Arista Partnering with Google Cloud to Deliver Hybrid Cloud and Multi-Cloud Connectivity

Arista has a long history of joint development with hyper-scale cloud providers delivering innovative solutions for a broad range of customers.  Our integration with Google Cloud and Network Connectivity Center is a testament to that ongoing innovation and abstracting complex networking challenges making them simple and agile for IT clients worldwide.

AMD Datacenter Sales Break Through $1 Billion In Q3

Here is a moment that Lisa Su, the chief executive officer who has lead the team that brought AMD back into the datacenter with the vigor the market needs, has been waiting six years for. …

AMD Datacenter Sales Break Through $1 Billion In Q3 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Cloudflare recognized as a ‘Leader’ in The Forrester New Wave for Edge Development Platforms

Forrester’s New Wave for Edge Development Platforms has just been announced. We’re thrilled that they have named Cloudflare a leader (you can download a complimentary copy of the report here).

Since the very beginning, Cloudflare has sought to help developers building on the web, and since the introduction of Workers in 2017, Cloudflare has enabled developers to deploy their applications to the edge itself.

According to the report by Forrester Vice President, Principal Analyst, Jeffrey Hammond, Cloudflare “offers strong compute, data services and web development capabilities. Alongside Workers, Workers KV adds edge data storage. Pages, Stream and Images provide higher level platform services for modern web workloads. Cloudflare has an intuitive developer experience, fast, global deployment of updated code, and minimal cold start times.”

Reimagining development for the modern web

Building on the web has come a long way. The idea that one might have to buy a physical machine in order to build a website seems incomprehensible now. The cloud has played a major role in making it easier for developers to get started. However, since the advent of the cloud, things have stalled — and innovation has become more incremental. That means that while developers Continue reading

Custom Headers for Cloudflare Pages

Until today, Cloudflare Workers has been a great solution to setting headers, but we wanted to create an even smoother developer experience. Today, we're excited to announce that Pages now natively supports custom headers on your projects! Simply create a _headers file in the build directory of your project and within it, define the rules you want to apply.

/developer-docs/*
  X-Hiring: Looking for a job? We're hiring engineers
(https://www.cloudflare.com/careers/jobs)

What can you set with custom headers?

Being able to set custom headers is useful for a variety of reasons — let’s explore some of your most popular use cases.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

When you create a Pages project, a pages.dev deployment is created for your project which enables you to get started immediately and easily preview changes as you iterate. However, we realize this poses an issue — publishing multiple copies of your website can harm your rankings in search engine results. One way to solve this is by disabling indexing on all pages.dev subdomains, but we see many using their pages.dev subdomain as their primary domain. With today’s announcement you can attach headers such as X-Robots-Tag to hint to Google and other search Continue reading

Ansible for AWS: Introduction to Spot Instance Automation

What are Spot Instance and Spot Instance Requests?

A Spot Instance is an instance that uses spare AWS EC2 capacity that is available for less than the On-Demand price. Because Spot Instances provide the ability to request unused EC2 instances at steep discounts, it can lower your Amazon EC2 costs significantly. 

Spot Instances are a cost-effective choice if you can be flexible about when your applications run and whether your applications can be interrupted. For example, Spot Instances are well-suited for data analysis, batch jobs, background processing, and optional tasks.

Managing Spot Instances with Ansible

So you want to manage your Spot Instance Requests with Ansible Automation Platform? When it comes to managing AWS resources, the Ansible Amazon AWS Collection includes a variety of Ansible content to help automate the management of AWS instances. Using Ansible to automate applications in AWS greatly increases the chances that your cloud initiative will be a success.  

With the latest addition of new modules to the Ansible Amazon AWS Collection, we have introduced two new modules to help manage Spot Instance Requests efficiently.

