Internet Native Applications

I grew up with DOS and Windows 3.1. I remember applications being fast - instant feedback or close to it. Today, native applications like Outlook or Apple Mail still feel fast - click compose and the window is there instantly and it feels snappy. Internet applications do not.

My first Internet experience was paying $30 for a prepaid card with 10 hour access over a 14.4k modem. First, it was bulletin boards and later IRC and the WWW. From my small seaside town in Australia, the Internet was a window into the wider world, but it was slooooooow. In a way, it didn’t matter. The world of opportunities the Internet opened up, from information to music, to socializing and ecommerce, who cared if it was slow? The utility of the Internet and Internet applications meant I would use them regardless of the experience.

Performance improved from the 90s, but in 2008 when I switched from Outlook downloading my Yahoo! email over IMAP to Gmail in the browser, it wasn’t because it was faster - it wasn’t - it was because features like search, backed up mail, and unlimited storage were too good to resist. The cloud computing power Continue reading

Worth Reading: Practice Hours

Often times musicians have “sacred” practice hours. They don’t do it for an artist, band, or for anyone other than themselves. It’s their time to sit down and focus on a technique, song that they want to learn, or whatever their heart desires. —Stephanie Winn Provence @Free Code Camp

Automation Everywhere At AnsibleFest austin

AnsibleFest is fast approaching! We couldn’t be more excited to be holding our 13th AnsibleFest in Austin, TX. It must be true that everything is bigger in Texas, because this year's AnsibleFest is on track to be the biggest one ever. We have more sessions, more content, and more opportunities to learn from Ansible, from partners, and from each other. So much more in fact, we have made AnsibleFest a multi-day event for the first time ever.

This year, we have so much content that we’ve created six tracks. Plus, we have a new Getting Started Hub for those of you beginning on your automation journey with Ansible or Red Hat Ansible Tower. If you want to get a deeper dive, we will be offering onsite Ansible Automation and Ansible Network Automation Technical Workshops.

This year’s breakout sessions are split into six tracks of content:

• Best Practices
• Community & Culture
• Technical Deep Dives
• Business Solutions
• Network Automation
• Ansible Integrations
• And more

To give you more insight into what to expect, we will be blogging about each track in the coming weeks. We will highlight some of the most exciting, interesting, and useful content for attendees (although, let’s be honest it’s Continue reading

Alibaba Rolls Own Distributed File System for Cloud Database Performance

There is much value in separating storage from compute, particular for cloud database deployments. …

Alibaba Rolls Own Distributed File System for Cloud Database Performance was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .

Foundries.io Tightens Edge, IoT Integration to Boost Security

The firm sees constant and long-term updates as key to maintaining edge and IoT security.

Integrating redirection.io with Cloudflare Workers

The following is a guest post by Xavier Lacot, a developer at redirection.io and founder at JoliCode. He works primarily on Web and mobile projects as a consultant, trainer and technical expert.

What is redirection.io

Redirection.io is a Web traffic redirection manager. It provides a collection of tools for website administrators, SEO agencies, and developers, which help analyze HTTP errors, setup HTTP redirections, customize HTTP responses, and monitor the traffic efficiently.

The main part of a traditional redirection.io setup is the proxy, a software component which parses every request to check if a redirection or another response override is required. This "proxy" can be of several types - we provide libraries in several languages - but this setup can be simplified for Cloudflare clients by taking advantage of Cloudflare Workers.

Here come Cloudflare Workers

Earlier this year, Cloudflare unveiled its Workers product, a smart way of running code on the edge of Cloudflare locations. This computing feature is particularly interesting, as it allows performing several traffic operations without requiring any change on your own platform, code, or infrastructure: just enable Workers, write some code, and let Cloudflare handle the magic ✨

In practical terms, Workers Continue reading

DHCP defined and how it works

The ability to network devices quickly and easily is critical in a hyper-connected world, and although it has been around for decades, DHCP remains an essential method to ensure that devices are able to join networks and are configured correctly. DHCP greatly reduces the errors that are made when IP addresses are assigned manually, and can stretch IP addresses by limiting how long a device can keep an individual IP address. [ Now read 20 hot jobs ambitious IT pros should shoot for. ] DHCP definition DHCP stands for dynamic host configuration protocol and is a network protocol used on IP networks where a DHCP server automatically assigns an IP address and other information to each host on the network so they can communicate efficiently with other endpoints.To read this article in full, please click here

DHCP defined and how it works

The ability to network devices quickly and easily is critical in a hyper-connected world, and although it has been around for decades, DHCP remains an essential method to ensure that devices are able to join networks and are configured correctly. DHCP greatly reduces the errors that are made when IP addresses are assigned manually, and can stretch IP addresses by limiting how long a device can keep an individual IP address. [ Now read 20 hot jobs ambitious IT pros should shoot for. ] DHCP definition DHCP stands for dynamic host configuration protocol and is a network protocol used on IP networks where a DHCP server automatically assigns an IP address and other information to each host on the network so they can communicate efficiently with other endpoints.To read this article in full, please click here

Keysight Provides NTT DoCoMo With 5G Network Emulation for 5G NR Devices

Keysight and NTT DoCoMo have been collaborating on 5G research since 2015 when the two companies worked on mmWave channel measurement.

