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Understanding operational 5G: a first measurement study on its coverage, performance and energy consumption

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Interop Is On!

We shifted this year's Interop to an online event. And it's this week. We've used the extra time to develop an incredibly strong networks and infrastructure track.

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Birthday week: Cloudflare turns 10

2020 marks a major milestone for Cloudflare: it’s our 10th birthday.

We’ve always used birthdays as an opportunity to give back to the Internet. But this year — a year in which the Internet has been so central to giving us all some degree of connectedness and normalcy — it feels like giving back to the Internet has been more important than ever.

And while we couldn’t celebrate in person, we were humbled by some of the incredible minds that joined us online to talk about how the Internet has changed over the last ten years — and what we might see over the next ten.

With that, let’s recap the key announcements from Birthday Week 2020.

Day 1, Monday: Workers

During Birthday Week in 2017, Cloudflare announced Workers — a serverless platform that represented a completely new way to build applications: by writing your code directly onto our network edge. On Monday of this year’s Birthday Week, we announced Durable Objects and Cron Triggers — both of which continue to expand the use cases that Workers can address.

Many folks associate the serverless paradigm with functions as a service — which, at its core, is stateless. Workers KV started Continue reading

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Weekend Reads 100220

Equinix is not just about colocation anymore. The company is reinforcing that reality with new branding that positions Equinix as “the world’s digital infrastructure company.”

An FPGA is a chip that is programmed by a circuit. It is said to “emulate” that circuit. This emulation runs slower than the actual circuit would run if it were implemented in an ASIC—it has a slower clock frequency and uses more power, but it can be reprogrammed every few hundred milliseconds.

If I could change one thing in the minds of all programming language designers, it would be to impress upon them—forcefully—the idea that anything that is significant to the syntactic or structural meaning of a program must be easily visible to the human reader, as well as easily understood by the systems used by developers.

The same attributes that give deep learning its ability to tell images apart are helping attackers break into the cryptoprocessors built into integrated circuits that were meant improve their security. The same technology may provide the tools that will let chip designers find effective countermeasures, but it faces an uphill struggle.

If your broadband keeps going haywire, maybe someone nearby is using an ancient television set.

Continue reading

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Must Watch: Fault Tolerance through Optimal Workload Placement

While I keep telling you that Google-sized solutions aren’t necessarily the best fit for your environment, some of the hyperscaler presentations contain nuggets that apply to any environment no matter how small it is.

One of those must-watch presentations is Fault Tolerance through Optimal Workload Placement together with a wonderful TL&DR summary by the one-and-only Todd Hoff of the High Scalability fame.

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Must Watch: Fault Tolerance through Optimal Workload Placement

While I keep telling you that Google-sized solutions aren’t necessarily the best fit for your environment, some of the hyperscaler presentations contain nuggets that apply to any environment no matter how small it is.

One of those must-watch presentations is Fault Tolerance through Optimal Workload Placement together with a wonderful TL&DR summary by the one-and-only Todd Hoff of the High Scalability fame.

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Introducing support for the AVIF image format

We've added support for the new AVIF image format in Image Resizing. It compresses images significantly better than older-generation formats such as WebP and JPEG. It's supported in Chrome desktop today, and support is coming to other Chromium-based browsers, as well as Firefox.

What’s the benefit?

More than a half of an average website's bandwidth is spent on images. Improved image compression can save bandwidth and improve overall performance of the web. The compression in AVIF is so good that images can reduce to half the size of JPEG and WebP

What is AVIF?

AVIF is a combination of the HEIF ISO standard, and a royalty-free AV1 codec by Mozilla, Xiph, Google, Cisco, and many others.

Currently JPEG is the most popular image format on the Web. It's doing remarkably well for its age, and it will likely remain popular for years to come thanks to its excellent compatibility. There have been many previous attempts at replacing JPEG, such as JPEG 2000, JPEG XR and WebP. However, these formats offered only modest compression improvements, and didn't always beat JPEG on image quality. Compression and image quality in AVIF is better than in all of them, and by a wide margin.

Continue reading

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MUST READ: A Summary of High Speed Ethernet ASICs

Justin Pietsch is back with another must-read article, this time focused on high-speed Ethernet switching ASICs. I’ve rarely seen so many adjacent topics covered in a single easy-to-read article.

