Future Thinking: Getachew Engida on Digital Divides

In 2017, the Internet Society unveiled the 2017 Global Internet Report: Paths to Our Digital Future. The interactive report identifies the drivers affecting tomorrow’s Internet and their impact on Media & Society, Digital Divides, and Personal Rights & Freedoms. In April 2018, we interviewed two stakeholders – Getachew Engida, Deputy Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and Augusto Mathurin, who created Virtuágora, an open source digital participation platform – to hear their different perspectives on the forces shaping the Internet.

Getachew Engida is the Deputy Director-General of UNESCO. He has spent the past twenty years leading and managing international organizations and advancing the cause of poverty eradication, peace-building, and sustainable development. He has worked extensively on rural and agricultural development, water and climate challenges, education, science, technology and innovation, intercultural dialogue and cultural diversity, communication and information with emphasis on freedom of expression, and the free flow information on and offline. (You can read Augusto Mathurin’s interview here).

The Internet Society: You have, in the past, stressed the role that education has played in your own life and can play in others’ lives. Do you see technology helping to promote literacy and Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Why carriers aren’t ready for SD-WAN services

Throughout my early years as a consultant, when asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) was the rage and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) was still at the outset, I handled numerous roles as a network architect alongside various carriers. During that period, I experienced first-hand problems that the new technologies posed to them.The lack of true end-to-end automation made our daily tasks run into the night. Bespoke network designs due to the shortfall of appropriate documentation resulted in one that person knows all. The provisioning teams never fully understood the design. The copy-and-paste implementation approach is error-prone, leaving teams blindfolded when something went wrong.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Why carriers aren’t ready for SD-WAN services

Throughout my early years as a consultant, when asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) was the rage and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) was still at the outset, I handled numerous roles as a network architect alongside various carriers. During that period, I experienced first-hand problems that the new technologies posed to them.The lack of true end-to-end automation made our daily tasks run into the night. Bespoke network designs due to the shortfall of appropriate documentation resulted in one that person knows all. The provisioning teams never fully understood the design. The copy-and-paste implementation approach is error-prone, leaving teams blindfolded when something went wrong.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: WAN Summit recap: challenges facing SD-WAN services

If the recent WAN Summit in New York where I moderated a panel on last-mile access (more on that later) was any indication, the SD-WAN market is shifting towards a service-delivery model where sufficient network security and predictability are baked into the SD-WAN so the service can replace MPLS.In session and private conversations, topics related to secure SD-WAN services kept popping up. The challenges of today’s managed services. The impact of the cloud. The need for SLAs in SD-WAN services. How encryption complicates visibility and, by extension, enterprise security. These and other issues point to the change and challenges facing SD-WAN services.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: WAN Summit recap: challenges facing SD-WAN services

If the recent WAN Summit in New York where I moderated a panel on last-mile access (more on that later) was any indication, the SD-WAN market is shifting towards a service-delivery model where sufficient network security and predictability are baked into the SD-WAN so the service can replace MPLS.In session and private conversations, topics related to secure SD-WAN services kept popping up. The challenges of today’s managed services. The impact of the cloud. The need for SLAs in SD-WAN services. How encryption complicates visibility and, by extension, enterprise security. These and other issues point to the change and challenges facing SD-WAN services.To read this article in full, please click here

The Week in Internet News: A New Use for Blockchain

Blockchain takes on censorship: Students looking into sexual harassment accusations involving a professor at Peking University in China wrote a letter accusing the school of trying to silence one of them, but the letter was removed from social media outlets for “violating rules.” So some supporters distributed the letter using the Ethereum blockchain, reports Yahoo finance.

Why routing security matters: Hackers used a well-known weakness in Border Gateway Protocol routing to hijack Amazon Web Services’ DNS traffic for about two hours last Tuesday. Attackers were able to redirect an Ethereum wallet developer’s website to a phishing site and steal about $150,000 from MyEtherWallet.com users, ZDNet reports.

