Liveblog: Deep Dive on Amazon Elastic File System

This is a liveblog of the AWS re:Invent 2017 session titled “Deep Dive on Amazon Elastic File System (EFS).” The presenters are Edward Naim and Darryl Osborne, both with AWS. This is my last session of day 2 of re:Invent; thus far, most of my time has been spent in hands-on workshops with only a few breakout sessions today. EFS is a topic I’ve watched, but haven’t had time to really dig into, so I’m looking forward to this session.

Naim kicks off the session with looking at the four phases users go through when they are choosing/adopting a storage solution:

  1. Choosing the right storage solution
  2. Testing and optimizing
  3. Ingest (loading data)
  4. Running it (operating it in production)

Starting with Phase 1, Naim outlines the three main things that people think about. The first item is storage type. The second is features and performance, and the third item is economics (how much does it cost). Diving into each of these items in a bit more detail, Naim talks about file storage, block storage, and object storage, and the characteristics of each of these approaches. Having covered these approaches, Naim returns to file storage (naturally) and talks about why file Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: 5 ways to shape Ajit Pai’s proposal to actually benefit broadband users via net neutrality

The FCC’s December 14th vote on repealing net neutrality will have far reaching implications for our future. It is important in that case to not only read articles and watch the videos, but to actually read Ajit Pai’s proposal in its entirety. This Harvard grad and former Verizon lawyer chooses words carefully, leaning on legal terminology rather than technical verbiage to produce a conclusion that does not stem from his premise. It is not clear what the intent of this proposal is, however, it clearly does not benefit broadband users.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Making digitalization work

 What is digitalization? According to Gartner, “digitalization is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities. It is the process of moving to a digital business.” This includes evolving existing products more quickly, and being more agile in bringing new products to market.At a greater level of detail, digitalization means that the enterprise implements its critical business processes in software. These include: Marketing to prospective customers Engaging with existing customers Managing the relationships with suppliers Managing the entire production to fulfillment process Managing the relationships with partners Managing the relationships with employees and contractors It is also clear from the Gartner research that CEO’s expect digitalization to drive growth in sales and profits and that they expect their technology management teams (IT) and technology leadership teams (the CIO and his staff) to successfully lead and implement the technology initiatives that will deliver these benefits from digitalization.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Making digitalization work

 What is digitalization? According to Gartner, “digitalization is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities. It is the process of moving to a digital business.” This includes evolving existing products more quickly, and being more agile in bringing new products to market.At a greater level of detail, digitalization means that the enterprise implements its critical business processes in software. These include: Marketing to prospective customers Engaging with existing customers Managing the relationships with suppliers Managing the entire production to fulfillment process Managing the relationships with partners Managing the relationships with employees and contractors It is also clear from the Gartner research that CEO’s expect digitalization to drive growth in sales and profits and that they expect their technology management teams (IT) and technology leadership teams (the CIO and his staff) to successfully lead and implement the technology initiatives that will deliver these benefits from digitalization.To read this article in full, please click here

Debating The Role Of Commodity Chips In Exascale

Building the first exascale systems continues to be a high-profile endeavor, with efforts underway worldwide in the United States, the European Union, and Asia – notably China and Japan – that focus on competition between regional powers, the technologies that are going into the architectures, and the promises that these supercomputers hold for everything from research and government to business and commerce.

The Chinese government is pouring money and resources into its roadmaps for both pre-exascale and exascale systems, Japan is moving forward with Fujitsu’s Post-K system that will use processors based on the Arm architecture rather than the …

Debating The Role Of Commodity Chips In Exascale was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Worth Reading: DNS performance metrics

Most of these benchmarks focus on denial-of-service resistance: What is the maximum query load that can be served? This is indeed a metric that is good to know. Less discussed, however, is performance under normal conditions. Every time a nameserver is slow, a user somewhere is waiting. And not only is a user waiting, some government agencies, one of which is the UK’s OFCOM, take a very strong interest in DNS latencies. In addition, in contractual relations, there is frequently the desire to specify guaranteed performance levels. —Bert Hubert @ APNIC

How Docker Enterprise Edition Helps Open Doors at Assa Abloy

ASSA ABLOY is the world’s largest lock manufacturer with 47,000 employees worldwide and well-known brands like Yale, Sargent and Assa in their portfolio. The vision for ASSA ABLOY is to become the most innovative provider of door opening solutions through growth of electro-mechanical and digital entry solutions. With increasingly global operations to deal with as well, ASSA ABLOY recognized the opportunity to leverage public cloud, microservices and containers to fuel this digital transformation.

