SDxCentral’s Weekly Roundup — June 22, 2018
ZTE stock sinks after U.S. Senate bill; T-Mobile and Sprint advance their proposed merger; and VMware works with the U.S. government and public sector.
Show 395: The Nature Of Optical Networking
In this episode, the Packet Pushers dive into optical networking. Optical networking tends to be a specialized area of networking. It’s much less about packets and paths and more about physical properties of fiber optic cables, signal propagation, and remote operations.
In recent times, optical companies have been moving into Data Center Interconnect (DCI) and selling direct to enterprises using dark fiber as well as offering DCI services via infrastructure suppliers.
Joining us today to offer their expertise on optical are Scott Wilkinson, Senior Director, Portfolio Marketing at ECI Telecom; and Andrew Schmitt, founder of Cignal AI.
We discuss the basics of silicon photonics and how it impacts optical networking, particularly for DCI. We also examine the open optical movement being driven by the Facebook-backed Telecom Infrastructure Project.
Show Links:
Cignal AI Newsletter sign-up – Cignal AI
IP and Optical integration white paper – ECI Telecom (PDF)
ONF s ODTN Project Brings Disaggregation and Open Source to Optical Networking – Open Networking.org
Infinera – Following the Open Road(map) – YouTube
Download an overview of latest news from last big optical conference – OFC2018
Pulse-amplitude modulation – Wikipedia
Quadrature amplitude modulation – Wikipedia
Short Take – Thinking About Your Career Trajectory
In this Short Take, Eyvonne explores how to think about your career trajectory and covers 5 questions you should ask yourself when planning your career.
Eyvonne Sharp
Host
The post Short Take – Thinking About Your Career Trajectory appeared first on Network Collective.
Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For June 22nd, 2018
Hey, it's HighScalability time:
4th of July may never be the same. China creates stunning non-polluting drone swarm firework displays. Each drone is rated with a game mechanic and gets special privileges based on performance (just kidding). (TicToc)
Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please lend me your support on Patreon. It would mean a great deal to me. And if you know anyone looking for a simple book that uses lots of pictures and lots of examples to explain the cloud, then please recommend my new book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love you even more.
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$40 million: Netflix monthly spend on cloud services; 5%: retention increase can increase profits 25%; 50+%: Facebook's IPv6 traffic from the U.S, for mobile it’s over 75 percent; 1 billion: monthly Facebook, err, Instagram users; 409 million: websites use NGINX; 847 Tbps: global average IP traffic in 2021; 200 million: Netflix subscribers by 2020; $30bn: market for artificial-intelligence chips by 2022;
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Quotable Quotes:
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@evacide: Just yelled “Encryption of data in transit is not the same as encryption of data at rest!” at Continue reading
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Leveling Up Women One Edit at a Time
Only 1 in 10 Wikipedia editors is a woman. Unfortunately, the underrepresentation of female perspectives is quite common within the tech world. In order to help achieve gender equality in content creation and dissemination, Wikipedia Editathons are held as a way of bridging the gap and encourage female editors to increase the coverage of women’s topics.
The Internet Society India Delhi Chapter, in partnership with the Women Special Interest Group and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, organized the 1st Global Editathon “Girls in ICT” on 28 April, 2018. Various Chapters and groups participated in this event to increase Wikipedia pages about Asian women who have contributed to any technology-related fields.
“Women are seriously underrepresented in Wikipedia’s content,” says Amrita Choudhury, treasurer of the Internet Society India Delhi Chapter. She has over 17 years of experience in IT and the Internet industry and is a member of the SIG Women team. “Exact figures vary depending on which research you’re reading, but only around 17% of individuals profiled on Wikipedia are women.”
What Chapters were involved and how did you work together?
“As devoted to the #ShineTheLight movement, we decided to collaborate with the SIG Women, whose main interest Continue reading
New To The INE Course Library: AWS Automation Options
We’ve added another AWS course to our Collection. This course is 6 hours and 18 minutes long and taught by James Fogerson. You can view this, and all of our other AWS courses, by logging into your streaming account.
This course will provide guidance on the various native options that can be used to script and deploy AWS resources. The course will cover a number of options from the easiest (Elastic Beanstalk) to the most complex (CloudFormation). AWS Opsworks and the CLI will also be covered and a brief introduction to Opscode Chef will also be included as an alternative to native CloudFormation. The course will be somewhat detailed but should allow the viewer to follow along so that he/she can create their own resources.
Announcing NDSS 2019 & the Call for Papers
It may seem far away, but it’s time to begin planning for the 26th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium. NDSS 2019 will once again be held in sunny San Diego at the lovely Catamaran Spa and Resort from 24-27 February 2019.
This annual security symposium is a premiere venue for fostering information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal is to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available security technologies.
NDSS 2019 will have a new General Chair, Dr. Trent Jaeger of Pennsylvania State University. In addition, the Program Committee for NDSS 2019 is being chaired by Dr. Alina Opera of Northeastern University and Dr. Dongyan Xu of Purdue University. Additional positions will be announced in the coming weeks.
