Video: Should You Build or Buy a Solution?

After figuring out what business problem you’re trying to solve and what the users expect to get from you it’s time for the next crucial question: should you buy a shrink-wrapped product/solution or build your own? I addressed that question in the third part of Focus on Business Challenges First presentation.

Not surprisingly, the same dilemma applies to network automation solutions, and is often the source of endless time-wasting discussions that I really should have stopped engaging in, but sometimes duty calls ;)

Watch the video
The video is part of Business Aspects of Networking Technologies webinar and available with Free ipSpace.net Subscription.

AWS offers “bare-metal” Mac cloud services

Amazon Web Services has announced that it is offering what it calls bare-metal Macs in its cloud, although Amazon’s definition of “bare metal” doesn’t exactly jibe with the generally accepted definition.“Bare metal” typically means no operating system. It’s very popular as a means of what is known as “lift and shift,” where a company takes its custom operating environment, starting with the operating system, libraries, apps, databases, and so on, and moves it from on-premises to the cloud without needing to make a modification to its software stack.Here, Amazon is offering Macs running macOS 10.14 (Mojave) or 10.15 (Catalina) on an eighth generation, six-core Intel Core i7 (Coffee Lake) processor running at 3.2 GHz. (Amusingly, the instances are run on Mac Minis. What I wouldn’t give to see a data center with racks full of Mac Minis.)To read this article in full, please click here

One Way To Bring DPU Acceleration To Supercomputing

That is not a typo in the title. We did not mean to say GPU in title above, or even make a joke that in hybrid CPU_GPU systems, the CPU is more of a serial processing accelerator with a giant slow DDR4 cache for GPUs in hybrid supercomputers these days – therefore making the CPU a kind of accelerator for the GPU. …

One Way To Bring DPU Acceleration To Supercomputing was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

What Does A Good Network Design Look Like? – James Bensley, Senior Network Design Engineer

Is a good network design just about technical specifications or should you take into account business drivers and needs? James is a network design veteran and presented on this topic at UKNOF45. We talk about design considerations, tips and tricks, drivers and motivations, asking the question behind the question and even about a book that is ‘in the works’. James is very active on Twitter, LinkedIn and can be reached via [email protected].

Lenovo Spreads The AI Message Far And Wide

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.

What developers need to know about Docker, Docker Engine, and Kubernetes v1.20

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

MANRS Welcomes 500th Network Operator

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

Isovalent Harnesses eBPF for Cloud Native Security, Visibility

Veteran networking pros at Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) technology, which makes the Linux kernel programmable, to address the ephemeral challenges of Kubernetes and microservices. “If you think about the Linux kernel, traditionally, it’s a static set of functionality that some Linux kernel developer over the course of the last 20 or 30 years decided to build and they compiled it into the Linux kernel. And it works the way that kernel developer thought about, but may not be applicable to the use case that we need to do today,” said Isovalent CEO

Fast Failover: Techniques and Technologies

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).

The following text is heavily based on comments Jeff Tantsura wrote on one of my LinkedIn posts as well as the original blog post. Thank you!

There are numerous technologies you can use to implement fast reroute, from the most complex to the easiest one:

Read more …

Fast Failover: Techniques and Technologies

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).

The following text is heavily based on comments Jeff Tantsura wrote on one of my LinkedIn posts as well as the original blog post. Thank you!

There are numerous technologies you can use to implement fast reroute, from the most complex to the easiest one:

Read more …

Rails Generators Cheat Sheet

As I am digging into Rails again I find myself constantly having to look the naming and syntax of generators up so I am documenting them in this post. Rails utilizes convention over configuration to speed up development and increase developer happiness. If you embrace this fact you will...

Bypassing safety check for an obviously safe change

This is less concrete technical than my usual blog post.

For every 100 changes we’re 99% sure won’t cause an outage, one will

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

Broadcom Widens And Smartens Switch Chip Lineup

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.

SUSE’s Rancher acquisition brings containerization support

SUSE’s acquisition of Rancher Labs puts the Germany-based open-source software company in a much stronger position to offer flexible, edge-based services to its customers, according to an analyst at IDC.The deal—which was originally announced this summer—essentially makes Rancher Labs into SUSE’s containerization “innovation center,” said IDC research director Gary Chen. Any customer working on digital transformation and rapid development is likely to appreciate the improved support for containerization—letting workloads function on whatever hardware is handy, and communicate across different arrangements of edge, cloud and local computing.Terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed, but a CNBC report published after the initial announcement quoted sources familiar with the deal as saying that SUSE is paying between $600 million and $700 million.To read this article in full, please click here

SUSE’s Rancher acquisition brings containerization support

SUSE’s acquisition of Rancher Labs puts the Germany-based open-source software company in a much stronger position to offer flexible, edge-based services to its customers, according to an analyst at IDC.The deal—which was originally announced this summer—essentially makes Rancher Labs into SUSE’s containerization “innovation center,” said IDC research director Gary Chen. Any customer working on digital transformation and rapid development is likely to appreciate the improved support for containerization—letting workloads function on whatever hardware is handy, and communicate across different arrangements of edge, cloud and local computing.Terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed, but a CNBC report published after the initial announcement quoted sources familiar with the deal as saying that SUSE is paying between $600 million and $700 million.To read this article in full, please click here

What is a WAN? Wide-area network definition and examples

People want to connect to all of their apps all of the time from all of their devices no matter where they are. And they pretty much can, thanks to wide-area networks (WANs).At its core, a WAN is a network of networks. The Internet itself is a giant WAN, and how you connect to it can be as diverse as through an Ethernet cable, coaxial cable, or a cellular radio signal.Your office network, home Wi-Fi, cellphone, smartwatch, doorbell camera and vehicle-based Internet connection are just endpoints on a vast global WAN that is constantly evolving to carry more traffic, and to carrt that traffic faster as the demands for near-instantaneous access to resources increase.To read this article in full, please click here

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