Jan Hedstrom, Cloud Infrastructure Architect in the Shared Technologies department at ASSA ABLOY, and Patrick Van Der Bleek, Solutions Engineer at Docker, presented at DockerCon Europe how ASSA ABLOY leveraged Docker Enterprise Edition (Docker EE)  as their central secure container management platform for their global hardware and software workflow . 

You can watch their entire talk here:

 

Journey from Docker CE to Docker EE

Some developers at ASSA ABLOY started using Docker for microservice development back in 2014, but it was uncoordinated with manual, scripted deployments of containers onto individual servers, inconsistent practices, no separation between teams, and without any image standards. Additionally, ASSA ABLOY knew that going to a public cloud like AWS would give them a “datacenter with superpowers”, but they were concerned about cloud Continue reading

The Migration of Political Internet Shutdowns

In January 2011, what was arguably the first significant disconnection of an entire country from the Internet took place when routes to Egyptian networks disappeared from the Internet’s global routing table, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could exchange Internet traffic with Egypt’s service providers. It was followed in short order by nationwide disruptions in Bahrain, Libya, and Syria. These outages took place during what became known as the Arab Spring, highlighting the role that the Internet had come to play in political protest, and heralding the wider use of national Internet shutdowns as a means of control.

“How hard is it to disconnect a country from the Internet, really?”

After these events, and another significant Internet outage in Syria, this question led a blog post published in November 2012 by former Dyn Chief Scientist Jim Cowie that examined the risk of Internet disconnection for countries around the world, based on the number of Internet connections at their international border. “You can think of this, to [a] first approximation,” Cowie wrote, “as the number of phone calls (or legal writs, or infrastructure attacks) that would have to be performed in order to Continue reading

The Future Is Limitless

In September 2017, the Internet Society celebrated its 25th anniversary in Los Angeles. Here are the stories of some who are using the Internet to shape tomorrow. 

“I made my first computer program at 18 and it felt like I had a new superpower.”

To get to the buzzing banquet hall where Akah Harvey N stands, filled with Internet pioneers, visionaries, and trailblazers, requires navigating the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Athletics Hall of Fame. Glass cases featuring old sequined spirit uniforms and uniforms worn by Jackie Robinson (the first athlete to letter in four sports at the university) line the way to the room where people from around the world are seated at tables, excitedly chatting away.

Harvey N is at the front of the room, speaking into the microphone like he belongs there. And that’s because he does. The 25-year-old from Cameroon is in Los Angeles, California to be recognized as one of the Internet Society’s 25 Under 25 – young people who are using the Internet as a force for good. Harvey N and his team of engineers developed Traveler, an app that can predict and detect motor vehicle accidents. Along with providing Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Warning: security vulnerabilities found in SD-WAN appliances

In a rush to capitalize on the SD-WAN market opportunity, some SD-WAN vendors seem to be playing fast and loose with their appliances.At a recent customer site of ours, Nirvik Nandy, CISO of SD-WAN Experts and CEO of Red Lantern, a security and compliance consultancy, and I collaborated on a security analysis of SD-WAN architectures. We conducted penetration testing of several SD-WAN solutions, looking atthe appliances and cloud architectures. Details of how we tested and vendor results are necessarily confidential. However, I can share with you some of our overall findings about appliances – we’ll get to the cloud at a later date.SD-WAN security: what it really means First, some context: SD-WAN vendors speak about their architectures as being secure and that’s true to an extent. All SD-WAN solutions secure traffic in transit. But there’s more to network security than protecting data against eavesdropping and wiretapping, which is why companies deploy next-generation firewall (NGFW), intrusion prevention systems (IPS), and more.  SD-WAN and security vendors have been addressing this need, integrating the functionality of one another into solutions that provide networking and security.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Warning: security vulnerabilities found in SD-WAN appliances

In a rush to capitalize on the SD-WAN market opportunity, some SD-WAN vendors seem to be playing fast and loose with their appliances.At a recent customer site of ours, Nirvik Nandy, CISO of SD-WAN Experts and CEO of Red Lantern, a security and compliance consultancy, and I collaborated on a security analysis of SD-WAN architectures. We conducted penetration testing of several SD-WAN solutions, looking atthe appliances and cloud architectures. Details of how we tested and vendor results are necessarily confidential. However, I can share with you some of our overall findings about appliances – we’ll get to the cloud at a later date.SD-WAN security: what it really means First, some context: SD-WAN vendors speak about their architectures as being secure and that’s true to an extent. All SD-WAN solutions secure traffic in transit. But there’s more to network security than protecting data against eavesdropping and wiretapping, which is why companies deploy next-generation firewall (NGFW), intrusion prevention systems (IPS), and more.  SD-WAN and security vendors have been addressing this need, integrating the functionality of one another into solutions that provide networking and security.To read this article in full, please click here

