New Content: Graph Algorithms – Flows and Connectivity

Last week we enjoyed the second half of Graph Algorithms lecture by Rachel Traylor, this time focusing on flow- and connectivity challenges.

After an easy start defining flows and walking us through various maximum flow algorithms, Rachel explained circulations and saturating flows, switched into high gear with (supposedly painless) intro to linear programming and minimum cost flow problems, and concluded with dynamic flows and using flows to explore graph connectivity.

You’ll need Standard or Expert ipSpace.net subscription to watch the videos.

Network, It’s Time to Modernize!

The network is a critical component of any IT environment. When it works, it’s “normal” and few notice it. But the smallest glitch can have devastating business impacts.  For over a decade, networking has been adapting to become more programmable, closer to applications, and easier to use. At the same, the number of devices increased drastically while and applications exponentially. More than ever, there is a need to adapt the network to the new paradigm of multi-cloud environments, and to make it on-demand, easy to use, and simple. The network should be transparent to applications and users, yet allow the most complex environments to communicate reliably.

Let’s dig into the three pillars of a Modern Network framework.

Modern App Connectivity Services

User experience is paramount in today’s world. Applications and data are increasingly distributed across multiple on-premises data centers and public, private, and multi-cloud environments. At the same time, users and devices (including IoT) are spreading out from a centralized corporate headquarters to branch offices, remote worksites, and, increasingly, home offices. This new reality means that, more and more, machines are talking to machines and applications are talking to applications, creating network complexity that can only be mitigated by Continue reading

When trusted relationships are formed, everyone wins!

When trusted relationships are formed, everyone wins!
When trusted relationships are formed, everyone wins!

Key Points:

  • Customer Success Managers offer continual strategic and technical guidance by way of interactive workshops, account reviews, tuning sessions and regular product updates.
  • Our product development and design teams constantly work on new features and product updates based on your input.
  • It’s a team effort. As part of our Premium Success offering, we can introduce you to Product Managers for in-depth conversations about our solutions and how they can apply to your business goals.
  • Cloudflare is always rapidly evolving and expanding our solutions! As technology advances, so does the sophistication of attacks. Through machine learning and behavioural analysis, we are able to ship new products to ensure you remain secure without impacting performance.

Reach out to your Customer Success Manager to gain more information on how they can accelerate your business.

The Success Story

Hi there. My name is Jake Jones and I’m a Customer Success Manager at Cloudflare covering the Middle East and Africa. When I look at what success means to me, it’s becoming a trusted advisor for my customers by taking a genuine interest in their priorities and helping them reach desired goals. I’ve learnt that successful partnerships are a byproduct of successful relationship building. Every Continue reading

Using AI to manage IoT sensor power

Sensor power loss is the scourge of IoT.Deploying millions of sensors is pretty much a useless endeavor if the devices continually run out of power. IoT sensors can't collect or transmit data without power.That's one reason researchers are exploring ambient energy harvesting. Numerous projects have shown that small amounts of power can be generated by converting ambient energy in the environment – from stray magnetic fields, humidity, waste heat, and even unwanted wireless radio noise, for example – into usable electrical energy to power the IoT.To read this article in full, please click here

Using AI to manage IoT sensor power

Sensor power loss is the scourge of IoT.Deploying millions of sensors is pretty much a useless endeavor if the devices continually run out of power. IoT sensors can't collect or transmit data without power.That's one reason researchers are exploring ambient energy harvesting. Numerous projects have shown that small amounts of power can be generated by converting ambient energy in the environment – from stray magnetic fields, humidity, waste heat, and even unwanted wireless radio noise, for example – into usable electrical energy to power the IoT.To read this article in full, please click here

Hybrid cloud keeps human-capital management firm nimble

Ceridian is betting on hybrid cloud, network virtualization and automation as it aims to improve IT service delivery, weed out inefficiencies and bolster security.The human capital management (HCM) company recently completed its transition to a cloud architecture, shuttering its on-premises data centers and migrating its applications and back-office systems to multiple clouds. "We are a true consumer of hybrid cloud technology," says CIO Warren Perlman. "We have operations in both [VMware Cloud on AWS] as well as native AWS, and also native Azure."To read this article in full, please click here

Why You Should Cancel Your Social Media Accounts

Over the past ten years, the world generally has noticed serious social media websites like MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook which have all generated different ways for people to interact and connect with other people. Facebook is known as the biggest social website. Today we have more than a billion users that make use of Facebook. In the future, with kids growing up and joining the social media platform, the number of people will increase. Facebook has been used for both personal and business communication, and its usage has brought lots of advantages in terms of sharing ideas, increasing connectivity, and learning online.

