RISC-V In The Datacenter Is No Risky Proposition
It was only a matter of time, perhaps, but the skyrocketing costs of designing chips is colliding with the ever-increasing need for performance, price/performance, and performance per watt. …
RISC-V In The Datacenter Is No Risky Proposition was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Cloudflare’s view of the Virgin Media outage in the UK
Just after midnight (UTC) on April 4, subscribers to UK ISP Virgin Media (AS5089) began experiencing an Internet outage, with subscriber complaints multiplying rapidly on platforms including Twitter and Reddit.
Cloudflare Radar data shows Virgin Media traffic dropping to near-zero around 00:30 UTC, as seen in the figure below. Connectivity showed some signs of recovery around 02:30 UTC, but fell again an hour later. Further nominal recovery was seen around 04:45 UTC, before again experiencing another complete outage between around 05:45-06:45 UTC, after which traffic began to recover, reaching expected levels around 07:30 UTC.
After the initial set of early-morning disruptions, Virgin Media experienced another round of issues in the afternoon. Cloudflare observed instability in traffic from Virgin Media’s network (called an autonomous system in Internet jargon) AS5089 starting around 15:00 UTC, with a significant drop just before 16:00 UTC. However in this case, it did not appear to be a complete outage, with traffic recovering approximately a half hour later.
Virgin Media’s Twitter account acknowledged the early morning disruption several hours after it began, posting responses stating “We’re aware of an issue that is affecting broadband services for Virgin Media customers as well as our contact centres. Our teams Continue reading
4 Ways to Prevent Data Loss In the Cloud
For businesses to maximize cloud’s potential and use it efficiently for data management, they will have to take data protection seriously.HPE Converges 3PAR Block And Vast Data File Onto One Alletra MP Platform
If incumbent storage suppliers want to have a business in the hybrid cloud world, they have to find ways to erase the line between what’s in the cloud and what’s on-premises – and increasingly what’s at the edge. …
HPE Converges 3PAR Block And Vast Data File Onto One Alletra MP Platform was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
The Most Complex Chip Ever Made?
Historically Intel put all its cumulative chip knowledge to work advancing Moore’s Law and applying those learnings to its future CPUs. …
The Most Complex Chip Ever Made? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Real-time flow analytics on VyOS
vyos@vyos:~$ add container image sflow/ddos-protectFirst, download the sflow/ddos-protect image.
vyos@vyos:~$ mkdir -m 777 /config/sflow-rtCreate a directory to store persistent container state.
set container name sflow-rt image sflow/ddos-protect set container name sflow-rt allow-host-networks set container name sflow-rt arguments '-Dhttp.hostname=10.0.0.240' set container name sflow-rt environment RTMEM value 200M set container name sflow-rt memory 0 set container name sflow-rt volume store source /config/sflow-rt set container name sflow-rt volume store destination /sflow-rt/storeConfigure a container to run the image. The RMEM environment variable setting limits the amount of memory that the container will use to 200M bytes. The -Dhttp.hostname argument sets the internal web server to listen on management address, 10.0.0.240, assigned to eth0 on this router. The container has is no built-in authentication, so access needs to be limited using an ACL or through a reverse proxy - see Download and install.
set system sflow interface eth0 set system sflow interface eth1 set system sflow interface Continue reading
What’s New: Cloud Automation with amazon.cloud 0.3.0
Last year, we made available an experimental alpha Ansible Content Collection of generated modules using the AWS Cloud Control API to interact with AWS services. Although the Collection is not intended for production, we are constantly trying to improve and extend its functionality and achieve its supportability in the future.
In this blog post, we will go over what else has changed and highlight what’s new in the 0.3.0 release of this Ansible Content Collection.
Forward-looking Changes
Much of our work in release 0.3.0 focused on releasing several new enhancements, clarifying supportability policies, and extending the automation umbrella by generating new modules. Let’s deep dive into it!
New boto3/botocore Versioning
The amazon.cloud Collection has dropped support for botocore<1.28.0 and boto3<1.25.0. Most modules will continue to work with older versions of the AWS Software Development Kit (SDK), however, compatibility with older versions of the AWS SDK is not guaranteed and will not be tested.
New Ansible Support Policy
This Collection release drops support for ansible-core<2.11. In particular, Ansible Core 2.10 and Ansible 2.9 are not supported. For more information, visit Ansible release documentation.
Continue reading
Oxy: the journey of graceful restarts
Any software under continuous development and improvement will eventually need a new version deployed to the systems running it. This can happen in several ways, depending on how much you care about things like reliability, availability, and correctness. When I started out in web development, I didn’t think about any of these qualities; I simply blasted my new code over FTP directly to my /cgi-bin/ directory, which was the style at the time. For those of us producing desktop software, often you sidestep this entirely by having the user save their work, close the program and install an update – but they usually get to decide when this happens.
At Cloudflare we have to take this seriously. Our software is in constant use and cannot simply be stopped abruptly. A dropped HTTP request can cause an entire webpage to load incorrectly, and a broken connection can kick you out of a video call. Taking away reliability creates a vacuum filled only by user frustration.
The limitations of the typical upgrade process
There is no one right way to upgrade software reliably. Some programming languages and environments make it easier than others, but in a Turing-complete language few things are impossible.
netlab Release 1.5.1: VLAN and VRF Links
netlab release 1.5.1 makes it easier to create topologies with lots of VRF- or VLAN access links, or topologies with numerous similar links. It also includes support for D2 diagram scripting language in case you prefer its diagrams over those generated by Graphviz.
Even if you don’t find those features interesting (more about them later), you might want to upgrade to fix a nasty container-related behavior I discovered in recently-upgraded Ubuntu servers.
netlab Release 1.5.1: VLAN and VRF Links
netlab release 1.5.1 makes it easier to create topologies with lots of VRF- or VLAN access links, or topologies with numerous similar links. It also includes support for D2 diagram scripting language in case you prefer its diagrams over those generated by Graphviz.
Even if you don’t find those features interesting (more about them later), you might want to upgrade to fix a nasty container-related behavior I discovered in recently-upgraded Ubuntu servers.