NFV’s Return on Investment Disappoints Some NFV Players
“We had inflated expectations” because the promise was vendors could easily obtain commodity hardware and “throw some VNFs on it and it would make money," said a Masergy executive.
Bandwidth Alliance: powered by smart routing on Cloudflare’s network
Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of the Bandwidth Alliance, a group of cloud providers that have agreed to reduce data transfer fees for mutual customers.
Three things were required to make the Bandwidth Alliance a reality:
- An ecosystem of like-minded companies who want to provide reduced data transfer fees to their customers.
- A large global and well-connected network (Cloudflare has 150+ points of presence around the world and multiple peered and paid links at each location). Our network is connected to thousands of partners through transit providers, Internet exchanges, peering interconnects, and private network interconnects. Having a large network footprint allows us to meet our partners where their infrastructure is and exchange traffic with them over low-cost or free connections, instead of expensive paid transit.
- Argo, our sophisticated traffic routing engine. Argo allows us to make decisions on how to carry traffic across our network in ways that optimize for a number of factors: latency, throughput, jitter, or in the case of the Bandwidth Alliance, cost to our partners to exchange traffic. This routing engine is the technical underpinning of the Bandwidth Alliance.
Typically, as traffic moves across the Internet, packets are exchanged between multiple networks as they Continue reading
Introducing the Bandwidth Alliance: sharing the benefits of interconnected networks
At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better Internet. That means making the Internet faster, safer and smarter, but also more efficient alongside our cloud partners. As such, wherever we can, we're on the lookout for ways to help save our common customers money. That got us looking into why and how much cloud customers pay for bandwidth.
If you're hosting on most cloud providers, data transfer charges, sometimes known as "bandwidth” or “egress” charges, can be an integral part of your bill. These fees cover the cost of delivering traffic from the cloud all the way to the consumer. However, if you’re using a CDN such as Cloudflare, the cost of data transfer comes in addition to the cost of content delivery.
In some cases, charging makes sense. If you're hosted in a facility in Ashburn, Virginia and someone visits your service from Sydney, Australia there are real costs to moving traffic between the two places. The cloud provider likely hands off traffic to a transit provider or uses its own global backbone to carry the traffic across the United States and then across the Pacific, potentially handing off to other transit providers along the way, until Continue reading
CNCF, Eclipse Foundation Push Kubernetes to the Edge
The Kubernetes IoT Edge Working Group is looking to see how far it can push the centralized Kubernetes platform out into the distributed edge and IoT ecosystem.
Test Web Page Load Time with a Free Chrome Extension
A walk-through shows you how to use a free Chrome extension to measure web page loading times.
Infrastructure-as-Code Tools
This is the fourth blog post in “thinking out loud while preparing Network Infrastructure as Code presentation for the network automation course” series. Previous posts: Network-Infrastructure-as-Code Is Nothing New, Adjusting System State and NETCONF versus REST API.
Dmitri Kalintsev sent me a nice description on how some popular Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools solve the challenges I described in The CRUD Hell section of Infrastructure-as-Code, NETCONF and REST API blog post:
Read more ...The design and implementation of modern column-oriented database systems
The design and implementation of modern column-oriented database systems Abadi et al., Foundations and trends in databases, 2012
I came here by following the references in the Smoke paper we looked at earlier this week. “The design and implementation of modern column-oriented database systems” is a longer piece at 87 pages, but it’s good value-for-time. What we have here is a very readable overview of the key techniques behind column stores.
What is a column store?
Column stores are relational databases that store data by column rather than by row. Whereas a traditional row-based store stores all attributes of one row together, followed by the attributes of the next row, and so on, a column-based stored uses one logical file per attribute (column). The column-oriented layout makes it efficient to read just the columns you need for a query, without pulling in lots of redundant data.
Data for a column may be stored in an array with implicit ids (a), or in some format with explicit ids (b).
Since data transfer costs from storage (or through a storage hierarchy) are often the major performance bottlenecks in database systems, while at the same time database schemas are becoming more and Continue reading
Measuring the KSK Roll
It has been a trade-off between waiting long enough to have the key sentinel mechanism deployed in sufficient volume in resolvers to generate statistically valid outcomes and yet start this measurement prior to the planned roll of the KSK on 11th October 2018. These are early results, and reflect less than one week of measurement, but some strong signals are evident in the data.Forging A Hybrid CPU-FPGA Supercomputer
It is hard to say for sure, but a very substantial part of the hard work in buying supercomputers and creating simulations and models that tell us about the real world around us gets done in thousands of academic research institutions worldwide. …
Forging A Hybrid CPU-FPGA Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
Intel Kicks FPGA Performance Up a Notch With Stratix 10 PAC
Intel is gearing up the FPGA user base it inherited from Altera for the release of Stratix 10 hardware and companion application acceleration stack. …
Intel Kicks FPGA Performance Up a Notch With Stratix 10 PAC was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .
HPE Selects Intel Programmable Card for Data Center Servers
HPE is the first original equipment manufacturer to incorporate the programmable card into its devices.
Microsoft Office 365
This information is extremely useful, allowing traffic analytics software to combine telemetry obtained from network devices with information obtained using the Microsoft REST API in order to identifying clients, links, and devices carrying the traffic, as well as any issues, such as link errors, and congestion, that may be impacting performance.
var api = 'https://endpoints.office.com/endpoints/worldwide';
function uuidv4() {
return 'xxxxxxxx-xxxx-4xxx-yxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx'.replace(/[xy]/g, function(c) {
var r = Math.random() * 16 | 0, v = c == 'x' ? r : (r & 0x3 | 0x8);
return v.toString(16);
});
}
var reqid = uuidv4();
function updateAddressMap() {
var res, i, ips, id, groups;
try { res = http(api+'?clientrequestid='+reqid); }
catch(e) { logWarning('request failed ' + e); }
if(res == null) return;
res = JSON.parse(res);
groups Continue reading
Vodafone, China Mobile Tap ONAP for Broader Network Orchestration
The CCVPN use case allows for the orchestration of an operator’s underlying optical transport network and overlay SD-WAN in a way to support the peering of inter-operator VPN service delivery.