Observe & Troubleshoot Your Kubernetes Environments with Dynamic Service Graph

Kubernetes workloads are highly dynamic, ephemeral, and are deployed on a distributed and agile infrastructure. Application developers, DevOps teams, and site reliability engineers (SREs) often require better visibility of their different microservices, what their dependencies are, how they are interconnected, and which other clients and applications access them. This makes Kubernetes observability challenges unique. While Kubernetes helps to meet the needs of deploying and managing distributed applications, its observability challenges require a Kubernetes-native approach.

Traditional monitoring and observability solutions create data silos by collecting data at different levels (e.g. infrastructure, cluster, and application levels), or from a large number of ephemeral objects that generate data across a distributed environment. Traditional monitoring and observability solutions then stitch this data together to provide a near real-time snapshot view. This approach is not scalable given the high volume of granular data generated at each level, as well as Kubernetes’ distributed nature. It also starts to become expensive and budget unfriendly to run traditional monitoring solutions, as they require higher resource consumption (high-performance memory, more compute, and higher bandwidth).

In contrast, a Kubernetes-native observability solution can visualize all information with all relationship context intact and provide a high-fidelity view of the environment. This Continue reading

Heavy Networking 583: How Salesforce Evolved Its Branch Network With Prisma SD-WAN (Sponsored)

On today's Heavy Networking, sponsored by Palo Alto Networks, we hear from Salesforce about the evolution of its branch network to SD-WAN. Salesforce was able to trade MPLS for Internet broadband, get more bandwidth for less money, employ application-based steering and policy enforcement, and more. Our guests are Georgi Stoev, Sr. Network Architect at Salesforce; and Kumar Ramachandran, Senior Vice President at Palo Alto Networks.

Heavy Networking 583: How Salesforce Evolved Its Branch Network With Prisma SD-WAN (Sponsored)

On today's Heavy Networking, sponsored by Palo Alto Networks, we hear from Salesforce about the evolution of its branch network to SD-WAN. Salesforce was able to trade MPLS for Internet broadband, get more bandwidth for less money, employ application-based steering and policy enforcement, and more. Our guests are Georgi Stoev, Sr. Network Architect at Salesforce; and Kumar Ramachandran, Senior Vice President at Palo Alto Networks.

The post Heavy Networking 583: How Salesforce Evolved Its Branch Network With Prisma SD-WAN (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Don’t OutSMART Your Goals

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I read a piece on LifeHacker yesterday that made me shake my head a bit. I’m sure the title SMART Goals Are Overrated was designed to get people to click on it, so from that perspective it succeeded. Wading into the discourse there was an outline of how SMART goals were originally designed for managers to give tasks to employees and how SMART doesn’t fit every goal you might want to set, especially personal aspirational ones. Since I have a lot of experience with using SMART goals both for myself and for others I wanted to give some perspective on why SMART may not be the best way to go for everything but you’re a fool if you don’t at least use it as a measuring tool.

SMRT, Eh?

As a recap, SMART is an acronym for the five key things you need to apply to your goal:

  • S – Specific (what are you going to do)
  • M – Measurable (how will you know when you’ve succeeded)
  • A – Attainable or Assignable (can you or the person you’ve selected do this thing)
  • R – Relevant or Relatable (is this goal appropriate for me or for the person doing it)
  • T Continue reading

Observe & Troubleshoot Your Kubernetes Environments with Dynamic Service Graph

Kubernetes workloads are highly dynamic, ephemeral, and are deployed on a distributed and agile infrastructure. Application developers, DevOps teams, and site reliability engineers (SREs) often require better visibility of their different microservices, what their dependencies are, how they are interconnected, and which other clients and applications access them. This makes Kubernetes observability challenges unique. While Kubernetes helps to meet the needs of deploying and managing distributed applications, its observability challenges require a Kubernetes-native approach.

Traditional monitoring and observability solutions create data silos by collecting data at different levels (e.g. infrastructure, cluster, and application levels), or from a large number of ephemeral objects that generate data across a distributed environment. Traditional monitoring and observability solutions then stitch this data together to provide a near real-time snapshot view. This approach is not scalable given the high volume of granular data generated at each level, as well as Kubernetes’ distributed nature. It also starts to become expensive and budget unfriendly to run traditional monitoring solutions, as they require higher resource consumption (high-performance memory, more compute, and higher bandwidth).

