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

Datanauts 145: Microservice Meshes With Istio And Envoy

The Datanauts explore Envoy (an application-level proxy) and Istio (management software or the control plane for service meshes), key open-source projects for microservices architectures. Our guest is Christian Posta, Chief Architect, Cloud Application Development at Red Hat.

The post Datanauts 145: Microservice Meshes With Istio And Envoy appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Automation and AI in Telco Ops — A Reality Check

Automation is getting a lot of buzz right now but operators should only use automation if it helps reduce the complexity of the network or compensates for human limitations.

Worth Reading: Sunrise DNS over TLS

Currently, DoT and DNSSEC are complementary: they serve two different purposes (privacy and origin authenticity respectively), and thereby overcome each other’s limitations and weaknesses. This said, DoT could realistically become a viable replacement for DNSSEC. —Willem Toorop @APNIC

Research Brief: Achieving Early Success in Edge Deployments

SDxCentral’s new Research Brief on Edge Computing aims to provide insights into the most common pitfalls in building out the edge and provides recommendations on how to maximize success at the Edge for operators.

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

Research Brief: Achieving Early Success in Edge Deployments

SDxCentral’s new Research Brief on Edge Computing aims to provide insights into the most common pitfalls in building out the edge and provides recommendations on how to maximize success at the Edge for operators.

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.

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 .

SAP Kubernetes Efforts Focused On the ‘Big Bump’ Not ‘Propeller Heads’

The firm says Kubernetes is still a "three-star wizard to figure out," but abstraction could help ease deployment pains.

Network Architect Jobs Evolve

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.

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

A Simple Kubernetes Context Switcher

I recently needed to find a simple way of switching between Kubernetes contexts. I already use powerline-go (here’s the GitHub repo), which allows me to display the Kubernetes context in the prompt so I always know which context is the active (current) context. However, switching between contexts using kubectl config set-context <name> isn’t the easiest approach; not to mention it requires merging multiple config files into a single file (which is itself a bit of a task). So, I set out to create a simple Kubernetes context switcher—and here’s the initial results of my efforts.

Before I go any further, I’d like to stress 2 important points. First, I’m not a programmer, so keep that in mind. Second, this is a simple Kubernetes context switcher—it’s not meant to address any and every possible use case out there, nor do I claim any sort of sophistication in the code.

With those disclaimers out of the way, allow me to introduce kcs: the simple Kubernetes context switcher. kcs is built on the idea that it’s easiest to manage Kubernetes contexts in their own files, rather than trying to merge config files. So, it makes the assumption that you’ll store your Continue reading

Refresh Stale DNS Records on 1.1.1.1

You can now refresh 1.1.1.1’s DNS cache for domain names by using the purge cache tool. This is useful for domain owners who have updated their DNS records and want to make sure it is reflected for people who are using 1.1.1.1 as their public DNS resolver.

When a client queries for a domain against 1.1.1.1, the resolver returns the IP address from its cache. The cache TTL for a DNS entry is 3 hours. If the host specifies a cache TTL that is shorter than 3 hours, the resolver respects that. This means, when a domain owner changes the DNS host from one to another, in the worst case, she will have to wait for at least 3 hours before the old IP address expires from 1.1.1.1’s cache. With the help of the purge cache tool, a domain owner can now easily refresh 1.1.1.1’s DNS cache and will not have to wait for the cached entry to expire.

To purge a DNS record, you enter the name of your domain, pick the DNS record type and hit the ‘Purge Cache’ button.

You can Continue reading

How we chose the 10 AI-powered startups to watch

The selection process for this roundup started back in May at the tail-end of a previous, but closely related competition, 10 Hot IoT startups to watch.AI wasn’t a key selection criterion then. Some startups had it, some did not, but enough of them focused squarely on AI that it made sense to look more closely at this subsector of the overall IoT market.[ Check out our corporate guide to addressing IoT security. ] This roundup considered about 20 companies from the previous contenders that had strong AI components. Notice of the search for candidates was posted on HARO, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., and all told, just under 40 startups were considered.To read this article in full, please click here

10 Hot AI-powered IoT startups

Plants, factories, and manufacturers in general are embracing IoT, which in turn is driving the use of artificial intelligence at the edge of corporate networks as a way to streamline industrial processes, improve efficiency and detect maintenance issues before they become problems – perhaps even big problems that could force plant shutdowns.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Dell Moves One Step Closer To Composable With PowerEdge MX

There is a certain level of impatience in the IT industry to create truly composable infrastructure from disaggregated compute, storage, and networking. …

Dell Moves One Step Closer To Composable With PowerEdge MX was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Cohesity’s Helios Uses Machine Learning to Manage Secondary Data

The cloud service gives companies visibility and mobility across all of their secondary data and applications from a single dashboard. It also uses machine learning and analytics to power a bunch of new infrastructure management features.