How Community Networks Are Helping during COVID-19

In July 2020, the Internet Society organized the webinar “How Community Networks are helping during COVID-19.”

We are halfway through this unprecedented year in which COVID-19 continues to cause disruptions and confusion in many areas of our lives. What is clear though, is the recognition of the Internet as a lifeline for us – for communicating with family members and health workers, accessing essential services, and participating in online learning and remote work.

But what about those who don’t have it?

The panel was an opportunity to show that there are solutions out there. To get to them will take strong communities driven by the understanding that everyone can make a difference.

The discussions of July’s webinar got to the heart of this.

The panelists shared stories and videos of the community networks they have helped to build in remote villages where underserved Indigenous tribes live. We heard the story of one Indigenous tribe located in the southern part of West Java in Indonesia, who set up a wireless network for their community. It helped them find jobs and increase their income, as well as access health information, learning resources, and government services.

In India, an Continue reading

Switch turns to Tesla batteries for solar-power storage

Data center provider Switch has selected Tesla as the battery supplier for a massive solar project at its northern Nevada data-center facilities.It's a geographically easy alliance as Switch's campus is right near Tesla's Gigafactory Nevada manufacturing facility. While best known for its cars, Tesla has also made quite an entry in the battery space with products such as the Powerwall, Powerpack, and Megapack energy storage products.To read this article in full, please click here

Google’s Management of Istio Raises Questions in the Cloud Native Community

When the proposed to be included in the still v.02, had only been around less than six months, and yet it aimed to skip the entry-level most young projects enter at and instead applied for inclusion at the secondary incubation tier. While the project was founded primarily by Google and IBM, and boasted numerous other contributors such as Yahoo, Apprenda, Concur, and AT&T, it was met with skepticism — it was so new, it didn’t really have adoption to speak of quite yet, and there were some Solo.io CEO

On the ‘net: Internet Consolidation

Did you know that today Video, gaming and social media account for almost 80% of the world’s internet traffic? The change in the composition of traffic has been accompanied by a dramatic change in the way content is delivered to the internet user: ISPs and transit providers have diminished in number and importance as the power and profile of a few Content Distribution Networks has increased as content is being pushed closer to the edge. But isn’t that just competition at work? What are the long-term consequences of such a change? In the second episode of our three-part series on “Internet Consolidation”, we talk to Russ White, co-host of The History of Networking and The Hedge podcast and a distinguished infrastructure architect and internet transit and routing expert.

Containerized Python Development – Part 3

This is the last part in the series of blog posts showing how to set up and optimize a containerized Python development environment. The first part covered how to containerize a Python service and the best development practices for it. The second part showed how to easily set up different components that our Python application needs and how to easily manage the lifecycle of the overall project with Docker Compose.

In this final part, we review the development cycle of the project and discuss in more details how to apply code updates and debug failures of the containerized Python services. The goal is to analyze how to speed up these recurrent phases of the development process such that we get a similar experience to the local development one.

Applying Code Updates

In general, our containerized development cycle consists of writing/updating code, building, running and debugging it.

For the building and running phase, as most of the time we actually have to wait, we want these phases to go pretty quick such that we focus on coding and debugging.

We now analyze how to optimize the build phase during development. The build phase corresponds to image build time when we change Continue reading

Cloudflare Workers Announces Broad Language Support

Cloudflare Workers Announces Broad Language Support
Cloudflare Workers Announces Broad Language Support

We initially launched Cloudflare Workers with support for JavaScript and languages that compile to WebAssembly, such as Rust, C, and C++. Since then, Cloudflare and the community have improved the usability of Typescript on Workers. But we haven't talked much about the many other popular languages that compile to JavaScript. Today, we’re excited to announce support for Python, Scala, Kotlin, Reason and Dart.

You can build applications on Cloudflare Workers using your favorite language starting today.

Cloudflare Workers Announces Broad Language Support

Getting Started

Getting started is as simple as installing Wrangler, then running generate for the template for your chosen language: Python, Scala, Kotlin, Dart, or Reason. For Python, this looks like:

wrangler generate my-python-project https://github.com/cloudflare/python-worker-hello-world

Follow the installation instructions in the README inside the generated project directory, then run wrangler publish. You can see the output of your Worker at your workers.dev subdomain, e.g. https://my-python-project.cody.workers.dev/. You can sign up for a free Workers account if you don't have one yet.

