Worth Reading: Cloudflare Control Plane Outage

Cloudflare experienced a significant outage in early November 2023 and published a detailed post-mortem report. You should read the whole report; here are my CliffsNotes:

Also (unrelated to Cloudflare outage):

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IPv6, the DNS and Happy Eyeballs

If we are going to update RFC 3901, "DNS IPv6 Transport Guidelines," and offer a revised set of guidelines that are more positive guidelines about the use of IPv6 in the DNS, then what should such updated guidelines say?

Microsoft Holds Chip Makers’ Feet To The Fire With Homegrown CPU And AI Chips

After many years of rumors, Microsoft has finally confirmed that it is following rivals Amazon Web Services and Google into the design of custom processors and accelerators for their clouds. …

The post Microsoft Holds Chip Makers’ Feet To The Fire With Homegrown CPU And AI Chips first appeared on The Next Platform.

Microsoft Holds Chip Makers’ Feet To The Fire With Homegrown CPU And AI Chips was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

SC23 WiFi Traffic Heatmap

Real-time WiFi-Traffic Heatmap (source code GitHub: cod3monk/showfloor-heatmap) displays real-time WiFi traffic from The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC23) being held this week in Denver.
The conference network used in the demonstration, SCinet, is described as the most powerful and advanced network on Earth, connecting the SC community to the world.
In this example, the sFlow-RT real-time analytics engine receives sFlow telemetry from switches, routers, and servers in the SCinet network and creates metrics to drive the real-time heatmap. Getting Started provides a quick introduction to deploying and using sFlow-RT for real-time network-wide flow analytics.

Additional use cases being demonstrated this week include, SC23 Dropped packet visibility demonstration and SC23 SCinet traffic.

Cisco: Generative AI expectations outstrip enterprise readiness

While 95% of businesses are aware that AI will increase infrastructure workloads, only 17% have networks that are flexible enough to handle the complex requirements of AI. Given that disconnect, it’s too early to see widespread deployment of AI at scale, despite the hype.That's one of the key takeaways from Cisco’s inaugural AI Readiness Index, a survey of 8,000 global companies aimed at measuring corporate interest in and ability to utilize AI technologies.To read this article in full, please click here

D2C220: KubeConversations Part 1 – Platform Engineering

Welcome to a special edition of Day Two Cloud. Host Ned Bellavance traveled to KubeCon Chicago 2023 and spoke to vendors and open source maintainers about what’s going on in the cloud-native ecosystem. This episode features conversations on platform engineering. Part 2 will focus on security. Episode Guests: Cole Morrison, Developer Advocate at HashiCorp LinkedIn... Read more »

Microsoft’s Maia AI, Azure Cobalt chips to rev up efficiency, performance

After months of speculation that Microsoft was developing its own semiconductors, the company at its annual Ignite conference Wednesday took the covers off two new custom chips, dubbed the Maia AI Accelerator and the Azure Cobalt CPU, which target generative AI and cloud computing workloads, respectively.The new Maia 100 AI Accelerator, according to Microsoft, will power some of the company's heaviest internal AI workloads running on Azure, including OpenAI’s model training and inferencing workloads.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel updates HPC processor roadmap

Intel kicked off the Supercomputing 2023 conference with a series of high performance computing (HPC) announcements, including a new Xeon line and Gaudi AI processor.Intel will ship its fifth-generation Xeon Scalable Processor, codenamed Emerald Rapids, to OEM partners on December 14. Emerald Rapids features a maximum core count of 64 cores, up slightly from the 56-core fourth-gen Xeon.In addition to more cores, Emerald Rapids will feature higher frequencies, hardware acceleration for FP16, and support 12 memory channels, including the new Intel-developed MCR memory that is considerably faster than standard DDR5 memory.According to benchmarks that Intel provided, the top-of-the-line Emerald Rapids outperformed the top-of-the-line fourth gen CPU with a 1.4x gain in AI speech recognition and a 1.2x gain in the FFMPEG media transcode workload. All in all, Intel claims a 2x to 3x improvement in AI workloads, a 2.8x boost in memory throughput, and a 2.9x improvement in the DeepMD+LAMMPS AI inference workload.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel updates HPC processor roadmap

