While InfiniBand is making gains, many enterprises are sticking with Ethernet for their data center switching and interconnectivity needs to run their AI workloads.
Investment in supercomputing and related HPC technologies is not just a sign of how much we are willing to bet on the future with someone else’s money, but how much we believe in it ourselves, and more importantly, how much we believe in the core idea that we can predict and therefore shape the future of the world. …
At the start of each year, I’ve been reporting on the behaviour of the Internet’s inter-domain routing system over the previous 12 months, looking in some detail at some metrics from the routing system that can show the essential shape and behaviour of the underlying interconnection fabric of the Internet. The year 2023 marks a significant point in the evolution of the Internet where the strong growth numbers that were a constant feature of the past thirty years are simply not present in the data. Not only is the Internet’s growth slowing down significantly, but in the IPv4 network it appears to be shrinking, which is unprecedented in the brief history of the Internet to date.
At the start of each year, I’ve been reporting on the behaviour of the Internet’s inter-domain routing system over the previous 12 months, looking in some detail at some metrics from the routing system that can show the essential shape and behaviour of the underlying interconnection fabric of the Internet. The year 2023 marks a significant point in the evolution of the Internet where the strong growth numbers that were a constant feature of the past thirty years are simply not present in the data. Not only is the Internet’s growth slowing down significantly, but in the IPv4 network it appears to be shrinking, which is unprecedented in the brief history of the Internet to date.
At NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, patients are the priority. That focus on patient care extends to the hospital’s campus network, data center, wireless network, and SD-WAN. These networks are instrumental for delivering medical applications and connecting medical devices. On today’s Heavy Networking, we talk with network architects and engineers at NewYork-Presbyterian about their use of automation to... Read more »
We talk with network architects and engineers at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital about their automation strategy for mission-critical networks that support patient care. We explore the automation progress they've made, long-term goals, technical and cultural challenges, what they'd like to see from vendors, and more.
Welcome to Technology Short Take #172, the first Technology Short Take of 2024! This one is really short, which I’m assuming reflects a lack of blogging activity over the 2023 holiday season. Nevertheless, I have managed to scrape together a few links to share with readers. As usual, I hope you find something useful. Enjoy!
Networking
Via this blog post, I learned that Ivan Pepelnjak has a GitHub repository of hands-on examples for learning public cloud networking (including both AWS and Azure). Ivan’s materials are always excellent, so if you’re looking for resources to help with expanding your networking skills into the public cloud, this should be on the short list. (I plan to submit a PR soon to add Pulumi examples, which the repository is currently missing.)
Cloud Computing/Cloud Management
Jonathan Major shares his experience using Pulumi with Google Cloud APIs. I think there are some code snippets in Jonathan’s article, but my instance of Firefox wouldn’t render the code snippets (instead only showing empty black boxes).
Nisar Ahmad explores whether Terraform or Pulumi is better for your use case.
One of the delightful side effects of leaving the paid content business is that I no longer have to try to persuade anyone that my content is any good. That includes the “this video is now public” announcements – instead of elaborate introductions, I’ll just publish a short blog post with the links.
As of today, these videos (along with dozens of previously-released videos) from the Routing Protocols section of the How Networks Really Work webinar are no longer behind a login wall:
In my last post EVPN Deepdive Route Types 2 and 3, we took a deepdive into these two route types. I mentioned that the IP address of a host, a /32 or /128 address, could optionally be advertised. I also mentioned that this is mainly to facilitate features such as ARP suppression where a VTEP will be aware of the MAC/IP mapping and not have to flood BUM frames. However, in my last lab no IP addresses were advertised. Why is that? How do we get them advertised?
Currently, I have only setup a L2 VNI in the lab. This provides connectivity for the VLAN that my hosts are in, but it does not provide any L3 services. There is no SVI configured and there is also no L3 service configured that can route between different VNIs. The “standard” way of setting this up would be to configure anycast gateway on the leafs where every leaf that hosts the VNI has the same IP/MAC, but I consider this to be an optimization that I want to cover in a future posts. I prefer to break things down into their components and focus on the configuration needed for each component Continue reading
What does it mean to be a network engineer in today’s world of information technology? Phil Gervasi joins Tom and Russ to discuss the ins and outs of network engineering, and what it’s really like to be in this small corner of information technology today.
Can clouds be green? Today we discuss sustainability in the tech industry, focusing on running Kubernetes and workloads in more efficient and environmentally friendly ways. Co-hosts Kristina Devochko and Michael Levan explore current tools, the reuse of resources like excess heat from data centers, and the challenges of sustainable energy infrastructure, such as electric cars... Read more »
Can clouds be green? Today we discuss sustainability in the tech industry, focusing on running Kubernetes and workloads in more efficient and environmentally friendly ways.
Enabling anonymous access to the web with privacy-preserving cryptography
The challenge of telling humans and bots apart is almost as old as the web itself. From online ticket vendors to dating apps, to ecommerce and finance — there are many legitimate reasons why you'd want to know if it's a person or a machine knocking on the front door of your website.
Unfortunately, the tools for the web have traditionally been clunky and sometimes involved a bad user experience. None more so than the CAPTCHA — an irksome solution that humanity wastes a staggering amount of time on. A more subtle but intrusive approach is IP tracking, which uses IP addresses to identify and take action on suspicious traffic, but that too can come with unforeseen consequences.
And yet, the problem of distinguishing legitimate human requests from automated bots remains as vital as ever. This is why for years Cloudflare has invested in the Privacy Pass protocol — a novel approach to establishing a user’s identity by relying on cryptography, rather than crude puzzles — all while providing a streamlined, privacy-preserving, and often frictionless experience to end users.
To implement a successful NDR strategy, network managers must first prioritize a strategy for safer decryption of encrypted traffic to successfully mitigate attacks now and in the future.