4 Emerging Wireless Standards To Watch
A look at what's ahead in WiFi, including the speedy 802.11ax and HaLow for IoT connectivity.
Workflow Enhanced Networking (WEN)
Software Defined Networking (SDN) offered lots of hope, a centralized control-plane, programmable network functions and authenticated network nodes. Once we all stopped laughing and rolling around the floor with rib ache, the reality of SDN dawned quickly. It was a nice academic thought and set of experiments, but for the masses, the original meaning of SDN has changed significantly. The software giants with mountains of cash will drive technology like this early and possibly pave the way for the rest of us eventually, but for the masses of enterprises that vendors serve and that have more immediate requirements, SDN isn’t something that’s had massive adoption. The question of ‘why’ is a pretty obvious place to start and you don’t have to look too far before you find answers.
I will not get in to the overlay and underlay arguments here. These have been done to death already. Lots of organizations and vendors offer various takes on the middle-ground, far left and far right. This isn’t a product pitch either.
This post is around the “next onwards step” as opposed to changing the world. I also ‘feel’, this is the natural pull as opposed to the industry push we’ve come to Continue reading
Have to choose between VMware NSX and Cisco ACI? You’re Not Alone
I keep getting questions along the lines of “should I go with VMware NSX or should I deploy Cisco ACI” every single week, and as you know it’s hard to answer anything but it depends without spending hours on the topic.
That’s exactly what we plan to do in Zurich next Tuesday (May 16th) in a DIGS workshop that will run in parallel with the Data Center & Cloud Day (part of the SIGS Technology Conference).
Read more ...Colombo, Sri Lanka: Six million Internet properties now faster for six million Internet users
We are excited to add four new data centers this week to Cloudflare's growing network, beginning with Colombo, Sri Lanka. This deployment is our 112th data center globally, and our 38th in Asia.
Faster Performance
CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 image by Pavel Dobrovsky
Six million Internet properties using Cloudflare are now even faster across the island country of Sri Lanka. Previously, local visitors to Cloudflare customers were served out of our Singapore or Dubai data centers.
Latency (ms) decreases 4x to Cloudflare customers. Source: Cedexis
Sri Lanka added over one million Internet users in the past year alone. At ~30% Internet penetration, there is considerable room to grow.
Next Three Cities
Our deployments to be revealed later this week will provide additional redundancy to existing facilities in North America and Africa.
If you enjoy the idea of helping build one of the world's largest networks, come join our team!
Impatient For Fabrics, Micron Forges Its Own NVM-Express Arrays
There may be a shortage in the supply of DRAM main memory and NAND flash memory that is having an adverse effect on the server and storage markets, but there is no shortage of vendors who are trying to push the envelope on clustered storage using a mix of these memories and others such as the impending 3D XPoint.
Micron Technology, which makes and sells all three of these types of memories, is so impatient with the rate of technological advancement in clustered flash arrays based on the NVM-Express protocol that it decided to engineer and launch its own product …
Impatient For Fabrics, Micron Forges Its Own NVM-Express Arrays was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
A Dive into Deep Learning Chip Startup Graphcore’s Software Stack
The last two years have delivered a new wave of deep learning architectures designed specifically for tackling both training and inference sides of neural networks. We have covered many of them extensively, but only a few have seen major investment or acquisition—the most notable of which was Nervana Systems over a year ago.
Among the string of neural network chip startups, Graphcore stood out with its manycore approach to handling both training and inference on the same manycore chip. We described the hardware architecture in detail back in March and while its over $30 million in funding from a …
A Dive into Deep Learning Chip Startup Graphcore’s Software Stack was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Liveblog: OpenStack Summit Keynote, Day 2
This is a liveblog of the day 2 keynote of the OpenStack Summit in Boston, MA. (I wasn’t able to liveblog yesterday’s keynote due to a schedule conflict.) It looks as if today’s keynote will have an impressive collection of speakers from a variety of companies, and—judging from the number of laptops on the stage—should feature a number of demos (hopefully all live).
The keynote starts with the typical high-energy video that’s intended to “pump up” the audience, and Mark Collier (COO, OpenStack Foundation) takes the stage promptly at 9am. Collier re-iterates a few statistics from yesterday’s keynote (attendees from 63 countries, for example). Collier shares that he believes that all major challenges humanity is trying to solve counts on computing. “All science is computer science,” according to Collier, which is both great but also represents a huge responsibility. He leads this discussion by pointing out what he believes to be the fundamental role of open source in machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI). Collier also mentions a collection of “composable” open source projects that are leading the way toward a “cloud-native” future. All of these projects are designed in a way to be combined together in a “mix-and-match” Continue reading
Liveblog: AT&T’s Container Strategy and OpenStack’s Role in it
This is a liveblog of the OpenStack Summit session titled “AT&T’s Container Strategy and OpenStack’s Role in it”. The speakers are Kandan Kathirvel and Amit Tank, both from AT&T. I really wanted to sit in on Martin Casado’s presentation next door (happening at the same time), but as much as I love watching/hearing Martin speak, I felt this like presentation might expose me to some new information.