That’s it. It is really easy to write in your favorite languages. But, this wouldn’t be a very compelling blog post if we left it at that. Now, I’ll shift the focus to Continue reading

The Migration of Legacy Applications to Workers

The Migration of Legacy Applications to Workers
The Migration of Legacy Applications to Workers

As Cloudflare Workers, and other Serverless platforms, continue to drive down costs while making it easier for developers to stand up globally scaled applications, the migration of legacy applications is becoming increasingly common. In this post, I want to show how easy it is to migrate such an application onto Workers. To demonstrate, I’m going to use a common migration scenario: moving a legacy application — on an old compute platform behind a VPN or in a private cloud — to a serverless compute platform behind zero-trust security.

Wait but why?

Before we dive further into the technical work, however, let me just address up front: why would someone want to do this? What benefits would they get from such a migration? In my experience, there are two sets of reasons: (1) factors that are “pushing” off legacy platforms, or the constraints and problems of the legacy approach; and (2) factors that are “pulling” onto serverless platforms like Workers, which speaks to the many benefits of this new approach. In terms of the push factors, we often see three core ones:

  • Legacy compute resources are not flexible and must be constantly maintained, often leading to capacity constraints or excess cost;
  • Continue reading

Spectral Clustering

Motivation

Clustering is a way to make sense of the data by grouping similar values into a group. There are many ways to achieve that and in this post we will be looking at one of the way based on spectral method. Spectral clustering provides a starting point to understand graphs with many nodes by clustering them into 2 or more clusters. This clustering technique can also be applied for analyzing general data. This technique is based on Linear algebra and Graph theory.

We will start with a very brief introduction of the prerequisite for the sake of completeness and one can skip the prerequisite topics if they already have the familiarity.

Prerequisite Topic

Eigen Vectors and Eigen Values

One way to interpret when we multiply a vector a matrix is that a matrix transforms the vector. For example: below is a vector \(\begin{pmatrix} 2\\1 \end{pmatrix}\)

Original Vector (3,2)

we apply a transformation by multiplying the above vector to a matrix

\[\begin{pmatrix} -1 & 3 \\ 2 & -2 \end{pmatrix}\]

The resultant vector \(\begin{pmatrix} 1\\2 \end{pmatrix}\) is in orange after transformation. Transformed Vector (1,3)

you can see how the vector changed its direction after the transformation. Now in case of Eigenvectors, which are special kinds of Continue reading

Your Automation Skills will Travel Well

In 2020 our automation skills may be the only thing that does travel! What I mean is that the automation skills being evangelized by so many in the networking community (Kirk Byers, David Bombal, Nick Russo, Jason Edelman and the Network to Code team, Hank Preston and Cisco DevNet and many more ....) will serve READ MORE

The post Your Automation Skills will Travel Well appeared first on The Gratuitous Arp.

Building An Ecosystem for Heterogeneous Memory Supercomputing

The drive toward exascale computing is giving researchers the largest HPC systems ever built, yet key bottlenecks persist: More memory to accommodate larger datasets, persistent memory for storing data on the memory bus instead of drives, and the lowest power consumption possible. …

Building An Ecosystem for Heterogeneous Memory Supercomputing was written by Ken Strandberg at The Next Platform.

Smart Network or Dumb?

Should the network be dumb or smart? Network vendors have recently focused on making the network as smart as possible because there is a definite feeling that dumb networks are quickly becoming a commodity—and it’s hard to see where and how steep profit margins can be maintained in a commodifying market. Software vendors, on the other hand, have been encroaching on the network space by “building in” overlay network capabilities, especially in virtualization products. VMWare and Docker come immediately to mind; both are either able to, or working towards, running on a plain IP fabric, reducing the number of services provided by the network to a minimum level (of course, I’d have a lot more confidence in these overlay systems if they were a lot smarter about routing … but I’ll leave that alone for the moment).

