Member News: Connecting Remote Tribes
Connecting the people: The San Francisco Chapter recently received a Beyond the Net Grant from the Internet Society Foundation and will use it to help bring high-quality Internet service to more than 9,000 Native Americans in in a remote area of southern California. The grant will be used to extend wireless service about seven miles further into tribal lands.
Campaign against disinformation: The Netherlands Chapter is working with the artificial intelligence-powered KRINO Project to fight fake news online. KRINO will be able to analyze online content, including political statements, social media posts, and even medical information, but with humans reviewing its recommendations. The AI-based tool is in development, and the chapter’s Make Media Great Again Working Group will help fine tune the tool.
How the Internet works: Recently, two Internet Society chapters have hosted Internet-related training programs for members of the community. The Mali Chapter hosted the first edition of the Mali School of Internet Governance, with 46 people, including lawyers, engineers, law enforcement officers, and students, participating. The goal of the training is to give participants the knowledge and confidence to participate effectively in Internet governance processes and debates at regional, national, and international levels.
Digital literacy: The Panama Chapter Continue reading
2020 Year In Review
2020. WAS. A. SHIT. SHOW. Thank you global pandemic. /RANT At the start of the year I set myself a few goals outlined in this post. Some went to plan, some did not. Head down below for a recap. 2020 Goals 10% body fat I was committed to continuing the healthy lifestyle and I definitely...EVE-NG add Palo Alto PanOS 10 VM
In 2021 I am starting a new role were I will be working with Palo Alto products. In preperation for that I want to get familiar with Palo Alto firewalls again after not using them for about 5 years. In this post I will show you how to add a Palo Alto PanOS 10.0 VM to EVE-NG. Software...Books 2020
Books 2020
I read at least 41 books in 2020. Here are some highlights.
Intellectual History (?)
This is the category I’m using for my two overall favorites for the year, although it doesn’t quite fit. I love books like this that tell the stories of historic figures in unusual ways.
A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines - Janna Levin
This is generally described as a “philosophical novel”, a description which is both accurate and suitably vague, as the novel is difficult to describe. Janna Levin is famous for a lot of things: she’s possibly the most influential living black hole physicist, an author of a number of well-known books, and a well-known science communicator. This was her first book (I think), and doesn’t seem to be particularly well-known despite being an amazing work.
It’s a fictionalized account of the lives of Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. The writing is alernately strange and beautiful. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
The Weil Conjectures - Karen Olsson
I read this back to back with the previous book, and they will always be connected in my mind although they don’t intersect except for a few biographical years.
The book explores the Continue reading
Hybrid Computing Sharpens Its Edge
Computing has become more complex as the digital age has progressed. …
Hybrid Computing Sharpens Its Edge was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The Tectonic Shift To Virtual Distributed Routing
In the IT sector, there is a constant flow of little changes to hardware and software that culminate in progress. …
The Tectonic Shift To Virtual Distributed Routing was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
MikroTik – RouterOSv7 first look – Dynamic routing with IPv6 and OSPFv3/BGP
If you missed it, take a look at MikroTik’s video on RouterOS v7 routing performance and changes.
Overview
One of the long awaited benefits of RouterOS version 7 is a new routing protocol stack that enables new capabilities and fixes limitations in RouterOSv6 caused by the use of a very old Linux kernel.
The new routing stack in v7 has created quite a buzz in the MikroTik community as lab tests have shown that it’s significantly more efficient in processing large numbers of BGP routes.
The ability to use MikroTik’s new generation of CCR routers with ARM64 to quickly process BGP routes is a blog post all to itself and we’ll tackle that in the future – however, the information below provides a quick look into the performance comparison between ROS v6 and v7.
The new routing stack also paves the way to add a number of features that have been needed for a long time like RPKI and large community support.
Using a lab based on EVE-NG, we’ll take a look at configuration changes and iBGP using the IPv6 AFI with OSPFv3 as the IGP for loopback/next hop reachability. Prior to 7.1beta2, this has been nonfunctional for years Continue reading
Year in Review: The Most Viewed Docker Blog Posts of 2020 Part 2
It’s end of year round up time! The first post in this series covered the number 10-6 most viewed Docker blog posts. If you were wondering what the #1 most viewed blog post of the year was, then keep reading. The suspense will soon be over…
5) How to Develop Inside a Container Using Visual Studio Code Remote Containers
VS Code is another beloved tool. This guest post from Docker Community Leader Jochen Zehnder included some handy tricks for the Visual Studio Code Remote Containers extension that allows you to develop inside a container.
4) How to deploy on remote Docker hosts with docker-compose
There was some solid Compose momentum this year. This how-to post showed an example of how to access remote docker hosts via SSH and tcp protocols in hopes to cover a large number of use-cases.
3) How To Use the Official NGINX Docker Image
NGINX is super popular, so naturally so was this tutorial that took a look at the NGINX Official Docker Image and how to use it.
