The cloud continues to drive network evolution

It’s fair to say that there has never been a bigger driver of network evolution than the cloud. The reason for this is the cloud is a fundamentally different kind of compute paradigm, as it enables applications, data, and architecture changes to be done seemingly instantly. Cloud-native infrastructure is what enables mobile app developers to roll out new versions daily if they so choose.The cloud is network-centric Another fact about the cloud is that it is a network-centric compute model, so a poorly performing network leads to equally poorly performing applications. A lack of network agility means DevOps teams need to sit around twiddling their thumbs while network operations make changes to the network. To read this article in full, please click here

Power Failure Leaves Brazilian Internet In The Dark

On Wednesday, March 21, a massive power failure impacted large parts of northern Brazil, leaving tens of millions of people without electricity. Beginning at about 3:40pm local time (18:40 UTC), the outage was reportedly due to the failure of a transmission line near the Belo Monte hydroelectric station.

As occurred in a major power outage in Brazil in 2009, this power failure had a measureable impact on the country’s Internet. This is illustrated below through graphs from Oracle Dyn’s Internet Intelligence team based on BGP and traceroute data, as well as graphs from Akamai’s mPulse service, based on end user Web traffic.

The graphic below depicts the counts of available networks (lower graph) and unstable networks (upper graph) for Brazil in the latter half of March 21. The number of unstable networks spikes around 18:40 UTC as routers of ISPs in Brazil began re-routing traffic away from disabled connections, while the lower graph shows that the corresponding drop in available networks (i.e. routed prefixes) was minor when compared to the total number routes that define the Internet of Brazil.

In addition to aggregating BGP routing information from around the globe, the Internet Intelligence team also performs millions of Continue reading

Technology Short Take 97

Welcome to Technology Short Take 97! This Tech Short Take marks the end of an era (sort of); it’s the last Tech Short Take published while I’m a VMware employee (today is my last day; see here for more details). But enough about me—let’s talk some tech! This Short Take may be a bit longer than some, so buckle up.

Networking

Mininet weathermap

Mininet dashboard is a real-time dashboard displaying traffic information from Mininet virtual networks. The screen capture demonstrates the real-time network weather map capability that was recently added to the dashboard. The torus topology is displayed and link widths are updated every second to reflect traffic. In this example a large flow between switches s1x1 and s3x3 is routed via s1x3.

The network was created using the following Mininet command:
sudo mn --custom=sflow-rt/extras/sflow.py --link tc,bw=10 \
--topo torus,3,3 --switch ovsbr,stp=1 --test iperf
In the screen capture above you can clearly see the large flow traversing switches, s4, s3, s2, s1, s9, s13, and s15 in a tree topology. The network was created using the following command: 
sudo mn --custom sflow-rt/extras/sflow.py --link tc,bw=10 \
--topo tree,depth=4,fanout=2 --test iperf
The screen capture above shows a large flow traversing switches s1, s2, s3, and s4 in a linear topology. The network was created using the following command: 
sudo mn --custom sflow-rt/extras/sflow.py --link tc,bw=10 \
--topo linear,4 --test iperf
It's also easy to create Custom Topologies. The following command creates the example custom topology, topo-2sw-2host.py, that ships with Mininet:
sudo mn --custom ~/mininet/custom/topo-2sw-2host.py,sflow-rt/extras/sflow.py  Continue reading

WannaCry after one year

In the news, Boeing (an aircraft maker) has been "targeted by a WannaCry virus attack". Phrased this way, it's implausible. There are no new attacks targeting people with WannaCry. There is either no WannaCry, or it's simply a continuation of the attack from a year ago.


It's possible what happened is that an anti-virus product called a new virus "WannaCry". Virus families are often related, and sometimes a distant relative gets called the same thing. I know this watching the way various anti-virus products label my own software, which isn't a virus, but which virus writers often include with their own stuff. The Lazarus group, which is believed to be responsible for WannaCry, have whole virus families like this. Thus, just because an AV product claims you are infected with WannaCry doesn't mean it's the same thing that everyone else is calling WannaCry.

