Configuring BGP Community Propagation is Confusing
A large number of vendors claim to use industry-standard CLI, which means “something that looks like Cisco IOS, but we can’t say that in public.” The implementations of that “standard” are full of quirks; as I was making fun of Cisco IOS last week, it’s only fair to look at how others deal with BGP community propagation.
netlab has BGP configuration templates for 14 different platforms1, including these implementations that look like Cisco IOS from a distance if you squint just right2: Arista EOS, Aruba CX, and FRRouting. You can check the configuration templates if you wish; here’s the TC&DB3 overview:
NAN098: Democratizing the Learning Environment for Network Engineers
Democratizing the learning environment is a passion for Deepak Ahuja. So much so, he founded CloudMyLab, a company that provides hands-on, cloud-based labs and networking environments. His goal is to offer an affordable lab-as-a-service for two groups of people: network engineers seeking certifications, and network engineers and automators that need a place to safely test... Read more »How we built AI face cropping for Images
During Developer Week 2024, we introduced AI face cropping in private beta. This feature automatically crops images around detected faces, and marks the first release in our upcoming suite of AI image manipulation capabilities.
AI face cropping is now available in Images for everyone. To bring this feature to general availability, we moved our CPU-based prototype to a GPU-based implementation in Workers AI, enabling us to address a number of technical challenges, including memory leaks that could hamper large-scale use.
Photograph by Suad Kamardeen (@suadkamardeen) on Unsplash
We developed face cropping with two particular use cases in mind:
Social media platforms and AI chatbots. We observed a lot of traffic from customers who use Images to turn unedited images of people into smaller profile pictures in neat, fixed shapes.
E-commerce platforms. The same product photo might appear in a grid of thumbnails on a gallery page, then again on an individual product page with a larger view. The following example illustrates how cropping can change the emphasis from the model’s shirt to their sunglasses.
Photograph by Media Modifier (@mediamodifier) on Unsplash
When handling high volumes of media content, preparing images for production can be Continue reading
TCG056: Network Automation Reality Check with Ivan Pepelnjak
In this unplanned and unfiltered conversation, we dive deep into network automation realities with Ivan Pepelnjak, networking’s long standing and independent voice from ipSpace.net. We explore why automation projects fail, dissect the tooling landscape (Ansible vs. Terraform vs. Python), and discuss the cultural barriers preventing enterprises from modernizing their networks. Ivan delivers hard truths about... Read more »SwiNOG 40: Trustworthy Network Automation
The SwiNOG 40 event started with an interesting presentation on Building Trustworthy Network Automation (video) by Damien Garros (now CEO @ OpsMill) who discussed the principles one can use to build a trustworthy network automation solution, including idempotency, dry runs, and transactional changes. He also covered the crucial roles of the declarative approach, version control, and testing.
If you have ever watched any of my network automation materials, you won’t be surprised by anything he said, but if you’re just starting your network automation journey, you MUST watch this presentation to get your bearings straight.
It Is Very Hard To Catch AWS On The Clouds
Years before Amazon Web Services launched in March 2006, there were a slew of grid computing startups and incumbent system makers – and a few of them with deep supercomputing experience – that were hawking remotely accessible, utility-style computing on demand. …
It Is Very Hard To Catch AWS On The Clouds was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
PP075: Kernel Vs. User Mode In Endpoint Security Software
Microsoft is rethinking allowing endpoint security software to run in the Windows kernel (including third-party and Microsoft’s own endpoint security software). While there are benefits to running security software in the kernel, there are also serious downsides (see the CrowdStrike outage). Dan Massameno joins JJ and Drew on Packet Protector to talk about the role... Read more »Automating Data Pipelines With AI Agents
PARTNER CONTENT: For years, data science and engineering teams have faced a familiar challenge: turning vast, messy datasets into timely, reliable insights. …
Automating Data Pipelines With AI Agents was written by David Gordon at The Next Platform.
