What’s quantum computing [and why enterprises need to care]

The first thing to know about quantum computing is that it won’t displace traditional, or ‘classical’ computing. The second thing to know: Quantum computing is still a nascent technology that probably won’t be ready for prime time for several more years.And the third thing you should know? The time to start protecting your data’s security from quantum computers is now.[ Learn how server disaggregation can boost data center efficiency and how Windows Server 2019 embraces hyperconverged data centers . | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Here’s an overview of what you should know about quantum computing.To read this article in full, please click here

Who’s developing quantum computers?

There are two main camps in the quantum computing development, says Ashish Nadkarni, Program Vice President of Computing Platforms, Worldwide Infrastructure at IDC. In the first camp are entrenched players from the world of classical computing. And in the second are quantum computing startups.“It’s a highly fragmented landscape,” Nadkarni says. “Each company has its own approach to building a universal quantum computer and delivering it as a service.”[ Now see What is quantum computing [and why enterprises should care.] Classic-computing vendors pioneer quantum computing Along with IBM, other classical computing companies staking a claim in the emerging field of quantum computing include:To read this article in full, please click here

Multi-tier load-balancing with Linux

A common solution to provide a highly-available and scalable service is to insert a load-balancing layer to spread requests from users to backend servers.1 We usually have several expectations for such a layer:

scalability
It allows a service to scale by pushing traffic to newly provisioned backend servers. It should also be able to scale itself when it becomes the bottleneck.
availability
It provides high availability to the service. If one server becomes unavailable, the traffic should be quickly steered to another server. The load-balancing layer itself should also be highly available.
flexibility
It handles both short and long connections. It is flexible enough to offer all the features backends generally expect from a load-balancer like TLS or HTTP routing.
operability
With some cooperation, any expected change should be seamless: rolling out a new software on the backends, adding or removing backends, or scaling up or down the load-balancing layer itself.

The problem and its solutions are well known. From recently published articles on the topic, “Introduction to modern network load-balancing and proxying” provides an overview of the state of the art. Google released “Maglev: A Fast and Reliable Software Network Load Balancer” describing their Continue reading

Why is Network Automation So Hard?

This blog post was initially sent to the subscribers of my SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.

Every now and then someone asks me “Why are we making so little progress on network automation? Why does it seem so hard?

There are some obvious reasons:

However, there’s a bigger elephant in the room: every network is a unique snowflake.

Read more ...

Pixie: a system for recommending 3+ billion items to 200+ million users in real-time

Pixie: a system for recommending 3+ billion items to 200+ million users in real-time Eksombatchai et al., WWW’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, or from the WWW 2018 proceedings page).

Pinterest is a visual catalog with several billion pins, which are visual bookmarks containing a description, a link, and an image or a video. A major problem faced at Pinterest is to provide personalized, engaging, and timely recommendations from a pool of 3+ billion items to 200+ million monthly active users.

Stating the obvious, 3 billion or so items is a lot to draw recommendations from. This paper describes how Pinterest do it. One of the requirements is that recommendations need to be calculated in real-time on-demand. I’m used to thinking about the shift from batch to real-time in terms of improved business responsiveness, more up-to-date information, continuous processing, and so on. Pinterest give another really good reason which is obvious with hindsight, but hadn’t struck me before: when you compute recommendations using a batch process, you have to calculate the recommendations for every user Continue reading

Regular Expression for Network Engineer Part-1

A regular expression is set of pattern used to define certain amount of text. An powerful  tool in any scripting language to match any pattern.

Lets have a look , how regular expression can be used in Python to solves the problem. Module “re’ is imported in python to support regular expression .

<< import re >>

[  ] – its for specifying character class, individual char or range of character can be mached .

 

  • [123] will match any of the character ‘1’,’2′,’3′
  • [1-3] will match any of the character  ‘1’,’2′,’3′
  • [a-d] will match any of the character a,b,c,d
  • [a-z] will match lowercase
  • [A-Z] will match uppercase
  • [^6] will match any character except 6
  • [a-zA-Z0-9] will match any alphanumeric character
  • [^a-zA-Z0-9] will not match any alphanumeric character
  •  [a-zA-Z0-9] is equivalent to \w
  •  [^a-zA-Z0-9] is equivalent to \W
  • [0-9] is equivalent to \d
  • [^0-9] is equivalent to \D
  • [  \t\n\r\f\v] is equivalent to \s
  • [ ^ \t\n\r\f\v] is equivalent to \S

