Crystal Notes: Hashes

Hashes in Crystal are a collection of key/value pairs of defined types. Creating a hash # Deduce the type signature of a hash. typeof(stuff_and_things) # => Hash(String, String) # To create an empty hash, you must define # the intended type of its key/value pairs. # There are 2 ways to define...continue reading

FAQ: What in the wireless world is CBRS?

First off, CBRS is an acronym for Citizens Broadband Radio Service, and the upshot for IT pros is that it’s enabling enterprises to build their own private 4G/5G networks and result in improved 4G/5G offerings from service providers. Here’s a primer on CBRS—because you are going to want to know about this.CB, as in CB radio? No, good buddy, this has nothing to do with the Citizens’ Band radio service used by truckers for two-way voice communications and that lives in the 27MHz band in the US. CBRS lives in the 3.5GHz band.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM upgrades its Big Iron OS for better cloud, security, and AI support

IBM continues to fine-tune its mainframe to keep it attractive to enterprise users interested in keeping the Big Iron in their cloud and AI-application development plans.The company released a new version of the mainframe operating system—z/OS V2.5—that includes beefed-up support for containers, AI, and security.Chip shortage will hit hardware buyers for months to years According to IBM, applications are at the heart of transactional and batch workloads running on z/OS. Fundamentally, developing new applications while modernizing existing applications is part of the digital transformation occurring in many enterprises.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM upgrades its Big Iron OS for better cloud, security, and AI support

IBM continues to fine-tune its mainframe to keep it attractive to enterprise users interested in keeping the Big Iron in their cloud and AI-application development plans.The company released a new version of the mainframe operating system—z/OS V2.5—that includes beefed-up support for containers, AI, and security.Chip shortage will hit hardware buyers for months to years According to IBM, applications are at the heart of transactional and batch workloads running on z/OS. Fundamentally, developing new applications while modernizing existing applications is part of the digital transformation occurring in many enterprises.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM upgrades its Big Iron OS for better cloud, security, and AI support

IBM continues to fine-tune its mainframe to keep it attractive to enterprise users interested in keeping the Big Iron in their cloud and AI-application development plans.The company released a new version of the mainframe operating system—z/OS V2.5—that includes beefed-up support for containers, AI, and security.Chip shortage will hit hardware buyers for months to years According to IBM, applications are at the heart of transactional and batch workloads running on z/OS. Fundamentally, developing new applications while modernizing existing applications is part of the digital transformation occurring in many enterprises.To read this article in full, please click here

Xilinx launches Versal HBM processors for the data center

Xilinx continues to be arguably the most productive chip maker in the Valley with the introduction of the Versal HBM adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP), the latest in its Versal processor portfolio.Xilinx is known as a FPGA company, but the Versal line is so much more than that. Versal is the mashup of many different processor technologies into one die. Of course it has the FPGA programmable logic gates, but it also has Arm cores for applications and real-time processing, intelligent engines (AI blocks, DSPs), and I/O (PCIe Gen 5, CXL). The family ranges from the high-end Premium edition to the Versal AI Edge processors.To read this article in full, please click here

Xilinx launches Versal HBM processors for the data center

Xilinx continues to be arguably the most productive chip maker in the Valley with the introduction of the Versal HBM adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP), the latest in its Versal processor portfolio.Xilinx is known as a FPGA company, but the Versal line is so much more than that. Versal is the mashup of many different processor technologies into one die. Of course it has the FPGA programmable logic gates, but it also has Arm cores for applications and real-time processing, intelligent engines (AI blocks, DSPs), and I/O (PCIe Gen 5, CXL). The family ranges from the high-end Premium edition to the Versal AI Edge processors.To read this article in full, please click here

Do you really need a service mesh?

The challenges involved in deploying and managing microservices have led to the creation of the service mesh, a tool for adding observability, security, and traffic management capabilities at the application layer. While a service mesh is intended to help developers and SREs with a number of use cases related to service-to-service communication within Kubernetes clusters, a service mesh also adds operational complexity and introduces an additional control plane for security teams to manage.

What is a service mesh?

