Why I’m running for the NANOG Board of Directors?
This year I decided to run for the NANOG Board of Directors and I wanted to elaborate what I would like to accomplish if elected. The election for NANOG Board of Directors will be held October 19 -21, 2020. Please mark your calendar and see my full profile at https://www.nanog.org/participate/elections-nominations/2020-board-candidates/board-candidate-tom-kacprzynski/
Being in the industry for the last sixteen years, I have been involved in operating a number of network types such as enterprise, datacenter, private backbone and CDN networks. Throughout these years I’ve gained the technical and organizational knowledge at established and lean startup businesses. My roles ranged from technical network engineering/architecture to leadership as department head of network engineering and software development teams along with network sourcing.
Since 2018, I was selected for the NANOG program committee and currently serving my second term. Additionally I serve as community organizer in creating a local Chicago/Midwest community of network operators. Since 2014 I have started the Chicago Network Operators Group, which is modeled after NANOG, as a vendor neutral organization. Producing nine successful conferences for the last six years has provided me with experience on working with vendors, navigating conference venue logistics, acquiring sponsors, curating content with the Continue reading
Tech Bytes: AppNeta And Performance Visibility Over The Last Mile (Sponsored)
Today’s Tech Bytes episode is sponsored by AppNeta, and we’re going to discuss how companies can get performance visibility for end users now that many people are working from home and connecting over last-mile networks that IT has little visibility into or control over. Our AppNeta guests are Seth Differ, Senior Manager, Solutions Consulting; and Alec Pinkham, Director of Product Marketing.Tech Bytes: AppNeta And Performance Visibility Over The Last Mile (Sponsored)
Today’s Tech Bytes episode is sponsored by AppNeta, and we’re going to discuss how companies can get performance visibility for end users now that many people are working from home and connecting over last-mile networks that IT has little visibility into or control over. Our AppNeta guests are Seth Differ, Senior Manager, Solutions Consulting; and Alec Pinkham, Director of Product Marketing.
The post Tech Bytes: AppNeta And Performance Visibility Over The Last Mile (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Announcing eBPF Mode GA
A few days ago, our team released Calico v3.16. As part of that release, we have marked the eBPF dataplane as “GA”, signalling that it is now stable and ready for wider use by the community. In this blog post I want to take you through the process of moving from tech-preview to GA. If you’re not already familiar with eBPF and the benefits of the Calico eBPF dataplane, or if you want to see throughput and latency graphs compared to the standard Linux dataplane, I recommend that you read our introductory blog post. To recap, when compared with the standard Linux dataplane (based on iptables), the eBPF dataplane:
- Scales to higher throughput, using less CPU per GBit
- Natively supports Kubernetes services (without kube-proxy) in a way that:
- Reduces latency
- Preserves external client source IP addresses
- Supports DSR (Direct Server Return) for reduced latency (and CPU usage)
- Uses less CPU than kube-proxy to keep the dataplane in sync
For the tech preview release, our focus was on covering a broad set of features and proving out the performance of the new dataplane. However to meet the bar for GA, we had to:
- Address our list of known missing features
- Continue reading
Everyone Must Learn to Code
The word on the street is that everyone—especially network engineers—must learn to code. A conversation with a friend and an article passing through my RSS reader brought this to mind once again—so once more into the breach. Part of the problem here is that we seem to have a knack for asking the wrong question. When we look at network engineer skill sets, we often think about the ability to configure a protocol or set of features, and then the ability to quickly troubleshoot those protocols or features using a set of commands or techniques.
This is, in some sense, what various certifications have taught us—we have reached the expert level when we can configure a network quickly, or when we can prove we understand a product line. There is, by the way, a point of truth in this. If you claim your expertise is with a particular vendor’s gear, then it is true that you must be able to configure and troubleshoot on that vendor’s gear to be an expert. There is also a problem of how to test for networking skills without actually implementing something, and how to implement things without actually configuring them. This is a Continue reading
Moving HPC to the Cloud: A Guide for 2020
This is a guest post by Limor Maayan-Wainstein, a senior technical writer with 10 years of experience writing about cybersecurity, big data, cloud computing, web development, and more.
High performance computing (HPC) enables you to solve complex problems which cannot be solved by regular computing. Traditionally, HPC solutions provided mainly supercomputers. Today, HPC is typically a mix of resources, including supercomputing and virtualized and bare metal servers, platforms for management, sharing and integration capabilities, and more. When coupled with the cloud, HPC is made more affordable, accessible, efficient and shareable.
What Is HPC?