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MUST READ: A Summary of High Speed Ethernet ASICs

Justin Pietsch is back with another must-read article, this time focused on high-speed Ethernet switching ASICs. I’ve rarely seen so many adjacent topics covered in a single easy-to-read article.

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Technology Short Take 131

Welcome to Technology Short Take #131! I’m back with another collection of articles on various data center technologies. This time around the content is a tad heavy on the security side, but I’ve still managed to pull in articles on networking, cloud computing, applications, and some programming-related content. Here’s hoping you find something useful here!

Networking

• This recent Ars Technica article points out that a feature in Chromium—the open source project leveraged by Chrome and Edge, among others—is having a significant impact on root DNS traffic. More technical details can be found in an associated APNIC blog post.
• Here’s a few details around Open Service Mesh.
• Quentin Machu outlines a series of problems his company experienced using Weave Net as the CNI for their Kubernetes clusters, as well as describes the migration process to a new CNI. His blog post is well worth a read, IMO.

Security

• I thought I’d mentioned this already, but there’s a flaw in a Snapdragon chip that puts greater than 1 billion Android phones at risk, according to Ars Technica.
• Jed Salazar of Isovalent (the company behind Cilium) has a fairly detailed article showing some examples of how Cilium protects against certain network attacks.
• Continue reading

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Heavy Networking 542: Is Whitebox Too Risky For The Enterprise?

Tom Hollingsworth stops by the Heavy Networking podcast to weigh in on a few topics, including the conflict between Broadcom and NVIDIA, and whether whitebox networking is becoming too risky for enterprise networks.

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Heavy Networking 542: Is Whitebox Too Risky For The Enterprise?

Tom Hollingsworth stops by the Heavy Networking podcast to weigh in on a few topics, including the conflict between Broadcom and NVIDIA, and whether whitebox networking is becoming too risky for enterprise networks.

The post Heavy Networking 542: Is Whitebox Too Risky For The Enterprise? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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BiB097: VMware’s Future In The Cloud-Native Era

Kit Colbert is the VP & CTO, Cloud Platform BU at VMware. In this briefing, Drew Conry-Murray and Ethan Banks reflect on a Zoom conversation they had with Kit during VMworld 2020. The context of the conversation was simple enough. Harshly stated, we wanted to know what VMware's future is in the cloud-native era. Will companies need VMware? Kit's answer was not hand-wavy, cheerleader-ish nonsense. Instead, he responded with a thoughtful plan.

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BiB097: VMware’s Future In The Cloud-Native Era

Kit Colbert is the VP & CTO, Cloud Platform BU at VMware. In this briefing, Drew Conry-Murray and Ethan Banks reflect on a Zoom conversation they had with Kit during VMworld 2020. The context of the conversation was simple enough. Harshly stated, we wanted to know what VMware's future is in the cloud-native era. Will companies need VMware? Kit's answer was not hand-wavy, cheerleader-ish nonsense. Instead, he responded with a thoughtful plan.

The post BiB097: VMware’s Future In The Cloud-Native Era appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Design an Edge System for the Cloud Native Edge Infrastructure

In the previous article, I discussed how Rancher’s Calico networking software, and the Intel NUCs. The infrastructure is based on K3s, Calico, and Portworx that provide the core building blocks of the Kubernetes cluster. Solution Architecture The sensors attached to the fans of the turbine provide the current rotational speed, vibration, temperature, and noise level. This telemetry data stream along with the deviceID from each fan acts as the input to the predictive maintenance solution. InfluxDB is connected to Mosquitto via Grafana dashboard to InfluxDB to build a beautiful visualization for our AIoT solution. In the next part of this tutorial, I will discuss the deployment architecture along with the storage and network considerations based on K3s, Calico, and Portworx. Stay tuned. Janakiram MSV’s Webinar series, “Machine Intelligence and Modern Infrastructure (MI2)” offers informative and insightful sessions covering cutting-edge technologies. Sign up for the upcoming MI2 webinar at

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The Internet Is Built on ‘Intermediaries’ – They Should Be Protected

This opinion piece was originally published in The Hill.

Now is not the time to be careless with laws that could harm the Internet we rely on more than ever in our day to day lives.

Policymakers owe it to the billions of users around world that rely on the Internet for work, education, and daily activities to do their homework before attempting to change laws so pivotal to the Internet’s success.

