Nimble tech startups find ways to navigate the pandemic

The economic devastation of the global COVID-19 pandemic has many businesses fighting for survival, but dealing with chaos and uncertainty comes with the territory for a certain category of business: Startups.They thrive on disruption (or at least that’s the message they pitch to investors), but is the lean, move-fast-and-break-things model one that can survive global disruptions?Unlike retail, travel, and tourism that have been hammered by the downturn, data-center and networking businesses have fared better, with some such as teleconferencing seeing spikes in demand.To read this article in full, please click here

Beyond the Usual: Challenges, Opportunities, and Insights in Asia-Pacific

Last month, we held our inaugural APAC Insights. The idea behind this is to bring together thought leaders and subject matter experts to discuss issues related to the Internet and its use in the Asia-Pacific.

However, the intention is not to make this another run-of-the-mill talk shop – rather, we want this to be a forum that shares and contrasts experiences, explores challenges and opportunities in a pragmatic way, and provides attendees insights into the issues beyond the usual.

With the global pandemic causing major disruptions to our professional and personal lives, the topic for the first APAC Insights zoomed in on the role the Internet has played in helping communities deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

Speakers from across the region – representing the world’s largest Internet shutdown to the world’s strictest – discussed initiatives that worked well and those that didn’t work so well, and the critical role of the Internet in rolling out these initiatives. During a Q&A segment, attendees had the opportunity to ask the speakers questions.

One of the key points made was that even though the Asia-Pacific is regarded as a mobile-first region, the shutdowns demonstrated (in some countries in particular) how fragile connectivity can Continue reading

The Network is not Free: The Case of the Connected Toaster

Latency is a big deal for many modern applications, particularly in the realm of machine learning applied to problems like determining if someone standing at your door is a delivery person or a … robber out to grab all your smart toasters and big screen television. The problem is networks, particularly in the last mile don’t deal with latency very well. In fact, most of the network speeds and feeds available in anything outside urban areas kindof stinks. The example given by Bagchi et al. is this—

A fixed video sensor may generate 6Mbps of video 24/7, thus producing nearly 2TB of data per month—an amount unsustainable according to business practices for consumer connections, for example, Comcast’s data cap is at 1TB/month and Verizon Wireless throttles traffic over 26GB/month. For example, with DOCSIS 3.0, a widely deployed cable Internet technology, most U.S.-based cable systems deployed today support a maximum of 81Mbps aggregated over 500 home—just 0.16Mbps per home.

Bagchi, Saurabh, Muhammad-Bilal Siddiqui, Paul Wood, and Heng Zhang. “Dependability in Edge Computing.” Communications of the ACM 63, no. 1 (December 2019): 58–66. https://doi.org/10.1145/3362068.

The authors claim a lot of the problem here is just Continue reading

Ansible security automation resource modules

Security professionals are increasingly adopting automation as a way to help unify security operations into structured workflows that can reduce operational complexity, human error, time to respond and can be integrated into existing SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) or SOAR (Security Orchestration Automation and Response) platforms.

In October of 2019 the Ansible network automation team introduced the concept of resource modules:

So what exactly is a “resource module?” Sections of a device’s configuration can be thought of as a resource provided by that device. Network resource modules are intentionally scoped to configure a single resource and can be combined as building blocks to configure complex network services.

Keep in mind that the first network automation modules could either execute arbitrary commands on target devices, or read in the device configuration from a file and deploy it. These modules were quite generic and provided no fine-tuning of certain services or resources.

In contrast, resource modules can make network automation easier and more consistent for those automating multiple platforms in production by avoiding large configuration file templates covering all kinds of configuration. Instead they focus on the task at hand, providing separate building blocks which can be used to Continue reading

Network Break 290: HPE Unveils Edge-To-Cloud Strategy; Anuta, Juniper Partner On Automation

Take a Network Break! We cover HPE's virtual Discover event, including news on Greenlake and Ezmeral. LiveAction extends its portfolio with cloud monitoring, Anuta and Juniper partner around network automation, VMware releases a private beta of VMC on Oracle Cloud, and more tech news.

The post Network Break 290: HPE Unveils Edge-To-Cloud Strategy; Anuta, Juniper Partner On Automation appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The Week in Internet News: Google to Pay Some News Publishers

News isn’t free: Google has announced it will pay some news publishers in a “new news experience” it is rolling out later this year, TechCrunch reports. News outlets in Germany, Australia, and Brazil are among the first group of publishers that have signed on. The goal is to “help participating publishers monetize their content through an enhanced storytelling experience that lets people go deeper into more complex stories, stay informed and be exposed to a world of different issues and interests,” Google says.

AI in HR: Japanese companies are turning to artificial intelligence to help hire employees, Japan Times says. SoftBank says it has cut labor time by 75 percent by using AI to sift through tens of thousands of resumes. Still, some companies are concerned about AI giving them inappropriate or discriminatory decisions.

Attacking encryption: Three U.S. Senators have introduced legislation that would require tech companies to help law enforcement agencies defeat end-to-end encryption, PC Mag reports. The Republican bill would allow courts to order companies to bypass encryption when police agencies request it.

More broadband for all: In the meantime, a group of U.S. representatives has introduced legislation to spend $100 billion to deploy fiber-based broadband Continue reading

Catching up with Workers KV

Catching up with Workers KV
Catching up with Workers KV

The Workers Distributed Data team has been hard at work since we gave you an update last November. Today, we’d like to share with you some of the stuff that has recently shipped in Workers KV: a new feature and an internal change that should significantly improve latency in some cases. Let’s dig in!

