Introducing Cloudflare Stream: Fixing the Streaming Video Market



Cloudflare turns seven years old today. We launched on September 27, 2010.

It was only a few days after our launch that we got our first request to support video streaming. Yet, until today, we'd avoided it.

Why? Simply put: the video streaming market is screwed up. While there's a lot of money spent on video, there are only really about 1,000 customers that do any meaningful level of streaming.

This is in large part because it's technically far too complicated. If you want to move beyond just uploading your videos to a consumer service like YouTube, then you have to use at least three different services. You need someone to encode your video into a streamable format, you need someone else to act as the content delivery network delivering the bytes, and you need someone else still to provide the player code that runs on the client device. Further, since video encoding standards keep evolving and vary across generations of devices, it becomes challenging to ensure a consistently high quality experience for all visitors.

And if that sounds like a technical mess, the business side is even worse. Encoding companies charge based on CPU usage, which is driven by Continue reading

Nextcloud’s file storage solution gets a security boost

Nextcloud today released a preview of Nextcloud 13, its online file storage solution for enterprise and individual users.What makes this release so interesting? End-to-end file encryption.When we’re talking about the needs of big businesses, keeping files secure is absolutely critical. There has been no shortage of data breaches and hacks in recent months – reliable encryption and security is absolutely vital to reducing those problems. + Also on Network World: 4 ways to simplify data management + From Jos Poortvliet, member of the Nextcloud, team:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nextcloud’s file storage solution gets a security boost

Nextcloud today released a preview of Nextcloud 13, its online file storage solution for enterprise and individual users.What makes this release so interesting? End-to-end file encryption.When we’re talking about the needs of big businesses, keeping files secure is absolutely critical. There has been no shortage of data breaches and hacks in recent months – reliable encryption and security is absolutely vital to reducing those problems. + Also on Network World: 4 ways to simplify data management + From Jos Poortvliet, member of the Nextcloud, team:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

4 job skills that can boost networking salaries

The coming year looks promising for IT pros on the hunt for new positions. Employers are forging ahead with hiring plans, and it remains a job-seeker’s market. IT salaries are set to increase in 2018, particularly for talent that possesses hard-to-find skills.In the networking arena, certain skills will be especially lucrative – Cisco network administration, Linux/UNIX administration, VoIP administration, and Windows, according to Robert Half Technology.Job candidates with these four in-demand talents may see an additional 5% to 10% bump in starting salary, according to the recruiting and staffing specialist’s 2018 Salary Guide.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

4 job skills that can boost networking salaries

The coming year looks promising for IT pros on the hunt for new positions. Employers are forging ahead with hiring plans, and it remains a job-seeker’s market. IT salaries are set to increase in 2018, particularly for talent that possesses hard-to-find skills.In the networking arena, certain skills will be especially lucrative – Cisco network administration, Linux/UNIX administration, VoIP administration, and Windows, according to Robert Half Technology.Job candidates with these four in-demand talents may see an additional 5% to 10% bump in starting salary, according to the recruiting and staffing specialist’s 2018 Salary Guide.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CCIE Recertification Continuing Education Program

The Cisco Continuing Education Program is a brilliant initiative from Cisco. It is not widely known about but Cisco recently announced a new program to help you re-certify your CCIE without taking the written exam.   Continuing Education Program – How does it work? The concept is very simple, you have to obtain 100 credits […]

The post CCIE Recertification Continuing Education Program appeared first on Network Automation.

2G is still the most common Mobile network technology

2G is still the most common deployed mobile access technology. It is hard to believe but as per my discussions with probably more than twenty Mobile Operators, 2G , especially GSM is the most common mobile access technology.   Almost all those twenty Mobile operators deployed 3G and LTE and some of them deployed LTE Advanced as well, […]

The post 2G is still the most common Mobile network technology appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Collect SSH Keys with Ansible

Here’s a common scenario I’m encountering on Ansible-related forums:

Q: I cannot connect to network devices with my Ansible network modules. I keep getting these weird error messages…

Me: Are you sure you have the device SSH keys in known_hosts file?

Q: How did you know?

Read more ...

5 years with home NAS/RAID

I have lots of data-sets (packet-caps, internet-scans), so I need a large RAID system to hole it all. As I described in 2012, I bought a home "NAS" system. I thought I'd give the 5 year perspective.


Reliability. I had two drives fail, which is about to be expected. Buying a new drive, swapping it in, and rebuilding the RAID went painless, though that's because I used RAID6 (two drive redundancy). RAID5 (one drive redundancy) is for chumps.

Speed. I've been unhappy with the speed, but there's not much I can do about it. Mechanical drives access times are slow, and I don't see any way of fixing that.

Cost. It's been $3000 over 5 years (including the two replacement drives). That comes out to $50/month. Amazon's "Glacier" service is $108/month. Since we all have the same hardware costs, it's unlikely that any online cloud storage can do better than doing it yourself.

