Automation: Flow Control & Dimensionality

Human beings as we are, struggle sometimes to think multi-dimensionally about tasks. Our brains seem to have a conscious layer and a sub-conscious layer. Whether you think in words, noise or images, your brain is a single threaded engine with a silent co-processor that can either assist or annoy. Experience has shown that we look at network automation challenges through this shaped lens and try and solve things that makes sense to humans, but not necessarily for mechanized processes.

In an attempt not to lose my own thread, I’ll try and explain some different view points through examples.

Example One: I’m English, Make me some Tea!

Making a a cup of tea is a very English thing to do and the process of making one will suffice for this example.

Let’s look at the process involved:

// { type: activity}
(Start)-><a>[kettle empty]->(Fill Kettle)->|b|
<a>-(note: Kettle activities)
<a>[kettle full]->|b|->(Boil Kettle)->|c|
|b|->(Add Tea Bag)-><d>[Sugar: yes]->(Add Sugar)->(Add Milk)
<d>[Sugar: no]->(Add Milk)
<d>-(note: Sweet tooth?)
(Add Milk)->|c|->(Pour Boiled Water)
(Pour Boiled Water)->(Enjoy)->(Stop)

Fig.1

This makes us a relative standard cup of English breakfast tea.

Let’s assume macros exist for milk and sugar quantity and the dealing of a mug or best china Continue reading

When It Comes to IoT, We Must Work Together to #SecureIt

My first ever rendezvous with the word “IoT” was during my final year at a college conference, when a prominent regional start-up figure dispensed an oblique reference to it. I learned that IoT was the next big thing veering towards the mass market, which would eventually change the course of everyday human existence by making our way of life more convenient. What caught my attention was the term “things” in IoT – an unbounded category which could be anything from the the bed you sleep on, the clothes you drape, or even the personal toiletries you use.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a class of devices that “can monitor their environment, report their status, receive instructions, and even take action based on the information they receive.” IoT connotes not just the device but also the complex network connected to the device. Multiple studies have revealed that there are more connected devices than people on the planet. Although, combining computers and networks to devices has existed for long, they were previously not integrated to consumer devices and durable goods, used in ordinary day to day life. Furthermore, IoT being an evolving concept, exhibiting a range of ever-changing features, Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For October 19th, 2018

Hey, wake up! It's HighScalability time:

 

Now that's a cloud! The largest structure ever found in the early universe. The proto-supercluster Hyperion may contain thousands of galaxies or more. (Science)

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please support me on Patreon. I'd really appreciate it. Know anyone looking for a simple book explaining the cloud? Then please recommend my well reviewed book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love it and you'll be their hero forever.

 

  • four petabytes: added to Internet Archive per year; 60,000: patents donated by Microsoft to the Open Invention Network; 30 million: DuckDuckGo daily searches; 5 seconds: Google+ session length; 1 trillion: ARM device goal; $40B: Softbank investment in 5G; 30: Happy Birthday IRC!; 97,600: Backblaze hard drives; 15: new Lambda function minute limit; $120 Billion: Uber IPO; 12%: slowdown in global growth of internet access; 25%: video ad spending in US; 1 billion: metrics per minute processed at Netflix; 900%: inflated Facebook ad-watch times; 31 million: GitHub users; 19: new AWS Public datasets; 25%: IPv6 adoption; 300: requests for Nest data;  913: security Continue reading

Diving into the DNS

DNS OARC organizes two meetings a year. They are two-day meetings with a concentrated dose of DNS esoterica. Here’s what I took away from the recent 29th meeting of OARC, held in Amsterdam in mid-October 2018.

IXPs: Why Is the Middle East Lagging Behind?

On October 2nd, the Internet Society was happy to support the ITU in organizing the IXP Workshop on Peering and Interconnection in the Arab World “Towards unlocking regional interconnection opportunities” It was held in Manama-Bahrain, and kindly hosted by the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) of Bahrain. This workshop was held on the eve of the Annual Meeting of the Arab ICT Regulators Network (AREGNET), and 30 regulators and 10 operators attended from all over the Arab region.

The workshop started with an overview of the Arab peering landscape given by Christine Arida, Director for Telecom Services and Planning at National Telecom Regulatory Authority of Egypt. Christine showed that the region is well served by undersea cables, with the oldest IXP established 20 years ago. However, all countries have either an underperforming IXP or do not have one at all. Regionally, cross-border interconnection is almost non-existent – with very few exceptions and most of the traffic is exchanged in London and Marseilles.

The debate started with an acknowledgement that strong and vibrant IXPs are needed in the Arab region. IXPs are a means and not the end… They are the enablers of digital transformation and a means to attract investment. Cheaper Continue reading

New: Expert ipSpace.net Subscription

Earlier this month I got this email from someone who had attended one of my online courses before and wanted to watch another one of them:

Is it possible for you to bundle a 1 year subscription at no extra cost if I purchase the Building Next-Generation Data Center course?

We were planning to do something along these lines for a long time, and his email was just what I needed to start a weekend-long hackathon.

End result: Expert ipSpace.net Subscription. It includes:

Read more ...

Orca: differential bug localization in large-scale services

Orca: differential bug localization in large-scale services Bhagwan et al., OSDI’18

Earlier this week we looked at REPT, the reverse debugging tool deployed live in the Windows Error Reporting service. Today it’s the turn of Orca, a bug localisation service that Microsoft have in production usage for six of their large online services. The focus of this paper is on the use of Orca with ‘Orion,’ where Orion is a codename given to a ‘large enterprise email and collaboration service that supports several millions of users, run across hundreds of thousands of machines, and serves millions of requests per second.’ We could it ‘Office 365’ perhaps? Like REPT, Orca won a best paper award (meaning MR scooped 2 out of the three awards at OSDI this year!).

Orca is designed to support on-call engineers (OCEs) in quickly figuring out the change (commit) that introduced a bug to a service so that it can be backed out. (Fixes can come later!). That’s a much harder task than it sounds in highly dynamic and fast moving environments. In ‘Orion’ for example there are many developers concurrently committing code. Post review the changes are eligible for inclusion in a Continue reading

1 … 1,435 1,436 1,437 1,438 1,439 … 3,849