Linkerd Graduates CNCF with Focus on Simplicity

The number of requirements around stability, adoption, maturity, and governance, and joins more than a dozen other graduated projects, such as Helm, Prometheus, Envoy, and Kubernetes. In a press release regarding Linkerd’s graduation, H-E-B is quoted as saying that they didn’t “choose a service mesh based on hype,” and that they “weren’t worried about which mesh had the most marketing behind it.” The service mesh being alluded to here is Istio, which, in the most recent William Morgan. “And the fact that it has attained graduation, that it has this community of enthusiastic and committed adopters, I think it’s pretty remarkable given that context. It’s hard not to talk about Linkerd without also talking about Istio, although I think the reality is, there’s some pretty fundamental philosophical differences between those projects.” Linkerd was created by Buoyant in 2016, and Morgan said its first iterations were rather complex before the project found its focus on simplicity. This simplicity, which starts with Linkerd using Envoy, is a key differentiator for the service mesh, and one of the fundamental philosophical differences Morgan speaks of. “Naturally, as engineers, what you want to do when you’re building infrastructure is, you want to solve every possible problem with this beautiful platform that can do all things for all people,” Morgan said. “I think when you go down that path, which feels very natural to an engineer, you end up with something that is really unwieldy, and that’s complex, and that is fundamentally unsatisfying. It sounds great, but it’s so hard to operate that you never accomplish your goals.” Part of the balancing act, said Morgan, is to deliver all the features of the service mesh around reliability, security, and observability, “without getting mired in all the complexity, without having to hire a team of developers or a team of engineers, service mesh experts, just to run your service mesh.” In the past year, Linkerd has seen a 300% increase in downloads, and part of that acceleration may be attributed to a migration away from Istio due to its complexity. Rather than focusing on moving away from Istio, which he says some users may end up using simply because they see it first, Morgan again focuses on Linkerd’s simplicity as the reason behind its increased adoption. “In the absence of having these marketing bullhorns, these huge marketing budgets, the way that Linkerd has grown has been by word of mouth,” said Morgan. “It’s been like the way that open source projects used to grow. The way that we’ve been able to accomplish that is by having a really clear vision and a really clear message around simplicity.” Another key architectural decision made around simplicity was that Linkerd was made to focus on Kubernetes. An earlier version, said Morgan, was made to work with Mesos, Zookeeper, Kubernetes and others, and they instead decided that they had to go with the “lowest common denominator,” which was Kubernetes. Linkerd’s decision to go with the Rust programming language, rather than Go, C, or C++, was another distinction for the service mesh in its evolution, and one Morgan stands behind. “It was a scary choice, but we did that because we felt that the future of the service mesh, and in fact the future of all cloud native technology, really has to be built in Rust,” he said. “There’s no reason for us, in 2021, to ever write code in C++ or in C anymore. That was a pretty scary, risky, controversial decision at the time, but it’s paid off because now we have the adoption to kind of show it off.” While Morgan calls the project’s CNCF graduation “a nice moment for us to reflect and to be grateful for all the people around the world who worked so hard to get Linkerd to this point,” he says that there is a long roadmap ahead, which includes things like server and client-side policies, and “mesh expansion” to allow the Linkerd data plane to operate outside of Kubernetes. But when your focus is on simplicity, where do you draw the line on additional features? Morgan said that, as a project designer, you have to ask yourself some questions. “What is the maximum number of those problems that I can solve, and then the rest, we’re just not going to solve? Like, that’s the stopping point,” said Morgan. “There are going to be use cases that Linkerd is just not going to solve, and that’s okay. For those folks, I do actually sometimes tell people to use Istio. There’s a set of things that Istio can do, super complicated situations, where I just don’t want Linkerd to be able to solve that because it would be too complicated.” The post Linkerd Graduates CNCF with Focus on Simplicity appeared first on The New Stack.

It Always Takes Too Long

It always takes longer to find a problem than it should. Moving through the troubleshooting process often feels like swimming in molasses—it’s never fast enough or far enough to get the application back up and running before that crucial deadline. The “swimming in molasses effect” doesn’t end when the problem is found out, either—repairing the problem requires juggling a thousand variables, most of which are unknown, combined with the wit and sagacity of a soothsayer to work with vendors, code releases, and unintended consequences.

