Career changes and transitions seem inevitable in technology. When is the right time? How do you know you're ready? Is it a smart move? How do you deal with imposter syndrome? Full Stack Journey Scott Lowe and guest Massimo Re Ferre discuss these and other IT career questions.
The post Full Stack Journey 051: Knowing When It’s Time For A Career Transition appeared first on Packet Pushers.
FARNT was a regional consortium of smaller network operators that eventually helped drive the adoption of TCP/IP and the global Internet, as well as helping efforts to commercialize Internet access. Join Donald Sharp and Russ White as Laura Breeden discusses the origins of FARNT, it’s importance in the adoption of early Internet technologies, and the many hurdles regional network operators had to overcome.
Laura is now the Board Chair at the National Digital Inclusion Alliance.
I was recently a guest on The Art of Conviction podcast, where we covered a bit of my background, some of the challenges I’ve faced in getting where I am, and then we moved into a discussion around my recently finished dissertation. I’m working to find places to publish more in the area of worldview and culture; I’ll point to those here as I can find a “home” for that side of my life.
You can find the recording here.
Beyond my episode, The Art of Conviction is a fascinating podcast; you should really subscribe and listen in.
The inception of Google’s effort to build its own AI chips is quite well known by now but in the interests of review, we’ll note that as early 2013 the company envisioned machine learning could consume the majority of its compute time. …
What Chip Startups Can Learn from Google’s TPU Design Team was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
We are excited to introduce Calico Cloud, a pay-as-you-go SaaS platform for Kubernetes security and observability. With Calico Cloud, users only pay for services consumed and are billed monthly, getting immediate value without upfront investment.
Calico Cloud gives DevOps, DevSecOps, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams a single pane of glass across multi-cluster and multi-cloud Kubernetes environments to deploy a standard set of egress access controls, enforce security policies, ensure compliance, get end-to-end visibility, and troubleshoot applications. Calico Cloud is Kubernetes-native and provides native extensions to enable security and observability as code for easy and consistent enforcement across Kubernetes distributions, multi-cloud and hybrid environments. It scales automatically with the managed clusters according to the user requirements to ensure uninterrupted real-time visibility at any scale.
Many applications can take advantage of GPU acceleration, in particular resource-intensive Machine Learning (ML) applications. The development time of such applications may vary based on the hardware of the machine we use for development. Containerization will facilitate development due to reproducibility and will make the setup easily transferable to other machines. Most importantly, a containerized application is easily deployable to platforms such as Amazon ECS, where it can take advantage of different hardware configurations.
In this tutorial, we discuss how to develop GPU-accelerated applications in containers locally and how to use Docker Compose to easily deploy them to the cloud (the Amazon ECS platform). We make the transition from the local environment to a cloud effortless, the GPU-accelerated application being packaged with all its dependencies in a Docker image, and deployed in the same way regardless of the target environment.
In order to follow this tutorial, we need the following tools installed locally:
For deploying to a cloud platform, we rely on the new Docker Compose implementation embedded into the Docker CLI binary. Therefore, when targeting a cloud Continue reading
This week's Network Break dives into Juniper reorganizing and rebranding automation products as the Paragon portfolio, new SASE and ZTNA capabilities from Fortinet, the rise of cyber-insurance premiums, an HPE server getting launched into space, and more tech news.
The post Network Break 320: Juniper Rebrands Service Provider Automation Offerings; Fortinet Gets SASE With Latest OS appeared first on Packet Pushers.
In our first article in this short series we explored SambaNova Systems’ thesis that future advances in AI require a new architecture to handle new and highly demanding workloads. …
A Simultaneous Boost for AI, Traditional HPC was written by Daniel Robinson at The Next Platform.
The quantum computing race is on to collect as many Fortune 500 companies to sign onto broad research agreements that send a clear message: quantum may still be on the horizon, but leading enterprises are already taking it seriously. …
IBM Gathers Energy Giants for Quantum Network was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
My friend Daniel Dib sent me this interesting question:
As I understand it, subnets in Azure span availability zones. Do you see any drawback to this? Does subnet matter if your VMs are in different AZs?
I’m positive I don’t have to tell you what networks, subnets, and VRFs are, but you might not have worked with public cloud availability zones before. Before going into the details of Daniel’s question (and it will take us three blog posts to get to the end), let’s introduce regions and availability zones (you’ll find more details in AWS Networking and Azure Networking webinars).
My friend Daniel Dib sent me this interesting question:
As I understand it, subnets in Azure span availability zones. Do you see any drawback to this? Does subnet matter if your VMs are in different AZs?
I’m positive I don’t have to tell you what networks, subnets, and VRFs are, but you might not have worked with public cloud availability zones before. Before going into the details of Daniel’s question (and it will take us three blog posts to get to the end), let’s introduce regions and availability zones (you’ll find more details in AWS Networking and Azure Networking webinars).
Digging through my office looking for some other technology which I had misplaced, I stumbled across a small box containing a Northbound Networks Zodiac-FX, a small 4-port FastEthernet OpenFlow SDN switch which I had picked up after backing a 2015 kickstarter campaign.
These were a pretty cool idea, and at the time OpenFlow (OF) was the hottest thing around, everything was being SDN-washed, and the idea that a regular user like myself could afford actual hardware with OF capabilities to toy with in the home lab was beyond belief. Of course, it was possible to virtualize OF with Mininet, but there’s something about using a real switch that goes beyond that. Even though, as you’ll in a future post, I ended up wasting that opportunity, I am still honored to have backed it, and my hat is off to Northbound Networks’ founder Paul Zanna for what he has accomplished.
With that in mind, I’m sad to note that when I went to the Northbound Networks website, I discovered that some time around August 2020 the company stopped manufacturing SDN hardware.
Since the original Zodiac FX campaign, Paul had expanded the available products to include an 802. Continue reading
The fist post on this topic considered some basic definitions and the reasons why I am writing this series of posts. The second considered the convergence speed of BGP on a dense topology such as a DC fabric, and what mechanisms we normally use to improve BGP’s convergence speed. This post considers some of the objections to slow convergence speed—convergence speed is not important, and ECMP with high fanouts will take care of any convergence speed issues. The network below will be used for this discussion.
Two servers are connected to this five-stage butterfly: S1 and S2 Assume, for a moment, that some service is running on both S1 and S2. This service is configured in active-active mode, with all data synchronized between the servers. If some fabric device, such as C7, fails, traffic destined to either S1 or S2 across that device will be very quickly (within tens of milliseconds) rerouted through some other device, probably C6, to reach the same destination. This will happen no matter what routing protocol is being used in the underlay control plane—so why does BGP’s convergence speed matter? Further, if these services are running in the overlay, or they are designed to discover Continue reading