Intel kicked off the Supercomputing 2023 conference with a series of high performance computing (HPC) announcements, including a new Xeon line and Gaudi AI processor.Intel will ship its fifth-generation Xeon Scalable Processor, codenamed Emerald Rapids, to OEM partners on December 14. Emerald Rapids features a maximum core count of 64 cores, up slightly from the 56-core fourth-gen Xeon.In addition to more cores, Emerald Rapids will feature higher frequencies, hardware acceleration for FP16, and support 12 memory channels, including the new Intel-developed MCR memory that is considerably faster than standard DDR5 memory.According to benchmarks that Intel provided, the top-of-the-line Emerald Rapids outperformed the top-of-the-line fourth gen CPU with a 1.4x gain in AI speech recognition and a 1.2x gain in the FFMPEG media transcode workload. All in all, Intel claims a 2x to 3x improvement in AI workloads, a 2.8x boost in memory throughput, and a 2.9x improvement in the DeepMD+LAMMPS AI inference workload.To read this article in full, please click here

Introducing hostname and ASN lists to simplify WAF rules creation

Introducing hostname and ASN lists to simplify WAF rules creation

If you’re responsible for creating a Web Application Firewall (WAF) rule, you’ll almost certainly need to reference a large list of potential values that each field can have. And having to manually manage and enter all those fields, for numerous WAF rules, would be a guaranteed headache.

That’s why we introduced IP lists. Having a separate list of values that can be referenced, reused, and managed independently of the actual rule makes for a better WAF user experience. You can create a new list, such as $organization_ips, and then use it in a rule like “allow requests where source IP is in $organization_ips”. If you need to add or remove IPs, you do that in the list, without touching each of the rules that reference the list. You can even add a descriptive name to help track its content. It’s easy, clean, and organized.

Which led us, and our customers, to ask the next natural question: why stop at IPs?

Cloudflare’s WAF is highly configurable and allows you to write rules evaluating a set of hostnames, Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs), countries, header values, or values of JSON fields. But to do so, you’ve to input a list of Continue reading

Agentless configuration drift detection and remediation

Over time, application owners find themselves compelled to continuously refine their applications and the underlying infrastructure to enhance the products they deliver, whether to internal or external customers. These modifications inevitably lead to changes in the configuration of both applications and infrastructure. While some of these changes may be benign, others can unintentionally steer the systems away from their securely configured state, a phenomenon commonly referred to as "configuration drift." Left unaddressed, the extent of this drift can introduce substantial risks to the organization.

Traditionally, agent-based automation configuration management tools have been favored as the primary solution for tackling configuration drift. 

However, is this approach genuinely the most effective strategy? 

According to AWS's well-architected framework, the concept of a Fault Isolation Zone (FIZ) is crucial, characterized by isolation boundaries like Availability Zones (AZ), Regions, control planes, and data planes. While this concept is centered in a cloud context, the principles behind FIZ remain relevant in traditional data centers and at the network edge. The core idea is to minimize the impact of errors, particularly human misconfigurations, that can propagate beyond a defined Fault Isolation Zone.

Are misconfigurations resulting from human error still a matter of concern?

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Cloud management skills gap drives hybrid cloud adoption

A lack of cloud management skills could be limiting in-house innovation and the benefits enterprises gain from implementing public cloud exclusively, driving more IT organizations to invest in hybrid cloud environments, according to recent research. In one survey, software vendor Parallels polled 805 IT professionals to learn more about how they use cloud resources. The responses showed that a technical skills gap continues to concern many organizations deploying cloud. Some 62% of survey respondents said they viewed the lack of cloud management skills at their organization as a “major roadblock for growth.” According to the results, 33% of respondents pointed to a lack of in-house expertise when trying to get maximum value from their cloud investment. Another 15% survey cited a difficulty finding the appropriate talent.To read this article in full, please click here

Will Isambard 4 Be The UK’s First True Exascale Machine?

Here is a story you don’t hear very often: A supercomputing center was just given a blank check up to the peak power consumption of its facility to build a world-class AI/HPC supercomputer instead of a sidecar partition with some GPUs to play around with and wish its researchers had a lot more capacity. …

The post Will Isambard 4 Be The UK’s First True Exascale Machine? first appeared on The Next Platform.

Will Isambard 4 Be The UK’s First True Exascale Machine? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Getting started on the Linux (or Unix) command line, Part 1

To get started as a Linux (or Unix) user, you need to have a good perspective on how Linux works and a handle on some of the most basic commands. This first post in a “getting started” series examines some of the first commands you need to be ready to use.On logging in When you first log into a Linux system and open a terminal window or log into a Linux system from another system using a tool like PuTTY, you’ll find yourself sitting in your home directory. Some of the commands you will probably want to try first will include these:pwd -- shows you where you are in the file system right now (stands for “present working directory”) whoami – confirms the account you just logged into date -- show the current date and time hostname -- display the system’s name Using the whoami command immediately after logging in might generate a “duh!” response since you just entered your assigned username and password. But, once you find yourself using more than one account, it’s always helpful to know a command that will remind you which you’re using at the moment.To read this article in full, Continue reading

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