Mellanox Joins the Open Compute Party
Nothing against Broadcom, but it's nice that the OCP has other options.
OpenStack Summit – Tokyo – 2015 – Wednesday 28th – Show Notes
It’s Tuesday, it’s 9am and most people have hangovers from the numerous evening events going on in and around Takanawa.
The opening keynote seemed to revolve around Neutron and the great work Kyle (@mestery) has been doing as the project technical lead (PTL) of Neutron. Seriously, Neutron has the highest activity rate of all projects. Some argue that Neutron is too complicated and previous to attending the summit, rumours were rife around increasing support for simplifying Neutron to replacing it with Open Daylight. Needless to say, there are parties out there that want to see Neutron dead and claim it’s just too complicated to use.
So, to some keynote ‘framing’ figures: In 2014, 68% if OpenStack users (at least of those reporting) were making use of Neutron. Just one year later and it’s jumped to 89%! Maybe this can be attributed to OpenvSwitch and OVN, but either way, usage is increasing. This could also be attributed to new users not wanting to veer away from the popular projects.
With regards to the ever standing argument of “OpenStack isn’t ready for wide adoption”, which is self perpetuating, the guest speakers who were part of the keynotes, seemed to Continue reading
Paper: Coordination Avoidance in Distributed Databases By Peter Bailis
Peter Bailis has released the work of a lifetime, his dissertion is now available online: Coordination Avoidance in Distributed Databases.
The topic Peter is addressing is summed up nicely by his thesis statement:
Many semantic requirements of database-backed applications can be efficiently enforced without coordination, thus improving scalability, latency, and availability.
I'd like to say I've read the entire dissertation and can offer cogent insightful analysis, but that would be a lie. Though I have watched several of Peter's videos (see Related Articles). He's doing important and interesting work, that as much University research has done, may change the future of what everyone is doing.
From the introduction:
The rise of Internet-scale geo-replicated services has led to upheaval in the design of modern data management systems. Given the availability, latency, and throughput penalties associated with classic mechanisms such as serializable transactions, a broad class of systems (e.g., “NoSQL”) has sought weaker alternatives that reduce the use of expensive coordination during system operation, often at the cost of application integrity. When can we safely forego the cost of this expensive coordination, and when must we pay the price?
In this thesis, we investigate the potential for coordination avoidance—the Continue reading
How Shopify Scales to Handle Flash Sales from Kanye West and the Superbowl
This is a guest repost by Christophe Limpalair, creator of Scale Your Code.
In this article, we take a look at methods used by Shopify to make their platform resilient. Not only is this interesting to read about, but it can also be practical and help you with your own applications.
Shopify's Scaling Challenges
Shopify, an ecommerce solution, handles about 300 million unique visitors a month, but as you'll see, these 300M people don't show up in an evenly distributed fashion.
One of their biggest challenge is what they call "flash sales". These flash sales are when tremendously popular stores sell something at a specific time.
For example, Kanye West might sell new shoes. Combined with Kim Kardashian, they have a following of 50 million people on Twitter alone.
They also have customers who advertise on the Superbowl. Because of this, they have no idea how much traffic to expect. It could be 200,000 people showing up at 3:00 for a special sale that ends within a few hours.
How does Shopify scale to these sudden increases in traffic? Even if they can't scale that well for a particular sale, how can they make sure it doesn't affect Continue reading
Ixia Secures the Connected Car
Car connectivity is on the rise, but with that connectivity comes vulnerability. Ixia looks at how to secure access points into connected cars.
Network Break 60: Cisco’s Acquisitions, Verizon’s IoT Ambitions
Network Break analyzes Cisco's latest acquisitions, Verizon's IoT ambitions, Microsoft's failed bid for Mesosphere, a security bill that endangers privacy, and a new startup from an old NSA hand.
The post Network Break 60: Cisco’s Acquisitions, Verizon’s IoT Ambitions appeared first on Packet Pushers.
SDxCentral’s Top 10 SDN and NFV Articles — October 2015
AT&T, Juniper, Charles Giancarlo, and HP are in the top 3.
Review: The Art of the Humble Inquiry
Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling
Edgar H Schein
Edgar Schein says we have a cultural issue. We like to tell people what we think, rather than asking them what they’re trying to tell us. Overall, especially in the world of information technology, I tend to agree. To counter this problem, he suggests that we perfect the art of the humble inquiry — redirecting our thinking from the immediate solution that comes to mind, or even from the question that was asked, and trying to get to the what the person we’re talking to is actually asking.
He gives numerous examples throughout the book; perhaps my favorite is of the person who asked stopped their car while he was doing yard work to ask directions to a particular street. Rather than answering, he asked where they were trying to get to. They were, in fact, off course for their original plan, but he directed them down a different path that got them there faster than if they’d turned around and found their way back to that original path. This is a perfect example of asking returning a specific question with a larger question — an authentic Continue reading
Its Hewlett Packard Enterprise Day
As an Enterprise IT person you probably know that today is the day that HP splits into two companies and discards the “deadweight” of the $50 Billion PC and Printer business to “HP Inc” while the new Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) company is expected to be leaner and more focussed on Webscale and Enterprise $50B […]
The post Its Hewlett Packard Enterprise Day appeared first on EtherealMind.
Stretched Firewalls across Layer-3 DCI? Will the Madness Ever Stop?
I got this question from one of my readers (and based on these comments he’s not the only one facing this challenge):
I was wondering if you can do a blog post on Cisco's new ASA 5585-X clustering. My company recently purchased a few of these with the intent to run their cross data center active/active firewalls but found out we cannot do this without OTV or a layer 2 DCI.
A while ago I expressed my opinion about these ideas, but it seems some people still don’t get it. However, a picture is worth a thousand words, so maybe this will work:
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