It’s enough to make a network engineer want to find a mountain top and assume an all-knowing pose—even if they don’t know anything at all.
The problem of taking longer, though, applies in every area of computer networking. It takes too long for the packet to get there, it takes to long for the routing protocol to converge, it takes too long to support a new application or server. It takes so long to create and validate a network design change that the hardware, software and processes created are obsolete before they are used.

Why does it always take too long? A short story often told to me by my Grandfather—a farmer—might help.

One morning a Continue reading

Evolution of search engines architecture – Algolia New Search Architecture Part 1

 

What would a totally new search engine architecture look like? Who better than Julien Lemoine, Co-founder & CTO of Algolia, to describe what the future of search will look like. This is the first article in a series.


Search engines, and more generally, information retrieval systems, play a central role in almost all of today’s technical stacks. Information retrieval started in the beginning of computer science. Research accelerated in the early 90s with the introduction of the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC). After more than 30 years of evolution since TREC, search engines continue to grow and evolve, leading to new challenges.

In this article, we look at some key milestones in the evolution of search engine architecture. We also describe the challenges those architectures face today. As you’ll see, we grouped the engines into four architecture categories. This is a simplification, as there are in reality a lot of different engines with various mix of architectures. We did this to focus our attention on the most important characteristics of those architectures.

1. The Inverted Index —  the early days of search

Tech Bytes: Get IoT Context And Control With Aruba ESP (Sponsored)

oday's Tech Bytes podcast discusses how to get visibility into, and context for, all the IoT devices connecting wirelessly to your network. Our sponsor is Aruba, and we explore Aruba’s Edge Services Platform, or ESP, and how it delivers hyper-awareness of your IoT environment.

The post Tech Bytes: Get IoT Context And Control With Aruba ESP (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Decentralized Chat: Matrix Offers Red Pill to Slack Users

One of the most interesting internet trends of 2021 is the experimentation going on with decentralized technologies. We’re seeing a blossoming of open source, decentralized internet applications — many of them attempting to provide alternatives to big tech products. Privacy breaches, misinformation, black box algorithms, lack of user control — these are just some of the problems inherent in the proprietary, centralized social media and communications products of Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Google, and others. The question is: can decentralized applications be a panacea? Richard MacManus Richard is senior editor at The New Stack and writes a weekly column about web and application development trends. Previously he founded ReadWriteWeb in 2003 and built it into one of the world’s most influential technology news and analysis sites. In today’s column, I look at an emerging decentralized, open standard for real-time communications: defined as “an open standard for interoperable, decentralized, real-time communication over IP.” Products built on top of Matrix could provide an alternative to using commercial Instant Messaging products like Slack or WhatsApp.

Thought Experiment: How Did Zoom’s Infrastructure Keep Us Connected?

What bit of technology got us through the pandemic, was available for scaling up at just the right time to keep a pretty sizeable chunk of our economy working, redefined education on a moment’s notice, and now is redefining for the world the entire notion of work?  …

Thought Experiment: How Did Zoom’s Infrastructure Keep Us Connected? was written by Mark Funk at The Next Platform.

Helping Keep Governments Safe and Secure

Helping Keep Governments Safe and Secure
Helping Keep Governments Safe and Secure

Today, we are excited to share that Cloudflare and Accenture Federal Services (AFS) have been selected by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to develop a joint solution to help the federal government defend itself against cyberattacks. The solution consists of Cloudflare’s protective DNS resolver which will filter DNS queries from offices and locations of the federal government and stream events directly to Accenture’s analysis platform.

Located within DHS, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) operates as “the nation’s risk advisor.”1 CISA works with partners across the public and private sector to improve the security and reliability of critical infrastructure; a mission that spans across the federal government, State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial partnerships and the private sector to provide solutions to emerging and ever-changing threats.

