2015 Recap and 2016 Goals

Wow, it’s that time of year again! 2015 went by really quickly, and a lot has changed for me. It’s also worth mentioning that this is the first year-end recap to be published on my new github pages site!

If you haven’t seen this kind of thing before, I make this post yearly to publicly track my own professional development goals. I find this helps me stay accountable to these goals, and it also allows others to give me a kick in the butt if I’m falling behind.

2015 Goal Recap

First, let me recap some of the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the year, and see how well I did.

Public Presence (aka Community Contributions)

Last year I added this goal because I was doing a lot more than just blogging, and wanted to capture it all. This was a good move, since - as expected - I did quite a bit of community-oriented work, and a large portion of it didn’t take place on the blog. So, while I didn’t hit that (admittedly fairly arbitrary) 50 post number, I can say I truly feel good about what little writing I did manage to Continue reading

Looking Back: 2015 Project Report Card

In early 2015, I posted a look ahead at my planned 2015 projects, where I took a quick look at some of the self-development projects I set out for myself over the course of 2015. In this post, I’m going to review my progress on those 2015 projects.

The 2015 projects were as follows:

  1. Complete a new book
  2. Make more open source contributions
  3. Expand to a new configuration management solution
  4. Complete a “wildcard project”

So, how well did I do? Let’s take a look.

  1. Complete a new book: Technically, I haven’t (fully) completed a new book, but given that my new book project with Jason Edelman and Matt Oswalt on network automation is available now as an Early Access edition, I suppose this should count for something. Strangely enough, this wasn’t the book project I had in mind at the start of 2015, but sometimes things like this take unexpected turns. Grade: C

  2. Make more open source contributions: I expected this one to be easy, but it turns out that this is the area where my performance is the worst. I submitted a pull request to Terraform (for a docs update), but I did not make the contributions Continue reading

Cairo, Egypt: CloudFlare’s 74th Data Center

Cairo

It’s been a big year of expansion for CloudFlare’s global network as we added new data centers across six continents, and we’re certainly not done. Today we announce the launch of our newest data center in Cairo, Egypt and a partnership with Telecom Egypt. This marks our third data center in Africa, after Johannesburg and Mombasa, and our 74th data center globally.

Faster performance across Egypt

For many years, CloudFlare has been trusted by Egyptian websites to be protected from attacks.

Over half of the 20 most popular websites in Egypt already use CloudFlare to be safe, and are now seeing a 2x improvement in performance.

Reduced latency to Egypt's largest network

Reduced latency to Egypt's largest network, Telecom Egypt

Local Deployments

Just like in Egypt, we partner with ISPs globally by deploying caches directly into their facilities. These points of presence help major networks improve the performance of millions of websites, reduce their costs and capacity used in accessing our customers' content, and provide a direct local interconnect with critical Internet infrastructure. If you are a carrier or Internet service provider in Egypt, elsewhere in Africa or anywhere around the world that would like to request a CloudFlare cache deployment, please reach out to Continue reading

In Memoriam: Ian Murdock

Dear friends and members of the open source community, It is with great sadness that we inform you that Ian Murdock passed away on Monday night. This is a tragic loss for his family, for the Docker community, and the … Continued

How to choose an in-memory NoSQL solution: Performance measuring

The main purpose of this work is to show results of benchmarking some of the leading in-memory NoSQL databases with a tool named YCSB.

We selected three popular in-memory database management systems: Redis (standalone and in-cloud named Azure Redis Cache), Tarantool and CouchBase and one cache system Memcached. Memcached is not a database management system and does not have persistence. But we decided to take it, because it is also widely used as a fast storage system. Our “firing field” was a group of four virtual machines in Microsoft Azure Cloud. Virtual machines are located close to each other, meaning they are in one datacenter. This is necessary to reduce the impact of network overhead in latency measurements. Images of these VMs can be downloaded by links: one, two, three and four (login: nosql, password: qwerty). A pair of VMs named nosql-1 and nosql-2 is useful for benchmarking Tarantool and CouchBase and another pair of VMs named nosql-3 and nosql-4 is good for Redis, Azure Redis Cache and Memcached. Databases and tests are installed and configured on these images.

Our virtual machines were the basic A3 instances with 4 cores, 7 GB RAM and 120 GB disk Continue reading

BGP in Large Scale Data Centers with Clos Networks

Getting to the point where big is never big enough, one may think “What’s cooking?” Well, BGP in the DC is a subject that’s been under my radar for some time, so the purpose of this article is to get things a bit more straight-forward regarding the WHYs and HOWs.

A look in the past

First of all, we should ask ourselves who was Clos. Charles Clos started his work at Bell Labs, mainly focusing on finding a way to switch telephone calls in a scalable and cost-effective way. In 1953, he published the paper “A Study of Non-Blocking Switching Networks”, where he described how to use equipment having multiple stages of interconnections to switch calls.

The crossbar switches (you may think of them as common use switches with a defined number of ports) connected in a three-stage network (ingress, middle, egress) form the so called Clos network.

This had a pretty big use back in the 1950’s but once the level of circuit integration got to the point where interconnections would no longer be a problem, it was no longer of interest, at least for some time.  Until huge scale data centers came to be needed (and Continue reading

Resolve is easy. Planning & execution are hard.

When we fail, we pity ourselves, have a consolation cookie or three, give up, and go back to a moribund contentment with the status quo. Maybe next year, we'll be more serious, we think. More determined. Yes, we'll try it all again at some future point when we can muster up the will to give it another go. This is all wrong. For me, difficulty in realizing goals has never been due to a lack of desire or will.

What’s Wrong With the Internet?

How many times have you received that call or even made the statement that “The Internet is Down?” Or perhaps the “Internet is Slow?” Obviously these statements are very rarely true. As a whole, the Internet is functional and it is FAST. However these statements seem true from the perspective of the individual making them. My frustration is that we never have visibility into the data necessary to assess the health of the Internet from a relevant, holistic perspective over time. As a result, consumers and providers have a limited view of problems that randomly present in this manner.

The Problem

When I think about the impact Internet hiccups have on me, I realize that I could do things much differently if it delivered consistent reliability. Even if it wasn’t as reliable as infrastructures like the PSTN, having some semblance of trust in knowing when and how my connections might fail or degrade would help. The resulting improvements would allow me to use more robust tools like video and voice over the Internet and put my cell phone away. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spent hours chasing ghosts. These transient issues tend to get resolved when they worsens and the root cause is more easily identifiable. Increasing the trust we have in our services would materially change the way in which we use them. Continue reading

Routing design

Understanding everything about routing design is no brainer, especially if you have the chart below on your wall. The table below highlights the pros and cons of each routing protocol. Of course, you need to consider the design attributes shown in Figure A before embarking on routing design. Should you like the comparison of the […]

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PQ Show 69: Sonus VellOS And QoE For Unified Communications (Sponsored)

Sonus joins the Packet Pushers to talk about VellOS, a network operating system for ensuring quality of experience for unified communications. With VellOS you can automate flows through a network and control bandwidth, packet marketing, MPLS values, and more to guarantee high-quality voice and video calls.

The post PQ Show 69: Sonus VellOS And QoE For Unified Communications (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

PQ Show 69: Sonus VellOS And QoE For Unified Communications (Sponsored)

Sonus joins the Packet Pushers to talk about VellOS, a network operating system for ensuring quality of experience for unified communications. With VellOS you can automate flows through a network and control bandwidth, packet marketing, MPLS values, and more to guarantee high-quality voice and video calls.

The post PQ Show 69: Sonus VellOS And QoE For Unified Communications (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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