Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For November 20th, 2015

Hey, it's HighScalability time:


100 years ago people saw this as our future. We will be so laughably wrong about the future.
  • $24 billion: amount telcos make selling data about you; $500,000: cost of iOS zero day exploit; 50%: a year's growth of internet users in India; 72: number of cores in Intel's new chip; 30,000: Docker containers started on 1,000 nodes; 1962: when the first Cathode Ray Tube entered interplanetary space; 2x: cognitive improvement with better indoor air quality; 1 million: Kubernetes request per second; 

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • Zuckerberg: One of our goals for the next five to 10 years is to basically get better than human level at all of the primary human senses: vision, hearing, language, general cognition. 
    • Sawyer Hollenshead: I decided to do what any sane programmer would do: Devise an overly complex solution on AWS for a seemingly simple problem.
    • Marvin Minsky: Big companies and bad ideas don't mix very well.
    • @mathiasverraes: Events != hooks. Hooks allow you to reach into a procedure, change its state. Events communicate state change. Hooks couple, events decouple
    • @neil_conway: Lamport, trolling distributed systems engineers since 1998. Continue reading

Zürich, Switzerland: CloudFlare’s 69th data center

Grüetzi Zürich, our 5th point of presence (PoP) to be announced this week, and 69th globally! Located at the northern tip of Lake Zürich in Switzerland, the city of Zürich, often referred to as "Downtown Switzerland," is the largest city in the country. Following this expansion, traffic from Switzerland's seven million internet users to sites and apps using CloudFlare is now mere milliseconds away. Although best known to some for its chocolate and banks, Switzerland is home to many of the most significant developments prefacing the modern internet.

Vague but interesting

It was in 1989 that Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, the large particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, invented the World Wide Web (WWW). Tim laid out his vision to meet the demand for automatic information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world in a memo titled, "Information Management: a Proposal". Amusingly, his initial proposal wasn't immediately accepted. In fact, his boss at the time noted that the proposal was, "vague but exciting" on the cover page.

At least one VC may have said something similar to us once upon a time

The first website at CERN—and in the world—was dedicated to the Continue reading

Show 264: Design & Build 8: NSX Deployment

NSX has become a popular option for data center network virtualization. If you do choose to go with NSX, what should you be thinking about? Our focus for today's show is what to consider when designing an NSX implementation, why planning is so essential, and what will change operationally once NSX is in production.

The post Show 264: Design & Build 8: NSX Deployment appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Risky Business #390 — Crypto derpery abounds in wake of Paris attacks

In this week's feature interview we're checking in with FireEye's Jonathan Wrolstad. He's a threat intelligence guy at FireEye and they've just published a really interesting report about what a threat group is doing in terms of target recon. They're using marketing company tricks to recon all sorts of high value targets. It's very interesting stuff, and it's likely tied to the Russian state.

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Eight more years of leap-second problems loom as governments punt decision to 2023

Tick. Tick. Tick. Clang! That was the sound of an intergovernmental conference kicking the leap-second can down the road. Sysadmins will be dealing with the consequences for the next eight years.Just as adding an extra day in leap years helps us keep our calendars in step with the rotation of the earth around the sun, adding occasional leap seconds to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) allows us to keep this time reference in step with the earth's gradually slowing rotation. Without adjustment, there would be about a minute's difference between the two by 2100. Leap seconds are great if you're using your time reference to note exactly when the sun should be directly overhead, or when certain stars should be in view, but for keeping a bunch of servers or Internet routers in sync around the world, continuity matters more than your place in the universe.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud Builders: Building Networks for Third Era Cloud Environments

It’s no secret that network architecture is evolving to address the new needs and requirements of the Third Era of IT. This is happening for a reason. There is a trifecta of events affecting the industry: new requirements, new application architectures and new consumption models.

What all this reveals is that a new IT landscape has arrived – the Third Platform, where applications and service offerings define IT rather than the opposite.

The need of businesses to drive new application development, change, and deployment is changing the consumption models for IT so radically that for the first time the industry is prioritizing consumption of an entire service over individual infrastructure silos. It’s quickly becoming apparent that IT will increasingly be consumed as service offerings whether delivered through private or public cloud providers (SaaS, IaaS and PaaS).

The Changing Nature of the Private Cloud

Cloud enables rapid scaling; both up and down, of compute and storage capacity and facilitates agility for the introduction of new services and applications as well as resource alignment to the changing needs of the business. Public cloud has been the most prevalent adoption model to date, however we see a growing trend where organizations are Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Scientists developing solar panel that doubles as a Li-Fi receiver

Light-based data communications, or Li-Fi, which uses LEDs to create networked communications, can be integrated into a solar panel to create a self-powered Li-Fi receiver.The solar panel receives light from the LED to create power, and also receives light from the network to act as the broadband receiver, thereby powering itself, the technology's inventor says.Solar cells The currently prototyped solution allows "a solar cell to be tightly integrated into communication nodes, to then receive relatively high bandwidth data while also providing electrical power for the nodes' operation," the University of Edinburgh's Edinburgh Research and Innovation subsidiary says on its website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CloudFlare launches India data centers in Mumbai, Chennai and New Delhi

India is home to 400 million Internet users, second only to China, and will add more new users this year than any other country in the world. CloudFlare protects and accelerates 4 million websites, mobile apps and APIs, and is trusted by over 10,000 new customers each day. Combine these forces, and we are positioned to connect hundreds of millions of Indian users with the millions of internet applications they use each day.

Today, we accelerate this momentum with the announcement of three new points of presence (PoPs) in Mumbai, Chennai and New Delhi. These new sites represent the 66th, 67th and 68th data centers respectively across our global network.

We’ve come a long way

The beginnings of the “internet” in India as we know it started in 1986 when the country launched ERNET (the Education and Research Network). Six years later, a 64 Kbps digital leased line was commissioned from the National Centre for Software Technology in Mumbai to UUNet in Virginia to connect India with the rest of the internet. By comparison, a single port on our router in each of Mumbai, Chennai and New Delhi has nearly 160,000 times the capacity today.

The pace of progress has Continue reading

How tech led to the death of France’s public enemy number 1

When one of the terrorists involved in the Paris shootings dropped his smartphone in a trashcan outside the Bataclan concert venue on Friday night, he wasn't worried about encrypting his text messages or stored documents. Why would he be? With a bomb strapped to his waist, he knew he was about to die.But that telephone, and wiretaps on another, led police to announce Thursday that the suspected organizer of the shootings and a string of other attacks, Abdel Hamid Abaaoud, was dead.The phone discarded by one of the terrorists contained an SMS sent to an unidentified recipient at 9.42 p.m. local time, moments before the shooting there began: "On est parti on commence" ("We're going in"), public prosecutor François Molins told a news conference Wednesday evening.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Message service blocks 78 ISIS-related encrypted channels

Encrypted messaging app maker Telegram blocked 78 ISIS-related propaganda channels in reaction to abuse reports sent by users, Telegram tweeted late Wednesday.The Berlin-based company said in a statement that it took the action because "we were disturbed to learn that Telegram's public channels were being used by ISIS to spread propaganda. We are carefully reviewing all reports sent to use at [email protected] and are taking appropriate action to block such channels."Telegram also said it will block terrorist bots and channels including those that are ISIS-related, but will not block anybody who peacefully expresses alternative opinions. Telegram announced on its second anniversary in August that it was delivering 10 billion messages daily.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here