The Importance of Quality in Infrastructure Software

Infrastructure doesn’t matter.

That’s what we keep hearing, right? The ongoing effort to commoditize infrastructure has generated a lot of buzzwords and clickbait taglines, and this is one of the biggest.

IT infrastructure has had a long history of hero culture, and it’s easy to make the assumption - given how low many of these technologies sit in the stack - that we are the important snowflakes and that we run the whole show. The reality is that we don’t, and every time an application engineering team has to hold a series of meetings on how to properly work on the existing infrastructure, that is time spent not creating new features.

The reality is that the underlying infrastructure never stopped being important. The call to simplify these layers was never borne out of a desire to sweep the carpet out from beneath ones own feet. It was a call for help; application teams barely have time to meet the feature requirements laid out by the business, and having to deal with downtime or overbearing change management procedures makes a bad situation worse. The business is not measuring software project success by the number of challenges they overcame on our way Continue reading

The Importance of Quality in Infrastructure Software

Infrastructure doesn’t matter.

That’s what we keep hearing, right? The ongoing effort to commoditize infrastructure has generated a lot of buzzwords and clickbait taglines, and this is one of the biggest.

IT infrastructure has had a long history of hero culture, and it’s easy to make the assumption - given how low many of these technologies sit in the stack - that we are the important snowflakes and that we run the whole show. The reality is that we don’t, and every time an application engineering team has to hold a series of meetings on how to properly work on the existing infrastructure, that is time spent not creating new features.

The reality is that the underlying infrastructure never stopped being important. The call to simplify these layers was never borne out of a desire to sweep the carpet out from beneath ones own feet. It was a call for help; application teams barely have time to meet the feature requirements laid out by the business, and having to deal with downtime or overbearing change management procedures makes a bad situation worse. The business is not measuring software project success by the number of challenges they overcame on our way Continue reading

The Importance of Quality in Infrastructure Software

Infrastructure doesn’t matter. That’s what we keep hearing, right? The ongoing effort to commoditize infrastructure has generated a lot of buzzwords and clickbait taglines, and this is one of the biggest. IT infrastructure has had a long history of hero culture, and it’s easy to make the assumption - given how low many of these technologies sit in the stack - that we are the important snowflakes and that we run the whole show.

The Importance of Quality in Infrastructure Software

Infrastructure doesn’t matter. That’s what we keep hearing, right? The ongoing effort to commoditize infrastructure has generated a lot of buzzwords and clickbait taglines, and this is one of the biggest. IT infrastructure has had a long history of hero culture, and it’s easy to make the assumption - given how low many of these technologies sit in the stack - that we are the important snowflakes and that we run the whole show.

Railgun v5 has landed: better, faster, lighter

Three years ago we launched Railgun, CloudFlare's origin network optimizer. Railgun allows us to cache the uncacheable to accelerate the connection between CloudFlare and our customers' origin servers. That brings the benefit of a CDN to even dynamic content with no need for 'fast purging' or other tricks. With Railgun even dynamic, ever-changing pages benefit from caching.

CC BY 2.0 image by Nathan E Photography

Over those three years Railgun has been deployed widely by our customers to accelerate the delivery of their web sites and lower their bandwidth costs.

Today we're announcing the availability of Railgun v5 with a number of significant improvements:

We've substantially reduced memory utilization and CPU requirements

Railgun performs delta compression on every request/response requiring CPU (to perform the compression) and memory (to keep a cache of pages to delta against). Version 5 has undergone extensive optimization based on the performance of Railgun on large web sites and at hosting providers. Version 5 requires much less memory and lower CPU.

A new, lighter weight, faster wire protocol

The original Railgun wire protocol that transfer requests and compressed responses between the customer server and CloudFlare's infrastructure has been completely replaced with a new, lighter-weight Continue reading

Networking Field day 10 – Nuage Networks

I just got done watching all the Nuage Networks videos from Networking Field Day 10 (NFD10) and I’m quite impressed with the presentation they gave.  If you haven’t watched them yet, I would recommend you do…

Nuage Networks Intro

Nuage Networks Evolution of Wide Area Networking

Nuage Networks Onboarding the Branch Demo

Nuage Networks Application Flexibility Demo

Nuage Networks Boundary-less Wide Are Networking

Here are some things I thought were worth highlighting…

A consistent Model
What I find interesting about Nuage is their approach.  Most startup networking companies these days limit their focus to one area of the network.  The data center is certainly a popular area but others are focusing on the WAN as well.  Nuage is tackling both. 

I heard a couple of times in the presentation statements like “users are stuck in the past” or “the network model has to be consistent”.  The problem with any overlay based network solution is that ,at some point, you need to connect it back to the ‘normal’ network.  Whether that entails bridging a physical appliance into the overlay, or actually peering the physical into the overlay, the story usually starts to get messy. Continue reading

Tired of memorizing passwords? A Turing Award winner came up with this algorithmic trick

Passwords are a bane of life on the Internet, but one Turing Award winner has an algorithmic approach that he thinks can make them not only easier to manage but also more secure.The average user has some 20 passwords today, and in general the easier they are to remember, the less secure they are. When passwords are used across multiple websites, they become even weaker.Manuel Blum, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who won the Turing Award in 1995, has been working on what he calls "human computable" passwords that are not only relatively secure but also don't require us to memorize a different one for each site. Instead, we learn ahead of time an algorithm and a personal, private key, and we use them with the website's name to create and re-create our own unique passwords on the fly for any website at any time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Russia, China said to use hacked databases to find US spies

Foreign spy agencies, including those from Russia and China, are cross-checking hacked databases to identify U.S. intelligence operatives, according to a news report.One secret network of U.S. engineers and scientists providing technical assistance to the country's overseas undercover agencies has been compromised, according to a story Monday in the Los Angeles Times.Foreign intelligence agencies are cross-referencing several compromised databases, whose information includes security clearance applications and airline records, to identify U.S. intelligence agents, the report said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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This is a liveblog for the Day 1 general session at VMworld 2015 in San Francisco. For many people, VMworld started yesterday with the Welcome Receptio in the Solutions Exchange, but today marks the official kick-off to the event. I’ll have to end this liveblog shortly before the general session ends in order to make it to some customer meetings.

