Network Break 192: Dell Goes Public Again; Vodafone Trials Whitebox Optical

IDG Contributor Network: Solving for serverless: How do you manage something that’s not there?

Function-as-a-service (FaaS) technologies, including AWS Lambda, Azure Functions and IBM/Apache OpenWhisk, are experiencing mass adoption, even in private clouds, and it’s easy to see why. The promise of serverless is simple: developers and IT teams can stop worrying about their infrastructure, system software and network configuration altogether. There’s no need to load-balance, adjust resources for scale, monitor for network latency or CPU performance. Serverless computing can save you a lot of time, money and operational overhead, if you play your cards right.Say goodbye to the idle instance There’s also less waste with serverless computing. You only pay for infrastructure in the moment that code gets executed (or, each time a user processes a request). It’s the end of the server that just sits there. But with all these advantages, IT practitioners are also faced with an avalanche of complexity and new challenges.  To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Solving for serverless: How do you manage something that’s not there?

Function-as-a-service (FaaS) technologies, including AWS Lambda, Azure Functions and IBM/Apache OpenWhisk, are experiencing mass adoption, even in private clouds, and it’s easy to see why. The promise of serverless is simple: developers and IT teams can stop worrying about their infrastructure, system software and network configuration altogether. There’s no need to load-balance, adjust resources for scale, monitor for network latency or CPU performance. Serverless computing can save you a lot of time, money and operational overhead, if you play your cards right.Say goodbye to the idle instance There’s also less waste with serverless computing. You only pay for infrastructure in the moment that code gets executed (or, each time a user processes a request). It’s the end of the server that just sits there. But with all these advantages, IT practitioners are also faced with an avalanche of complexity and new challenges.  To read this article in full, please click here

Q&A: Bill Hoffman of the Industrial Internet Consortium talks AI, IoT and more

Bill Hoffman, president of the Industrial Internet Consortium, has worked with artificial intelligence (AI) for decades. He's been with the IIC since its inception, and he worked with IIC executive director Richard Soley at various AI firms for years before that. Hoffman recently sat down with Network World's Jon Gold for a chat about IoT and the role of automation and AI.NWW: Is this what you guys expected to be working on 20-30 years ago?BF: For us it’s fascinating to see, three decades later, that the term AI actually has a good connotation. It’s funny, but a lot of the systems that we were involved with, which were primarily renamed “decision support systems” – for liability reasons, they didn’t want to call them “expert” systems – a lot of those are still functioning today. So it never really went away, it just went somewhat underground, and people said “OK, that works.”To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: A taxonomy of Intent-Based Networking (IBN)

You have probably heard all sorts of claims by various vendors and solutions that they are providing or supporting Intent-Based Networking (IBN), yet there is a wide range of capabilities that are all very confusing.One way to make sense of this is to apply a "maturity model" like the one used to classify the maturity level of RESTful web services implementations. The Richardson Maturity Model divides capabilities of RESTful web services into levels, starting from 0 and going up as the maturity of the implementation increases. Just like IBN, REST had received its fair share of hype. While the REST principles were clearly defined in Roy Fielding’s dissertation, in practice the REST label was attached to implementations with wildly varying levels of conformance to the original principles, starting from anything that had the words “HTTP” and “JSON” in it to full blown “hypermedia as the engine of application state.”To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: A taxonomy of Intent-Based Networking (IBN)

You have probably heard all sorts of claims by various vendors and solutions that they are providing or supporting Intent-Based Networking (IBN), yet there is a wide range of capabilities that are all very confusing.One way to make sense of this is to apply a "maturity model" like the one used to classify the maturity level of RESTful web services implementations. The Richardson Maturity Model divides capabilities of RESTful web services into levels, starting from 0 and going up as the maturity of the implementation increases. Just like IBN, REST had received its fair share of hype. While the REST principles were clearly defined in Roy Fielding’s dissertation, in practice the REST label was attached to implementations with wildly varying levels of conformance to the original principles, starting from anything that had the words “HTTP” and “JSON” in it to full blown “hypermedia as the engine of application state.”To read this article in full, please click here