Kathirvel kicks off the session with some quick introductions, then sets the stage for the session. Naturally, Kathirvel starts out by describing AT&T’s cloud deployment. (I say “naturally” because it seems that every presentation starts out with describing how great and how awesome the presenter’s company’s OpenStack cloud is.)
Following the discussion of AT&T’s cloud, Kathirvel launches into a discussion of container trends and demands. He indicates that he believes container usage (or demand?) for enterprise IT applications is huge (and will continue to be large), but doesn’t believe that will hold true for virtual network functions (VNFs) in telco clouds.
As for how containers and OpenStack may be coming together, Kathirvel describes three different use cases:
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The first use case has OpenStack managing the infrastructure, with Kubernetes (or another container Continue reading
Liveblog: Kuryr Project Update
This is a liveblog of an OpenStack Summit session providing an update on the Kuryr project. The speakers are Antoni Segura Puimedon and Irena Berezovsky. Kuryr, if you recall, was a project aimed at making OpenStack Neutron functionality available to Docker containers; it has since expanded to also offer Cinder and Manila storage to Docker containers, and has added support for both Docker Swarm and Kubernetes as well.
According to Puimedon, the latest release of Kuryr has a diverse base of contributors, with over 45 active contributors.
So, what will be in the Pike release? For the Kubernetes-specific support:
- This will be the first release
- Support for Kubernetes Services (this leverages LBaaS v2)
- Client- and server-side SSL support
- RDO packaging
What’s planned for Pike, but may not actually make it? (Again, this is for Kubernetes support.)
- Token support
- Resource pools
- Improved support for Services defined as LoadBalancer type
On the Docker side, the following new features and enhancements will arrive in Pike:
- Support for Swarm mode
- IPv4 and IPv6 networking
- TLS support between Docker and the libnetwork plugin
On the Fuxi side, Kuryr is adding support for Manila shares.
At this point, Berezovsky takes over to discuss the release Continue reading
Liveblog: OpenStack Summit Keynote, Day 2
This is a liveblog of the day 2 keynote of the OpenStack Summit in Boston, MA. (I wasn’t able to liveblog yesterday’s keynote due to a schedule conflict.) It looks as if today’s keynote will have an impressive collection of speakers from a variety of companies, and—judging from the number of laptops on the stage—should feature a number of demos (hopefully all live).
The keynote starts with the typical high-energy video that’s intended to “pump up” the audience, and Mark Collier (COO, OpenStack Foundation) takes the stage promptly at 9am. Collier re-iterates a few statistics from yesterday’s keynote (attendees from 63 countries, for example). Collier shares that he believes that all major challenges humanity is trying to solve counts on computing. “All science is computer science,” according to Collier, which is both great but also represents a huge responsibility. He leads this discussion by pointing out what he believes to be the fundamental role of open source in machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI). Collier also mentions a collection of “composable” open source projects that are leading the way toward a “cloud-native” future. All of these projects are designed in a way to be combined together in a “mix-and-match” Continue reading
Liveblog: Deploying Containerized OpenStack: Challenges & Tools Comparison
This is a liveblog for an OpenStack Summit session on containerized OpenStack and a comparison of the tools used for containerized OpenStack. The speaker is Jaivish Kothari, from NEC Technologies. Two other speakers were listed on the title slide, but were apparently unable to make it to the Summit to present.
Kothari provides a brief overview of the session, then jumps into a discussion of deployment tools. As illustrated by one of his slides, there’s a huge collection of tools that are used to deploy OpenStack; some are “pure” deployment tools, others are configuration management tools. In this presentation, Kothari says he will focus specifically on OpenStack deployment tools, like Juju (Canonical), Fuel (Mirantis), Crowbar (Dell), and PackStack/TripleO (Red Hat), but I’m not sure how this relates to containerized OpenStack (per the session title).
According to Kothari, some of the challenges in “traditional” (non-containerized) deployment tools are best understood by looking at the challenges in deploying OpenStack:
- Difficulty related to deployment (conflicts due to services configuration, deployment still prone to failures)
- Ongoing lifecycle management of OpenStack components
This whole first section of the presentation was setting up the argument that containerizing your OpenStack control plane will help address these challenges. Continue reading
DockerCon 2017: all the session videos are now live!
We’re happy to announce that all the breakout session video recordings from DockerCon 2017 are now available online! Special shoutout to all the amazing speakers for making their sessions informative and insightful. All the videos are published on the Docker Youtube channel and the presentation slides available from the Docker Slideshare account.
Here are the links to the playlists of each track:
Use Case Track
Use case talks are about practical applications of Docker and are heavy on technical detail and implementation advice. Topics covered during this track were related to high availability and parallel usage in the gaming industry, Cloud scale for e-commerce giants, Security compliance and system, protocols legacy in financial and health care institutions.
Black Belt Track
Black Belt talks were deeply technical sessions presented by Docker experts. These sessions are code and demo heavy and light on the slides. From container internals to advanced container orchestration, security and networking, this track is a delight for the container experts in the room.
Docker Deep Dive
This track focuses on the technical details associated with the different components of the Docker platform: advanced orchestration, networking, security, storage, management and plug-ins. The Docker engineering leads walk you through the best way to Continue reading
VMware’s Distro of OpenStack Comes Free for vSphere Customers
The biggest use case for VIO is to create developer clouds.