The ec2_spot_instance module helps in creating as well as terminating the Spot Instance Requests, while it’s companion module, Continue reading

Graphcore beefs up data center AI offerings

Graphcore, the British semiconductor company that develops accelerators for AI and machine learning, has greatly increased the performance of its massively parallel Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) servers.Graphcore sells its AI-oriented chips in rack-mounted designs called IPU-PODs. Up until now, the maximum per cabinet has been 64 units (in the IPU-POD64). The newest racks are twice and four times as large: the IPU-POD128 and IPU-POD256. Read more: 10 of the world's fastest supercomputersTo read this article in full, please click here

Graphcore beefs up data center AI offerings

Graphcore, the British semiconductor company that develops accelerators for AI and machine learning, has greatly increased the performance of its massively parallel Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) servers.Graphcore sells its AI-oriented chips in rack-mounted designs called IPU-PODs. Up until now, the maximum per cabinet has been 64 units (in the IPU-POD64). The newest racks are twice and four times as large: the IPU-POD128 and IPU-POD256. Read more: 10 of the world's fastest supercomputersTo read this article in full, please click here

EVPN/VXLAN Complexity

We have school holidays this week, so I’m reposting wonderful comments that would otherwise be lost somewhere in the page margins. Today: Minh Ha on complexity of emulating layer-2 networks with VXLAN and EVPN.

Dmytro Shypovalov is a master networker who has a sophisticated grasp of some of the most advanced topics in networking. He doesn’t write often, but when he does, he writes exceptional content, both deep and broad. Have to say I agree with him 300% on “If an L2 network doesn’t scale, design a proper L3 network. But if people want to step on rakes, why discourage them.”

EVPN/VXLAN Complexity

We have school holidays this week, so I’m reposting wonderful comments that would otherwise be lost somewhere in the page margins. Today: Minh Ha on complexity of emulating layer-2 networks with VXLAN and EVPN.

Dmytro Shypovalov is a master networker who has a sophisticated grasp of some of the most advanced topics in networking. He doesn’t write often, but when he does, he writes exceptional content, both deep and broad. Have to say I agree with him 300% on “If an L2 network doesn’t scale, design a proper L3 network. But if people want to step on rakes, why discourage them.”

Why aren’t optical disks the top choice for archive storage?

Optical media is the longest lasting medium currently in production. It can reliably hold onto your data for 50-100 years without power or cooling, and without the worry of magnetic degradation. Using recordable optical media such as DVD-R is perfectly suitable for long-term archiving because it is write-once, read-many, meaning it is physically immutable—cannot be changed—so the data on it is tamper-proof.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] It seems, then, that optical media might dominate archived storage, but it doesn’t. To explore why, first let’s take a look at the technology.To read this article in full, please click here

Why aren’t optical disks the top choice for archive storage?

Optical media is the longest lasting medium currently in production. It can reliably hold onto your data for 50-100 years without power or cooling, and without the worry of magnetic degradation. Using recordable optical media such as DVD-R is perfectly suitable for long-term archiving because it is write-once, read-many, meaning it is physically immutable—cannot be changed—so the data on it is tamper-proof.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] It seems, then, that optical media might dominate archived storage, but it doesn’t. To explore why, first let’s take a look at the technology.To read this article in full, please click here

vmWare vRealize Automation (with embedded vRO) – Full Example of Custom Resources for Executing Ansible Playbooks from Blueprints

This articles exists because I spend a lot of time in the last year inside vmware vRealize Automation (vRA) that includes an embedded vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) on a undisclosed project. And the main take-away is that the documentation in certain aspects that are on the edge of new features of vRA/vRO are, to put it mildly “documented in a very chaotic way”. Additionally, what worked in vRA 8.0 – 8.2 suddenly stopped working in 8.3 and 8.4 when upgraded. So this product is not yet as stable as I would like and for this article it means that it will probably be completely outdated in a year or so. Nevertheless I wanted to put together a simple example that is working end-to-end and providing practical jump of point for building more.

And I have decided that bridging vRA/vRO with traditional Ansible playbook is a good idea for an example. Because it combines the vRAs great Infrastructure As A Code (IaaS) capabilities of using blueprints with a more infrastructure focused automation of Ansible. We will be building an abstract object on a blueprint (these types of objects are called “custom resource” because you are defining what they Continue reading

China Has Already Reached Exascale–On Two Separate Systems

Native CPU and accelerator architectures that have been in play on China’s previous large systems have been stepped up to make China first to exascale on two fronts.  …

China Has Already Reached Exascale–On Two Separate Systems was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.