IT budgets remain tight due to cloud migration

For the third straight year, IT organizations are keeping tight control over their IT budgets, but not because of economic uncertainty. Instead, the hesitancy to spend is because of the transition to the cloud.That’s the findings from IT market research firm Computer Economics, which published the report Worldwide IT Spending and Staffing Outlook for 2018 (paywall), and it echoes a common finding that on-premises computing continues to fall out of favor as IT shops look to migrate as much work as possible to the public cloud.“Typically, before the cloud transition, companies would grow IT budgets roughly to match expected revenue growth,” said David Wagner, vice president of research for Computer Economics in a statement. “This is no longer true in regions of higher cloud adoption, such as the U.S. and Canada, where IT budgets are not keeping pace with revenue growth.”To read this article in full, please click here

IT budgets remain tight due to cloud migration

For the third straight year, IT organizations are keeping tight control over their IT budgets, but not because of economic uncertainty. Instead, the hesitancy to spend is because of the transition to the cloud.That’s the findings from IT market research firm Computer Economics, which published the report Worldwide IT Spending and Staffing Outlook for 2018 (paywall), and it echoes a common finding that on-premises computing continues to fall out of favor as IT shops look to migrate as much work as possible to the public cloud.“Typically, before the cloud transition, companies would grow IT budgets roughly to match expected revenue growth,” said David Wagner, vice president of research for Computer Economics in a statement. “This is no longer true in regions of higher cloud adoption, such as the U.S. and Canada, where IT budgets are not keeping pace with revenue growth.”To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: A software defined network requires reinventing IT devops

It’s common for a newly released application to have a few bugs in it. Customers may grumble, and IT service requests may increase, but life goes on and people will figure out how to work around the issues. The same cannot be said for a network software upgrade. If the network goes down, everything grinds to a halt, and service to employees and customers ceases.In the old hardware network model, an operator relied on three to four vendors to run annual or semiannual upgrades, and even that process put the network’s resiliency at risk.  As networks transition to a software model, they are supported by a myriad of best-of-breed partners and a more diverse ecosystem, increasing the frequency of updates and therefore the degree of network vulnerability. In addition, the technology implemented is less mature, resulting in greater network exposure to errors and risk.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: A software defined network requires reinventing IT devops

It’s common for a newly released application to have a few bugs in it. Customers may grumble, and IT service requests may increase, but life goes on and people will figure out how to work around the issues. The same cannot be said for a network software upgrade. If the network goes down, everything grinds to a halt, and service to employees and customers ceases.In the old hardware network model, an operator relied on three to four vendors to run annual or semiannual upgrades, and even that process put the network’s resiliency at risk.  As networks transition to a software model, they are supported by a myriad of best-of-breed partners and a more diverse ecosystem, increasing the frequency of updates and therefore the degree of network vulnerability. In addition, the technology implemented is less mature, resulting in greater network exposure to errors and risk.To read this article in full, please click here

Deep Learning is the Next Platform for Pathology

It is a renaissance for companies that sell GPU-dense systems and low-power clusters that are right for handling AI inference workloads, especially as they look to the healthcare market–one that for a while was moving toward increasing compute on medical devices.

The growth of production deep learning in medical imaging and diagnostics has spurred investments in hospitals and research centers, pushing high performance systems for medicine back to the forefront.

We have written quite a bit about some of the emerging use cases for deep learning in medicine with an eye on the systems angle in particular, and while these …

Deep Learning is the Next Platform for Pathology was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Rust 로 복잡한 매크로를 작성하기: 역폴란드 표기법​

This is a Korean translation of a prior post.

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(이 글은 제 개인 블로그에 게시된 튜토리얼을 다시 올린 것입니다)

Rust에는 흥미로운 기능이 많지만 그중에도 강력한 매크로 시스템이 있습니다. 불행히도 The Book^[1]과 여러가지 튜토리얼을 읽고 나서도 서로 다른 요소의 복잡한 리스트를 처리하는 매크로를 구현하려고 하면 저는 여전히 어떻게 만들어야 하는지를 이해하는데 힘들어 하며, 좀 시간이 지나서 머리속에 불이 켜지는 듯한 느낌이 들면 그제서야 이것저것 매크로를 마구 사용하기 시작 합니다. :) (맞아요, 난-매크로를-써요-왜냐하면-함수나-타입-지정이나-생명주기를-쓰고-싶어하지-않아서 처럼과 같은 이유는 아니지만 다른 사람들이 쓰는걸 봤었고 실제로 유용한 곳이라면 말이죠)

CC BY 2.0 image by Conor Lawless

그래서 이 글에서는 제가 생각하는 그런 매크로를 쓰는 데 필요한 원칙을 설명하고자 합니다. 이 글에서는 The Book의 매크로 섹션을 읽어 보았고 기본적인 매크로 정의와 토큰 타입에 대해 익숙하다고 가정하겠습니다.

