In June 2017, we concluded the Building Next Generation Data Center online course with a roundtable discussion with Andrew Lerner, Research Vice President, Networking, and Simon Richard, Research Director, Data Center Networking @ Gartner.
During the first 45 minutes, we covered a lot of topics including:
Read more ...For quite a long time installation and deployment have been deemed as major barriers for OpenStack adoption. The classic “install everything manually” approach could only work in small production or lab environments and the ever increasing number of project under the “Big Tent” made service-by-service installation infeasible. This led to the rise of automated installers that over time evolved from a simple collection of scripts to container management systems.
The first generation of automated installers were simple utilities that tied together a collection of Puppet/Chef/Ansible scripts. Some of these tools could do baremetal server provisioning through Cobbler or Ironic (Fuel, Compass) and some relied on server operating system to be pre-installed (Devstack, Packstack). In either case the packages were pulled from the Internet or local repository every time the installer ran.
The biggest problem with the above approach is the time it takes to re-deploy, upgrade or scale the existing environment. Even for relatively small environments it could be hours before all packages are downloaded, installed and configured. One of the ways to tackle this is to pre-build an operating system with all the necessary packages and only use Puppet/Chef/Ansible to change configuration files and Continue reading
I’m returning to my OpenStack SDN series to explore some of the new platform features like service function chaining, network service orchestration, intent-based networking and dynamic WAN routing. To kick things off I’m going to demonstrate my new fully-containerized OpenStack Lab that I’ve built using an OpenStack project called Kolla.
Continue reading
AWS and Microsoft Azure already offer direct connections to their clouds.
Over the last two days, Cloudflare observed two events that had effects on global Internet traffic levels. Cloudflare handles approximately 10% of all Internet requests, so we have significant visibility into traffic from countries and networks across the world.
On Tuesday, September 5th, the government of Togo decided to restrict Internet access in the country following political protests. The government blocked social networks and rate-limited traffic, which had an impact on Cloudflare.
This adds Togo to the list of countries like Syria (twice), Iraq, Turkey, Libya, Tunisia, etc that have restricted or revoked Internet access.
The second event happened on Wednesday, September 6th, when a category 5 hurricane ravaged the Caribbean Islands.
The affected countries at the moment are:
Most of the network cables are buried underground or laying at the bottom of the oceans but the hardware which relies on electricity is the first one to go down.
Cell towers sometime have their own power source thus allowing local phone calls but without a backbone no outside Continue reading
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Several months ago I had created a simple GNS3 network topology for practicing my networking skills. What had firstly begun as a simple lab, later grew in to a real world enterprise network consisting of a campus, data center, DMZ network blocks and ISPs. During the next several weeks I added new devices into the topology, struggling with no time due to complicated family circumstances. In March 2017 I completely stopped working on this project. Luckily, I was done with the configuration of all devices and I wrote several articles describing my progress. Now, almost a half of the year later, I am ready to share my experience with the blog readers and publish the articles. Below is the list of the articles. I hope you find them useful.
Enterprise Network on GNS3 - Part 1 - Introduction
Enterprise Network on GNS3 - Part 2 - Access Layer
Enterprise Network on GNS3 - Part 3 - Distribution and Core Layers
Enterprise Network on GNS3 - Part 4 - Cisco ASAv-I
Enterprise Network on GNS3 - Part 5 - Data Center
Enterprise Network on GNS3 - Part 6 - Edge Router and ISPs
Enterprise Network on GNS3 - Part 7 - Continue reading
Containers vs. hypervisors: the battle is ongoing, but the two technologies don’t need to be pitted against one another—in fact, they each offer benefits that are more suitable for certain workloads than others.
Containers are considered resilient, in part, because they can be deployed both as classic monolithic applications as well as highly composable microservices. They are portable, and can be scaled up or down and deleted when no longer needed. Among many other benefits, containers pack more applications into a single physical server than a virtual machine (VM) is capable of, which means they are superior if you need the maximum amount of applications on a bare minimum number of servers.
When it comes to hypervisors in our current technology climate, their value seems to be slowly diminishing—and containers continue to enjoy a steady increase in popularity. Part of VM’s decline is due to resource allocation: they use a lot of system resources, requiring a full copy of the OS and a virtual copy of the hardware that the OS needs to run, while containers only need the supporting libraries required to run a specific program.
Furthermore, VM’s don’t provide the same level of portability, consistency, or speed that Continue reading
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Dell and EMC merger.
The rivalry between Mesos, Kubernetes, and OpenStack just keeps getting more interesting, and instead of a winner take all situation, it has become more of a take what you need approach. That said, it is looking like Kubernetes is emerging as the de facto standard for container control, even though Google not the first out of the gate in open sourcing Kubernetes and Docker Swam and the full Docker Enterprise are seeing plenty of momentum in the enterprise.
Choice is a good thing for the IT industry, and the good news is that because of architectural choices made by …
Mesos Borgs Google’s Kubernetes Right Back was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The update includes engineering support for operating systems from Arista, Cisco, Juniper, and Open vSwitch.
You might have noticed that my blog looks a bit different than it did a few hours ago thanks to fantastic work by Nils & Mathias from Strandrover.Agency (and a bit of homegrown blogger template hacking). We tested all functionality we could think of, if we missed something, please write a comment (they still work ;).
When reporting a problem, please tell me what browser (and browser version) you're using and whether you're using a web proxy (like Cisco Web Security Appliance).
Today our Internet Society chapter in Togo issued a statement (in French) calling on the government of Togo to restore Internet access. Reports in the media and from our own members there indicate that that the government has shut down Internet access in the wake of protests after their recent election. The president of our ISOC Togo Chapter alerted us today that the shutdown has now even extended to SMS text messages.
Contrary to rumors, the company is not prohibited from selling equipment in the U.S.
On September 18th in Los Angeles, California, the Internet Society will celebrate a selected group of exceptional young people under the age of 25 who are using the Internet to make a difference in peoples’ lives.
I had the privilege of reading hundreds of submissions and nominations, many of which left me feeling humbled and inspired. The incredible impact these individuals have already had in such a short time is a model for youth around the world and for those of us who already have some years of experience!
Their efforts include creating an anti-cyberbullying youth movement in Australia, providing health education to teens in Tanzania, reducing the gender technology gap in Gambia, and using ICTs to break the cycle of poverty for families in Costa Rica. You can read more about the awardees and honourable mention recipients and their extraordinary work here.
Although the awardees’ stories are as individual as they are compelling, they do share a common theme: an unwavering commitment to solving an identified problem and a passion for using the Internet to shape tomorrow in their communities.
This is the same theme that motivated young innovators, pioneers, and connectors in their twenties and thirties to imagine the Continue reading
New ZTE exec to battle public policy issues; Avaya gets a new CEO as it tries to emerge from bankruptcy.