Rating the best converged infrastructure systems

Once the data center was home only to separate compute, storage and networking infrastructures. Sure, they communicated, but the disparate systems required dedicated management and hardware to care and feed for these heterogenous platforms.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Rating the best converged infrastructure systems

Once the data center was home only to separate compute, storage and networking infrastructures. Sure, they communicated, but the disparate systems required dedicated management and hardware to care and feed for these heterogenous platforms.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

The Week in Internet News: WhatsApp Looks to Combat the Spread of Fake News

Fake messaging: WhatsApp, the popular messaging tool, will pay researchers up to $50,000 to study the spread of fake news through its platform, notes Mashable.com. The announcement came after reports of mob lynchings in India fueled by false information spread on WhatsApp, reports the Washington Post. India’s government asked the app maker to take immediate action to stop the spread of fake news.

Defining fake news: While we’re still on the topic of fake news, Cambodia’s recent crackdown on false information is raising concerns about press freedom in the country, reports The Guardian. A new directive aimed at fake news on websites and social media allows for violators to be jailed for two years and fined US$1,000, but civil rights groups said the new rules could give “authorities the power to silence individuals at the click of a button.”

Fired by a computer: A Los Angeles worker was recently shown the door by an automated process that seemed to assume he was let go after his original manager was laid off, the BBC reports. The case could raise questions about artificial intelligence processes, but the real fix would be a more intelligent machine, The Conversation says.

AI manages Continue reading

Goodbye, content.ipspace.net

It turns out that while I cannot bring myself to writing or creating other content during the summer break, it feels perfectly fine to be a janitor and fix small things on the web site.

One of the long-outstanding items: get rid of the free content web site that never went where I wanted it to go… one can do only so much in 24 hours. All the features available on content.ipspace.net are now part of the main ipSpace.net web site including pointers to free content and list of free presentations.

During the summer break, I’m publishing blog posts about the projects I’m working on. Regular blog posts will return in autumn.

Scales Tip in Cisco-Arista Legal Battle

Rough Guide to IETF 102

Starting next weekend, the Internet Engineering Task Force will be in Montreal for IETF 102, where over 1,000 engineers will discuss open Internet standards and protocols. The week begins on Saturday, 14 July, with a Hackathon and Code Sprint. The IETF meeting itself begins on Sunday and goes through Friday. We’ll be providing our rough guides on topics of mutual interest to both the IETF and the Internet Society as follows:

• Overview of ISOC @ IETF (this post)
• Internet Infrastructure Resilience
• Internet of Things
• IPv6
• DNSSEC, DANE and DNS Security
• Identity, Privacy, and Encryption

For more general information about IETF 102 see:

• IETF 102 main page
• Remote participation & live stream information

Immediately prior to the IETF meeting, ICANN are hosting a DNS Symposium on the theme “Attention, Domain Name System: Your 30-year scheduled maintenance is overdue.” The ICANN DNS Symposium will take place in the same venue as the IETF 102 meeting on Friday 13th July.

Here are some of the activities that the Internet Society is involved in during the week.

Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW 2018)

The ACM, IRTF and ISOC Applied Networking Research Workshop will take place on the Monday of IETF week, Continue reading

Backup vs. archive: Why it’s important to know the difference

If you want to make a backup person apoplectic, call an old backup an archive.It’s just shy of saying that data on a RAID array doesn’t need to be backed up. The good news is that the differences between backup and archive are quite stark and easy to understand.[ Check out AI boosts data-center availability, efficiency. Also learn what hyperconvergence is and whether you’re ready for hyperconverged storage. | For regularly scheduled insights sign up for Network World newsletters. ] What is backup? Backup is a copy of data created to restore said data in case of damage or loss. The original data is not deleted after a backup is made.To read this article in full, please click here

Using JUNOS Firewall Filters for Troubleshooting & Verification | QFX5110

The Junos firewall filter feature can be a really useful tool for troubleshooting and verification scenarios. I was recently troubleshooting a packet loss fault and I was fairly sure it was an asymmetrical routing issue but I needed a quick way of verifying. And then a colleague said, “hey, how about a firewall filter?”. Of course, assuming IP traffic, we can use a Junos firewall filter to capture specific traffic flows.

