What do you believe now that you didn’t five years ago? Centralized wins. Decentralized loses.

 

 

Decentralized systems will continue to lose to centralized systems until there's a driver requiring decentralization to deliver a clearly superior consumer experience. Unfortunately, that may not happen for quite some time.

I say unfortunately because ten years ago, even five years ago, I still believed decentralization would win. Why? For all the idealistic technical reasons I laid out long ago in Building Super Scalable Systems: Blade Runner Meets Autonomic Computing In The Ambient Cloud.

While the internet and the web are inherently decentralized, mainstream applications built on top do not have to be. Typically, applications today—Facebook, Salesforce, Google, Spotify, etc.—are all centralized.

That wasn't always the case. In the early days of the internet the internet was protocol driven, decentralized, and often distributed—FTP (1971), Telnet (<1973), FINGER (1971/1977),  TCP/IP (1974), UUCP (late 1970s) NNTP (1986), DNS (1983), SMTP (1982), IRC(1988), HTTP(1990), Tor (mid-1990s), Napster(1999), and XMPP(1999).

We do have new decentalized services: Bitcoin(2009), Minecraft(2009), Ethereum(2104), IPFS(2015), Mastadon(2016), and PeerTube(2018). We're still waiting on Pied Piper to deliver the decentralized internet

On an evolutionary timeline decentralized systems are neanderthals; centralized systems are the humans. Neanderthals came first. Humans may have interbred with neanderthals, humans may have even killed off the neanderthals, but Continue reading

Learn More About Docker at VMworld 2018

The Docker team will be at VMworld in Las Vegas next week (Aug. 26-30) to interact with IT leaders and virtualization administrators and share the latest on Docker Enterprise – the leading enterprise-ready container platform that supports your choice of technology stacks, application types, operating systems and infrastructure. Register today to get a guided tour of Docker Enterprise.

 

Secure Your Legacy, Protect Your Future – See How Docker Works for Windows Server Migrations

Come by Booth #2513 near the Mobility Zone to learn more about container platforms and how Docker Enterprise is the only solution that can help IT migrate applications from Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2016 – without recoding!

Windows Server 2008 is approaching End of Support which means security and maintenance patches will be discontinued. Don’t risk your business critical apps with an unpatched and unsupported operating system. Discover the simplest way to move off of Windows Server 2008 (and even Windows Server 2003) with a proven methodology using Docker Enterprise and  purpose-built containerization. With Docker, you can:

  • Eliminate legacy app security risks and improve reliability
  • Make your apps portable and cloud-ready
  • Cut costs by 50% from increased server consolidation and operational efficiencies

Stop by, talk to our Continue reading

Episode 33 – The Importance Of Breaking Things

Conventional wisdom tells us that a network that never breaks is the most resilient, but practice tells us otherwise. In this episode we explore the value of chaos engineering and how breaking your network intentionally can make it stronger.

 

Chris Morrow
Guest
Michael Kehoe
Guest

Jordan Martin
Host
Eyvonne Sharp
Host
Russ White
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 Episode 33 – The Importance Of Breaking Things appeared first on Network Collective.

Getting To The Root Of Security With Trusted Silicon

The increasingly distributed nature of computing and the rapid growth in the number of the small connected devices that make up the Internet of Things (IoT) are combining with trends like the rise of silicon-level vulnerabilities highlighted by Spectre, Meltdown, and more recent variants to create an expanding and fluid security landscape that’s difficult for enterprises to navigate.

Getting To The Root Of Security With Trusted Silicon was written by Jeffrey Burt at .

Reality Check: Self-Driving Networks

I stumbled upon an article with an interesting title (and worth reading): To Make Self-Driving Cars Safe, We Also Need Better Roads and Infrastructure… and thought about the claims along the lines of “if they managed to solve the self-driving cars challenge, it’s realistic to expect self-driving networks” made in Self-Driving Networks podcast episode. Turns out the self-driving cars problem is far far away from being solved.

Read more ...

AfPIF 2018 Kicks Off

The ninth edition of Africa Peering and Interconnection Forum (AfPIF) kicked off today, with more than 400 tech executive in attendance.

This year, the forum was organized and held jointly with iWeek- South Africa ISP Association’s premier tech event. The event is underway at the Cape Town International Convention Center.

This year’s event is dubbed AfPIF@iWeek has attracted tech executives, chief technology officers, peering coordinators and business development managers, Internet service providers and operators, telecommunications policymakers and regulators, content providers, Internet Exchange Point (IXP) operators, infrastructure providers, data center managers, National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), carriers, and transit providers.

The sessions started with an introduction by Nishal Goburdhan, a veteran of AfPIF, who traced the history of AfPIF, from its conception to the community event it is. The community took over the program three years ago, determining the speakers and the conference content.

How can you take advantage of AfPIF? Nishal suggested that the participants use peering personals sessions; this is like speed dating for networks – members give details of their AS numbers, where they peer, peering policy, contact information, and explain why other participants should peer with them. At the end of every session, participants get a Continue reading

Snorkel: rapid training data creation with weak supervision

Snorkel: rapid training data creation with weak supervision Ratner et al., VLDB’18

Earlier this week we looked at Sparser, which comes from the Stanford Dawn project, “a five-year research project to democratize AI by making it dramatically easier to build AI-powered applications.” Today’s paper choice, Snorkel, is from the same stable. It tackles one of central questions in supervised machine learning: how do you get a large enough set of training data to power modern deep models?

…deep learning has a major upfront cost: these methods need massive training sets of labeled examples to learn from – often tens of thousands to millions to reach peak predictive performance. Such training sets are enormously expensive to create…

Snorkel lets you throw everything you’ve got at the problem. Heuristics, external knowledge bases, crowd-sourced workers, you name it. These are known as weak supervision sources because they may be limited in accuracy and coverage. All of these get combined in a principled manner to produce a set of probability-weighted labels. The authors call this process ‘data programming’. The end model is then trained on the generated labels.

Snorkel is the first system to implement our recent work Continue reading