How can this question be answered? One way is to think through what sorts of things need to be done in processing packets, and then think through where it makes most sense to do those things. Another way is to measure the accuracy or speed at which some of these “packet processing things” can be done so you can decide in a more Continue reading

Cloudflare’s Network Shutdown Shows Why DNS Is a DevOps Problem

Cloudflare’s Jonathan Sullivan, NS1 chief technology officer and co-founder, told The New Stack. While Cloudflare — an NS1 competitor — did have DNS redundancy built into its infrastructure, the resulting traffic drop in its network infrastructure was about 50% throughout its network and resulted in a 27-minutes outage of Cloudflare Internet properties and services, Cloudflare Chief Technology Officer blog post. A router overload in the state of Georgia resulted in the Cloudflare outage. One way Cloudflare learned to prevent such an event from recurring was to set a limit on the Georgia router’s traffic for BGP sessions. This will result in the shutdown of Continue reading

What’s the Big Deal with Multi-Cloud Networking?

The other day I was pruning my apps on my phone to delete those that had not been used in a long time. Here are some that gave me pause: Business (Adobe, Concur, Dropbox, etc) E-commerce (Amazon, Grocery Shopping, Meal Delivery, Starbucks, etc) Financial Institutions G-Suite Apps Microsoft 365 Apps Home Automation (Amazon Alexa, Home … Continue reading What’s the Big Deal with Multi-Cloud Networking? →

Multi-arch build, what about GitLab CI?

Following the previous article where we saw how to build multi arch images using GitHub Actions, we will now show how to do the same thing using another CI. In this article, we’ll show how to use GitLab CI, which is part of the GitLab.

To start building your image with GitLab CI, you will first need to create a .gitlab-ci.yml file at the root of your repository, commit it and push it.

image: docker:stable

variables:
  DOCKER_HOST: tcp://docker:2375/
  DOCKER_DRIVER: overlay2

services:
  - docker:dind

build:
  stage: build
  script:
    - docker version

This should result in a build output that shows the version of the Docker CLI and Engine: 

We will now install Docker buildx. Because GitLabCI runs everything in containers and uses any image you want to start this container, we can use one with buildx preinstalled, like the one we used for CircleCI. And as for CircleCI, we need to start a builder instance.

image: jdrouet/docker-with-buildx:stable

variables:
  DOCKER_HOST: tcp://docker:2375/
  DOCKER_DRIVER: overlay2

services:
  - docker:dind

build:
  stage: build
  script:
    - docker buildx create --use
    - docker Continue reading

How to tailor SASE to your enterprise

Businesses considering the secure access service edge (SASE) model need to understand that there are numerous ways to implement it that can be tailored to their future needs and the realities of their legacy networks.As defined by Gartner, which coined the term, SASE calls for security to be built in as part of the network and delivered as a cloud service, but that might not fit the circumstances faced by all enterprises.READ about SD-WAN: How to buy SD-WAN technology: Key questions to consider when selecting a supplier • How to pick an off-site data-backup method •  SD-Branch: What it is and why you’ll need it • What are the options for security SD-WAN? Depending on their needs, it may make more sense to have SASE delivered as a managed service package or even in an architecture that includes privately owned security infrastructure that is managed from the cloud – alternatives that can achieve the same goals.To read this article in full, please click here

Network Break 294: Fortinet, Arrcus Target Multi-Cloud Networking; Innovium Rakes In More ASIC Funding

Today's Network Break analyzes multi-cloud networking announcements from Fortinet and Arrcus, discusses additional venture funding for ASIC-maker Innovium, looks at more consolidation in the SD-WAN market, and debates whether "Internet" should be capitalized.

The post Network Break 294: Fortinet, Arrcus Target Multi-Cloud Networking; Innovium Rakes In More ASIC Funding appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The Week in Internet News: Looking for a Broadband Miracle in Rural Canada

Creating a miracle: Residents of rural British Columbia, Canada, are pushing for better Internet access, with one resident saying getting access to good connectivity is like “hoping for a miracle,” the CBC reports. Local government leaders are working with community leaders and businesses to improve Internet services. Local leaders are researching options to establish a broadband Internet service in Clearwater, British Columbia, including the possibility of building new mobile towers.

Building their own: Meanwhile, a few hundred miles south in Klamath, California, Yurok tribal officials have announced a new project that they hope will significantly boost Internet speeds and expand coverage on their reservation, KRCR News reports. The$2.1 million project is funded by the U.S. Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. One of the goals is to better allow students to participate in distance learning.

No distance learning for you: In a related story, a study from Future Ready Schools finds that 16.9 million U.S. students lack home Internet access, Education Dive says. In addition, 3.6 million U.S. households lack a computer, impacting 7.3 million students, according to the study. About a third of Native American, Latino, and African-American students in the Continue reading

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