the integration costs notably on the security and management fronts for joint customers," said Stephen Elliot, program vice president with IDC. “It also provides customers with some ideas on how to migrate workloads from private to public clouds.”To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco-AWS marriage simplifies hybrid-cloud app development

Cisco and Amazon Web Services (AWS) will soon offer enterprise customers an integrated platform that promises to help them more simply build, secure, and connect Kubernetes clusters across private data centers and the AWS cloud.The new package, Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS, combines Cisco, AWS and open-source technologies to simplify complexity and helps eliminate challenges for customers who use Kubernetes to enable deploying applications on premises and across the AWS cloud in a secure, consistent manner said David Cope, senior director of Cisco Cloud Platform & Solutions Group (CPSG).[ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.] “The significance of Amazon teaming with Cisco means  more integration between product lines from AWS and Cisco, thus reducing the integration costs notably on the security and management fronts for joint customers," said Stephen Elliot, program vice president with IDC. “It also provides customers with some ideas on how to migrate workloads from private to public clouds.”To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco-AWS marriage simplifies hybrid-cloud app development

Cisco and Amazon Web Services (AWS) will soon offer enterprise customers an integrated platform that promises to help them more simply build, secure, and connect Kubernetes clusters across private data centers and the AWS cloud.The new package, Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS, combines Cisco, AWS and open-source technologies to simplify complexity and helps eliminate challenges for customers who use Kubernetes to enable deploying applications on premises and across the AWS cloud in a secure, consistent manner said David Cope, senior director of Cisco Cloud Platform & Solutions Group (CPSG).[ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.] “The significance of Amazon teaming with Cisco means  more integration between product lines from AWS and Cisco, thus reducing the integration costs notably on the security and management fronts for joint customers," said Stephen Elliot, program vice president with IDC. “It also provides customers with some ideas on how to migrate workloads from private to public clouds.”To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco, Amazon marriage simplifies hybrid cloud app development

Cisco and Amazon Web Services will soon offer enterprise customers an integrated platform that promises to help them more simply build, secure and connect Kubernetes clusters across private data centers and the AWS cloud.The new package, Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS combines Cisco, AWS and open source technologies to simplify complexity and helps eliminate challenges for customers who use Kubernetes to enable deploying applications across on-premises and the AWS cloud in a secure, consistent manner said David Cope, senior director of Cisco Cloud Platform & Solutions Group (CPSG).[ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.] “The significance of Amazon teaming with Cisco means  more integration between product lines from AWS and Cisco, thus reducing the integration costs notably on the security and management fronts for joint customers," said Stephen Elliot, program vice president with IDC.  “It also provides customers with some ideas on how to migrate workloads from private to public clouds.”To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco, Amazon marriage simplifies hybrid cloud app development

Cisco and Amazon Web Services will soon offer enterprise customers an integrated platform that promises to help them more simply build, secure and connect Kubernetes clusters across private data centers and the AWS cloud.The new package, Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS combines Cisco, AWS and open source technologies to simplify complexity and helps eliminate challenges for customers who use Kubernetes to enable deploying applications across on-premises and the AWS cloud in a secure, consistent manner said David Cope, senior director of Cisco Cloud Platform & Solutions Group (CPSG).[ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.] “The significance of Amazon teaming with Cisco means  more integration between product lines from AWS and Cisco, thus reducing the integration costs notably on the security and management fronts for joint customers," said Stephen Elliot, program vice president with IDC.  “It also provides customers with some ideas on how to migrate workloads from private to public clouds.”To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco, Amazon marriage simplifies hybrid cloud app development

Cisco and Amazon Web Services will soon offer enterprise customers an integrated platform that promises to help them more simply build, secure and connect Kubernetes clusters across private data centers and the AWS cloud.The new package, Cisco Hybrid Solution for Kubernetes on AWS combines Cisco, AWS and open source technologies to simplify complexity and helps eliminate challenges for customers who use Kubernetes to enable deploying applications across on-premises and the AWS cloud in a secure, consistent manner said David Cope, senior director of Cisco Cloud Platform & Solutions Group (CPSG).[ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.] “The significance of Amazon teaming with Cisco means  more integration between product lines from AWS and Cisco, thus reducing the integration costs notably on the security and management fronts for joint customers," said Stephen Elliot, program vice president with IDC.  “It also provides customers with some ideas on how to migrate workloads from private to public clouds.”To read this article in full, please click here

Which cloud performs better, AWS, Azure or Google?

Most IT professionals select cloud providers based on price or proximity to users, but network performance should also be considered. Because as we see in a new report from ThousandEyes, the underlying network architecture of the big cloud providers can have a significant impact on performance. And performance varies widely among cloud service providers.In its first annual public cloud benchmark report, ThousandEyes compared the global network performance of the “big three” public cloud providers — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. The network management company looked at network performance (latency, packet loss, jitter) and connectivity architecture. It also measured user-to-cloud connectivity from 27 cities around the globe to 55 AWS, Azure, and GCP regions and measured the inter-AZ and inter-region connectivity within all three cloud provider networks. In addition, they measured inter-region connectivity between all 55 regions on a multi-cloud basis.To read this article in full, please click here

Which cloud performs better, AWS, Azure or Google?

Most IT professionals select cloud providers based on price or proximity to users, but network performance should also be considered. Because as we see in a new report from ThousandEyes, the underlying network architecture of the big cloud providers can have a significant impact on performance. And performance varies widely among cloud service providers.In its first annual public cloud benchmark report, ThousandEyes compared the global network performance of the “big three” public cloud providers — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. The network management company looked at network performance (latency, packet loss, jitter) and connectivity architecture. It also measured user-to-cloud connectivity from 27 cities around the globe to 55 AWS, Azure, and GCP regions and measured the inter-AZ and inter-region connectivity within all three cloud provider networks. In addition, they measured inter-region connectivity between all 55 regions on a multi-cloud basis.To read this article in full, please click here

The network matters for public cloud performance

Most IT professionals select cloud providers based on price or proximity to users, but network performance should also be considered. Because as we see in a new report from ThousandEyes, the underlying network architecture of the big cloud providers can have a significant impact on performance. And performance varies widely among cloud service providers.In its first annual public cloud benchmark report, ThousandEyes compared the global network performance of the “big three” public cloud providers — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. The network management company looked at network performance (latency, packet loss, jitter) and connectivity architecture. It also measured user-to-cloud connectivity from 27 cities around the globe to 55 AWS, Azure, and GCP regions and measured the inter-AZ and inter-region connectivity within all three cloud provider networks. In addition, they measured inter-region connectivity between all 55 regions on a multi-cloud basis.To read this article in full, please click here

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