Famously, WannaCry was the first virus/ransomware/worm that used the NSA ETERNALBLUE exploit. Other viruses have since added the exploit, and of course, hackers use it when attacking systems. It may be that a network intrusion detection system detected ETERNALBLUE, which people then assumed was due to WannaCry. It may actually have been an nPetya infection instead (nPetya Continue reading

Meet the APRICOT 2018 Fellows

The Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT) is an annual event that brings together Internet engineers and networking experts, government representatives, Internet business leaders, and other interested parties from around the world to learn from training workshops and tutorials, attend technical presentations, discuss policies, and extend social and professional networks with like-minded peers. This year’s event was held in Kathmandu, Nepal from 19-28 February.

The Internet Society Asia-Pacific Bureau has a long-term partnership with APRICOT and proudly sponsors its fellowship program, providing financial support for individuals from developing economies to attend the event, and to contribute to discussions about Internet operations, technologies and development. This year the Internet Society sponsored a total of 13 fellows to APRICOT 2018, split between the technical workshops and the conference week, depending on their areas of interest. 75% of these fellows were females, endorsing our focus to inspire and facilitate the participation of women in the technology sector and to #ShineTheLight!

We had an opportunity to meet some of these fellows, to know more about them and their experience as a fellow.

Athirah Rosli is a Doctoral Researcher at Universiti Utara Malaysia, and also a committee member of the ISOC Malaysia Continue reading

Three more US data centers! Jacksonville, Memphis and Tallahassee

Three more US data centers! Jacksonville, Memphis and Tallahassee

Three more US data centers! Jacksonville, Memphis and Tallahassee

Good things come in threes! Following the launch of three data centers each in the Baltics (Riga, Tallinn, Vilnius) and in the Canadian Prairies (Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg), we're thrilled to announce three new data centers in the Southern United States!

Located in Jacksonville (Florida), Memphis (Tennessee), and Tallahassee (Florida), they represent the 146th, 147th and 148th cities across our growing global network, and our 40th, 41st and 42nd cities just in North America. They join existing Cloudflare facilities in the US, including other Florida / Tennessee deployments such as Miami, Tampa and Nashville. Just in March, we've added deployments in 28 new cities worldwide, which help reduce latency to millions of Internet properties using Cloudflare, while expanding our capacity to withstand new and familiar attacks.

Three more US data centers! Jacksonville, Memphis and TallahasseePhoto of Jacksonville Beach by Lance Asper / Unsplash

Whether you're doing the Memphis Main Street Crawl, experiencing history through a visit to Tallahassee's Mission San Luis de Apalachee, or just relaxing by the stunning beaches of Jacksonville, you'll be close to the nearest Cloudflare data center.

The Cloudflare Global Anycast Network

Three more US data centers! Jacksonville, Memphis and Tallahassee
This map reflects the network as of the publish date of this blog post. For the most up to date directory Continue reading

How converged infrastructure can accelerate the AI journey

The technology that powers businesses is evolving faster than ever before, allowing us to do more than we ever thought possible. Things that were once only seen in science fiction movies are actually coming to life.One of these areas is the field of artificial intelligence (AI). We’re on the verge of having machines diagnose cancer, map out the universe, take over dangerous jobs, and drive us around. The downside to the rapid evolution has been a rise in complexity. Putting together the infrastructure and software to power AI-based systems can often take months to build, tune, and tweak so that it runs optimally.Compounding the difficulty is that AI infrastructure is often deployed by data scientists who do not have the same level of technical acumen as the IT team. To read this article in full, please click here