Most importantly for all you researchers out there, the NDSS 2019 Call for Papers has been released. As in years past, the focus of the symposium will be the many aspects of security and privacy including the security of emerging Continue reading
Finding Value in Cisco Live 2018
The world famous Cisco Live Sign picture, 2018 edition
Another Cisco Live has come and gone. Overall it was a fun time for many. Catching up with friends. Meeting people for the first time. Enjoying the balmy Orlando weather. It was a chance to relive some great times for every one. But does Cisco Live 2018 dictate how the future of the event will go?
Packing The Schedule
Did you get a chance to attend any of the social events at Cisco Live? There were a ton. There were Tweetups and meet ups and special sessions galore. There was every opportunity to visit a lounge or area dedicated to social media presence, Boomerang videos, goofy pictures, or global outreach. Every twenty feet had something for you to do or some way for you to make an impact.
In fact, if you went to all of these things you probably didn’t have time for much else. Definitely not time for the four or five keynote addresses. Or a certification test. Or the classes and sessions. In fact, if you tried to do everything there was to do at Cisco Live, you’d probably not sleep the whole week. There’s almost as much Continue reading
HPE Says Composable Infrastructure Is the Future of Data Center Tech
HPE started shipping its composable infrastructure product last year, and says in the first quarter of fiscal year 2018 alone it increased its customer base by more than 50 percent.
Kernel of Truth episode 02 — Day 2 operations
Network monitoring, “Wonderwall” by Oasis, virtual test environments, Wu-Tang Clan (Cumulus Rules Everything Around Me!), validating configurations and cursed email chains. What do all of these things have in common? They’re all topics in Kernel of Truth’s second episode! Now, if you want to know HOW all of these seemingly random talking points fit together, you’ll have to listen for yourself, but the main focus of this discussion is Day 2 operations. Specifically, we get into important topics like:
- The importance of accurate virtual environments
- Managing configuration changes
- How to handle updating configs and removing vulnerabilities
- Why screenshots of Word documents make network operators die inside
- And more!
Our guest panel consists of two networking ops experts from Cumulus Networks: Senior Consulting Engineer Rama Darbha (also known as “Tough Tiger Fist” according to the Wu-Tang name generator), who you’ll remember from our previous episode on network automation, and Technical Marketing Engineer Pete Lumbis (aka “Master Block Warrior”). These industry pros joined me (“Ungrateful Ambassador”) to provide first-hand experience and insight into why Day 2 operations deserve just as much attention as architectural design.
On another note, we’ve got some great news — Continue reading
Building a serverless Slack bot using Cloudflare Workers
Our Workers platform can be used for a ton of useful purposes: for A/B (multivariate) testing, storage bucket authentication, coalescing responses from multiple APIs, and more. But Workers can also be put to use beyond "HTTP middleware": a Worker can effectively be a web application in its own right. Given the rise of 'chatbots', we can also build a Slack app using Cloudflare Workers, with no servers required (well, at least not yours!).
What are we Building?
We're going to build a Slack bot (as an external webhook) for fetching the latest stock prices.
This Worker could also be adapted to fetch open issues from GitHub's API; to discover what movie to watch after work; anything with a REST API you can make query against.
Nevertheless, our "stock prices bot":
- Uses the Alpha Vantage API to fetch stock prices
- Caches a map of the top equities to their public identifiers, so you can request
/stocks MSFTas a shorthand. - Leverages Cloudflare's cache to minimize the need to hit the API on every invocation, whilst still serving recent price data.
Using the cache allows you to improve your bot's response times across all invocations of your Worker. It's also polite Continue reading
AI in Business: The Practical Reality
IT executives need to start thinking about how they can integrate artificial intelligence into their operations or risk being left behind.
A Quick Intro to the AWS CLI
This post provides a (very) basic introduction to the AWS CLI (command-line interface) tool. It’s not intended to be a deep dive, nor is it intended to serve as a comprehensive reference guide (the AWS CLI docs nicely fill that need). I also assume that you already have a basic understanding of the key AWS concepts and terminology, so I won’t bore you with defining an instance, VPC, subnet, or security group.
For the purposes of this introduction, I’ll structure it around launching an EC2 instance. As it turns out, there’s a fair amount of information you need before you can launch an AWS instance using the AWS CLI. So, let’s look at how you would use the AWS CLI to help get the information you need in order to launch an instance using the AWS CLI. (Tool inception!)
To launch an instance, you need five pieces of information:
- The ID of an Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
- The type of instance you’re going to launch
- The name of the SSH keypair you’d like to inject into the instance
- The ID of the security group to which this instance should be added
- The ID of the subnet on which this Continue reading
Time for a Summer Break
So many things have happened since I wrote “this is what we’re going to do in 2018” blog post. We ran
- An automation course and a data center course, resulting in three new modules in the automation course, and over 20 hours of fresh content
- Three workshops, two of them brand new and resulting in material for VMware NSX Deep Dive and AWS Networking webinars (both coming in early autumn).
We also did a ton of webinars:
Read more ...