Network Break 301: Samsung Dials Up A 5G Contract; Broadcom Announces Fast, Power-Efficient New Jericho Chip
Network Break analyzes Samsung's multi-billion 5G contract from Verizon, a new Jericho ASIC from Broadcom, the insiders driving Zoombombing, the persistence of DDoS attacks, and more tech news.Network Break 301: Samsung Dials Up A 5G Contract; Broadcom Announces Fast, Power-Efficient New Jericho Chip
Network Break analyzes Samsung's multi-billion 5G contract from Verizon, a new Jericho ASIC from Broadcom, the insiders driving Zoombombing, the persistence of DDoS attacks, and more tech news.
The post Network Break 301: Samsung Dials Up A 5G Contract; Broadcom Announces Fast, Power-Efficient New Jericho Chip appeared first on Packet Pushers.
What Happens When The Whole World Goes Remote? Not To Worry, We Were Built For This
In March, governments all over the world issued stay-at-home orders, causing a mass migration to teleworking. Alongside many of our partners, Cloudflare launched free products and services supported by onboarding sessions to help our clients secure and accelerate their remote work environments. Over the past few months, a dedicated team of specialists met with hundreds of organizations - from tiny startups, to massive corporations - to help them extend better security and performance to a suddenly-remote workforce.
Most companies we heard from had a VPN in place, but it wasn’t set up to accommodate a full-on remote work environment. When employees began working from home, they found that the VPN was getting overloaded with requests, causing performance lags.
While many organizations had bought more VPN licenses to allow employees to connect to their tools, they found that just having licenses wasn’t enough: they needed to reduce the amount of traffic flowing through their VPN by taking select applications off of the private network.
We Were Built For This
My name is Dina and I am a Customer Success Manager (CSM) in our San Francisco office. I am responsible for ensuring the success of Cloudflare’s Enterprise customers and managing all of Continue reading
The Week in Internet News: Microsoft Warns of Cyberattacks on U.S. Election
Hackers vs. the election: Microsoft has warned that hackers from Russia, China, and Iran are targeting U.S. election systems, The Hill reports. The tech giant is seeing increasing efforts to hack into the Donald Trump and Joe Biden presidential campaigns. A Russian hacking group called Strontium has targeted more than 200 organizations, political campaigns, and parties over the past year, the company said.
Fighting disinformation: The government of India is calling for greater international cooperation among countries and tech companies to combat disinformation and doctored videos related to the COVID-19 pandemic, India Times reports. “The pandemic has demonstrated the existential dilemma of an information society,” Counsellor Paulomi Tripathi said at the United Nations. “We have been exposed to misinformation and disinformation campaigns which have put lives and livelihoods of millions at risk, divided communities with fake news and doctored videos and undermined the trust in public authorities to tackle the disease.”
Cutting red tape: Nigeria is looking to waive fees for laying fiber optic cables on federal highways as a way to expand Internet access in the country, Quartz Africa reports. Officials hope the waiver will help the country meet targets in its national broadband plan, which aims for Continue reading
Is Cisco ACI Too Different?
A friend of mine involved in multiple Cisco ACI installations sent me this comment on their tenant connectivity model:
I’m a bit allergic to ACI. The abstraction is mis-aligned with familiar configurations, in particular contracts being independent of and over-riding routing, tenants, etc. You can really make a mess with that, and I’ve seen some! One needs to impose some structure, naming conventions…, and most people don’t seem to get that done.
As I noticed in the NSX-or-ACI webinar, it’s interesting how NSX decided to stay with the familiar VLAN/routing/filtering paradigm (more details), whereas the designers of Cisco ACI decided to go down a totally different path.
Aligning superhuman AI with human behaviour: chess as a model system
Aligning superhuman AI with human behavior: chess as a model system, McIlroy-Young et al., KDD’20
It’s been a while, but it’s time to start reading CS papers again! We’ll ease back into it with one or two papers a week for a few weeks, building back up to something like 3 papers a week at steady state.
How human-like is superhuman AI?
AI models can learn to perform some tasks to human or even super-human levels, but do they then perform those tasks in a human-like way? And does that even matter so long as the outcomes are good? If we’re going to hand everything over to AI and get out of the way, then maybe not. But where humans are still involved in task performance, supervision, or evaluation, then McIlroy-Young et al. make the case that this difference in approaches really does matter. Human-machine collaboration offers a lot of potential to enhance and augment human performance, but this requires the human and the machine to be ‘on the same page’ to be truly effective (see e.g. ‘Ten challenges for making automation a ‘team player’ in joint human-agent activity‘).
The central challenge in realizing these Continue reading