HS110: Cryptocalypse Soon! The CRQCs Are Due Sooner Than We Thought
Google now estimates that the specs for a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer (CRQC), which can break conventional public key encryption in a useful amount of time, are lower than they had previously estimated…by 95%. Given the breadth and pace of advancement in quantum computing, this makes the advent of the CRQC likely to happen years... Read more »
Hope Is The First Phase Of A Strategy To Profit From Selling AI Systems
There are four businesses that are very difficult for an equipment manufacturer in the IT sector to make any money on: smartphones, PCs, datacenter servers, and services. …
Hope Is The First Phase Of A Strategy To Profit From Selling AI Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
NB539: Boom Times for Arista; SonicWall Offers $200K Firewall Warranty
Take a Network Break! We start with critical vulnerabilities in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center and Fortinet’s FortiSIEM. On the news front, SonicWall announces Gen8 firewalls plus a $200,000 warranty for customers that sign on to SonicWall’s Managed Protection Security Suite. IBM Cloud suffers its fourth major outage since May of this year, SASE vendor... Read more »Announcing the Cloudflare Browser Developer Program
Today, we are announcing Cloudflare’s Browser Developer Program, a collaborative initiative to strengthen partnership between Cloudflare and browser development teams.
Browser developers can apply to join here.
At Cloudflare, we aim to help build a better Internet. One way we achieve this is by providing website owners with the tools to detect and block unwanted traffic from bots through Cloudflare Challenges or Turnstile. As both bots and our detection systems become more sophisticated, the security checks required to validate human traffic become more complicated. While we aim to strike the right balance, we recognize these security measures can sometimes cause issues for legitimate browsers and their users.
A core objective of the program is to provide a space for intentional collaboration where we can work directly with browser developers to ensure that both accessibility and security can co-exist. We aim to support the evolving browser landscape, while upholding our responsibility to our customers to deliver the best security products. This program provides a dedicated channel for browser teams to share feedback, report issues, and help ensure that Cloudflare’s Challenges and Turnstile work seamlessly with all browsers.
Browser developers in Continue reading
Parallelization Strategies in Neural Networks
From a network engineer’s perspective, it is not mandatory to understand the full functionality of every application running in a datacenter. However, understanding the communication patterns of the most critical applications—such as their packet and flow sizes, entropy, transport frequency, and link utilization—is essential. Additionally, knowing the required transport services, including reliability, in-order packet delivery, and lossless transmission, is important.
In AI fabrics, a neural network, including both its training and inference phases, can be considered an application. For this reason, this section first briefly explains the basic operation of the simplest neural network: the Feed Forward Neural Network (FNN). It then discusses the operation of a single neuron. Although a deep understanding of the application itself is not required, this section equips the reader with knowledge of what pieces of information are exchanged between GPUs during each phase and why these data exchanges are important.
Feedforward Neural Network: Forward Pass
Figure 1-7 illustrates a simple four-layer Feed Forward Neural Network (FNN) distributed across four GPUs. The two leftmost GPUs reside in Node-1, and the other two GPUs reside in Node-2. The training data is fed into the first layer. In real neural networks, this first layer is the input Continue reading
AI Cluster Networking
Introduction
The Ultra Ethernet Specification v1.0 (UES), created by the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC), defines end-to-end communication practices for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) services in AI and HPC workloads over Ethernet network infrastructure. UES not only specifies a new RDMA-optimized transport layer protocol, Ultra Ethernet Transport (UET), but also defines how the full application stack—from Software through Transport, Network, Link, and Physical—can be adjusted to provide improved RDMA services while continuing to leverage well-established standards. UES includes, but is not limited to, a software API, mechanisms for low-latency and lossless packet delivery, and an end-to-end secure software communication path.
Before diving into the details of Ultra Ethernet, let’s briefly look at what we are dealing with when we talk about an AI cluster. From this point onward, we focus on Ultra Ethernet from the AI cluster perspective. This chapter first introduces the AI cluster networking. Then, it briefly explains how a neural network operates during the training process, including an short introduction to the backpropagation algorithm and its forward and backward pass functionality.
Note: This book doesn’t include any complex mathematical algorithms related backpropagation algorithm, or detailed explanation of different neural networks. I have written a book Continue reading
The Rise of CLI-Based AI Coding Agents: Claude code vs Gemini CLI
Introduction I have been a Cursor user for vibe coding for 3 months. I was very skeptical about using Claude Code and Gemini CLI at first, since I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of using a terminal as an AI agent. But in the last 1–2 months, I’ve been trying them both — and it … Continue reading The Rise of CLI-Based AI Coding Agents: Claude code vs Gemini CLITo Beat Neocloud Rivals To OpenAI, CoreWeave Spends Like Crazy
Sometimes, when datacenter computing does a paradigm shift, things get cheaper, like the move to RISC/Unix systems in the 1990s, and then to X86 systems in the 2000s. …
To Beat Neocloud Rivals To OpenAI, CoreWeave Spends Like Crazy was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.