Over the last few years, CISA has repeatedly flagged the cyber risk posed by malicious hostnames, phishing emails with malicious links, and untrustworthy upstream Domain Name System (DNS) resolvers.2 Attackers can compromise devices or accounts, and ultimately data, by tricking a user or system into sending a DNS query for a specific hostname. Once that query is resolved, those devices establish connections that can lead to malware downloads, phishing websites, Continue reading

SSD prices expected to spike as Intel, AMD ship new server processors

Prices of enterprise-grade solid-state drives are likely to jump in the coming months, perhaps by as much as 15% over current SSD prices, says TrendForce, a Taiwanese market research firm that focuses on the memory market.In a rare and no doubt unintentional move, Intel and AMD are on a path to begin shipping new processors at roughly the same time: Intel with its Ice Lake generation of Xeon processors and AMD with its Milan processors. You can expect HP Enterprise, Dell Technologies, Lenovo, Super Micro, and every other OEM to unleash a raft of servers at the same quarter as they usually do.To read this article in full, please click here

SSD prices expected to spike as Intel, AMD ship new server processors

Prices of enterprise-grade solid-state drives are likely to jump in the coming months, perhaps by as much as 15% over current SSD prices, says TrendForce, a Taiwanese market research firm that focuses on the memory market.In a rare and no doubt unintentional move, Intel and AMD are on a path to begin shipping new processors at roughly the same time: Intel with its Ice Lake generation of Xeon processors and AMD with its Milan processors. You can expect HP Enterprise, Dell Technologies, Lenovo, Super Micro, and every other OEM to unleash a raft of servers at the same quarter as they usually do.To read this article in full, please click here

Is your network AI as smart as you think?

Network-operations types tell me that, in the future, AI is going to manage their networks. They also tell me that their vendors told them that very same thing. The good news is that’s sort-of-true. The bad news is the same; with emphasis on the qualifier “sort-of”. To get the most from AI network management, you have to navigate out of that hazy “sort-of” zone, and you do it by thinking about ants and farmers.Ants can build wonderfully complex anthills, with all manner of interconnecting tunnels and levels. Do the worker ants have some mighty engineer-ant directing this process? Nope. Each of them is single-mindedly performing its own simple task, and instincts program them. There is in fact an ant-engineer, but it’s their own DNA that’s organized their work to accomplish the goal. That’s a bit like how most network AI works.To read this article in full, please click here

Extreme CEO: Cloud, hybrid workplaces drive big growth for networking

The continued growth of cloud applications, wireless technology and the COVID-19-driven enterprise hybrid workplace is making flexible networking a must.As a result the networking industry as a whole is set to experience the highest growth in years, according to Extreme Networks’ president and CEO Ed Meyercord.The 10 most powerful companies in enterprise networking 2021 Extreme Networks Extreme CEO Ed MeyercordTo read this article in full, please click here

How Pensando Redefines Networking with P4 DSC (SmartNIC) – Rolf Schaerer, Systems Engineer @ Pensando Systems

In this episode Rick and Melchior invited Rolf Schaerer from Pensando Systems and ask him all how Pensando redefines the Netwok Server Edge.

“A New Way of Thinking About Next-Gen Cloud Architectures” leveraging a custom, programmable P4 processor Pensanso refers to as Capri. Capri is optimized to execute a software stack delivering cloud, compute, network, storage, and security services at cloud scale. Capri is easily installed in any standard server via the Pensando Distributed Services Card (DSC). The DSC provides software-defined services at the server edge, eliminating an assortment of discrete appliances throughout the data center and simplifying IT operations.

pygnmi 10. Rapid and Reliable Network Testing with Pytest, Pygnmi, and OpenConfig

Hello my friend,

Talking to some our partners, they mentioned that they are extensively using the unit tests python libraries for the development of the software in Python. They are creating their applications in Django framework; therefore, they are using a built-in Django testing library, which is based on Python’s standard unittest. We start looking, how we can use that ourselves…



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Can This Help with Automated Network Assurance?

What do we, network engineers, do to quickly check that our network devices are reachable? We do ping. However, is that really good enough to check that your devices are OK? The one could say: I don’t even use a ping for that, as I rely on my NMS. This is also a good answer. In the same time, though, the vast majority of the NMS doesn’t contain all the details of network devices configuration and their operational data: e.g. all the details of OSPF and Continue reading

Crystal Notes: Enums

Enums group a related number of values and store the values internally as integers. Enums are good to use when the number of values are not too big. Considerations Enums are a type safe alternative to Symbols. It is recommended to use Enums whenever possible and only use Symbols for an...continue reading

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