0

Cumulus content roundup: May 2020

May means more content! There was a very exciting announcement from us this month, and if you missed it don’t worry, you can read all about it below. In addition, we were keeping very busy with fresh podcast episodes, informative blog posts and much more. Ready to dive into all things open networking? Get comfortable and let’s dive in.

From Cumulus Networks

UCMP: Augmenting L3 only designs: So what makes a purely L3 design so aspirational? Can a UCMP increase efficiency? Read this blog post by Rama Dharba as he addresses these questions and more. He delves into the challenges surrounding this type of design, possible solutions and a recent augmentation in Cumulus Linux 4.1 that increases the design’s ability for flexibility.

Kernel of Truth season 3 episode 6: Building modern campus networks: Let’s talk about all things modern campus networks. In this new Kernel of Truth episode, Brain O’Sullivan, Roopa Prabhu, Eric Pulvino and David Marshall dive into trends, technologies, architecture and much more. Grab your headphones and get ready to hear first-hand experiences from building these networks as well as tips and tricks learned along the way.

Build an OpenStack/ Ceph cluster with Cumulus Networks in Continue reading

0

Quit Manspreading. Tech Needs Women More Than Ever

Companies can kiss their dream of a future dominated by smart machines goodbye unless they start...

Read More »

0

Is QUIC really Quicker?

QUIC is a relatively new data transport protocol developed by Google, and currently in line to become the default transport for the upcoming HTTP standard. Because of this, it behooves every network engineer to understand a little about this protocol, how it operates, and what impact it will have on the network. We did record a History of Networking episode on QUIC, if you want some background.

In a recent Communications of the ACM article, a group of researchers (Kakhi et al.) used a modified implementation of QUIC to measure its performance under different network conditions, directly comparing it to TCPs performance under the same conditions. Since the current implementations of QUIC use the same congestion control as TCP—Cubic—the only differences in performance should be code tuning in estimating the round-trip timer (RTT) for congestion control, QUIC’s ability to form a session in a single RTT, and QUIC’s ability to carry multiple streams in a single connection. The researchers asked two questions in this paper: how does QUIC interact with TCP flows on the same network, and does UIC perform better than TCP in all situations, or only some?

To answer the first question, the authors tried running QUIC Continue reading

0

Ericsson Burns Cash to Gain China 5G Deals

The vendor's business in China has grown as of late, having inked contracts with the country’s...

Read More »

0

Chef Dishes Compliance, Desktop Automation

The updates follow a move by Chef last year to revamp its development, platforms, and go-to-market...

Read More »

0

Large flow marking using BGP Flowspec

Elephant Detection in Virtual Switches & Mitigation in Hardware discusses a VMware and Cumulus demonstration, Elephants and Mice, in which the virtual switch on a host detects and marks large "Elephant" flows and the hardware switch enforces priority queueing to prevent Elephant flows from adversely affecting latency of small "Mice" flows.

SDN and WAN optimization describes a presentation by Amin Vahdat describing Google's SDN based wide area network traffic engineering solution in which traffic prioritization allows Google to reduce costs by fully utilizing WAN bandwidth.

Deconstructing Datacenter Packet Transport describes how priority marking of packets associated with large flows can improve completion times for flows crossing the data center fabric. Simulation results presented in the paper show that prioritization of short flows over large flows can significantly improve throughput (reducing flow completion times by a factor of 5 or more at high loads).

This article demonstrates a self contained real-time Elephant flow marking solution that leverages the real-time visibility and control features available using commodity switch hardware.

The diagram shows the elements of the solution. An instance of the sFlow-RT real-time analytics engine receives streaming sFlow telemetry from a pair of edge routers. A mix of many small flows mixed Continue reading

0

Tech Bytes: Payomatic Cuts Costs, Revamps WAN With Fortinet Secure SD-WAN (Sponsored)

Today’s Tech Bytes episode, sponsored by Fortinet, explores an SD-WAN deployment with PAYOMATIC, a lending company in NYC. We talk about how PAYOMATIC cut costs by migrating off MPLS, and how Fortinet Secure SD-WAN positioned the company to take advantage of new infrastructure options. Our guest is Michael Saraceno, CISO and VP of IT at PAYOMATIC.