In contrast, a Kubernetes-native observability solution can visualize all information with all relationship context intact and provide a high-fidelity view of the environment. This Continue reading

EPCC Kicking Tires on New CS-1 AI System

The Edinburgh Parallel Computing Center (EPPC) is up and running with its Cerebras CS-1 waferscale system and is already working with European companies in biomedical and cybersecurity arenas in addition to its own research into different programming and AI models and projects in natural language processing and genome-wide association studies.

EPCC Kicking Tires on New CS-1 AI System was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Technology Short Take 141

Welcome to Technology Short Take #141! This is the first Technology Short Take compiled, written, and published entirely on my M1-based MacBook Pro (see my review here). The collection of links shared below covers a fairly wide range of topics, from old Sun hardware to working with serverless frameworks in the public cloud. I hope that you find something useful here. Enjoy!

Networking

Cloudflare TV: Doing it Live, 1,000 Times and Counting

Cloudflare TV: Doing it Live, 1,000 Times and Counting
Cloudflare TV: Doing it Live, 1,000 Times and Counting

Last week, Cloudflare TV celebrated its first anniversary the only way it knows how: with a broadcast brimming with live programming spanning everything from the keynotes of Cloudflare Connect, to a day-long virtual career fair, to our flagship game show Silicon Valley Squares.

When our co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince introduced Cloudflare TV to the world last year, he described it as a platform for experimentation. By empowering Cloudflare employees to try whatever they could think up on air — bound only by restraints of common sense — we hoped to unlock aspects of our team’s talent and creativity that otherwise might go untapped in the midst of the pandemic.

The results, as they say, have been extraordinary.

Since launching in June 2020, Cloudflare TV has featured over 1,000 original live episodes covering an incredible array of topics: technical deep dives and tutorials like Hardware at Cloudflare, Leveling up Web Performance with HTTP/3, and Hacker Time. Security expertise from top CISOs and compliance experts. In-depth policy discussions. And of course, updates on Cloudflare’s products with weekly episodes of Latest from Product and Engineering, Estas Semanas en Cloudflare en Español, and launch-day introductions to Magic WAN Continue reading

Member News: Somalia Chapter Focuses on Internet Education

Paying by phone: The Somalia chapter of the Internet Society is focusing on educating Internet users, particularly young people, about mobile payments. The chapter is working with technology stakeholders to improve digital literacy. The chapter notes that 70 percent of adults in Somalia use mobile money services regularly, and more than two thirds of payments […]

The post Member News: Somalia Chapter Focuses on Internet Education appeared first on Internet Society.

Review: Logitech Ergo K860 Ergonomic Keyboard

As part of an ongoing effort to refine my work environment, several months ago I switched to a Logitech Ergo K860 ergonomic keyboard. While I’m not a “keyboard snob,” I am somewhat particular about the feel of my keyboard, so I wasn’t sure how I would like the K860. In this post, I’ll provide my feedback, and provide some information on how well the keyboard works with both Linux and macOS.

Setup

Setting up the K860 is remarkably easy. The first system I tried to pair it with was an older Mac Pro workstation, and apparently the Bluetooth hardware on that particular workstation wasn’t new enough to support the K860 (Logitech indicates that Bluetooth 5.0 is needed; more on that in a moment). Instead, I popped in the USB-A wireless receiver, and was up and running with the K860 less than a minute later. This was using macOS, but the Mac Pro also dual-booted Linux, so I rebooted into Linux and found that the K860 with the Logitech-supplied USB receiver continued to work without any issues.

Linux, macOS, and Dual Boot Support

The key takeaway regarding Linux is this: if you’re interested in getting the K860 for use with Continue reading

Checking Linux system performance with sar

Sar is a system utility that gives us many ways to examine performance on a Linux system. It provides details on all aspects of system performance including system load, CPU usage, memory use, paging, swapping, disk usage, device load, network activity, etc.The name "sar" stands for "system activity report," and it can display current performance, provide reports that are based on log files stored in your system's /var/log/sa (or /var/log/sysstat) folder, or be set up to automatically produce daily reports. It's part of sysstat – a collection of system performance monitoring tools.To check if sar is available on your system, run a command like this:To read this article in full, please click here

Checking Linux system performance with sar

Sar is a system utility that gives us many ways to examine performance on a Linux system. It provides details on all aspects of system performance including system load, CPU usage, memory use, paging, swapping, disk usage, device load, network activity, etc.The name "sar" stands for "system activity report," and it can display current performance, provide reports that are based on log files stored in your system's /var/log/sa (or /var/log/sysstat) folder, or be set up to automatically produce daily reports. It's part of sysstat – a collection of system performance monitoring tools.To check if sar is available on your system, run a command like this:To read this article in full, please click here