Moore's Law. For the same price as I spent 5 years ago, I can now get three times the storage, including faster processors in the NAS box. From that perspective, I've only spent $33/month on storage, as the remaining third still has value.

Ease-of-use: The Continue reading

Netcat Quick Reference

Netcat is a utility for checking open ports. It has more flexibility than using the telnet command and can be used with scripts more easily. This is not a comprehensive tutorial, only a quick reference source. Consult the man pages and/or documentation for indepth explanation of commands. I...

Post Equifax, We Need to Reconsider How to Identify People 

Victims of identity theft will tell you the experience is like having your personal life broken into, tossed around, and thrown out onto the street. It is a violation that is indescribable. Then, you could discover that strangers are impersonating you, carrying out crimes under your name, and destroying your reputation. Unraveling the mess that follows is a long, painful and never-ending process – all this because someone else was careless or willfully negligent with your data.

Even if your data was not exposed in the Equifax breach, you should be both concerned and angry. This is a potentially catastrophic breach: roughly 143 million individuals (approximately 45% of the US population) now face the prospect of identity theft.

As a society, we need to seriously rethink why and how we identify people. How did the social security number become the default identifier, especially for non-governmental functions such as credit reporting? When the Social Security Administration first issued SSNs in 1936, their “sole purpose” was to track the earning history of workers for benefits. In fact, Kaya Yurieff points out that until 1972, the bottom of the card read: “FOR SOCIAL SECURITY PURPOSES — NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION.”

Social security numbers Continue reading

A networking expert on how to experiment with containers using Mesosphere and Cumulus Linux

With the rising popularity of containers, it seems that containers and networking interact more and more frequently. Amongst all the excitement, there is also terminology and technical complexity. And because of this, I’m super grateful for Cumulus in the Cloud. As a Sr. Consulting Engineer, part of my job is ensuring I am deeply familiar with the technologies and methodologies our customers are using. I’ve recently been playing with Cumulus in the Cloud to better learn how Mesos’s Marathon and Mesosphere interoperate with Cumulus Linux and NetQ.

Let me start off by saying that if you’re interested in container networking but want more information on how to do it right, we’re hosting a webinar with Mesosphere that you should most definitely check out. Our co-founder, JR Rivers, will also be hosting, and, I promise you, he’s always an engaging speaker. Of course if you’re already familiar with container networking, or you would like to learn about it in a more hands-on atmosphere, then please read on!

I’m a networking veteran, but working at Cumulus has pushed the boundaries of my networking knowledge as I’ve had to learn more about integrating networking solutions with application functionality. When I have to talk Continue reading

The Ascendancy Of Ethernet Storage Fabrics

It is hard to remember that for decades, whether a system was large or small, its storage was intricately and inescapably linked to its compute.

Network attached storage, as pioneered by NetApp, helped break those links between compute and storage in the enterprise at the file level. But it was the advent of storage area networks that allowed for storage to still be reasonably tightly coupled to servers and work at the lower block level, below file systems, while at the same time allowing that storage to scale independently from the number of disks you might jam into a single …

The Ascendancy Of Ethernet Storage Fabrics was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

With Machine Learning, Can HPC Be Self Healing?

High performance computing, long the domain of research centers and academia, is increasingly becoming a part of mainstream IT infrastructure and being opened up to a broader range of enterprise workloads, and in recent years, that includes big data analytics and machine learning. At the forefront of this expanded use is MasterCard, a financial services giant that is looking to drive the real-time business benefits of HPC.

As MasterCard has learned, however, alongside business value come additional needs around data protection. As HPC systems are more likely to hold customer-facing and other compliance related data, such infrastructure has the potential …

With Machine Learning, Can HPC Be Self Healing? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Pluribus Networks… Wait, where are we again?


I was privileged to visit Pluribus Networks as a delegate at Network Field Day 16 a couple of weeks ago. Somebody else paid for the trip. Details here.

Much has changed at Pluribus, I hardly recognized the place!

I quite like Pluribus (their use of Solaris under their Netvisor switching OS got me right in the feels early on) so I'm happy to report that most of what's new looks like changes for the better.

When we arrived at Pluribus HQ we were greeted by some new faces, a new logo, color scheme... Even new accent lighting in the demo area!

Gone also are the Server Switches with their monstrous control planes (though still listed on the website, they weren't mentioned in the presentation), Solaris, and a partnership with Supermicro.

In their place we found:

  • The new logo and colors
  • New faces in management and marketing
  • Netvisor running on Linux
  • Whitebox and OCP-friendly switches
  • A partnership with D-Link
  • Some Netvisor improvements

Linux

This was probably inevitable, and likely matters little to Netvisor users. When Pluribus was first getting off the ground, I was waiting for an OpenSolaris release that never happened. That Pluribus stuck with Solaris for as long Continue reading
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