How Twitter Handles 3,000 Images Per Second

Today Twitter is creating and persisting 3,000 (200 GB) images per second. Even better, in 2015 Twitter was able to save $6 million due to improved media storage policies.

It was not always so. Twitter in 2012 was primarily text based. A Hogwarts without all the cool moving pictures hanging on the wall. It’s now 2016 and Twitter has moved into to a media rich future. Twitter has made the transition through the development of a new Media Platform capable of supporting photos with previews, multi-photos, gifs, vines, and inline video.

Henna Kermani, a Software Development Engineer at Twitter, tells the story of the Media Platform in an interesting talk she gave at Mobile @Scale London: 3,000 images per second. The talk focuses primarily on the image pipeline, but she says most of the details also apply to the other forms of media as well.

Some of the most interesting lessons from the talk:

  • Doing the simplest thing that can possibly work can really screw you. The simple method of uploading a tweet with an image as an all or nothing operation was a form of lock-in. It didn’t scale well, especially on poor networks, which made it Continue reading

Worth Reading: Court rules cell phone location isn’t private information

This week, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held, in United States v. Carpenter, that we lack any privacy interest in the location information generated by our cell phones. The opinion shows a complete disregard for the sensitive and revealing nature of cell site location information (CSLI) and a misguided response to the differences between the analog technologies addressed in old cases and the data-rich technologies of today.

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Illumio’s cyber assessment program helps find new attack surfaces ASAP

Earlier this week, I wrote a post discussing how visibility can be used to reverse the security asymmetry challenge. On Tuesday, hot security startup Illumio proved my point by announcing a cyber assessment program that uses granular visibility to identify new attack surfaces.Illumio’s Attack Surface Assessment Program (ASAP) was led by Nathaniel Gleicher, former Director of Cybersecurity Policy for the National Security Council at the White House and now the Head of Cybersecurity Strategy for Illumio. The White House obviously has the strictest of security policies, giving Gleicher the necessary level of paranoia to put together a program like this. Now, any company can benefit from his experience.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Illumio’s cyber assessment program helps find new attack surfaces ASAP

Earlier this week, I wrote a post discussing how visibility can be used to reverse the security asymmetry challenge. On Tuesday, hot security startup Illumio proved my point by announcing a cyber assessment program that uses granular visibility to identify new attack surfaces.Illumio’s Attack Surface Assessment Program (ASAP) was led by Nathaniel Gleicher, former Director of Cybersecurity Policy for the National Security Council at the White House and now the Head of Cybersecurity Strategy for Illumio. The White House obviously has the strictest of security policies, giving Gleicher the necessary level of paranoia to put together a program like this. Now, any company can benefit from his experience.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Illumio’s cyber assessment program helps find new attack surfaces ASAP

Earlier this week, I wrote a post discussing how visibility can be used to reverse the security asymmetry challenge. On Tuesday, hot security startup Illumio proved my point by announcing a cyber assessment program that uses granular visibility to identify new attack surfaces.Illumio’s Attack Surface Assessment Program (ASAP) was led by Nathaniel Gleicher, former Director of Cybersecurity Policy for the National Security Council at the White House and now the Head of Cybersecurity Strategy for Illumio. The White House obviously has the strictest of security policies, giving Gleicher the necessary level of paranoia to put together a program like this. Now, any company can benefit from his experience.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Difference between in-store, online prices probably not what you think

Sure, online shopping is generally more convenient than going to the store for your purchases, but prices are pretty much the same three quarters of the time, according to a new MIT study.MIT Sloan Professor Alberto Cavallo cleverly went the crowdsourcing route to gather some of his data by having 370 recruits use a scanning app to check barcodes for prices on a random set of 10 to 50 products in physical stores in 10 countries. That information, along with online price data at multi-channel retailers (so no Amazon or eBay), was fed into the MIT Billion Prices Project database for analysis. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Automating Change With Help From Fibonacci

FibonacciShell

A few recent conversations that I’ve seen and had with professionals about automation have been very enlightening. It all started with a post on StackExchange about an unsuspecting user that tried to automate a cleanup process with Ansible and accidentally erased the entire server farm at a service provider. The post was later determined to be a viral marketing hoax but was quite believable to the community because of the power of automation to make bad ideas spread very quickly.

Better The Devil You Know

Everyone in networking has been in a place where they’ve typed in something they shouldn’t have. Whether you removed the management network you were using to access the switch or created an access list that denied packets that locked you out of something. Or perhaps you typed an errant debug command that forced you to drive an hour to reboot a switch that was no longer responding. All of these things seem to happen to people as part of the learning process.

But how many times have we typed something in to create a change and found that it broke more than we expected? Like changing a native VLAN on a trunk and bringing down Continue reading

A Baker’s Dozen, 2015 Regional View

Our Baker’s Dozen blog focuses on the top global Internet providers as measured by quantity of transited IP space.  If your market is not truly global, it pays to consider your provider options by region, country or even city.  Our Internet Intelligence product suite is designed around helping our customers understand the structure, performance and reliability of the Internet regardless of their geographic scope or potential providers.  In other words, there is a lot more to consider than just a top global list by a single metric.  To explore this topic further, we’ll look one geographic level deeper into the Internet Intelligence – Transit rankings for the top-5 providers by continent.  As we’ll see below, these can vary considerably from our top global list and even include other players with a more regional focus.  Let’s take a quick look.