Overview

In this scenario, we have a pair of Juniper QFX5110 switches that are both connected to an upstream IP transit provider. They are also connected to a local network via a VMware NSX edge. We’re going to use a firewall filter on QFX1 and QFX2 to identify which QFX is being used for egress traffic and which QFX is being used for ingress traffic. More specifically, the flow is an ICMP flow between a host on 212.134.79.62 and Cloudflare’s DNS service.

Topology

Firewall Filter

So we’re essentially going to create a firewall filter to count specific egress traffic and apply as an import filter on both QFX switches. We’re also going to create another firewall filter to count the return traffic and apply Continue reading

Registration Open for “Cyber Diplomacy Meets InfoSec and Technology” Alongside IETF 102

As we recently announced, the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace (GCSC) will host a lunch panel on “Cyber Diplomacy Meets InfoSec and Technology” alongside IETF 102 on Tuesday, 17 July. Registration opens today in two time slots for global time zone fairness, at 08:00 UTC and 20:00 UTC. Register here.

The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace is developing norms and policy initiatives that intend to counter the risk to the overall security and stability of cyberspace due to rise of offensive cyber-activities, and especially those by states. During this session, the Commission wants to inform and engage with the IETF community on its work so far and the work that is in the pipeline.

The Internet Society is assisting with logistics. Internet Society Chief Internet Technology Officer and GCSC Commissioner Olaf Kolkman will moderate the panel. The panelists are:

• Irina Rizmal, researcher at the DiploFoundation specialized in policy analysis in matters pertaining to national security and defense.
• Bill Woodcock, Commissioner and Executive Director at Packet Clearing House, the non-profit agency that supports critical Internet infrastructure.
• Jeff Moss, Commissioner, founder of Black Hat and Defcon, member of the DHS security council, Continue reading

Comparing Serverless Performance for CPU Bound Tasks

This post is a part of an ongoing series comparing the performance of Cloudflare Workers with other Serverless providers. In our past tests we intentionally chose a workload which imposes virtually no CPU load (returning the current time). For these tests, let's look at something which pushes hardware to the limit: cryptography.

tl;dr Cloudflare Workers are seven times faster than a default Lambda function for workloads which push the CPU. Workers are six times faster than Lambda@Edge, tested globally.  

Slow Crypto

The PBKDF2 algorithm is designed to be slow to compute. It's used to hash passwords; its slowness makes it harder for a password cracker to do their job. Its extreme CPU usage also makes it a good benchmark for the CPU performance of a service like Lambda or Cloudflare Workers.

We've written a test based on the Node Crypto (Lambda) and the WebCrypto (Workers) APIs. Our Lambda is deployed to with the default 128MB of memory behind an API Gateway in us-east-1, our Worker is, as always, deployed around the world. I also have our function running in a Lambda@Edge deployment to compare that performance as well. Again, we're using Catchpoint to test from hundreds of locations around Continue reading

End of term

It’s time to take my regular summer break from writing The Morning Paper – normal service will resume again on Monday 6th August. I’ll be topping up my paper backlog and scouting out interesting research during the break. If you’ve seen any great papers I haven’t already covered and that you think ‘The Morning Paper’ readers would enjoy, please do send them my way.