But as time passes, some studies have merged networking online with different disorders that come from the minds of the users. These disorders include low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, and a lot of others. Because social media is a product of the 21st century, lots of questions relating to their impact on the health of its users mentally haven’t gotten desired answers yet. Because these online services are linked to the general population, any confirmed connection in the future between these diseases and these social media platforms could turn to a serious problem.

Reasons You Should Cancel Your Continue reading

Hybrid cloud keeps human capital management firm nimble

Ceridian is betting on hybrid cloud, network virtualization and automation as it aims to improve IT service delivery, weed out inefficiencies and bolster security.The human capital management (HCM) company recently completed its transition to a cloud architecture, shuttering its on-premises data centers and migrating its applications and back-office systems to multiple clouds. "We are a true consumer of hybrid cloud technology," says CIO Warren Perlman. "We have operations in both [VMware Cloud on AWS] as well as native AWS, and also native Azure."To read this article in full, please click here

Used IT equipment: Millennials push enterprises into the circular economy

The Millennial generation is becoming a driving force behind the circular economy of used IT equipment.IT shops have typically bought used gear if they needed to replace old equipment and couldn't get parts from the vendor. But the idea of buying a low-mileage server with one or two years of use wasn't very popular. Companies typically bought new.But that's changing. IT shops of all sizes are increasingly buying used gear, both brand name and white box brands from China, according to IDC. The research firm puts the CAGR at 5% and estimates sales of used IT infrastructure gear will reach $36 billion by 2024. The deals are being done through the major OEMs as well as resellers like ITRenew, which buys servers from hyperscalers, refreshes them, certifies they are functioning, and resells them.To read this article in full, please click here

Hybrid cloud keeps human capital management firm nimble

Ceridian is betting on hybrid cloud, network virtualization and automation as it aims to improve IT service delivery, weed out inefficiencies and bolster security.The human capital management (HCM) company recently completed its transition to a cloud architecture, shuttering its on-premises data centers and migrating its applications and back-office systems to multiple clouds. "We are a true consumer of hybrid cloud technology," says CIO Warren Perlman. "We have operations in both [VMware Cloud on AWS] as well as native AWS, and also native Azure."To read this article in full, please click here

Used IT equipment: Millennials push enterprises into the circular economy

The Millennial generation is becoming a driving force behind the circular economy of used IT equipment.IT shops have typically bought used gear if they needed to replace old equipment and couldn't get parts from the vendor. But the idea of buying a low-mileage server with one or two years of use wasn't very popular. Companies typically bought new.But that's changing. IT shops of all sizes are increasingly buying used gear, both brand name and white box brands from China, according to IDC. The research firm puts the CAGR at 5% and estimates sales of used IT infrastructure gear will reach $36 billion by 2024. The deals are being done through the major OEMs as well as resellers like ITRenew, which buys servers from hyperscalers, refreshes them, certifies they are functioning, and resells them.To read this article in full, please click here

Achieve Multi-Cloud Application Scalability for Modern Apps

The modern application is dynamic and highly adaptive to changes in demand. It lives across multiple clusters and clouds. And it is highly distributed with hundreds of microservices servicing the requirements of rapid feature releases, high resiliency, and on demand scalability. In such a world, we simply cannot afford to continue to rely solely on the network architectures of the last decade.

Modern applications need a Modern Network—one that simplifies operations, reduces IT overhead and prioritizes user needs—such that organizations can empower users with fast, reliable and secure application access wherever and whenever they do business, regardless of the underlying infrastructure or connectivity. This requires adopting the public cloud—or even multiple public clouds—as an extension of on-premises infrastructure. What enterprises need is a common, multi-dimensional framework that provides availability, resiliency, and security for modern applications, with the ability to abstract connectivity, identity, and policy via declarative intents. These dimensions of control are paramount for modern applications – improving the visibility and control of assets that are ephemeral in nature and not directly under the Continue reading

The Case for Self-Healing Networks

Digital transformation has changed the way applications are deployed and consumed. The end-user to application journey has become increasingly complex and is a key objective for the Modern Network.  End-users are more distributed, and applications run on heterogenous infrastructure often delivered from on-prem data centers, IaaS, SaaS, and public cloud locations.  On average, enterprises use hundreds of applications.  The number of end-user and IoT devices have also increased exponentially. They include infusion pumps in hospitals to Point of Sale systems in retail.  These devices access applications from manufacturing floor, carpeted offices, homes or while users are on the move. As more devices and applications are enabled, the network increases in both complexity and value to the enterprise.

