Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For August 21st, 2015

Hey, it's HighScalability time:


Hunter-Seeker? Nope. This is the beauty of what a Google driverless car sees. Great TED talk.
  • $2.8 billion: projected Instagram ad revenue in 2017; 1 trillion: Azure event hub events per month; 10 million: Stack Overflow questions asked; 1 billion: max volts generated by a lightening strike; 850: apps downloaded every second from the AppStore; 2000: years data can be stored in DNA; 60: # of robots needed to replace 600 humans; 1 million: queries per second with Nginx, Ubuntu, EC2

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • Tales from the Lunar Module Guidance Computer: we landed on the moon with 152 Kbytes of onboard computer memory.
    • @ijuma: Included in JDK 8 update 60 "changes GHASH internals from using byte[] to long, improving performance about 10x
    • @ErrataRob: I love the whining over the Bitcoin XT fork. It's as if anarchists/libertarians don't understand what anarchy/libertarianism means.
    • Network World: the LHC Computing Grid has 132,992 physical CPUs, 553,611 logical CPUs, 300PB of online disk storage and 230PB of nearline (magnetic tape) storage. It's a staggering amount of processing capacity and data storage that relies on having no single point of failure.
    • @petereisentraut: Chef is Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Quantum computing breakthrough renews concerns of cybersecurity apocalypse

The term "cryptopocalypse" was probably first coined at the Black Hat USA information security convention in 2013.A talk presented by four security and technology experts at the show explored cryptographic weaknesses and attempted to answer the hypothetical question: "What happens the day after RSA is broken?"RSA is a widely used public-key cryptosystem used in digital signatures.The answer, they determined then, was: "almost total failure of trust in the Internet," for one thing. The reason? Almost everything we do on the Internet is in some way protected by cryptography.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Civilization

One of the most dangerous errors instilled into us by nineteenth-century progressive optimism is the idea that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost.
C.S. Lewis, Rehabilitations

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Plenty of fish, and exploits too, on dating website

Recent visitors to Plenty of Fish (pof.com), an online dating website with over 3 million daily active users, had their browsers redirected to exploits that installed malware. The attack was launched through a malicious advertisement that was distributed through a third-party ad network, researchers from security firm Malwarebytes said in a blog post Thursday. The malicious ad pointed to the Nuclear exploit kit, a Web-based attack tool that exploits known vulnerabilities in browsers and popular browser plug-ins like Flash Player, Java, Adobe Reader and Silverlight.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why corporate security pros should care about the Ashley Madison breach

Corporate security executives should have a professional interest in the Ashley Madison breach because publicly posted data about its customers represents a fertile field for spear phishers trying to attack business networks. Anyone whose name and contact information appears in the 9.7GB stolen names contact information will likely be susceptible to opening emails purportedly from Ashley Madison, divorce lawyers and private investigators, says Tom Kellerman, chief cybersecurity officer for Trend Micro. + ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD Hackers release full data dump from Ashley Madison, extramarital dating site +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mother Nature teaches Google a lesson

Four successive lightning strikes on a local utility grid in Europe caused a data loss at Google's Belgium data center. For Google, a company with a self-described "appetite for accuracy" in its data center operations, admitting an unrecoverable data loss as small as 0.000001% -- as it did -- likely came with a little bit of pain.The lightning strikes occurred Aug. 13 and the resulting storage system problems weren't fully resolved for five days. Google's post mortem found room for improvement in both hardware upgrades and in the engineering response to the problem.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

China group attacks India with Word exploit, then uses Microsoft’s WMI

A hacking group suspected of operating from China has had success stealing information from mostly Indian targets, often pertaining to border disputes and trade issues, according to FireEye. The gang specializes in sending targeted phishing emails to victims in the hope of gaining wider access to their networks, a practice known as spear phishing, said Bryce Boland, CTO for Asia-Pacific at the security firm. FireEye hasn’t give a name to the group, but has watched it since 2011, Boland said. The company has gathered data on the group based on attacks attempted against its customers. Analysis of Internet infrastructure used by the group, including command-and-control servers, have given insight into the scope of its operations, Boland said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Latest Ashley Madison data dump reveals emails, source code for websites