A service mesh is a software infrastructure layer for controlling and monitoring internal, service-to-service traffic in microservices applications.

Service mesh provides some of the middleware and some of the components that enable service-to-service communication, such as dynamic discovery. It provides capabilities around service discovery, load balancing traffic across services, security features around encryption and authentication, tracing observability, and more. The service mesh architecture leverages design patterns to enable communication between services without requiring microservices to rewrite applications.

Service mesh architecture

One of the key aspects of how a service mesh works is that it leverages a sidecar design pattern. Services communicate and handle requests via a proxy, which is dynamically injected into each pod. Envoy is one of the most popular proxies Continue reading

Is SD-WAN out to kill MPLS?

There is arguably no networking technology surrounded by more hype than software defined WANs (SD-WAN), and much of it is well deserved. SD-WAN resources What is SD-WAN and what does it mean for networking, security, cloud? 10 SD-WAN features you’re probably not using but should be SD-WAN may be the key to smart network services SD-WAN and analytics: A marriage made for the new normal Native SD-WAN monitoring tools are not enough, survey says A significant number of network professionals either have an SD-WAN deployment underway or on their near-term roadmap. The reason is that SD-WAN architecture is optimized for cloud computing while legacy WANs were designed when client-server computing was the norm.To read this article in full, please click here

Upcoming Live Webinar: Data Center Fabrics

I’ll be teaching a three-hour live webinar on data center fabrics on the 20th of August—

Data centers are the foundation of the cloud, whether private, public, on the edge, or in the center of the network. This training will focus on topologies and control planes, including scale, performance, and centralization. This training is important for network designers and operators who want to understand the elements of data center design that apply across all hardware and software types.

Register here.

Getting Started With BGP Address Family Resource Modules

Modern enterprise networks have grown a lot in size and complexity, making them more difficult to manage than ever before. Working on these complex networks manually can be tedious, time-consuming, costly, and more prone to error.

Red Hat Ansible Network Automation resource modules provide a path for users to ease the network management, especially across multiple different product vendors. This enables users to manipulate configuration as structured data without worrying about network platform specific details.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the newly added BGP address family resource module using junipernetwork.junos.junos_bgp_address_family as an example. Similar blogs are also available, which cover resource modules for OSPFv2, ACLs, BGP Global and route maps.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a standardized exterior gateway protocol designed to exchange routing and reachability information between autonomous systems (AS) on the internet. The protocol is often classified as a path vector protocol, but is sometimes also classed as a distance-vector routing protocol. It is used in larger network setups, as Network World so aptly observes:

BGP has been called the glue of the Internet and the postal service of the internet. One comparison likens BGP to GPS applications on mobile phones.

Managing Continue reading

Helping build a green Internet

Helping build a green Internet
Helping build a green Internet

When we started Cloudflare, we weren't thinking about minimizing the environmental impact of the Internet. Frankly, I didn't really think of the Internet as having much of an environmental impact. It was just this magical resource that gave access to information and services from anywhere.

But that was before I started racking servers in hyper-cooled data centers. Before Cloudflare started paying the bills to keep those servers powered up and cooled down. Before we became obsessed with maximizing the number of requests we could process per watt of power. And long before we started buying directly from renewable power suppliers to drive down the cost of electricity across our network.

Today, I have a very good understanding of how much power it takes to run the Internet. It therefore wasn't surprising to read the Boston Consulting Group study which found that 2% of all carbon output, about 1 billion metric tons per year, is attributable to the Internet. That’s the equivalent of the entire aviation industry.

Cloudflare: Accidentally Environmentally Friendly By Design

While we didn't set out to reduce the environmental impact of the Internet, Cloudflare has always had efficiency at its core. It comes from our ongoing fight with Continue reading

Announcing Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers

Announcing Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers
Announcing Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers

All too often we are confronted with the choice to move quickly or act responsibly. Whether the topic is safety, security, or in this case sustainability, we’re asked to make the trade off of halting innovation to protect ourselves, our users, or the planet. But what if that didn’t always need to be the case? At Cloudflare, our goal is to bring sustainable computing to you without the need for any additional time, work, or complexity.

Enter Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers.

