COVID-19: Weekly internet health check

As COVID-19 continues to spread, forcing employees to work from home, the services of ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services a.k.a. unified communications as a service (UCaaS) providers are experiencing increased traffic.ThousandEyes is monitoring how these increases affect outages and the performance challenges these providers undergo. It will provide Network World a roundup of interesting events of the week in the delivery of these services, and Network World will provide a summary here. Stop back next week for another update, and see more details here.To read this article in full, please click here

Folding@home exascale supercomputer finds potential targets for COVID-19 cure

The Folding@home project has shared new results of its efforts to simulate proteins from the SARS-CoV-2 virus to better understand how they function and how to stop them.Folding@home is a distributed computing effort that uses small clients to run simulations for biomedical research when users' PCs are idle. The clients operate independently of each other to perform their own unique simulation and send in the results to the F@h servers. (Read more about where the Folding@home network is administered and how it broke the exaFLOPS barrier.)To read this article in full, please click here

Grasp the Fundamentals before Spreading Opinions

I should have known better, but I got pulled into another stretched VLANs for disaster recovery tweetfest. Surprisingly, most of the tweets were along the lines of you really shouldn’t be doing that and that would never work well, but then I guess I was only exposed to a small curated bubble of common sense… until this gem appeared in my timeline:

Networking Needs ZIP codes

Interestingly, that’s exactly how IP works:

Read more …

Grasp the Fundamentals before Spreading Opinions

I should have known better, but I got pulled into another stretched VLANs for disaster recovery tweetfest. Surprisingly, most of the tweets were along the lines of you really shouldn’t be doing that and that would never work well, but then I guess I was only exposed to a small curated bubble of common sense… until this gem appeared in my timeline:

Networking Needs ZIP codes

Interestingly, that’s exactly how IP works:

Read more …

Choosing a Container-Native Network for Kubernetes

Similar to container-native storage, the container-native network abstracts the physical network infrastructure to expose a flat network to containers. It is tightly integrated with Kubernetes to tackle the challenges involved in pod-to-pod, node-to-node, pod-to-service and external communication. Kubernetes can support a host of plugins based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Sponsor Note KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conferences gather adopters and technologists to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. The vendor-neutral events feature domain experts and key maintainers behind popular projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, CoreDNS, containerd and more. Container-native networks go beyond basic connectivity. They provide dynamic enforcement of network security rules. Through a predefined policy, it is possible to configure fine-grained control over communications between containers, pods and nodes. Choosing the right networking stack is critical to maintain and secure the CaaS platform. Customers can select the stack from open source projects including Contiv, Project CalicoTungsten Fabric and

Helios: hyperscale indexing for the cloud & edge – part 1

Helios: hyperscale indexing for the cloud & edge, Potharaju et al., PVLDB’20

On the surface this is a paper about fast data ingestion from high-volume streams, with indexing to support efficient querying. As a production system within Microsoft capturing around a quadrillion events and indexing 16 trillion search keys per day it would be interesting in its own right, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Helios also serves as a reference architecture for how Microsoft envisions its next generation of distributed big-data processing systems being built. These two narratives of reference architecture and ingestion/indexing system are interwoven throughout the paper. I’m going to tackle the paper in two parts, focusing today on the reference architecture, and in the next post on the details of Helios itself. What follows is a discussion of where big data systems might be heading, heavily inspired by the remarks in this paper, but with several of my own thoughts mixed in. If there’s something you disagree with, blame me first!

Why do we need a new reference architecture?

Cloud-native systems represent by far the largest, most distributed, computing systems in our history. And the established cloud-native architectural principles behind Continue reading

Tech Bytes: Construction Firm Improves Job Site Productivity With Silver Peak SD-WAN (Sponsored)

Today's Tech Bytes, sponsored by Silver Peak, is an SD-WAN conversation with Rogers-O’Brien Construction. We’ll talk about how this construction company relies on SD-WAN to enable fast, high-performance connectivity at remote construction sites, handle massive file transfers, securely segment partner traffic, and more.

The post Tech Bytes: Construction Firm Improves Job Site Productivity With Silver Peak SD-WAN (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Random Thoughts on IoT

Let’s play the analogy game. The Internet of Things (IoT) is probably going end up being like … a box of chocolates, because you never do know what you are going to get? a big bowl of spaghetti with a serious lack of meatballs? Whatever it is, the IoT should have network folks worried about security. There is, of course, the problem of IoT devices being attached to random places on the network, exfiltrating personal data back to a cloud server you don’t know anything about. Some of these devices might be rogue, of course, such as Raspberry Pi attached to some random place in the network. Others might be more conventional, such as those new exercise machines the company just brought into the gym that’s sending personal information in the clear to an outside service.