The woes of AshleyMadison.com’s owners continued Thursday, with a second large release of internal data that security experts suspect is authentic. An 18.5 GB file was released on file-sharing networks by a group called the Impact Team. The same group claimed responsibility for the initial breach last month of the website, which caters to those seeking extramarital affairs. Because of the large file size, IDG News Service wasn’t able to take a look at the data. But David Kennedy, founder and CEO of the Ohio-based security company TrustedSec, said it appears to be legitimate. His company had taken a brief look at the data. It contains what purports to be email from Avid Life Media’s CEO, Noel Biderman, as well as other employees.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker for NetOps

I have been spending this week in Silicon Valley at Network Field Day 10. One of the announcements struck a chord with me, as this year has marked some significant career changes for me: specifically an uptake in involvement with containers and software development. My good friend Brent Salisbury once wrote about the idea of using Golang for Network Operations tooling. While I’ve continued (and will continue) to build my Python skillset, I’ve also been getting more and more experience with Golang and with some of the great software projects created by it, such as Docker, and Kubernetes.

Docker for NetOps

I have been spending this week in Silicon Valley at Network Field Day 10. One of the announcements struck a chord with me, as this year has marked some significant career changes for me: specifically an uptake in involvement with containers and software development. My good friend Brent Salisbury once wrote about the idea of using Golang for Network Operations tooling. While I’ve continued (and will continue) to build my Python skillset, I’ve also been getting more and more experience with Golang and with some of the great software projects created by it, such as Docker, and Kubernetes.

Docker for NetOps

I have been spending this week in Silicon Valley at Network Field Day 10. One of the announcements struck a chord with me, as this year has marked some significant career changes for me: specifically an uptake in involvement with containers and software development.

My good friend Brent Salisbury once wrote about the idea of using Golang for Network Operations tooling. While I’ve continued (and will continue) to build my Python skillset, I’ve also been getting more and more experience with Golang and with some of the great software projects created by it, such as Docker, and Kubernetes.

Brent has also more recently written about using Docker to build network tools, and I’d like to use this post to say I agree with this sentiment. Network Operations can really do more with container technology to accelerate what has traditionally been a pretty stagnant silo.

Fundamentally, the concept of application of containers is not that new, and admittedly, network engineers have not been required to think of them. I mean network operations is only now getting accustomed to delivering network services in form factors like virtual machines. It’s important to remember that solutions like Docker have provided application developers with Continue reading

Big Switch Improves Day to Day Network Operations

Big Switch recently launched major updates to their products Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) and Big Monitoring Fabric (BMF), formerly Big Tap. This post isn’t going to cover the updates or the products from an architectural standpoint, but rather two specific features that are meant to help general day to day network operations.

Command & API History

The first feature is simple – it shows command history, but also API history across the entire Big Cloud Fabric (BCF). The feature is accessed through the central UI of the BCF controller and you can simply look at the last N commands or APIs that were executed on the system. The great thing is that you don’t need a separate AAA system to capture the commands being made and should you want to see the API calls being generated from the CLI commands (because remember the CLI is just an API client), you can also view them. If the CLI isn’t being used, you can also still see each API call that has been recently made on the fabric. It’s my understanding that there is a certain amount of storage dedicated to this function so when the space does fill up, the history Continue reading

Docker for NetOps

I have been spending this week in Silicon Valley at Network Field Day 10. One of the announcements struck a chord with me, as this year has marked some significant career changes for me: specifically an uptake in involvement with containers and software development.

My good friend Brent Salisbury once wrote about the idea of using Golang for Network Operations tooling. While I’ve continued (and will continue) to build my Python skillset, I’ve also been getting more and more experience with Golang and with some of the great software projects created by it, such as Docker, and Kubernetes.

Fundamentally, the concept of application of containers is not that new, and admittedly, network engineers have not been required to think of them. I mean network operations is only now getting accustomed to delivering network services in form factors like virtual machines. It’s important to remember that solutions like Docker have provided application developers with an consistent format for packaging what they produce. In network operations, we can take advantage of this same tooling - instead of asking our network vendors to make sure Python is installed on our switches, we need them only to support Docker.

“Docker is in the Network! Continue reading