이 튜토리얼에서는 역폴란드 표기법 (Reverse Polish Notation, RPN)을 예제로 사용합니다. 충분히 간단하기 때문에 흥미롭기도 하고, 학교에서 이미 배워서 익숙할 지도 모르고요. 하지만 컴파일 시간에 정적으로 구현하기 위해서는 재귀적인 매크로를 사용해야 할 것입니다.

역폴란드 표기법(후위 또는 후치 표기법으로 불리기도 합니다)은 모든 연산에 스택을 사용하므로 연산 대상을 스택에 넣고 [이진] 연산자는 연산 대상 두개를 스택에서 가져와서 결과를 평가하고 다시 스택에 넣습니다. 따라서 다음과 같은 식을 생각해 보면:

2 3 + 4 *

이 식은 다음과 같이 해석됩니다:

1. 2 Continue reading

Writing complex macros in Rust: Reverse Polish Notation

(This is a crosspost of a tutorial originally published on my personal blog)

Among other interesting features, Rust has a powerful macro system. Unfortunately, even after reading The Book and various tutorials, when it came to trying to implement a macro which involved processing complex lists of different elements, I still struggled to understand how it should be done, and it took some time till I got to that "ding" moment and started misusing macros for everything :) (ok, not everything as in the i-am-using-macros-because-i-dont-want-to-use-functions-and-specify-types-and-lifetimes everything like I've seen some people do, but anywhere it's actually useful)

CC BY 2.0 image by Conor Lawless

So, here is my take on describing the principles behind writing such macros. It assumes you have read the Macros section from The Book and are familiar with basic macros definitions and token types.

I'll take a Reverse Polish Notation as an example for this tutorial. It's interesting because it's simple enough, you might be already familiar with it from school, and yet to implement it statically at compile time, you already need to use a recursive macros approach.

Reverse Polish Notation (also called postfix notation) uses a stack for all its operations, Continue reading

Is Networking Becoming a Commodity?

BGP Flowspec redirect with ExaBGP

I’ve been busy as hell since the summer, not had much time to work on blog posts – but it’s all been good work! I also got a new job working for Riot Games, (Makers of the worlds largest online multiplayer game – league of legends) which has been totally fantastic.

This post is about BGP Flowspec, specifically how we can now more easily redirect traffic to a scrubbing appliance, it’s common for a device such as an Arbor TMS, or some other type of filtering box, to be installed close to the network edge, it could be a linux box full of filters, a DPI box, anything that might be useful in terms of performing traffic verification or enforcement.

In the event that a DDOS event occurs, it’s possible to redirect suspect traffic, or traffic to a specific victim host, through an appliance where it can be dropped or permitted.

Traditionally this has been done with Layer-3 VPNS, where ingress traffic from the internet is punted into a “Dirty VRF” it’s then forced through a mitigation appliance where it’s either dropped, or permitted – where it returns back into the same router but in a new “Clean VRF”

It Continue reading

How to Become a Better Networking Engineer

Got an interesting set of questions from one of my readers. He started with:

I really like networks but I don't know if I am doing enough for this community. Most of my work is involved with technologies which are already discovered by people and I am not really satisfied with it.

Well, first you want to decide whether you want to be (primarily) a researcher (focusing on discovering new stuff), an engineer (mostly figuring out how to build useful things by using existing stuff), or an administrator (configuring stuff).

Red Hat Doubles Down on Containers with $250M CoreOS Acquisition

The deal is set to bolster Red Hat's OpenShift and enterprise focus.

Red Hat Shakes Up Container Ecosystem With CoreOS Deal

The container craze on Linux platforms just took an interesting twist now that Red Hat is sheling out $250 million to acquire its upstart rival in Linux and containers, CoreOS.

As the largest and by far the most profitable open source software company in the world – it had $2.4 billion in sales in fiscal 2017, brought $253.7 million of that to the bottom line, and ended that fiscal year in February with a $2.7 billion subscription and services backlog – Red Hat has not been afraid to spend some money to get its hands on control of key open …

Red Hat Shakes Up Container Ecosystem With CoreOS Deal was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Cumulus content roundup: February

We’ve made it through the first month of the year, and the future of networking is looking bright — but is your data center ready for the brave new world? In this content roundup, we’re giving out the latest articles, videos and reports so you’re ready for 2018 and not left behind in twenty late-teen. There’s no time to waste! Get started on your data center upgrade today.

What’s new from Cumulus:

Cumulus Networks: What we do: Looking for an overview of who we are and what we’re working towards? We’ve got you covered. Watch this video for more information about our mission and our products, and share it with anyone else who wants to know what we’re all about.

Getting started with Linux: the basics – part 1: Everyone has to start their journey with Linux somewhere, so why not start here? This three part blog series about the basics of Linux networking teaches you everything you need. Check out part one to start learning the language of the data center.