And yet, the uptick of lawmakers making hasty changes to the law known as “Section 230” is proof of uninformed decision making that has the future of a law that helped shape the Internet looking increasingly grim.

In the last two years, there have been at least 18 attempts – via bills, executive orders and other initiatives – to try blow up the rule that has kept Internet intermediaries from being liable from the actions of their users since 1996. Within each of those efforts, the definition of what will be impacted has varied widely from “platforms” to “interactive computer services” and “Internet intermediaries.”

Depending on these definitions, and the larger policies they are attached to, the associated impacts of these proposals could be annoying, or they could Continue reading

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Introducing Automatic Platform Optimization, starting with WordPress

Today, we are announcing a new service to serve more than just the static content of your website with the Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) service. With this launch, we are supporting WordPress, the most popular website hosting solution serving 38% of all websites. Our testing, as detailed below, showed a 72% reduction in Time to First Byte (TTFB), 23% reduction to First Contentful Paint, and 13% reduction in Speed Index for desktop users at the 90th percentile, by serving nearly all of your website’s content from Cloudflare’s network. This means visitors to your website see not only the first content sooner but all content more quickly.

With Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress, your customers won’t suffer any slowness caused by common issues like shared hosting congestion, slow database lookups, or misbehaving plugins. This service is now available for anyone using WordPress. It costs $5/month for customers on our Free plan and is included, at no additional cost, in our Professional, Business, and Enterprise plans. No usage fees, no surprises, just speed.

How to get started

The easiest way to get started with APO is from your WordPress admin console.

1. First, install the Cloudflare WordPress plugin on your WordPress Continue reading

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Building Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress using Cloudflare Workers

This post explains how we implemented the Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress. In doing so, we have defined a new place to run WordPress plugins, at the edge written with Cloudflare Workers. We provide the feature as a Cloudflare service but what’s exciting is that anyone could build this using the Workers platform.

The service is an evolution of the ideas explained in an earlier zero-config edge caching of HTML blog post. The post will explain how Automatic Platform Optimization combines the best qualities of the regular Cloudflare cache with Workers KV to improve cache cold starts globally.

The optimization will work both with and without the Cloudflare for WordPress plugin integration. Not only have we provided a zero config edge HTML caching solution but by using the Workers platform we were also able to improve the performance of Google font loading for all pages.

We are launching the feature first for WordPress specifically but the concept can be applied to any website and/or content management system (CMS).

A new place to run WordPress plugins?

There are many individual WordPress plugins for performance that use similar optimizations to existing Cloudflare services. Automatic Platform Optimization is bringing them all together into Continue reading

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Intel and Lightbits Labs team to improve storage performance

Intel has partnered with Lightbits Labs, as well as taken a financial stake in the startup, to improve the performance of storage systems in data centers. The two companies plan to develop disaggregated storage solutions designed to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) in storage systems due to extraneous hardware and "stranded disk capacity."Stranded disk capacity refers to storage that has been allocated but is unused or unavailable for use by applications for any number of reasons, including problems with a connection. The result is that storage systems are burning electricity but not being used. READ MORE: NVMe over Fabrics creates data-center storage disruptionTo read this article in full, please click here

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DNS Flag Day 2020

October 1 was this year’s DNS Flag Day. Read on to find out all about DNS Flag Day and how it affects Cloudflare’s DNS services (hint: it doesn’t, we already did the work to be compliant).

What is DNS Flag Day?

DNS Flag Day is an initiative by several DNS vendors and operators to increase the compliance of implementations with DNS standards. The goal is to make DNS more secure, reliable and robust. Rather than a push for new features, DNS flag day is meant to ensure that workarounds for non-compliance can be reduced and a common set of functionalities can be established and relied upon.

Last year’s flag day was February 1, and it set forth that servers and clients must be able to properly handle the Extensions to DNS (EDNS0) protocol (first RFC about EDNS0 are from 1999 - RFC 2671). This way, by assuming clients have a working implementation of EDNS0, servers can resort to always sending messages as EDNS0. This is needed to support DNSSEC, the DNS security extensions. We were, of course, more than thrilled to support the effort, as we’re keen to push DNSSEC adoption forward .

DNS Flag Day 2020

The goal for Continue reading