Arista Taps VMware, Zscaler to Create Consistent Cloud Security

VMware’s software will bring common security policy enforcement to virtual and physical workloads. Zscaler brings its north-south traffic security.

History of Networking: Ross Callon on MPLS

North America Will Be First With 5G, IHS 5G Survey Says

Lower latency, high capacity, and lower cost per bit are the three big draws for operators to deploy 5G.

Microsoft Foils Russian Security Threat, Seizes Fake Political Websites

Microsoft said it has used this approach 12 times in two years to shut down 84 fake websites associated with the state-sponsored hacking group called Fancy Bear.

What’s New in VMware NSX Data Center for vSphere 6.4.2

With this latest release, VMware NSX Data Center for vSphere 6.4.2 continues to improve overall efficiency of the network, enhance security with Context-Aware Micro-Segmentation, and deliver operational enhancements to the NSX platform. Here are just a few highlights of what’s new.

Multicast Routing Support

With VMware NSX Data Center for vSphere 6.4.2, NSX Logical Routers now have the capability of routing IPv4 multicast traffic.

The location of the Virtual Machine multicast receivers (identified by their hypervisor, Logical Switch and Virtual NIC) is discovered thanks to IGMP snooping within the NSX domain. The Edge Service Gateway (ESG) runs PIM sparse mode with physical routers and coordinates with the Distributed Logical Router (DLR) in order to provide both ways multicast connectivity from Virtual Machines to the outside world.

For added multicast replication performance in the VXLAN Overlay, NSX leverages Layer 2 multicast in an underlying physical infrastructure running IGMP snooping. 

Context-Aware Micro-Segmentation

New Layer 7 Application Context

VMware has been taking security to the next level with Context-Aware Micro-Segmentation, better securing application using the full context of the application. This latest release includes the following new Layer 7 Application Context:

• EPIC – Epic EMR Continue reading

Sponsored Post: NationBuilder, Twitch, InMemory.Net, Triplebyte, Etleap, Stream, Scalyr, MemSQL

Who's Hiring? 

• NationBuilder — if you’re a systems engineer, SRE or DevOps focused developer and have been looking for a place where you can help other people while still working in tech? We can give that opportunity. Please apply here. 


• Twitch's commerce team in San Francisco is looking to hire senior developers to keep up with rapidly increasing demand for our Subscriptions and Payment platform. Engineers will be tasked with building new products and features to solve business and ecommerce challenges as we're dealing with engaging problems at a massive scale and will create solutions that impact millions of people around the world. Apply here. 


• Triplebyte lets exceptional software engineers skip screening steps at hundreds of top tech companies like Apple, Dropbox, Mixpanel, and Instacart. Make your job search O(1), not O(n). Apply here.


• Need excellent people? Advertise your job here! 

Fun and Informative Events

• Advertise your event here!

Cool Products and Services

• InMemory.Net provides a Dot Net native in memory database for analysing large amounts of data. It runs natively on .Net, and provides a native .Net, COM & ODBC apis for integration. It also has an easy to use Continue reading

Akraino Edge Stack Project Hits Execution Stage

The Linux Foundation-hosted project is opening up its seed code that initially was contributed by AT&T.

OpenCL Optimizations Make Case for FPGAs in HPC

The use of FPGAs in HPC is limited less by the capabilities of current hardware and more by the challenges in programming them without sacrificing performance. …

OpenCL Optimizations Make Case for FPGAs in HPC was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .

Worth Reading: Active-Active Data Centers

Any enterprise running a high-availability application must answer the following fundamental question: How do we create a resilient application architecture when the underlying communications infrastructure may be unreliable? —Terry Slattery @Netcraftsmen

SANOG 32 – Another Success Story for MANRS

The SANOG 32 meeting was held on 2-10 August 2018 in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which marked fifteen amazing years of collaboration between network operators in the South Asia region. The Internet Society is proud to support the SANOG fellowship programme that provides opportunities for network engineers from countries in the region to attend, as well as organising the Network Security workshop during the event.

SANOG 32 also saw another MANRS milestone reached when the ISP Association of Bangladesh (ISPAB) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Internet Society. ISPAB is a membership-based, not-for-profit organization that provides a forum for Bangladeshi ISPs to discuss technology, policy, regulatory and commercial issues and find collective solutions.

In accordance with the MoU, both ISPAB and ISOC will work together to promote and support MANRS, to encourage network operators in Bangladesh to join the initiative. There are currently only two MANRS participants in the country, so being able to increase engagement with the networking community is a welcome development.

Dr Philip Smith (NSRC and Chair of SANOG Programme Committee) also provided a MANRS update during the conference session.

The Network Security workshop attracted 40 participants and was lead by MANRS founding member Matsuzaki Yoshinobu (IIJ) and Continue reading

Dell EMC Touts ‘Kinetic’ Composable Infrastructure in VMworld Ramp Up

Composable infrastructure — Dell EMC calls it “kinetic infrastructure” — treats networking, storage, and compute as fluid resource pools that can be composed and recomposed on the fly.