KV Metadata

Workers KV has a fairly straightforward interface: you can put keys and values into KV, and then fetch the value back out by key:

await contents.put(“index.html”, someHtmlContent);
await contents.put(“index.css”, someCssContent);
await contents.put(“index.js”, someJsContent);

// later

let index = await contents.get(“index.html”);

Pretty straightforward. But as you can see from this example, you may store different kinds of content in KV, even if the type is identical. All of the values are strings, but one is HTML, one is CSS, and one is JavaScript. If we were going to serve this content to users, we would have to construct a response. And when we do, we have to let the client know what the content type of that request is: text/html for HTML, text/css for CSS, and text/javascript for JavaScript. If we serve the incorrect content type to Continue reading

Ampere announces 128-core Arm server processor

Ampere – the semiconductor startup founded by former Intel executive Renee James and not to be confused with the new line of Nvidia cards – just introduced a 128-core, Arm-based server processor to complement its 80-core part.The new processor, Altra Max, comes just three months after the company launched its first product, the 80-core Altra. Ampere says the new processor will be fully socket compatible with the existing part so customers can just do a chip swap if they want. Ampere "This is not replacing Altra," says Jeff Wittich, senior vice president of products at Ampere and one of many ex-Intel executives at Ampere. "I expect there will be workloads and customers who will use Altra and Altra Max together for a long time. Anything suited for Max will be suited for Altra for a long time."To read this article in full, please click here

CEX (Code EXpress) 11. Working with files and parsing CSV.

Hello my friend,

With this post we start the second series of the Code EXpress (CEX) blogposts covering Python (namely, Python 3.8) basics for the network engineers. Previously we have covered the most simple elements and heading now to more complex scenarios.

Automation for networks and not only

Knowing how to improve the efficiency of your network or IT operation via applying some of the automation techniques with Ansible or Python is getting more and more important.

Boost up your skills with the industry best network automation training covering the details of the NETCONF/YANG, REST API with Bash, Ansible and Python for managing network devices from Cisco, Nokia, Arista and Cumulus. Besides you get the Linux management skills, as well as network virtualisation (KVM) and containerisation (Docker).

Don’t waste your time. Start your training today!

What are we going to do today?

In today’s blogpost we are going to cover the basics of the working with file in Python. Despite there are multiple ways how you can do, we will share, we believe, one of the most popular and convenient way:

  • Using context manager with … as … you will open the CSV file in your Python script.
  • Using Continue reading

Anatomy of the “kubernetes.default”

Every Kubernetes cluster is provisioned with a special service that provides a way for internal applications to talk to the API server. However, unlike the rest of the components that get spun up by default, you won’t find the definition of this service in any of the static manifests and this is just one of the many things that make this service unique.

The Special One

To make sure we’re on the same page, I’m talking about this:

$ kubect get svc kubernetes -n default
NAME         TYPE        CLUSTER-IP   EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)   AGE
kubernetes   ClusterIP   10.96.0.1    <none>        443/TCP   161m

This service is unique in many ways. First, as you may have noticed, it always occupies the first available IP in the Cluster CIDR, a.k.a. --service-cluster-ip-range.

Second, this service is invincible, i.e. it will always get re-created, even when it’s manually removed:

$ kubectl get svc
NAME         TYPE        CLUSTER-IP   EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)   AGE
kubernetes   ClusterIP   10.96.0.1    <none>        443/TCP   118s
$ kubectl delete svc kubernetes
service "kubernetes" deleted
$ kubectl get svc
NAME         TYPE        CLUSTER-IP   EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)   AGE
kubernetes   ClusterIP   10.96.0.1    <none>        443/TCP   0s

You may notice that it comes up with the Continue reading

Jinja2 Tutorial – Part 3 – Whitespace control

Text documents are the final result of rendering templates. Depending on the end consumer of these documents whitespace placement could be significant. One of the major niggles in Jinja2, in my opinion, is the way control statements and other elements affect whitespace output in the end documents.

To put it bluntly, mastering whitespaces in Jinja2 is the only way of making sure your templates generate text exactly the way you intended.

Now we know the importance of the problem, time to understand where it originates, to do that we’ll have a look at a lot of examples. Then we'll learn how we can control rendering whitespaces in Jinja2 templates.

Jinja2 Tutorial series

Contents

Weekend Reads 062620

A little late, but still…

In the recent GitHub Satellite online conference, one of the most exciting product announcements was GitHub Codespaces. The idea is to have a code button on every repository. —Michael Yuan

High impact vulnerabilities in modern communication protocol used by mobile network operators (MNOs) can be exploited to intercept user data and carry out impersonation, fraud, and denial of service (DoS) attacks, cautions a newly published research. —Ravie Lakshmanan

I want to explain the cost structure that firms, and in particular technology companies, must manage. I absorbed these lessons by studying the financial documents and annual reports of companies that perhaps you aspire to work for or whose products you may use and enjoy. —Adam Naor

As a search engine optimization (SEO) and domain name consultant, one of the questions I get asked most often about domain names is whether or not the domain name or TLD (Top-Level Domain) matters. Will the domain name ending have an effect on SEO or search engine rankings. Are certain domain name endings preferred by the search engines over other domain name extensions? I decided to answer this question based on search engine optimization testing and not just on my Continue reading

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