SDNs and NFV are complementary and core components of modernized networks

The terms software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) are often used interchangeably, which is incorrect.  In a sense, the two are tied together as companies start using NFV as part of their SDN plans but that doesn’t have to be the case.Enterprises could maintain their current network architecture and shift to NFV or they could roll out an SDN and never leverage the benefits of NFV, so it’s important to understand what each is and the benefits of both.[ For more on SDN see where SDN is going and learn the difference between SDN and NFV. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] What is software-defined Networking SDNs are a fundamentally different way to think about networks.  Technically, SDNs can be defined as the separation of the management, control and data-forwarding planes of networks.  Many people, including technical individuals read that definition and say, “So what?”, but the separation of these planes has a profound impact on networks and enables things that have never been done before.To read this article in full, please click here

Integrating 3rd Party Firewalls with Amazon Web Services (AWS) VPC Networking

After figuring out how packet forwarding really works within AWS VPC (here’s an overview, the slide deck is already available to ipSpace.net subscribers) the next obvious question should be: “and how do I integrate a network services device like a next-generation firewall I have to use because $securityPolicy into that environment?”

Please don’t get me started on whether that makes sense, that’s a different discussion.

Christer Swartz, an old-time CCIE and occasional guest on Software Gone Wild podcast will show you how to do it with a Palo Alto firewall during my Amazon Web Services Networking Deep Dive workshop on June 13th in Zurich, Switzerland (register here).

ServiceFabric: a distributed platform for building microservices in the cloud

ServiceFabric: a distributed platform for building microservices in the cloud Kakivaya et al., EuroSys’18

(If you don’t have ACM Digital Library access, the paper can be accessed either by following the link above directly from The Morning Paper blog site).

Microsoft’s Service Fabric powers many of Azure’s critical services. It’s been in development for around 15 years, in production for 10, and was made available for external use in 2015.

ServiceFabric (SF) enables application lifecycle management of scalable and reliable applications composed of microservices running at very high density on a shared pool of machines, from development to deployment to management.

Some interesting systems running on top of SF include:

  • Azure SQL DB (100K machines, 1.82M DBs containing 3.48PB of data)
  • Azure Cosmos DB (2 million cores and 100K machines)
  • Skype
  • Azure Event Hub
  • Intune
  • Azure IoT suite
  • Cortana

SF runs in multiple clusters each with 100s to many 100s of machines, totalling over 160K machines with over 2.5M cores.

Positioning & Goals

Service Fabric defies easy categorisation, but the authors describe it as “Microsoft’s platform to support microservice applications in cloud settings.” What particularly makes it stand out from the crowd Continue reading

An Update for my Adoring Fans

I feel like a teenage girl with a fashion blog who hasn’t posted in 6 months and comes back with “I know I haven’t posted in a while…”  Sigh.  It’s been right at a year since I actually published a post, so I figured I would give everyone an update.

I’ve had some personal things going on lately, and those have taken all of my energy.  We’ve made it through those rough times, so my energy is coming back.  I’m feeling better every day, and I hope I can get back to producing some content.  And, let me tell you…I’ve got some stuff to talk about.

*insert star wipe here*

We got a new director-level dude at the office, and he’s really mixing things up for us.  His philosophy includes changing the way we do everything that we do.  Like literally everything.  He ran a report for me on my ticket queue and showed me that 60% of my ticket count was on stupid stuff that’s below my pay grade.  His advice : Make somebody else do it.  So I did.  I taught myself some more Python (not hard since Continue reading

OpenStack Summit – May 2018

The second time the opportunity was presented to attend OpenStack Summit. Here is few thoughts and observations. Venue – In one of the recent podcasts Greg has mentioned – that probably the decision to have the summit in Canada (not US) was based on premises that it is easier for Out-of-North-America OpenStack users to get […]

Cloudflare Workers Recipe Exchange

Cloudflare Workers Recipe Exchange

Cloudflare Workers Recipe Exchange
Photo of Indian Spices, by Joe mon bkk. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Share your Cloudflare Workers recipes with the Cloudflare Community. Developers in Cloudflare’s community each bring a unique perspective that would yield use cases our core team could never have imagined. That is why we invite you to share Workers recipes that are useful in your own work, life, or hobby.

We’ve created a new tag “Recipe Exchange” in the Workers section of the Cloudflare Community Forum. We invite you to share your work, borrow / get inspired by the work of others, and upvote useful recipes written by others in the community.

Recipe Exchange in Cloudflare Community

We will be highlighting select interesting and/or popular recipes (with author permission) in the coming months right here in this blog.

What is Cloudflare Workers, anyway?

Cloudflare Workers let you run JavaScript in Cloudflare’s hundreds of data centers around the world. Using a Worker, you can modify your site’s HTTP requests and responses, make parallel requests, or generate responses from the edge. Cloudflare Workers has been in open beta phase since February 1st. Read more about the launch in this blog post.

What can you do with Continue reading

What’s on your DockerCon 2018 Agenda?

DockerCon is quickly approaching, taking place next week from June 12th – 15th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The conference will welcome 6,000+ developers, sysadmins, architects, VP of Apps and other IT leaders to get hands-on with the latest innovations in the container ecosystem at DockerCon 2018.