0

Tech Bytes: Payomatic Cuts Costs, Revamps WAN With Fortinet Secure SD-WAN (Sponsored)

Today’s Tech Bytes episode, sponsored by Fortinet, explores an SD-WAN deployment with PAYOMATIC, a lending company in NYC. We talk about how PAYOMATIC cut costs by migrating off MPLS, and how Fortinet Secure SD-WAN positioned the company to take advantage of new infrastructure options. Our guest is Michael Saraceno, CISO and VP of IT at PAYOMATIC.

The post Tech Bytes: Payomatic Cuts Costs, Revamps WAN With Fortinet Secure SD-WAN (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

0

Building Bulletproof Bioinformatics Storage

Going from sequence data based on millions of lines of short DNA fragments to the final, simplified report for clinicians is no small undertaking from IT standpoint. …

Building Bulletproof Bioinformatics Storage was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

0

Making the Most of Our MANRS Partnerships – NIC.br and Brazil Lead the MANRS Pack

Read this blog in Portuguese

Improving the state of routing security is no small task. It requires network operators, IXPs, and CDN and cloud providers of all sizes across the globe to work together, improve their own networks, and open lines of communications with both their friends and competitors to make a real difference.

One of the ways we’ve been able to spread the MANRS message so far and wide is through partnerships. We’re lucky to have dedicated, strong partners in several regions of the world. In this post, we’ll talk about one partnership in particular – NIC.br – and how their efforts have changed the landscape for routing security in Brazil and beyond.

A Little History

NIC.br is responsible for the administrative and operational functions related to the .br (Brazil) domain. In addition, NIC.br goes beyond similar entities in other countries, investing in actions and projects that bring a series of benefits to the improvement of activities related to the available Internet infrastructure in Brazil.

In 2017, NIC.br hosted a Safer Internet Program, which the Internet Society supported. NIC.br invited Andrei Robachevsky to speak on a fairly new initiative called MANRS addressing routing security as Continue reading

0

Network Break 287: Open Compute Infrastructure Makes Its Mark; Cisco Live Postponed

Today's Network Break podcast discusses the growth of the infrastructure market based on Open Compute specs, the decline in switch and routing revenues, Cisco postponing its 2020 Cisco Live virtual event, VMware's latest acquisition, and more tech news.

0

Network Break 287: Open Compute Infrastructure Makes Its Mark; Cisco Live Postponed

Today's Network Break podcast discusses the growth of the infrastructure market based on Open Compute specs, the decline in switch and routing revenues, Cisco postponing its 2020 Cisco Live virtual event, VMware's latest acquisition, and more tech news.

The post Network Break 287: Open Compute Infrastructure Makes Its Mark; Cisco Live Postponed appeared first on Packet Pushers.

0

The Week in Internet News: Zoom Says End-to-End Encryption Only for Paying Users

No free encryption: Popular videoconferencing service Zoom has promised to roll out end-to-end encryption, but it won’t provide encrypted service to free users, The Verge reports. The decision allows Zoom to share information about free conference with law enforcement agencies. Zoom doesn’t want to give free users end-to-end encryption “because we also want to work together with the FBI, with local law enforcement, in case some people use Zoom for a bad purpose,” Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said.

A big spike: Internet use has gone up dramatically in rural India in recent weeks, with people flocking to YouTube, Netflix, and other services during the COVID-19 pandemic, Inc42.com reports. Data consumption on the BharatNet fiber backbone nearly tripled, to 150 Terabytes in May from 55 TB in January. During the same timeframe, Netflix use in rural India grew by 422 percent, with YouTube and Facebook growing by 219 percent and 374 percent, respectively.