In the meantime, here are a few picks from papers we’ve covered this term in case you missed any of them. (In order of publication on the blog)

• Darwin – hardware/software co-design FTW.
• NetChain – blazingly fast in-network coordination service
• Beamer – rethinking the load balancer
• Semantics and complexity of GraphQL
• Measuring the tendency of CNNs to learn surface statistical irregularities
• zkLedger privacy preserving ledgers with full support for independent auditing
• DeepTest – testing tactics for DNNs (in this case, in the context of autonomous driving)
• Deep code search – joint embeddings enabling natural language queries return code snippet results
• EnclaveDB – protecting data in-memory, not just in-transit and at-rest.

Many thanks to all of you that follow along and support the blog – the accountability keeps me sticking at it when I’m snowed under, and Continue reading

How To Minikube + Cloudflare

The following is a guest blog post by Nathan Franzen, Software Engineer at StackPointCloud. StackPointCloud is the creator of Stackpoint.io, the leading multi-cloud management platform for cloud native workloads. They are the developers of the Cloudflare Ingress Controller for Kubernetes.

Deploying Applications on Minikube with Argo Tunnels

This article assumes basic knowledge of Kubernetes. If you're not familiar with Kubernetes, visit https://kubernetes.io/docs/tutorials/kubernetes-basics/ to learn the basics.

Minikube is a tool which allows you to run a Kubernetes cluster locally. It’s not only a great way to experiment with Kubernetes, but also a great way to try out deploying services using a reverse tunnel.

At Cloudflare, we've created a product called Argo Tunnel which allows you to host services through a tunnel using Cloudflare as your edge. Tunnels provide a way to expose your services to the internet by creating a connection to Cloudflare's edge and routing your traffic over it. Since your service is creating its own outbound connection to the edge, you don’t have to open ports, configure a firewall, or even have a public IP address for your service. All traffic flows through Cloudflare, blocking attacks and intrusion attempts before they ever make it to Continue reading

Redirecting DNS Requests to Umbrella with FTD

A few days ago I shared an article that described redirecting DNS requests with ASA. A good use case for this might be if an organization is using Cisco Umbrella but there is no way to get every host is pointed toward the correct DNS server(s) in a timely manner. In that case, a configuration of destination NAT in the ASA can force those misconfigured clients to use one of the OpenDNS addresses.

This article is very similar, but we will share a method for doing this with Firepower Threat Defence. The concept is the same but all configuration is done in Firepower Management Console. Before starting on the NAT configuration, it is important to configure the following network objects (Objects, Object Management, Network).

• obj_any – 0.0.0.0/0
• Umbrella1 – 208.67.220.220
• Umbrella2 – 208.67.222.222

It is also important to confirm the existence of two port objects (Objects, Object Management, Network).

• DNS_over_TCP  –  TCP Port 53
• DNS_over_UDP –  UDP Port 53

Most of the configuration will be done on the NAT policy for the device we are managing (Device, NAT, select edit for the appropriate NAT policy).

We will need four rules that Continue reading

Redirecting DNS Requests to Umbrella with FTD

A few days ago I shared an article that described redirecting DNS requests with ASA. A good use case for this might be if an organization is using Cisco Umbrella but there is no way to get every host is pointed toward the correct DNS server(s) in a timely manner. In that case, a configuration of destination NAT in the ASA can force those misconfigured clients to use one of the OpenDNS addresses.

This article is very similar, but we will share a method for doing this with Firepower Threat Defence. The concept is the same but all configuration is done in Firepower Management Console. Before starting on the NAT configuration, it is important to configure the following network objects (Objects, Object Management, Network).

• obj_any – 0.0.0.0/0
• Umbrella1 – 208.67.220.220
• Umbrella2 – 208.67.222.222

It is also important to confirm the existence of two port objects (Objects, Object Management, Network).

• DNS_over_TCP  –  TCP Port 53
• DNS_over_UDP –  UDP Port 53

Most of the configuration will be done on the NAT policy for the device we are managing (Device, NAT, select edit for the appropriate NAT policy).

We will need four rules that Continue reading