The keynote kicks off with a short video about the VMware Cloud Academy, where both “legacy” and “cloud-native” apps can enjoy the Unified Hybrid Cloud. Following that video, Carl Eschenbach takes the stage (along with some “apps”). Eschenbach sets the stage for the session by talking about the momentum and volume of success that VMware has enjoyed (and continues to enjoy). He also calls out VMware’s philanthropic efforts, via the VMware Foundation and the #vGiveBack program.

Eschenbach nexts dives a bit deeper on the theme of the show, “Ready for Any.” This means VMware technologies and products supporting any application, any cloud, any infrastructure, any time, any place…you get the idea. This theme encompasses SDDC (software-defined data center) initiatives, mobility initiatives, and EUC (end-user computing) initiatives. Eschenbach talks in a a bit more detail about how Unified Hybrid Cloud Continue reading

Attivo brings deception technology to Amazon Web Services

Attivo Networks, a startup launched last year, has upgraded its deception technology so businesses can deploy it within the portion of their corporate cloud that is hosted by Amazon Web Services.That means customers can lure attackers to what looks like legitimate physical and virtual machines among their production AWS resources. It lets attackers carry out their exploits harmlessly to see what damage they are trying to do. This information can be used to find instances of the attack against real physical and virtual machines that are in use.+More on Network World: FBI: Major business e-mail scam blasts 270% increase since 2015+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Attivo brings deception technology to Amazon Web Services

Attivo Networks, a startup launched last year, has upgraded its deception technology so businesses can deploy it within the portion of their corporate cloud that is hosted by Amazon Web Services.That means customers can lure attackers to what looks like legitimate physical and virtual machines among their production AWS resources. It lets attackers carry out their exploits harmlessly to see what damage they are trying to do. This information can be used to find instances of the attack against real physical and virtual machines that are in use.+More on Network World: FBI: Major business e-mail scam blasts 270% increase since 2015+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cross vCenter Networking & Security with VMware NSX

NSX 6.2 was released on August 20, 2015. One of the key features in NSX 6.2 is Cross vCenter Networking and Security. This new capability scales NSX vSphere across vCenter boundaries. Now, one can span logical networking and security constructs across vCenter boundaries irrespective of whether the vCenters are in adjacent racks or across datacenters (up to 150ms apart). This enables us to solve a variety of use cases including:

  • Capacity pooling across vCenters
  • Simplifying data center migrations
  • Cross vCenter and long distance vMotion
  • Disaster recovery

With Cross vCenter Networking & Security one can extend logical switches (VXLAN networks) across vCenter boundaries enabling a layer 2 segment to span across VCs even when the underlying network is a pure IP / L3 network. However, the big innovation here is that with NSX we can also extend distributed routing and distributed firewalling seamlessly across VCs to provide a comprehensive solution as seen in the figure below.

Cross vCenter-Networking-and-Security

Of course, there are a more details behind how this feature works and how we solve some really cool challenges in a simple elegant manner with network virtualization which we will cover  at VMworld 2015 in the session NET5989. In the meanwhile if Continue reading

U.S. readies sanctions against China for cyber-spying

The U.S. government is working on a sanctions package against Chinese firms and individuals for cyber-espionage activities against U.S. companies, the Washington Post reported. This move comes after months of cyber-attacks on companies and government agencies which have been linked to China.The sanctions will impose costs for economic cyber-spying and not government-to-government intelligence activities. As a result, the incidents the package will cover do not include the Office of Personnel Management breach from earlier this year, because that attack was deemed to be part of traditional intelligence.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Behind the scenes: Security operations at the Little League World Series

Each year in late August, the Little League World Series (LLWS) in South Williamsport, Pa., kicks-off. However, before the games, there’s a ramp –up on security at the Little League Baseball World Series Complex, which requires months of preparation and planning. Part of this ramp-up requires implementing temporary, yet supremely effective, security measures on top of what’s already in place, says Jim Ferguson, Director of Security for the LLWS. The LLWS has been fortunate to have several electronic security companies, including AXIS Communications, Extreme Networking, and Lenel, volunteer their time and equipment for the event for the past 17 years, Ferguson says. These companies donate cameras, access control, and wireless networking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Will self-driving cars become terrorists’ best friends?

Uber snapped up car hackers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek. Miller, who had worked on Twitter's security team, and Valasek, who had been working as Director of Vehicle Security Research at IOActive, will now join "dozens of autonomous vehicle experts hired from Carnegie Mellon University" working at Uber's Advanced Technologies Center.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Will self-driving cars become terrorists’ best friends?

Uber snapped up car hackers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek. Miller, who had worked on Twitter’s security team, and Valasek, who had been working as Director of Vehicle Security Research at IOActive, will now join “dozens of autonomous vehicle experts hired from Carnegie Mellon University” working at Uber’s Advanced Technologies Center.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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