Green Compute can be enabled for any Cron triggered Workers. The concept is simple: when turned on, we’ll take your compute workload and run it exclusively on parts of our edge network located in facilities powered by renewable energy. Even though all of Cloudflare’s edge network is powered by renewable energy already, some of our data centers are located in third-party facilities that are not 100% powered by renewable energy. Green Compute takes our commitment to sustainability one step further by ensuring that not only our network equipment but also the building facility as a whole are powered by renewable energy. There are absolutely no code changes needed. Now, whether you need to update a leaderboard every five Continue reading

Designing Edge Servers with Arm CPUs to Deliver 57% More Performance Per Watt

Designing Edge Servers with Arm CPUs to Deliver 57% More Performance Per Watt
Designing Edge Servers with Arm CPUs to Deliver 57% More Performance Per Watt

Cloudflare has millions of free customers. Not only is it something we’re incredibly proud of in the context of helping to build a better Internet — but it’s something that has made the Cloudflare service measurably better. One of the ways we’ve benefited is that it’s created a very strong imperative for Cloudflare to maintain a network that is as efficient as possible. There’s simply no other way to serve so many free customers.

In the spirit of this, we are very excited about the latest step in our energy-efficiency journey: turning to Arm for our server CPUs. It has been a long journey getting here — we started testing our first Arm CPUs all the way back in November 2017. It’s only recently, however, that the quantum of energy efficiency improvement from Arm has become clear. Our first Arm CPU was deployed in production earlier this month — July 2021.

Our most recently deployed generation of edge servers, Gen X, used AMD Rome CPUs. Compared with that, the newest Arm based CPUs process an incredible 57% more Internet requests per watt. While AMD has a sequel, Milan (and which Cloudflare will also be deploying), it doesn’t achieve the same Continue reading

Cloudflare: 100% Renewable & Zeroing Out Emissions Back to Day 1

Cloudflare: 100% Renewable & Zeroing Out Emissions Back to Day 1
Cloudflare: 100% Renewable & Zeroing Out Emissions Back to Day 1

As we announced this week, Cloudflare is helping to create a clean slate for the Internet. Our goal is simple: help build a better, greener Internet with no carbon emissions that is powered by renewable energy.

To help us get there, Cloudflare is making two announcements. The first is that we're committed to powering our network with 100% renewable energy. This builds on work we started back in 2018, and we think is clearly the right thing to do. We also believe it will ultimately lead to more efficient, more sustainable, and potentially cheaper products for our customers.

The second is that by 2025 Cloudflare aims to remove all greenhouse gases emitted as the result of powering our network since our launch in 2010. As we continue to improve the way we track and mitigate our carbon footprint, we want to help the Internet begin with a fresh start.

Finally, as part of our effort to track and mitigate our emissions, we're also releasing our first annual carbon emissions inventory report. The report will provide detail on exactly how we calculate our carbon emissions as well as our renewable energy purchases. Transparency is one of Cloudflare's core values. It's how Continue reading

Green Hosting with Cloudflare Pages

Green Hosting with Cloudflare Pages

At Cloudflare, we are continuing to expand our sustainability initiatives to build a greener Internet in more than one way. We are seeing a shift in attitudes towards eco-consciousness and have noticed that with all things considered equal, if an option to reduce environmental impact is available, that’s the one widely preferred by our customers. With Pages now Generally Available, we believe we have the power to help our customers reach their sustainability goals. That is why we are excited to partner with the Green Web Foundation as we commit to making sure our Pages infrastructure is powered by 100% renewable energy.

The Green Web Foundation

As part of Cloudflare’s Impact Week, Cloudflare is proud to announce its collaboration with the Green Web Foundation (GWF), a not-for-profit organization with the mission of creating an Internet that one day will run on entirely renewable energy. GWF maintains an extensive and globally categorized Green Hosting Directory with over 320 certified hosts in 26 countries! In addition to this directory, the GWF also develops free online tools, APIs and open datasets readily available for companies looking to contribute to its mission.

Green Hosting with Cloudflare Pages

What does it mean to be a Green Web Foundation partner?

Continue reading