 

. – Period character ,use for matching any single charcter

  • EXAMPLE :

 

[code language=”python”]

In [225]: ip =’10.20.30.40′
In [226]: re.search(r”.”,ip)
Out[226]:&lt;_sre.SRE_Match object; span=(0, 1), match=’1’_>
In [227]: re.search(r”.”,ip).group(0)
Out[227]: ‘1’

Continue reading

Regular Expression for Network Engineer Part-1

A regular expression is set of pattern used to define certain amount of text. An powerful  tool in any scripting language to match any pattern. Lets have a look , how regular expression can be used in Python to solves the problem. Module “re’ is imported in python to support regular expression . << import […]

Introducing: The Cloudflare All-Stars Fantasy League

Introducing: The Cloudflare All-Stars Fantasy League

Introducing: The Cloudflare All-Stars Fantasy League

Baseball season is well underway, and to celebrate, we're excited to introduce the Cloudflare All-Stars Fantasy League: a group of fictitious sports teams that revolve around some of Cloudflare’s most championed products and services. Their mission? To help build a better Internet.

Cloudflare HQ is located just a block away from the San Francisco Giants Stadium. Each time there's a home game, crowds of people walk past Cloudflare's large 2nd street windows and peer in to the office space. The looks in their eyes scream: "Cloudflare! Teach me about your products while giving me something visually stimulating to look at!"

They asked. We listened.

The design team saw a creative opportunity, seized it, and hit it out of the park. Inspired by the highly stylized sports badges and emblems of some real-life sports teams, we applied this visual style to our own team badges. We had a lot of fun coming up with the team names, as well as figuring out which visuals to use for each.

Introducing: The Cloudflare All-Stars Fantasy League

For the next few months, the Cloudflare All-Stars teams will be showcased within the large Cloudflare HQ windows facing 2nd street and en route to Giants Stadium. Feel free to Continue reading

Weather Forecasting Gets A Big Lift In Japan

It has been a long time since the Japan Meteorological Agency has deployed the kind of supercomputing oomph for weather forecasting that the island nation would seem to need to improve its forecasts. But JMA, like its peers in the United States, Europe, and India, is investing heavily in new supercomputers to get caught up, and specifically, has just done a deal with Cray to get a pair of XC50 systems that will have 18.2 petaflops of aggregate performance.

This is a lot more compute capacity than JMA has had available to do generic weather forecasting as well as do

Weather Forecasting Gets A Big Lift In Japan was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Network Collective: State of the Podcast

In this edition of the Network Collective, Eyvonne, Jordan, and I talk about where the ‘cast has been, and share some thoughts on where it is going. While we like technology as much as anyone else, the NC is really all about community.

In particular, we discuss the upcoming subscription service. We have a lot of new, exciting, material being recorded around the skills needed to be a better engineer exclusively for the subscription service. For instance, we’ve started a series on communication that does not take the standard line, but looks at how to communicate from the perspective of our experience in living on every possible side of the network engineering world, and developing and delivering every possible kind of content. And we have our first Q&A guest lined up, as well as a lot of fantastic material from Rachel Traylor already being recorded. This is going to be fantastic material, designed to push your career forward in a way that includes technology, but goes beyond technical skills, as well.

Plan Your DockerCon 2018 Conference Experience: Everything an Enterprise Architect Needs to Know

DockerConSan Francisco 2018 is just around the corner and we’re here to help Enterprise Architects learn what Docker can do for them. DockerCon isn’t just for developers and we want to help you find the sessions and experiences that we’ve created that are developed with this role in mind:

In 2015, I attended DockerCon for the first time. I was sitting in a chair and listening to the amazing stories and ideas presented by speakers at the conference, which set off a chain of events that led to today. I feel privileged, and am really looking forward to being on stage and sharing our transformational journey to inspire the people who would sit in that chair. 
Alex Iankoulski, Principal Software Architect, Baker Hughes GE

The first thing to notice is that as you build your DockerCon agenda this year, we have a “Journey” theme that will help guide you during the conference. Whether you’re just “Getting Started” in your learning about containerization or you want to hear about “Innovation” using the Docker container platform for data sciences, AI, machine learning, and IoT, we have sessions that will be just right for you.

You can will also find content we’ve Continue reading