Understanding Linux internetworking: Let’s say you’ve already got the hang of the basics of Linux. What’s the next step, and how can you take your Continue reading

Nuage Networks Q&A: The 5 Key Success Factors on your Digital Transformation Journey for the WAN and Beyond

Thanks to all who joined us for the Nuage Networks webinar: The 5 Key Success Factors on your Digital Transformation Journey for the WAN and Beyond. With over 20 SD-WAN solutions in the market it is increasingly difficult to select the right one. Nuage Networks provided an evaluation framework that can be used to not... Read more →

Running OVS on Fedora Atomic Host

In this post, I’d like to share the results of some testing I’ve been doing to run Open vSwitch (OVS) in containers on a container-optimized Linux distribution such as Atomic Host (Fedora Atomic Host, specifically). I’m still relatively early in my exploration of this topic, but I felt like sharing what I’ve found so far might be helpful to others, and might help spark conversations within the relevant communities about how this experience might be improved.

The reason for the use of Docker containers in this approach is twofold:

1. Many of the newer container-optimized Linux distributions—CoreOS Container Linux (soon to be part of Red Hat in some fashion), Project Atomic, etc.—eschew “traditional” package management solutions in favor of containers.
2. Part of the reason behind my testing was to help the OVS community better understand what it would look like to run OVS in containers so as to help make OVS a better citizen on container-optimized Linux distributions.

In this post, I’ll be using Fedora 27 Atomic Host (via Vagrant with VirtualBox). If you use a different version or release of Atomic Host, your results may differ somewhat. For the OVS containers, I’m using the excellent keldaio/ovs Docker containers.

Continue reading

Networking With Intent

Networking has always been the laggard in the enterprise datacenter. As servers and then storage appliances became increasingly virtualized and disaggregated over the past 15 years or so, the network stubbornly stuck with the appliance model, closed and proprietary. As other datacenter resources became faster, more agile and easier to manage, many of those efficiencies were hobbled by the network, which could take months to program and could require new hardware before making any significant changes.

However slowly, and thanks largely to the hyperscalers and now telcos and other communications service providers, that has begun to change. The rise of …

Networking With Intent was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

802.11: Wi-Fi standards and speeds explained

In the world of wireless, the term Wi-Fi is synonymous with wireless access in general, despite the fact that it is a specific trademark owned by the Wi-Fi Alliance, a group dedicated to certifying that Wi-Fi products meet the IEEE’s set of 802.11 wireless standards.These standards, with names such as 802.11b (pronounced “Eight-O-Two-Eleven-Bee”, ignore the “dot”) and 802.11ac, comprise a family of specifications that started in the 1990s and continues to grow today. The 802.11 standards codify improvements that boost wireless throughput and range as well as the use of new frequencies as they  become available. They also address new technologies that reduce power consumption.To read this article in full, please click here

802.11: Wi-Fi standards and speeds explained

In the world of wireless, the term Wi-Fi is synonymous with wireless access in general, despite the fact that it is a specific trademark owned by the Wi-Fi Alliance, a group dedicated to certifying that Wi-Fi products meet the IEEE’s set of 802.11 wireless standards.These standards, with names such as 802.11b (pronounced “Eight-O-Two-Eleven-Bee”, ignore the “dot”) and 802.11ac, comprise a family of specifications that started in the 1990s and continues to grow today. The 802.11 standards codify improvements that boost wireless throughput and range as well as the use of new frequencies as they  become available. They also address new technologies that reduce power consumption.To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: TCP Congestion Signatures

Congestion in the Internet is an age-old problem. With the rise of broadband networks, it had been implicitly accepted that congestion is most likely to occur in the ‘last mile’, that is, the broadband link between the ISP and the home customer. This is due to service plans or technical factors that limit the bandwidth in the last mile. —Srikanth Sundaresan @APNIC

Docker for Windows Desktop… Now With Kubernetes!

Today we are excited to announce the beta for Docker for Windows Desktop with integrated Kubernetes is now available in the edge channel! This release includes Kubernetes 1.8, just like the Docker for Mac and Docker Enterprise Edition and will allow you to develop Linux containers.

The easiest way to get Kubernetes on your desktop is here.

Simply check the box and go

What You Can Do with Kubernetes on your desktop?

Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows are the most popular way to configure a Docker dev environment, and are each used everyday by millions of developers to build, test, and debug containerized apps. The beauty of building with Docker for Mac or Windows is that you can deploy the exact same set of Docker container images on your desktop as you do on your production systems with Docker EE.

Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows are used for building, testing and preparing to ship applications, whereas Docker EE provides the ability to secure and manage your applications in production at scale. You eliminate the “it worked on my machine” problem because you run the same Docker containers on the same Docker engines in development, testing, and production environments, along with the Continue reading