While there is research into how to tell the difference between IoT and “larger” devices, the reality is spoofing and blurred lines will likely make such classification difficult. What do you do with a virtual machine that looks like a Raspberry Pi running on a corporate laptop for completely legitimate reasons? Or what about the Raspberry Pi-like device that can run a fully operational Continue reading

Road to gRPC

Road to gRPC
Road to gRPC

Cloudflare launched support for gRPC® during our 2020 Birthday Week. We’ve been humbled by the immense interest in the beta, and we’d like to thank everyone that has applied and tried out gRPC! In this post we’ll do a deep-dive into the technical details on how we implemented support.

What is gRPC?

gRPC is an open source RPC framework running over HTTP/2. RPC (remote procedure call) is a way for one machine to tell another machine to do something, rather than calling a local function in a library. RPC has been around in the history of distributed computing, with different implementations focusing on different areas, for a long time. What makes gRPC unique are the following characteristics:

  • It requires the modern HTTP/2 protocol for transport, which is now widely available.
  • A full client/server reference implementation, demo, and test suites are available as open source.
  • It does not specify a message format, although Protocol Buffers are the preferred serialization mechanism.
  • Both clients and servers can stream data, which avoids having to poll for new data or create new connections.

In terms of the protocol, gRPC uses HTTP/2 frames extensively: requests and responses look very similar to a normal HTTP/2 request.

Continue reading

Network Break 307: Cisco Launches Catalyst 8000 Edge Routers; Juniper Spends $450 Million For 128 Technology

Today's Network Break covers new SD-WAN routers from Cisco, a giant Juniper acquisition, new WIPS capabilities from Extreme, the United States' anti-trust lawsuit against Google, Intel selling its NAND business, and Space Networking!

The post Network Break 307: Cisco Launches Catalyst 8000 Edge Routers; Juniper Spends $450 Million For 128 Technology appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Low demand and high production create a bargain for SSD drives

Analysts had expected 2020 to be a year of rising NAND flash prices after a supply glut in 2019. The reasoning, backed by years of repeating patterns, was that after an oversupply, vendors like SK Hynix and Micron would slow production to drive prices up.Cue COVID-19 and the ensuing chaos.TrendForce, a market research firm that follows the memory market, said there has been a general decline in contract prices starting last quarter due to oversupply. This oversupply situation is attributed to the accumulation of inventory caused by the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. Learn more:To read this article in full, please click here

Low demand and high production create a bargain for SSD drives

Analysts had expected 2020 to be a year of rising NAND flash prices after a supply glut in 2019. The reasoning, backed by years of repeating patterns, was that after an oversupply, vendors like SK Hynix and Micron would slow production to drive prices up.Cue COVID-19 and the ensuing chaos.TrendForce, a market research firm that follows the memory market, said there has been a general decline in contract prices starting last quarter due to oversupply. This oversupply situation is attributed to the accumulation of inventory caused by the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. Learn more:To read this article in full, please click here

The Week in Internet News: U.S. Files Antitrust Case Against Google

"In the news" text on yellow background

Searching for a monopoly: The U.S. Department of Justice has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, accusing the tech giant of illegal monopolies in search and search advertising, CNet reports. The DOJ has accused Google of acting as an Internet “gatekeeper.” Google disputed the allegations, saying people use its services because they choose to, not because they have to.

New networking: The Lower Brule Sioux Tribe in central South Dakota has advanced a plan to provide computers and high-speed Internet connections to all students and teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Argus Leader says. Since early June, the tribe has been working on a plan to build its own wireless Internet network, intended to cover the 207-square-mile Lower Brule reservation. The new network is the first-of-its-kind in South Dakota, and it began limited operations in July.

A bumpy relaunch: The French government’s relaunch of its COVID-19 tracing app, called, “TousAntiCovid,” hit some snags when it was downloaded more than 500,000 times in the hours following its launch, the BBC says. The traffic led to some stability problems, with some people unable to launch the app.

DNS vs. crime: Securing the Internet’s domain name system is a crucial step in Continue reading

1 … 856 857 858 859 860 … 3,834