2) Containerized Python Development – Part 1
This post contained tips for how to containerize a Python service/tool and the best practices for it. Fun Continue reading
Championing the Internet Way of Networking in Latin America
The Internet has radically transformed our lives for the better, and the year 2020 has shown us it will play an increasingly crucial role in our daily lives. This year, we embarked on a project to analyze what makes the Internet so useful for those with access, and work with partners worldwide to advocate for a strong Internet that will benefit many generations to come.
Among the many collaborations on the Internet Way of Networking (IWN), our work in Latin America was a clear highlight. Thanks to the community’s massive support, we produced meaningful outcomes that will form a strong base for our future work. As we take stock of the year, we would like to celebrate the achievements and look to reaching greater heights in 2021.
Mapping the Regulatory Landscape
Engaging the community in the first half of the year, we asked experts in the region to help us map and monitor the regulatory regimes that applied to Internet intermediaries in their respective countries. Following a survey conducted between March and June, we produced (through the outstanding work of Paula Côrte Real) a map of the regulatory landscape in eight countries in the region. The exercise helped us Continue reading
3 Ways Recovery and Continuity are Essential to Your Digital Transformation Strategy
Business continuity not only protects against downtime and security threats but also enhances and even speeds up overall digital transformation efforts.Goodbye 2020, Hello 2021!!
I don’t know about you but I am eagerly looking forward to the new year erasing all the negativity and losses that 2020 brought to our broader lives, health and the global economy. Today I digress to make some predictions on the post-pandemic era that are likely to change the way we live, learn, work and play, blending the lines between those distinct functions we had once partitioned.
Goodbye 2020, Hello 2021!!
I don’t know about you but I am eagerly looking forward to the new year erasing all the negativity and losses that 2020 brought to our broader lives, health and the global economy. Today I digress to make some predictions on the post-pandemic era that are likely to change the way we live, learn, work and play, blending the lines between those distinct functions we had once partitioned.
Converting From AWS SAM to CloudFormation
AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) is a framework for building serverless applications on AWS. One of the components of SAM is a template specification. SAM templates would look and feel familiar to anyone who has used AWS CloudFormation to define their infrastructure as code, however they are not completely interchangeable. There are multiple reasons why you might want to convert from SAM to native CloudFormation:
- You want to deploy the app using CloudFormation
StackSets.
SAM uses the
AWS::Serverlesstransform in its templates and transforms are not supported by stack sets. - You want to deploy the app as part of an AWS Landing Zone (ALZ) account baseline. ALZ uses stack sets as the mechanism to deploy baseline resources and so suffers from the same constraint as the point above.
- Your operating system of choice isn't documented in the SAM installation instructions and you're uncertain how to install from source or doubtful it will work at all (I'm looking at fellow OpenBSD and FreeBSD users here).
This post will show you how to take an existing SAM application and convert it to a CloudFormation template (CFT). As a CFT, the challenges listed above can be avoided.
Moving Desktops to the Cloud: Consider a Multi-Region and Multi-Cloud Approach
A multi-region or multi-cloud approach to cloud desktops helps IT teams deliver reliable service, while minimizing complexity and strengthening security.Calico in 2020: The World’s Most Popular Kubernetes CNI
Calico and Kubernetes go hand-in-hand. Kubernetes is the de facto standard for deploying and managing container-based applications at scale, both on-premises and in the cloud. Calico continues to be the most popular open-source networking and network security solution for Kubernetes. Despite the cataclysmic events that occurred in 2020, the Calico community, supported by the team at Tigera, remained focused and achieved several major successes. We are excited to share these highlights.
Calico By The Numbers…
Since the beginning of 2020, we have experienced a 50% increase in the number of Calico Users. As of this writing, it is estimated that Calico is running on…
- 1,000,000 nodes daily
- 250,000 clusters daily
- In 166 countries around the world
That’s an 85% year-to-year increase in the number of clusters running Calico.
Calico: Clear Winner Among All Tested CNIs
Alex Ducastel published an independent benchmark comparison of Kubernetes CNIs in August which showed that among all of the CNI’s tested, Calico was the clear winner, excelling in nearly every category and delivering superlative results which are summarized in the chart below. In fact, Calico is the CNI of choice in the primary use cases presented by the author in the report’s summary.
The exceptional Continue reading
A Look Back at 2020: How Community Networks Helped People Connect during COVID-19
Community networks connect people, helping to close the global digital divide one community at a time. At the Internet Society, we believe so much in this vision, we made ambitious goals for 2020.
We set out to support new networks, give people the training they need to deploy and manage them, bring people together to build a stronger community, and create and promote policies that support community networks (CNs), enabling more people to start or improve existing networks.
COVID-19 made this work especially pressing. Almost overnight, the Internet had become a lifeline to many, helping them to stay connected to friends and family, work and study from home, and access vital information and public services.
As the world saw the digital divide clearer than it ever has, the pandemic made working with communities harder. We had to adapt, change plans, and look for creative solutions to help people access the opportunities the Internet provides. It was one of the most challenging years in recent history, but through long-standing and new partnerships we were able to achieve our goals. Thank you to all our partners who made it possible!
Together, we trained over 300 people in skills for creating, operating, Continue reading