 

AF-f

At the end of 2015, Cogent (AS174) was ranked  as the #4 global provider by our metric, but it closed the year as #1 in Africa, opening up a wide margin over Level 3 (AS3356), its nearest competitor on the continent.  Cogent started transiting a sizeable number of new prefixes from South Africa’s Continue reading

First Guest Speaker in Building Next-Generation Data Center Course

When I started thinking about my first online course, I decided to create something special – it should be way more than me talking about cool new technologies and designs – and the guest speakers are a crucial part of that experience.

The first guest speaker is one of the gurus of network design and complexity, wrote numerous books on the topic, and recently worked on a hardware-independent network operating system.

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Cloud review: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Joyent

The message from the cloud has always been simple: Surrender your cares, IT managers, and we’ll handle everything. Forget about skinning your knuckles installing servers, double-checking diesel backups, or fretting about 1,000 or 10,000 things that could go wrong. Give us a credit card number and your data. We’ll do the rest.There are options for the teams doing data analytics. Microsoft offers a number of big data crunching services that are integrated with the Azure cloud. Once you upload your data, the algorithms are ready to go. You push a few buttons and fancy graphs and deep insights pour out. Similarly, you can tap the power of Watson and predictive analytics tools on IBM’s Bluemix. Amazon offers a narrower set of machine learning capabilities, tailored to developers and business analysts. Google’s machine learning service was recently made available in a limited preview.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

As Intel shifts its focus to the cloud, it commands its PC products to fight—or die

Right now, inside Intel’s headquarters, a deadly serious game of “Gladiator” is pitting Intel’s client products against one another. During its quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, Intel said it now expects the PC market to decline in the “high single digits” throughout all of 2016, rather than the mid-single-digit drop it previously expected. IDC and Gartner said recently that the PC market dropped between 10 and 12 percent during the first quarter. “Our projection of the PC market...is more cautious than third-party estimates,” chief financial officer Stacy Smith told analysts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

These CISOs explain why they got fired

Today’s Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) leads an increasingly precarious life.Since the emergence of the job title in the late 1990s, the CISO job has become more complex - and demanding - by the day.Whereas once this was a technical job focused largely on fixing firewalls and patching vulnerabilities, today’s security chiefs are expected to do this and a whole lot more. They’re charged with juggling the day-to-day operations of their security team with meeting board expectations while also staying abreast of an ever-evolving threat landscape and regular regulatory changes.As a result, it could be argued that the CISO job is a poisoned chalice: the job is well-paid, respected and increasingly available to people of all backgrounds (thanks to the well-publicized InfoSec skills shortage), and yet the average job can last 18 months or less. A CISO could be dismissed for any number of things, from a breach or missed vulnerability to failing to align security operations with the board’s business goals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle releases 136 security patches for wide range of products

Oracle has released another monster quarterly security update containing 136 fixes for flaws in a wide range of products including Oracle Database Server, E-Business Suite, Fusion Middleware, Oracle Sun Products, Java and MySQL.The biggest change is Oracle's adoption of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) version 3.0, which more accurately reflects the impact of flaws than CVSS 2.0. This Oracle Critical Patch Update (CPU) has both CVSS 3.0 and CVSS 2.0 scores for vulnerabilities, providing a chance to compare how the new rating system might affect Oracle patch prioritization inside organizations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle releases 136 security patches for wide range of products

Oracle has released another monster quarterly security update containing 136 fixes for flaws in a wide range of products including Oracle Database Server, E-Business Suite, Fusion Middleware, Oracle Sun Products, Java and MySQL.The biggest change is Oracle's adoption of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) version 3.0, which more accurately reflects the impact of flaws than CVSS 2.0. This Oracle Critical Patch Update (CPU) has both CVSS 3.0 and CVSS 2.0 scores for vulnerabilities, providing a chance to compare how the new rating system might affect Oracle patch prioritization inside organizations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

8 universities at the forefront of big data

Universities at the forefront of big dataImage by ThinkstockBig data has exploded in a way that has left companies unable to find enough qualified candidates to hire, and schools can't churn out skilled data scientists fast enough. Up until now, boot camps have helped fill the data skills gap and plenty of colleges and universities have created master's programs in this burgeoning field. And, while it's true that boot camps are a great way to learn new skills fast and a master's degree is a great way to move your career in another direction, there has been a glaring lack of undergraduate programs for young people looking to get right into the industry after graduation.However, that is starting to change as more undergraduate programs start to pop up at reputable universities and colleges across the country. And it's no surprise, considering the Department of Labor cites a projected 25 percent growth in data jobs by the year 2018, which is exceptionally fast compared to other industries. These universities are priming the next generation of data scientists who will be tasked with handling the steadily increasing influx of data information that nearly every industry is experiencing. Here are Continue reading

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