Broadband challenges: The government of Nigeria has a new broadband plan with a goal of increasing download speeds to 25 Mbps in urban areas and 10 Mbps in rural areas, Quartz Africa says. The country now has a mean download speed of less than 1.6 Mbps. But Continue reading

0

AT&T Trumpets First US Activation of Dynamic Spectrum Sharing

“DSS is an important stepping stone on our path to nationwide 5G," AT&T's Igal Elbaz said.

0

Not Giving Up on Data Surveillance

I often hear people expressing their of helplessness in the face of pervasive corporate surveillance.  "They've already got all my data, what can I do anyway ?" When I was twenty five, my career was centred on maintaining Novell and Windows networks, my life aspirations were to own my car and a house. My social […]

The post Not Giving Up on Data Surveillance appeared first on EtherealMind.

0

Redundant Server Connectivity in Layer-3-Only Fabrics

A long while ago I decided to write an article explaining how you could run VMware NSX on ESXi servers with redundant connections to two top-of-rack switches on top of a layer-3-only fabric (a fabric with IP subnets and VLANs limited to a single top-of-rack switch). Turns out that’s Mission Impossible, so I put the article on the back burner and slowly forgot about it.

Well, not exactly. Every now and then my subconsciousness would kick it up and I’d figure out yet-another reason why it’s REALLY hard to do it right. After a while, I decided to try again, and completely rewrote the article. The first part is already online, more details coming (hopefully) soon.

0

DevAsc – Introduction to XML

Introduction

XML, or Extensible Markup Language, rounds out the usual suspects of YAML, JSON, and XML. It’s probably my least favorite of the three, but knowledge of XML is needed when working with code.

XML is, of course, related to HTML. So why didn’t we just settle for HTML? Turns out machines don’t understand HTML very well. They can parse it perfectly fine, yes, but in HTML you put information in, such an address, and you understand it’s an address because you are a human. A machine doesn’t know that Baker Street is an address, unless you tell it.

Syntax

XML consists of tags, elements, and attributes. Let’s take a basic example and then go through these in more detail:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<address>
  <name>
    <title>Mr</title>
    <first-name>Sherlock</first-name>
    <last-name>Holmes</last-name>
  </name>
  <street>221B Baker Street</street>
  <city state="NA">London</city>
</address>

First, we declare that this is an XML document and the encoding used. This is called a prolog. It’s optional, but if included, should always be the first line.

The tag <address> is the root of the document. We must always have a root. The tag <address> has three children:

• <name>
• <street>
• <city>

The tag <name> has three children as well:

• Continue reading

0

Ladies and Gentlemen… Cloudflare TV!

I'm excited to announce the upcoming launch of Cloudflare TV. A 24x7 live television broadcast, streamed globally via the Cloudflare network. You can tune in to the pre-broadcast station and check out the upcoming schedule at: cloudflare.tv

I'm kicking off the first live broadcast starting at 12:00pm Pacific (1900 UTC) on Monday, June 8 with a conversation with Chris Young (add to calendar). Chris was most recently the CEO of McAfee and has had a career defining the cyber security industry, from his own startup Cyveillance in the 1990s, to leadership positions at AOL, RSA, VMWare, Cisco, and Intel. I hope you'll tune in and then stay tuned for all the content our team has in store.

Which leaves the question: why on earth is Cloudflare launching a 24x7 television station?

The Uniting Power of Television and Tech Conferences

I was born in the 70's, am a child of the 80's, and got started in my career in the 90's. In the background, throughout much of it, was linear television we watched together. Over the last few months I've learned that Michelle Zatlyn, my co-founder and Cloudflare's COO, and I shared a love of Children's Television Network's Continue reading

0

Headcount: Firings, Hirings, and Retirings — May 2020

Nutanix furloughed 25% of its workforce, saying COVID-19 is to blame; SAP cloud CFO jumped ship;...

Read More »

0

6G Concepts Gain Backing Amid Political Smacking

Efforts to develop what comes after 5G are gaining momentum, but it’s more of a rallying cry to...

Read More »