Have you scheduled your DockerCon Agenda or RSVP’d for sessions?

Check out the DockerCon Agenda Builder to browse and search the sessions. As an attendee log in using the information and create your DockerCon schedule.

We’ve brought back some of your favorite from past DockerCon events and are also thrilled to welcome many first-time DockerCon speakers to the stage. Here is a first look at some of our favorites sessions:

Customers in Production

Use case sessions highlight how companies are using Docker to modernize their infrastructure and build, manage and secure  distributed applications. These sessions are heavy on business value, ROI and production implementation advice, and learnings.

  • Building your NoSQL ship: How an Enterprise transitioned from a RDBMS to NoSQL DB using Agile and Docker by Jonell Taylor, Metlife
  • Black Friday and 100K Deployments Per Year by Srikanth Bulusu & Sanjoy Mukherjee, JCPenney
  • Packaging Software for Distribution on the Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Winning together in the co-economy: a new mindset for the 21st century

During the late 20th century, industrial technology providers focused on delivering complete, turnkey solutions by themselves. The thought was that to effectively address highly specialized and complex environments, a vertically integrated approach would produce a better outcome.Today, that mindset has drastically shifted.The accelerated pace of technology innovation has driven end customers to question this single-vendor model. Now, customers are increasingly embracing the open model involving multiple partners developing solutions based on open standards and the latest technology. Such solutions are typically better future-proofed, more cost effective and agile.To read this article in full, please click here

The Value of Community

What seems, now, like a few short months ago, I was drawn into a small community known as The Network Collective. This last week, we launched our paid membership service.

The first thing that must come to mind is that there will be training. Of course there will be training. A (minor) theme throughout the community launch among Eyvonne, Jordan, and I, is that the training on tap will be different from anything else out there. We all three have a great deal of respect for the existing training materials, and we all intend to continue to be involved in other training and education efforts. On the other hand, the style, tone, and content will be different at The Network Collective. The first series being launched are math for network engineers, a long conversation on network design, and a long conversation on communication skills. But training is, once again, a minor theme.

The major theme of The Network Collective is community.

Consider the position of the “average” network engineer. You are either the expert, or one of a few experts, on a topic very few people care about in your organization. What you build is largely seen as an opaque Continue reading

Network Break 187: China Tech Tariffs; FBI Advises Router Reboot

Take a Network Break! The Trump administration proposes sanctions on a portion of Chinese tech imports, the FBI advises router reboots to help thwart the VPNFilter malware, and Huawei completes a 200Gbps backbone network in Spain.

CenturyLink becomes certified on Cisco Meraki to compete with resellers, OpenStack matures, and network engineers decry an ITU proposal to speed IPv6 deployments in emerging countries.

Apstra extends its network orchestration coverage, Cisco wrestles with how to sell cloud, VMware posts a positive financial quarter, and AT&T tests an all-weather communications drone called a Flying COW.

Get links to all these stories just after our sponsor message.

Sponsor: Couchdrop

Couchdrop provides Secure Copy Protocol,or SCP and Rsync to Dropbox, Box and other cloud storage providers. Find out more at Couchdrop.io.

Show Links:

White House announces tariffs, investment restrictions on China over intellectual property abuse – Axios

Donald Trump to hit US$50 billion of Chinese imports with 25 per cent tariffs and restrict investment in US hi-tech industries – South China Morning Post

Sen. Warner warns against ZTE deal – Axios

Huawei and Orange Spain finalize the construction of 200 Gbps Backbone Network – Huawei Press Center

Foreign Cyber Actors Target Home and Office Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: To accelerate cloud application performance, start by mapping your apps

In the eternal words of Yogi Berra, “If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up someplace else.” So how does this sage advice apply to the new world of application performance and hybrid IT?As the pace of application migration to the cloud continues to accelerate, enterprise networking teams have turned to hybrid and SD-WANs as practical solutions to open up more localized internet access and direct routing to the cloud. So the theory goes that by deploying broadband and internet connections at the edge of the network, users can bypass the MPLS bottlenecks and avoid transiting the centralized data center internet egress points.So with the proliferation of hybrid and SD-WAN deployments, which according to most analysts is well past the tipping point and going mainstream, why is it that enterprise IT teams are still struggling with cloud application performance? User frustration with the performance of applications like Office 365, Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, and others is only growing, rather than waning.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: To accelerate cloud application performance, start by mapping your apps

In the eternal words of Yogi Berra, “If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up someplace else.” So how does this sage advice apply to the new world of application performance and hybrid IT?As the pace of application migration to the cloud continues to accelerate, enterprise networking teams have turned to hybrid and SD-WANs as practical solutions to open up more localized internet access and direct routing to the cloud. So the theory goes that by deploying broadband and internet connections at the edge of the network, users can bypass the MPLS bottlenecks and avoid transiting the centralized data center internet egress points.So with the proliferation of hybrid and SD-WAN deployments, which according to most analysts is well past the tipping point and going mainstream, why is it that enterprise IT teams are still struggling with cloud application performance? User frustration with the performance of applications like Office 365, Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, and others is only growing, rather than waning.To read this article in full, please click here

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