What has become increasingly clear is the need for advanced self-healing solutions that compensate for this complexity by helping IT teams shift to a proactive mode of operating a network.  Several tools exist that provide domain or service-specific insights, but it is left to the IT teams to make sense of the volumes of data generated by these fragmented solutions to detect issues and perform root cause analysis.  The dynamic nature of the network, device density, and the volume of data and Continue reading

Fault Tolerant Network Design for Application High Availability

Enterprises are growing increasingly dependent on modern distributed applications to innovate and respond quickly to new market challenges.  As applications grow in significance, the end-user experience of the application has become a key differentiator for most businesses.  Understanding what kind of application performance the end-users experience, optimizing the infrastructure, and quickly identifying the source of any issues has become extremely critical.

The Modern Network framework puts the end-user experience at the forefront.  It helps our customers provide the public cloud experience on-premise with an on-demand network that enforces secure connectivity and service objectives across on-premise and cloud environments.  As applications become more distributed, the increased application resiliency and efficiency often comes at the cost of increased contention for shared resources.  The dynamic nature of the network, device density, and the volume of data and transactions generated makes this even more challenging. Managing network complexity and simplifying network operations in such environments requires a well architected network with support for modern cloud concepts such as availability zones that provide fault tolerance.  Similarly, effective network-level fault isolation requires the ability to create self-contained fault domains that facilitate network resiliency, disaster recovery and avoidance, and end-to-end root cause(s) analysis throughout the Continue reading

Achieving 100Gbps intrusion prevention on a single server

Achieving 100 Gbps intrusion prevention on a single server, Zhao et al., OSDI’20

Papers-we-love is hosting a mini-event this Wednesday (18th) where I’ll be leading a panel discussion including one of the authors of today’s paper choice: Justine Sherry. Please do join us if you can.

We always want more! This stems from a combination of Jevon’s paradox and the interconnectedness of systems – doing more in one area often leads to a need for more elsewhere too. At the end of the day, there are three basic ways we can increase capacity:

  1. Increasing the number of units in a system (subject to Amdahl’s law).
  2. Improving the efficiency with which we can coordinate work across a collection of units (see the Universal Scalability Law)
  3. Increasing the amount of work we can do on a single unit

Options 1 and 2 are of course the ‘scale out’ options, whereas option 3 is ‘scale up’. With more nodes and more coordination comes more complexity, both in design and operation. So while scale out has seen the majority of attention in the cloud era, it’s good to remind ourselves periodically just what we really can do on a single Continue reading

Zero-Touch Provisioning for Juniper

Juniper’s official documentation on ZTP explains how to configure the ISC DHCP Server to automatically upgrade and configure on first boot a Juniper device. However, the proposed configuration could be a bit more elegant. This note explains how.

TL;DR

Do not redefine option 43. Instead, specify the vendor option space to use to encode parameters with vendor-option-space.

When booting for the first time, a Juniper device requests its IP address through a DHCP discover message, then request additional parameters for autoconfiguration through a DHCP request message:

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (Request)
    Message type: Boot Request (1)
    Hardware type: Ethernet (0x01)
    Hardware address length: 6
    Hops: 0
    Transaction ID: 0x44e3a7c9
    Seconds elapsed: 0
    Bootp flags: 0x8000, Broadcast flag (Broadcast)
    Client IP address: 0.0.0.0
    Your (client) IP address: 0.0.0.0
    Next server IP address: 0.0.0.0
    Relay agent IP address: 0.0.0.0
    Client MAC address: 02:00:00:00:00:01 (02:00:00:00:00:01)
    Client hardware address padding: 00000000000000000000
    Server host name not given
    Boot file name not given
    Magic cookie: DHCP
    Option: (54) DHCP Server Identifier (10.0.2.2)
    Option: (55) Parameter Request List
        Length: 14
        Parameter Request List Item: (3) Router
        Parameter Request List Item: (51) IP  Continue reading
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