How converged infrastructure can accelerate the AI journey

The technology that powers businesses is evolving faster than ever before, allowing us to do more than we ever thought possible. Things that were once only seen in science fiction movies are actually coming to life.One of these areas is the field of artificial intelligence (AI). We’re on the verge of having machines diagnose cancer, map out the universe, take over dangerous jobs, and drive us around. The downside to the rapid evolution has been a rise in complexity. Putting together the infrastructure and software to power AI-based systems can often take months to build, tune, and tweak so that it runs optimally.Compounding the difficulty is that AI infrastructure is often deployed by data scientists who do not have the same level of technical acumen as the IT team. To read this article in full, please click here

Cloudflare Arrives in the Canadian Prairies! Welcome Calgary, Saskatoon and Winnipeg

Cloudflare Arrives in the Canadian Prairies! Welcome Calgary, Saskatoon and Winnipeg

Cloudflare Arrives in the Canadian Prairies! Welcome Calgary, Saskatoon and Winnipeg

We just turned up Calgary, Saskatoon and Winnipeg - Cloudflare’s 143rd, 144th, and 145th data centers. This brings our Canadian presence to six cities, joining Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. I grew up just outside of Saskatoon, so I couldn’t be happier that Cloudflare’s network has expanded to the Canadian Prairies. My parents still live there and I just booked flights to go and visit them this summer. When I tell people that I grew up in Saskatchewan, most people don’t know a lot about the region, so I wanted to share some of my favorite things about the region, starting from west to east:

  • Calgary was home to the 1988 Winter Olympics and is a 90 minute drive from Banff, an incredible National Park that is absolutely worth visiting. Calgary has grown quickly over the last twenty years because of all the natural resources, including oil and gas. They host a famous rodeo, Calgary Stampede, for 10 days every summer. Definitely something to add to your bucket list. With Cloudflare’s new deployment in Calgary, we’ll make the Internet even faster for visitors. Hello Calgary!

  • About 1 million people live in the province of Saskatchewan. Saskatoon is the Continue reading

Rewind & recap: OCP Summit 2018

As you probably know, Cumulus Networks is an active contributor and enthusiastic member of the OCP community. So naturally, we couldn’t bear to miss OCP Summit 2018! The summit was held in San Jose from March 20th – 21st, and believe us, if you’re into open source anything, it was THE place to be. From BoF sessions to engineering workshops and everything in-between, there’s so much to talk about — but we’ll spare you an essay-length article and keep this short blog limited to our absolute favorite Cumulus OCP Summit highlights from the event. So whether you’re an OCP fan that couldn’t make it or you’re an attendee that wants to reminisce, check out these stellar moments from OCP Summit 2018.

Cumulus’ OCP projects

It was great to hear Omar Baldonado from Facebook give Backpack a shoutout during his keynote address. With the support of OCP, we’ve teamed up our OS with Celestica’s hardware to bring this project to fruition, and what better place to highlight this venture than at OCP Summit? As Baldonado points out, “Cumulus also has been a very long standing partner and contributor and driver within the OCP community,” and we intend to continue those efforts. Continue reading

Kathy Brown’s Op-Ed in the Hill Times: Canada’s Unique Opportunity to Lead the Future of the Internet

Kathy Brown, CEO of the Internet Society, recently penned an Op-Ed for Canada’s the Hill Times calling for a multistakeholder approach to Internet governance: “an approach that is collaborative, one that engages the entire Internet community.” According to Brown, “The time has come to expand this inclusive model of governance to more places around the world.”

“No
 one party, government, corporation, or non-profit controls the Internet and we are all better for it. Nor does any one party have the knowledge or the ability to identify the solutions to these complex policy challenges. It has been this approach—what we call the multistakeholder model—that has allowed humankind’s most advanced and powerful communications tool to spread so far and so fast.”

She cites the partnership between the Internet Society, Innovation, Science and Economic Development, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, CANARIE, and CIPPIC as an example of the multistakeholder approach working successfully. “[Canada] is addressing cybersecurity head-on by working with the Internet Society to engage the Canadian Internet community in a process to develop recommendations to secure the Internet of Things.”

Read the entire Op-Ed, then learn how you can participate in the Collaborative Governance Project, Continue reading

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