Big Switch’s Big Mon Keeps an Eye on Mobile Subs
Big Mon uses a technology called GPRS tunneling protocol (GTP) to keep an eye on traffic.
Building a World Free of Barriers: Vashkar Bhattacharjee’s Story
We recently shared Part One and Part Two of Vashkar Bhattacharjee’s story. Vashkar is the National Consultant, Accessibility, A2i, Prime Minister’s Office of Bangladesh, and the Program Manager, Young Power in Social Action (YPSA). Here is Part Three.
Our research at Young People in Social Action (YPSA), Bangladesh revealed that developing multimedia talking books would not be enough to ensure proper learning among students. For that to happen, the students required access to rich vocabulary libraries for proper understanding of language. (We have been supported by a2i program’s Service Innovation Fund to develop Bangladesh’s first accessible dictionaries in English and Bangla available in both online and offline modes.)
People are amazed to see persons with visual impairment using computers and smartphones. This has been made easy thanks to the open-source screen-reading software that can convert text to speech. People with visual impairment can also use the standard QWERTY keyboard just like everybody else as it has become second nature. Among the 50 people working at YPSA, 32 have a disability. ICTs have helped them overcome physical barriers.
In the role of a2i’s national consultant for disability, I am working on making different websites accessible for all following W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Continue reading
Burst Buffers Blow Through I/O Bottlenecks
Burst buffers are carving out a significant space for themselves in the HPC arena as a way to improve data checkpointing and application performance at a time when traditional storage technologies are struggling to keep up with the increasingly large and complex workloads including traditional simulation and modeling and new things like as data analytics.
The fear has been that storage technologies such as parallel file systems could become the bottleneck that limits performance, and burst buffers have been designed to manage peak I/O situations so that organizations aren’t forced to scale their storage environments to be able to support …
Burst Buffers Blow Through I/O Bottlenecks was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
A tour of containerd 1.0
We have done a few talks in the past on different features of containerd, how it was designed, and some of the problems that we have fixed along the way. Containerd is used by Docker, Kubernetes CRI, and a few other projects but this is a post for people who may not know what containerd actually does within these platforms. I would like to do more posts on the feature set and design of containerd in the future but for now, we will start with the basics.
I think the container ecosystem can be confusing at times. Especially with the terminology that we use. Whats this? A runtime. And this? A runtime… containerd (pronounced “container-dee”) as the name implies, not contain nerd as some would like to troll me with, is a container daemon. It was originally built as an integration point for OCI runtimes like runc but over the past six months it has added a lot of functionality to bring it up to par with the needs of modern container platforms like Docker and orchestration systems like Kubernetes.
So what do you actually get using containerd? You get push and pull functionality as well as image Continue reading
Verizon Awards Ericsson First 5G Equipment Contract
Ericsson will provide pre-standard 5G Core and RAN.
AT&T Adds Humax to CPE Supplier List as Market is Forecast to Boom
AT&T's Device Supplier program began as Domain 1.0 in 2009.
Headcount: The Latest in Hirings, Firings, and Retirings — December 11, 2017
Dish co-founder steps down (again); Aryaka gains new CRO; Nutanix makes new additions.
Menlo Security Closes $40M Series C for its Isolation Platform
Ericsson is one of the startup's investors.
A Christmas Support Story
Warning: Non-Technical Post
As it’s the festive period and this time of the year is for caring and sharing, here’s a short story from many years ago. This might make some chuckle, but some of these times were not pleasant and I can assure you, they were very real!
Like most IT related people, I started in support. The job paid peanuts, it was shift work and I had much to learn. Being quite eager to please, many mistakes were made and in these cases seniors were supposed to help the younglings (like me). For some companies, a functioning support network just isn’t there and low rank power struggles leave you fighting fires a la solo.
Within the first three months of the job, I experienced two major backhaul fibre outages, a group of people stealing our generator power cables and the air conditioning system failed to the point of meltdown. We also had a total power outage which took 40 hours or so of non-stop work to get everything back online and healthy.
These kinds of experiences make or break you. The phones do not stop ringing (at least when the power is on) and customers rightfully do not Continue reading
CORD Says It’s the De Facto Choice for Edge Computing
The group also combined its separate CORD projects.
Nokia Gets a New COO to Replace Maurer
Former COO Monika Maurer departs after just eight months on the job.
Net Neutrality and the FCC’s December 14 Vote
Net neutrality is defined differently in different circles. For the Internet Society, it means that an Internet service provider should not block, filter, throttle a users’ Internet usage, or give preferential treatment to one end user or content provider over another. Fundamentally, everyone should be able to access the content and services they choose without corporate or government interference. We believe this will ensure the Internet remains an engine for innovation, free expression, and economic growth. In some jurisdictions, this may require policy, regulatory, and technical measures.
On December 14, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is likely to vote to repeal the 2015 Open Internet Order, which classified broadband providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. Under FCC Chairman Pai’s proposal, the FCC would yield authority over broadband providers to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Since the announcement of that vote, many American Internet users have been anxious that their Internet service provider may undo their commitments to provide open access to the Internet for their customers. They are right to be anxious. We are already seeing signs that ISPs may change their net neutrality commitments in light of the upcoming ruling.
American users have Continue reading
Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play?
This article is a chapter from my new book Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. The first release was written specifically for cloud newbies. I've made some updates and added a few chapters—Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play? and What is Cloud Computing?—that level it up to a couple ticks past beginner. I think even fairly experienced people might get something out of it.
So if you are looking for a good introduction to the cloud or know someone who is, please take a look. I think you'll like it. I'm pretty proud of how it turned out.
I pulled this chapter together from dozens of sources that were at times somewhat contradictory. Facts on the ground change over time and depend who is telling the story and what audience they're addressing. I tried to create as coherent a narrative as I could. If there are any errors I'd be more than happy to fix them. Keep in mind this article is not a technical deep dive. It's a big picture type article. For example, I don't mention the word microservice even once :-)
Netflix seems so simple. Press play and video magically Continue reading
Take a Deep Dive Into the SD-WAN Market
Find out why Citrix NetScaler SD-WAN was named a leading player to watch and how its solution is reshaping the modern enterprise network with improved performance reduced costs and enhanced security, with the flexibility of a hardware or virtual appliance, on-premises or in the cloud.
Put Building Data Culture Ahead Of Buying Data Analytics
In his keynote at the recent AWS re:Invent conference, Amazon vice president and chief technology officer Werner Vogels said that the cloud had created a “egalitarian” computing environment where everyone has access to the same compute, storage, and analytics, and that the real differentiator for enterprises will be the data they generate, and more importantly, the value the enterprises derive from that data.
For Rob Thomas, general manager of IBM Analytics, data is the focus. The company is putting considerable muscle behind data analytics, machine learning, and what it calls more generally cognitive computing, much of it based …
Put Building Data Culture Ahead Of Buying Data Analytics was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.