Brandon and Derick explore communities of IT folks, the wisdom of backup plans, and shifty vendors with Tech Field Day Organizer Tom Hollingsworth, also known as "The Networking Nerd."
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are foundational to many of the modernization efforts that enterprises are embracing, from leveraging them to more quickly analyze the mountains of data they’re generating and automating operational processes to running the advanced applications – like natural language processing, speech and image recognition, and machine vision – needed by a broad array of industries, from financial services, agriculture, healthcare and automotive. …
Lenovo Spreads The AI Message Far And Wide was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
The latest version of Kubernetes Kubernetes v1.20.0-rc.0 is now available. The Kubernetes project plans to deprecate Docker Engine support in the kubelet and support for dockershim will be removed in a future release, probably late next year. The net/net is support for your container images built with Docker tools is not being deprecated and will still work as before.
Even better news however, is that Mirantis and Docker have agreed to partner to maintain the shim code standalone outside Kubernetes, as a conformant CRI interface for Docker Engine. We will start with the great initial prototype from Dims, at https://github.com/dims/cri-dockerd and continuing to make it available as an open source project, at https://github.com/Mirantis/cri-dockerd. This means that you can continue to build Kubernetes based on Docker Engine as before, just switching from the built in dockershim to the external one. Docker and Mirantis will work together on making sure it continues to work as well as before and that it passes all the conformance tests and works just like the built in version did. Docker will continue to ship this shim in Docker Desktop as this gives a great developer experience, and Mirantis will be Continue reading
Today, we are glad to share a milestone for the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) initiative: the number of participants in the network operator program has reached 500.
By joining the community-driven initiative, these network operators, big and small, from around the world have taken specific, concrete actions to improve the resilience and security of the Internet’s inherently insecure routing infrastructure.
Systemic security issues about how traffic is routed on the Internet make it a relatively easy target for criminals. MANRS helps reduce the most common routing threats and increase efficiency and transparency among Internet service providers (ISPs) on peering relationships.
The growth of the network operator program – the oldest among three today – has been accelerating in recent years. Launched in 2014 with a group of nine operators, the number of participants in the program took four years to reach 100 in 2018 and has risen sharply in the last two years, with 156 joining in 2019 and 244 so far in 2020.
The 500 network operators manage 651 autonomous systems in total, as some of them manage multiple networks.
Meanwhile, the Internet Exchange Point (IXP) program, which we launched in 2018, now has 60 Continue reading
Continuing our Fast Failover saga, let’s focus on techniques and technologies available to implement it (assuming you still think it’s worth the effort).
There are numerous technologies you can use to implement fast reroute, from the most complex to the easiest one:
Continuing our Fast Failover saga, let’s focus on techniques and technologies available to implement it (assuming you still think it’s worth the effort).
There are numerous technologies you can use to implement fast reroute, from the most complex to the easiest one:
This is less concrete technical than my usual blog post.
It’s actually hard to be 99% sure of anything. I’m not 99% sure today’s Thursday. I say that because more often than one day in a hundred, I’ll think “hmm… feels like Wednesday” when it’s not.
I just closed my eyes and tried to remember what time it is. I don’t think I can guess with 99% accuracy what hour I’m in. (but to be fair, it’s de-facto Friday afternoon today, as I’m off tomorrow).
Anyway… the reason I say this is that this should be kept in mind every time someone comes and says they want to circumvent some process for a change that they are absolutely sure won’t cause an outage, that can actually be put into numbers. And those numbers are “you are not 100% sure of anything”.
By saying you are 99% sure this won’t cause an outage (and are you right about that?) you are saying that for every 100 requests like yours that will bypass normal checks, there will be an outage. You are taking on an amortized 1% of Continue reading
Cisco Systems may still be the biggest supplier of switches and routers in general, but it has long since been surpassed by Broadcom when it comes to suppling the silicon that does the switching itself and sometimes even a little bit of routing in the datacenter in particular. …
Broadcom Widens And Smartens Switch Chip Lineup was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Openness and transparency are key pillars of a healthy open source community. We’re constantly exploring ways to better engage the Docker community, to better incorporate feedback and to better foster participation.
To this end, we’re very excited to host our first Community All-Hands on Thursday December 10th at 8am PST / 5pm CET. This one-hour event will be a unique opportunity for Docker staff and the broader Docker community to come together for company and product updates, live demos, community shout-outs and a Q&A.
The All-Hands will include updates from:
We’ll then dive into specific product updates around Docker Desktop, Hub and Developer Tooling, followed by two awesome live demos where we’ll show cool new features and integrations.
A Community All-Hands is not complete without a community update. We will announce new community initiatives and recognize outstanding contributors who have gone above and beyond to help push Docker Continue reading
The first hour of material in my new BGP course over at Ignition dropped this week. I’m not going to talk about configuration and other operational things—this is all about understanding how BGP works, why it works that way, and thinking about design. This course will apply to cloud, Internet edge, DC fabric, and other uses of BGP. From the official site:
BGP is one of the fundamental protocols for routing traffic across the Internet. This course, taught by networking expert and network architect Russ White, is designed to take you from BGP basics to understanding BGP at scale. The 6-hour course will be divided into several modules. Each module will contain multiple video courses of approximately 15 minutes each that drill into key concepts. The first module contains four videos that describe how BGP works. They cover basics including reachability, building loop-free paths, BGP convergence, intra-AS models, and route reflectors.
There are many people, projects, and organizations that are collecting data on various facets of the Internet, but there’s no single site that provides a curated set of insights.
To help address this gap, we’ve launched the Internet Society Insights platform to help everyone gain deeper, data-driven insight into the Internet.
One of the key deliverables of the Measuring the Internet project, we have spent the last few months building the Insights platform together with our valued development partner, Frontwerks AG.
Data and Focus Areas
We’re collating data from several trusted organizations – our data partners – and will examine Internet trends, generate reports, and tell data-driven stories about how the Internet is evolving. Insights launched with two initial focus areas, Internet Shutdowns and Enabling Technologies.
Work is continuing on three additional focus areas – Internet Resilience, the Internet Way of Networking, and Keeping Traffic Local. We aim to add data and insights on these focus areas throughout 2021 and beyond.
Use and Share
Everyone is encouraged to use and share the text, images, and charts presented on Insights under our creative commons license.
If you would like to submit an idea for a guest post for the Continue reading
At first glance, it would seem like the history of a technology would have little to do with teaching that technology. Jacob Hess of NexGenT joins us in this episode of the Hedge to help us understand why he always includes the history of a technology when teaching it—a conversation that broadened out into why learning history is important for all network engineers.
Cluster API is, if you’re not already familiar, an effort to bring declarative Kubernetes-style APIs to Kubernetes cluster lifecycle management. (I encourage you to check out my introduction to Cluster API post if you’re new to Cluster API.) Given that it is using Kubernetes-style APIs to manage Kubernetes clusters, there must be a management cluster with the Cluster API components installed. But how does one establish that management cluster? This is a question I’ve seen pop up several times in the Kubernetes Slack community. In this post, I’ll walk you through one way of bootstrapping a Cluster API management cluster.
The process I’ll describe in this post is also described in the upstream Cluster API documentation (see the “Bootstrap & Pivot” section of this page).
At a high level, the process looks like this:
The following sections describe each of these steps in a bit more detail.
The first step is Continue reading