Hacking-for-hire site attacked: In this case, law enforcement agencies from 12 countries were the people who shut down hacking-for-hire site Webstresser.org. The site had 136,000 customers and its hackers launched more than 4 million DDoS attacks in recent years, according to Europol. GovTech.com has a story.

Inspecting the IoT: Researchers at Princeton University are launching IoT Inspector, an open-source tool designed to give Internet of Things users insight into the security of their devices. There’s even Raspberry Pi code for the project, says The Register.

Cryptocurrency for the suits: The Continue reading

Playing Dominoes In Data Science

The growing amounts of data that are being generated due to such trends as the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing have naturally beget the need for data scientists who can collect, analyze and, most importantly, interpret these massive stockpiles of complex information to help their companies more quickly and accurately make better business decisions to give them a competitive edge over competitors and to improve their operations and make them more efficient.

That in turn has created something of a land rush in what’s become a rapidly expanding data science platform market of more than a dozen vendors …

Playing Dominoes In Data Science was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Docker Government Summit 2018

Docker Government Summit

This year’s summit reflected what is top of mind for government organizations, namely IT modernization and what that means for infrastructure, applications, data and the workforce. As mentioned in the keynote address, the line between government IT and private sector IT is blurring now more than ever. From the priorities outlined in the White House IT Modernization Report to the discussions at the recent IT modernization summit, the themes focus on results of better customer service and better stewardship of tax dollars.

Better customer service translates into improving existing services, delivering new services and increasing transparency. To that end, government organizations are taking cues from industry to see how the latest technology and best practices can be applied and adapted to meet the added requirements of government.  The agenda featured speakers from government agencies, higher ed, system integrators and industry partners providing practical insight from their own transformation initiatives and deep dives into the modern technology stack.

Watch these featured videos from the event:

  • General Session: Banjot Chanana, Docker Senior Director Enterprise Product
  • Fireside Chat: Nick Sinai, Insight Ventures Partner and David Shive, GSA CIO
  • Case Study: Arjuna Rivera, Lockheed Martin i2Labs Lead
  • Case Study: Leo Garciga, JIDO CTO
  • Cyber Continue reading

NetChain: Scale-free sub-RTT coordination

NetChain: Scale-free sub-RTT coordination Jin et al., NSDI’18

NetChain won a best paper award at NSDI 2018 earlier this month. By thinking outside of the box (in this case, the box is the chassis containing the server), Jin et al. have demonstrated how to build a coordination service (think Apache ZooKeeper) with incredibly low latency and high throughput. We’re talking 9.7 microseconds for both reads and writes, with scalability on the order of tens of billions of operations per second. Similarly to KV-Direct that we looked at last year, NetChain achieves this stunning performance by moving the system implementation into the network. Whereas KV-Direct used programmable NICs though, NetChain takes advantage of programmable switches, and can be incrementally deployed in existing datacenters.

We expect a lightning fast coordination system like NetChain can open the door for designing a new generation of distributed systems beyond distributed transactions.

It’s really exciting to watch all of the performance leaps being made by moving compute and storage around (accelerators, taking advantage of storage pockets e.g. processing-in-memory, non-volatile memory, in-network processing, and so on). The sheer processing power we’ll have at our disposal as all of these become mainstream is staggering to Continue reading

Cloud Not Just Someone Else’s Computer

Cloud computing is a lot more than “someone else’s computer” and it annoys the hell out of me when people keep trotting out this tired old excuse. There is much more to service delivery than compute power. You do yourself and your customers a disservice if you don’t do your research.

A few years ago it was fashionable to dismiss cloud as “just someone else’s computer”, e.g.:

There’s T-shirts:

Someone else's Computer T-Shirt

You can even buy coffee mugs.

In a time when most cloud computing was Infrastructure as a Service, there was an element of truth to it. But…

Times Change

The problem is that there’s still people thinking this. Check these recent tweets.

These people don’t realize that the world has moved on a long way. There is much more to cloud computing than just “someone else’s computer.”

Consider a simple example, like email. To provide email services from “my computer” I also need power, cooling, rack space, servers, storage, networking, operating system, software, application configuration and maintenance, etc…not to mention the operational expertise to keep it all going.

