The market for cloud infrastructure is now so large that it is very difficult for it to change drastically. …
Cloud Spending Forecast Trimmed For This Year And Next was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
For a while now, I’ve been using Direnv to manage environment variables when I enter or leave certain directories. Since I have to work with more than one AWS account, one of the use cases for me has been populating AWS-specific environment variables, like AWS_REGION or AWS_PROFILE. This generally works really well for me, but recently I ran into a bit of a corner case involving multiple AWS regions, Pulumi, and using S3 as the Pulumi backend. In this post, I’ll share the workaround that allows this configuration to work as expected.
I describe this as a “bit of a corner case” because it only affects specific configurations (which included my configuration):
AWS_REGION environment variable and not setting the aws:region configuration value used by the Pulumi AWS provider.s3://bucket-name.In my specific situation, my backend state bucket resides in the AWS us-west-2 (Oregon) region, as this offers the lowest latencies from my home office in Colorado. Continue reading
For years, scientists in the field of molecular dynamics have been squeezed in their research. …
Gordon Bell Prize Awarded To Molecular Dynamics-Quantum Mechanics Mashup On “Frontier” Supercomputer was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
COMMISSIONED AI and advanced storage systems ensure a smooth and profitable winter shopping season, so retailers don’t miss a beat during the holiday rush. …
From Black Friday To Christmas Eve: The Data-Driven Holiday Hustle was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Hello my friend,
So far we have covered almost all possible data types in Python and Go (Golang), at least the ones we are going to use ourselves for network automation. One of these data types, which we have introduced in the previous blog post, that is object/class or struct, has without overestimations enormous importance as it opens for us doors into object oriented programming. As doors are opened, let’s enter them.
Meaning, apart of spending time your family and friends, cooking, eating and dancing, you also study network automation with our trainings!
We offer the following training programs in network automation for you:
During these trainings you will learn the following topics:
Phishing remains one of the most dangerous and persistent cyber threats for individuals and organizations. Modern attacks use a growing arsenal of deceptive techniques that bypass traditional secure email gateways (SEGs) and email authentication measures, targeting organizations, employees, and vendors. From business email compromise (BEC) to QR phishing and account takeovers, these threats are designed to exploit weaknesses across multiple communication channels, including email, Slack, Teams, SMS, and cloud drives.
Phishing remains the most popular attack vector for bad actors looking to gain unauthorized access or extract fraudulent payment, and it is estimated that 90% of all attacks start with a phishing email. However, as companies have shifted to using a multitude of apps to support communication and collaboration, attackers too have evolved their approach. Attackers now engage employees across a combination of channels in an attempt to build trust and pivot targeted users to less-secure apps and devices. Cloudflare is uniquely positioned to address this trend thanks to our integrated Zero Trust services, extensive visibility from protecting approximately 20% of all websites, and signals derived from processing billions of email messages a year.
Cloudflare recognizes that combating phishing requires an integrated approach and a more complete view Continue reading
The hyperscalers, cloud builders, HPC centers control the design and manufacturing of own AI infrastructure. …
Databricks Is Going To Be The Next Platform For Many Enterprises was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The expansion of the computing capacity in Europe for both traditional HPC simulation as well as AI training and modeling continues apace, with the Leibniz-Rechenzentrum lab in Germany announcing late last week (when we took a day of holiday) that it would be shelling out €250 million – about $262.7 million at current exchange rates – to build a hybrid CPU-GPU cluster based on Nvidia compute engines to tackle both kinds of high performance computing. …
LRZ Adopts Nvidia Engines For €250 Million “Blue Lion” Supercomputer In 2027 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Cloudflare Radar celebrated its fourth birthday in September 2024. As we’ve expanded Radar’s scope over the last four years, the value that it provides as a resource for the global Internet has grown over time, and with Radar data and graphs often appearing in publications and social media around the world, we knew that we needed to make it available in languages beyond English.
Localization is important because most Internet users do not speak English as a first language. According to W3Techs, English usage on the Internet has dropped 8.3 points (57.7% to 49.4%) since January 2023, whereas usage of other languages like Spanish, German, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch is steadily increasing. Furthermore, a CSA Research study determined that 65% of Internet users prefer content in their language.
To successfully (and painlessly) localize any product, it must be internationalized first. Internationalization is the process of making a product ready to be translated and adapted into multiple languages and cultures, and it sets the foundation to enable your product to be localized later on at a much faster pace (and at a lower cost, both in time and budget). Below, we review how Cloudflare’s Radar Continue reading
Another year is almost gone, and it’s time for my traditional “I will disappear until mid-January” retreat (also, don’t expect me to read my email until I’m back).
I hope you’ll also be able to disconnect from the crazy pace of the networking world, forget the “AI will make networking engineers obsolete” shenanigans (hint: SDN did not), and focus on your loved ones. I would also like to wish you all the best in 2025!
I will probably get bored sometime in late December, so expect a few new netlab features in early January.
So far, this book has introduced two neural network architectures. The first one, the Feed-Forward Neural Network (FNN), works well for simple tasks, such as recognizing handwritten digits in small-sized images. The second one, the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), is designed for processing larger images. CNNs can identify objects in images even when the location or orientation of the object changes.
This chapter introduces the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Unlike FNNs and CNNs, an RNN’s inputs include not only the current data but also all the inputs it has processed previously. In other words, an RNN preserves and uses historical data. This is achieved by feeding the output of the previous time step back into the hidden layer along with the current input vector.
Although RNNs can be used for predicting sequential data of variable lengths, such as sales figures or a patient’s historical health records, this chapter focuses on how RNNs can perform character-based text autocompletion. The upcoming chapters will explore word-based text prediction.
For training the RNN model, we typically use text datasets like IMDB Reviews or the Wikipedia Text Corpus. However, in this chapter, we simplify the process by using a tailored dataset containing Continue reading
Hello my friend,
Today we are going to talk about the last data type, which in generally exists in Python and Go (Golang), and which we need dearly for all meaningful applications including network and IT infrastructure automation. We are talking about structured, typed data, which is represented in Python in form of objects and classes and in Go (Golang) in form of structs. These structures are truly powerful and once you figure out how to use them, I’m quite confident you will be using it everywhere, where you can.
This question I’ve been asked rather frequently recently. Indeed, why do we in each blog post talk about Network Automation Trainings, which gravitate around Python/Ansible duet. The answer is straightforward: whilst Go (Golang) is very powerful as we showing it in these blogs, its usage in many cases is justified only in very high-scale environment. For majority of networks and IT systems, Python is great. It is suffice to say that entire OpenStack is built in Python. And ourselves we use it extensively in many customers’ systems. Go (Golang) is useful as extension of automation skills, Continue reading
Addy Osmani published an excellent overview of the challenges of AI-assisted coding. They apply equally well to the “AI will generate device configurations for me” or “AI will troubleshoot my network” ideas (ignoring for the moment the impact of the orders-of-magnitude smaller training set), so it’s definitely worth reading.
I particularly liked the “AI is like having a very eager junior developer on your team” take, as well as the description of the “70% problem” (AI will get you 70% there, but the last 30% will be frustrating) – a phenomenon perfectly illustrated by the following diagram by Forrest Brazeal: