Last Month in Internet Intelligence: September 2018

Over the course of a given month, hundreds of Internet-impacting “events” are visible within the Oracle Internet Intelligence Map. Many are extremely short-lived, lasting only minutes, while others last for hours or days; some have a minor impact on a single metric, while others significantly disrupt all three metrics. In addition, for some events, the root cause is publicly available/known, while for other events, digging into the underlying data helps us make an educated guess about what happened. Ultimately, this creates challenges in separating the signal from the noise, triaging and prioritizing that month’s events for review in this blog post.

Having said that, in September we observed Internet disruptions due to exams, power outages, extreme weather, and submarine cable issues, as well as a number of others with unknown causes. Additionally, a third test of nationwide mobile Internet connectivity took place in Cuba.

Cuba

As noted in our August post, ETECSA (the Cuban state telecommunications company) carried out two tests of nationwide mobile Internet connectivity, which were evident as spikes in the DNS query rates from Cuba. In a Facebook post, they noted, “On August 14th was a first test that measured levels of traffic congestion and Continue reading

IoT analytics guide: What to expect from Internet of Things data

The growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) is having a big impact on lots of areas within enterprise IT, and data analytics is one of them.Companies are gathering huge volumes of information from all kinds of connected of objects, such as data about how consumers are using certain products, the performance of corporate assets, and the environmental conditions in which systems operate. By applying advanced analytics to these incoming streams of data, organizations can gain new insights that can help them make more informed decisions about which actions to take. And with companies placing IoT sensors on more and more objects, the volumes of incoming data will continue to grow.To read this article in full, please click here

The Week in Internet News: AI Can Help, But Humans Are the Problem with Fake News

AI battles the fake news: Can Artificial Intelligence combat all the fake news that’s out there? An article in Forbes looks at several ways fake news fighters are using AI, but the author casts some doubt on these approaches. Ultimately, humans are the problem, the article says: “The willingness to believe sensational information is a real phenomenon and debunking false information does not always change people’s minds.”

Fake tweets: As social networks take steps to fight against fake news, some still have a way to go. Twitter, for example, is still flooded with sham accounts that generate more than 1 million tweets a day, reports CBS News. Twitter disputed the study the story is based on, noting it has suspended more than 70 million suspicious accounts in May and June.

Tiny infiltrations: Chinese hackers have used tiny microchips to gain access to computers at 30 U.S. companies, including Apple and Amazon, Bloomberg reports. Both companies disputed the report, and the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre appeared to support the denials later in the week, Reuters says.

Blockchain’s bright future: There were several reports this week focused on the growth projections of the blockchain technology, with the blockchain Continue reading

VXLAN and EVPN on Hypervisor Hosts

One of my readers sent me a series of questions regarding a new cloud deployment where the cloud implementers want to run VXLAN and EVPN on the hypervisor hosts:

I am currently working on a leaf-and-spine VXLAN+ EVPN PoC. At the same time, the systems team in my company is working on building a Cloudstack platform and are insisting on using VXLAN on the compute node even to the point of using BGP for inter-VXLAN traffic on the nodes.

Using VXLAN (or GRE) encap/decap on the hypervisor hosts is nothing new. That’s how NSX and many OpenStack implementations work.

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Online parameter selection for web-based ranking problems

Online parameter selection for web-based ranking problems Agarwal et al., KDD’18

Last week we looked at production systems from Facebook, Airbnb, and Snap Inc., today it’s the turned of LinkedIn. This paper describes the system and model that LinkedIn use to determine the items to be shown in a user’s feed:

It replaces previous hand-tuning of the feature mix and ranking:

In the past, a developer spent days to accurately estimate [the feature weights] with desired behavior with every significant drift and intervention. Using the approach described in this paper, we have completely eliminated the laborious manual tuning, significantly increased developer productivity as well as obtained better Pareto optimal solutions.

Here are representative results comparing the impact on three key metrics for a setting found by the new algorithm over a period of 36 hours, vs the best setting that could be found in 7 days of hand-tuning:

Viral Actions is the most important metric for the LinkedIn feed, ‘with far reaching consequences from more subsequent sessions to more revenue.’ The algorithm is tasked with maximising this metric while not allowing others to drop by more than 1%. (Increases in the other metrics as well are Continue reading

VAGRANT FOR NETWORK ENGINEERS

Vagrant is an alien word for network engineers ,we as network engineer are more close to windows environment than Linux and always try to avoid linux . But time has changed now and with introduction of automation ,SDN ,Devops  in networks professional  life has made him to come out of windows environment and  try Linux for multiple reasons as below:

  • Mostly open source projects (open stack, Docker etc. )tools are based on Linux which we as network engineers have to use.
  • Network devices are now having Linux as underlying shell.
  • Most of the software which are directly or indirectly related to networks are using development environment as Linux.

So when ever we plan to work on linux environment , we just start downloading ubantu on our windows laptop with VM box ..install both and start working.

But there is an environment known as Vagrant that will not help you do all the Linux related task but also provide an environment that helps reduce setup time and allows you to virtualize configurations for various projects.We can set up  up a virtual network environment for testing purposes, or setting up a lab,  work with python , ansible ,devops tools and much more .

You Continue reading

Announcing the DockerCon EU 2018 Sessions

 

DockerCon EU 2018 sessions focus on how Docker works for you. From the latest in Docker technology, to how-tos for your developer and IT infrastructure and operations team, to customer stories on how they are transforming their business with Docker, this year’s program was revamped based on audience feedback. The result –  we’ve doubled your favorite content! That’s right, we’ve expanded our popular Using Docker track into two customized tracks for those that are hands on with Docker technology on a daily basis – Using Docker for Developers and Using Docker for IT Infrastructure and Operations.  

DockerCon is for Teams

DockerCon is better with friends and colleagues. In Barcelona we are introducing tracks specifically dedicated to developers and IT Infrastructure and Operations professionals. Combined with hands-on learning opportunities with Official Training, Workshops and Labs, there is no shortage of ways to level up on how to work with containers every day. So grab your colleagues and register together to take advantage of our DockerCon for Teams offer: Teams of 4 or more get 10% off their registration and 10 or more get 20% off.

Using Docker for Developers

This track is designed to cover the range of topics applicable Continue reading

Leave your VPN and cURL secure APIs with Cloudflare Access

Leave your VPN and cURL secure APIs with Cloudflare Access
Leave your VPN and cURL secure APIs with Cloudflare Access

We built Access to solve a problem here at Cloudflare: our VPN. Our team members hated the slowness and inconvenience of VPN but, that wasn’t the issue we needed to solve. The security risks posed by a VPN required a better solution.

VPNs punch holes in the network perimeter. Once inside, individuals can access everything. This can include  critically sensitive content like private keys, cryptographic salts, and log files. Cloudflare is a security company; this situation was unacceptable. We need a better method that gives every application control over precisely who is allowed to  reach it.

Access meets that need. We started by moving our browser-based applications behind Access. Team members could connect to applications faster, from anywhere, while we improved the security of the entire organization. However, we weren’t yet ready to turn off our VPN as some tasks are better done through a command line. We cannot #EndTheVPN without replacing all of its use cases. Reaching a server from the command line required us to fall back to our VPN.

Today, we’re releasing a beta command line tool to help your team, and ours. Before we started using this feature at Cloudflare, curling a server required me to Continue reading

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