HPE offers a SaaS-based tool for hybrid cloud management

While cloud computing holds out the promise of operational efficiency and cost optimization, most big companies will be operating hybrid computing environments for the foreseeable future. As a result, cloud technology for many companies adds yet another layer on top of an already complex computing infrastructure.Seeing an opportunity to help IT departments work with developers and lines of business to optimize their hybrid computing environments, HPE is offering what it calls the first SaaS-based multicloud management application for on-premises and public clouds. Dubbed OneSphere, the software is being unveiled at the company's Discover Conference in Madrid today.To read this article in full, please click here

Julia Language Delivers Petascale HPC Performance

 

Written in the productivity language Julia, the Celeste project—which aims to catalogue all of the telescope data for the stars and galaxies in in the visible universe—demonstrated the first Julia application to exceed 1 PF/s of double-precision floating-point performance (specifically 1.54 PF/s).

The project took advantage of all 9300 Intel Xeon Phi Phase II nodes on the NERSC (National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center) Cori supercomputer.

Even in HPC terms, the Celeste project is big, as it created the first comprehensive catalog of visible objects in our universe by processing 178 terabytes of SDSS (Sloan Digital …

Julia Language Delivers Petascale HPC Performance was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Liveblog: IPv6 in the Cloud – Protocol and Service Overview

This is a liveblog of an AWS re:Invent 2017 breakout session titled “IPv6 in the Cloud: Protocol and Service Overview.” The presenter’s name is Alan Halachmi, who is a Senior Manager of Solutions Architecture at AWS. As with so many of the other breakout sessions and workshops here at re:Invent this year, the queues to get into the session are long and it’s expected that the session will be completely full.

Halachmi starts the session promptly at 11:30am (the scheduled start time) by reviewing the current state of IP4 exhaustion, then quickly moves to a “state of the state” regarding IPv6 adoption on the Internet. Global IPv6 adoption is currently around 22%, and is expected to hit 25% by the end of the year. Mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) are driving most of the growth, according to Halachmi. T-Mobile, for example, now has 89% of their infrastructure running on IPv6.

Transitioning again rather quickly, Halachmi moves into an overview of the IPv6 protocol itself. IPv4 uses a 32-bit address space; IPv6 uses a 128-bit address space (29 orders of magnitude larger than IPv4). IPv4 uses dotted decimal with CIDR (Classless Interdomain Routing) notation; IPv6 uses colon-separated hextet notation Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: The case for securing the SD-WAN

With everything from massive data breaches at global organizations to explosive ransomware attacks that infect hundreds of thousands of users within days, it’s well established that enterprises these days are dealing with more threats than ever before – all of which are increasing in abundance, frequency and complexity.Among other things, this rapidly evolving threat environment can be attributed to new and expanding threat vectors that have opened the door for external threats to reach critical business assets via non-corporate entities, whether through a consumer device, poorly secured partner network or branch office. The Internet of Things (IoT) and guest tenant services, for example, force a unique method of segmenting the traffic service/workloads and introduce a level of operational complexity.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The case for securing the SD-WAN

With everything from massive data breaches at global organizations to explosive ransomware attacks that infect hundreds of thousands of users within days, it’s well established that enterprises these days are dealing with more threats than ever before – all of which are increasing in abundance, frequency and complexity.Among other things, this rapidly evolving threat environment can be attributed to new and expanding threat vectors that have opened the door for external threats to reach critical business assets via non-corporate entities, whether through a consumer device, poorly secured partner network or branch office. The Internet of Things (IoT) and guest tenant services, for example, force a unique method of segmenting the traffic service/workloads and introduce a level of operational complexity.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Network Outages? Unacceptable. How to Ensure Availability

The rise of cloud applications has been well documented. The cloud era kicked off with a handful of SaaS applications, such as ERP, CRM and HR systems. Today, businesses are buying almost everything cloud-related — from compute services, contact center software, unified communications to anything else you can think of. These apps and services may look somewhat unrelated, but they all have one thing in common: They are highly dependent on the network to perform properly.Consider a consumer example. We pay Netflix a certain amount of money to watch a movie, but we are entirely dependent on our network connections to enjoy the experience. It doesn’t matter how much more money we pay Netflix; if our network connection performs poorly or is unavailable, the viewing experience suffers.To read this article in full, please click here

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