If Continue reading

What’s behind Cisco’s comeback?

Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) in just the last week or so has taken over the top spot for year-to-date performance among the 30 equities comprising the Dow Jones industrial average, with its shares having risen nearly 20 percent in 2018. That’s a big deal. How did it happen? What pushed Cisco beyond its best-known-router reputation to being a top performer on the DOW?A little history about Cisco Cisco has been around for nearly as long as I've been working on Unix and Linux systems. Founded in December 1984 by two Stanford University computer scientists and clearly named after San Francisco, its logo clearly depicts the two towers of the Golden Gate Bridge and its line of products have kept it a major player in routers and switches. In fact, Cisco was on top of the tech world before the dot.com meltdown. Then it plunged with the rest of the tech sector.To read this article in full, please click here

What’s behind Cisco’s comeback?

Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) in just the last week or so has taken over the top spot for year-to-date performance among the 30 equities comprising the Dow Jones industrial average, with its shares having risen nearly 20 percent in 2018. That’s a big deal. How did it happen? What pushed Cisco beyond its best-known-router reputation to being a top performer on the DOW?A little history Cisco has been around for nearly as long as I've been working on Unix and Linux systems. Founded in December 1984 by two Stanford University computer scientists and clearly named after San Francisco, its logo clearly depicts the two towers of the Golden Gate Bridge and its line of products have kept it a major player in routers and switches. In fact, Cisco was on top of the tech world before the dot.com meltdown. Then it plunged with the rest of the tech sector.To read this article in full, please click here

Getting started with Terraform and Cloudflare (Part 1 of 2)

Getting started with Terraform and Cloudflare (Part 1 of 2)

As a Product Manager at Cloudflare, I spend quite a bit of my time talking to customers. One of the most common topics I'm asked about is configuration management. Developers want to know how they can write code to manage their Cloudflare config, without interacting with our APIs or UI directly.

Following best practices in software development, they want to store configuration in their own source code repository (be it GitHub or otherwise), institute a change management process that includes code review, and be able to track their configuration versions and history over time. Additionally, they want the ability to quickly and easily roll back changes when required.

When I first spoke with our engineering teams about these requirements, they gave me the best answer a Product Manager could hope to hear: there's already an open source tool out there that does all of that (and more), with a strong community and plugin system to boot—it's called Terraform.

This blog post is about getting started using Terraform with Cloudflare and the new version 1.0 of our Terraform provider. A "provider" is simply a plugin that knows how to talk to a specific set of APIs—in this case, Cloudflare, but Continue reading

Link Propagation 116

Welcome to Link Propagation, a Packet Pushers newsletter. Link Propagation is included in your free membership. Each week we scour the InterWebs to find the most relevant practitioner blog posts, tech news, and product announcements. We drink from the fire hose so you can sip from a coffee cup. Blogs WISP Design – Building Highly […]

A Review of RSA Conference

So, I recently went to my first RSA Conference. It’s something I’ve had on my radar for a while but never had the opportunity to do. However, with Security Field Day coming up later this year I thought it was high time I went to see what everything was about. Here are some ideas that I came up with during my pilgrimage to the big security conference.

  • It’s Huge. Like, really big. I’ve never seen a bigger conference before. I haven’t gone to Oracle OpenWorld or Dreamforce, but the size of the RSA show floor alone dwarfs anything I’ve seen. Three whole areas, including one dedicated to emerging vendors. That’s big. Almost too big in fact.
  • I Still Hate Moscone. It’s official. No conference should ever use this place again. It’s been 4 years since I railed against it and every word still applies. Doubly so this year, as RSA was being held during construction! Seriously. At this point, Moscone must be paying people to hold a convention there. RSA is too big. I don’t care if it’s cheap to ferry people up from Silicon Valley. Stop doing this to yourself and tarnishing your brand. Just go to Vegas if Continue reading
1 … 1,663 1,664 1,665 1,666 1,667 … 3,878