Any time you can get a lot of companies with very technically adept and strongly opinionated people to work together on a problem, or a set of problems, then you know for a fact that there is a real problem. …
The Collaboration That Will Drive Ethernet Into The HPC And AI Future was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Industry standard sFlow telemetry is widely supported by network equipment vendors and network management platforms. However, the advent of real-time sFlow analytics has opened up a range of new applications for sFlow. The map above shows the proportion of sFlow-RT instances running in each of the over 70 countries in which it is deployed.
The following use cases are driving current deployments:
Addressing the challenge of operating AI / ML clusters is the emerging application for sFlow visibility. High speed (400/800G) data center switches needed to handle machine learning traffic flows include sFlow agents and real-time analytics are essential to optimize the network so that expensive GPU and compute resources are fully utilized, see Leveraging open technologies to monitor packet drops in AI cluster fabrics.
If you would like to see how real-time network analytics can transform network operations, Getting Started describes how to download and configure sFlow-RT analytics software for use in your network, or how to try it out using an emulator, or pre-captured data.
Anyone who thinks that Intel is easy to kill need look no further than the historical trends of the Mercury Research market share statistics that we see each quarter. …
The Server Recession Ends, And Both Intel And AMD Won was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
COMMISSIONED As the AI era unfolds, I have been reflecting on my journey in the tech industry. …
AI Workloads Are Changing IT Demands At The Edge was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
It’s time for another “the vendor IS-IS defaults are all wrong” blog post. Wide IS-IS metrics were standardized in RFC 3784 in June 2004, yet most vendors still use the ancient narrow metrics as the default setting.
Want to know more? The Using IS-IS Metrics lab exercise provides all the gory details.
Sponsored Feature Arm is starting to fulfill its promise of transforming the nature of compute in the datacenter, and it is getting some big help from traditional chip makers as well as the hyperscalers and cloud builders that have massive computing requirements and who also need to drive efficiency up and costs down each and every year. …
Custom Arm CPUs Drive Many Different AI Approaches In The Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Caddy is an open-source web server written in Go. It handles TLS certificates automatically and comes with a simple configuration syntax. Users can extend its functionality through plugins1 to add features like rate limiting, caching, and Docker integration.
While Caddy is available in Nixpkgs, adding extra plugins is not
simple.2 The compilation process needs Internet access, which Nix
denies during build to ensure reproducibility. When trying to build the
following derivation using xcaddy, a tool for building Caddy with plugins,
it fails with this error: dial tcp: lookup proxy.golang.org on [::1]:53:
connection refused.
{ pkgs }: pkgs.stdenv.mkDerivation { name = "caddy-with-xcaddy"; nativeBuildInputs = with pkgs; [ go xcaddy cacert ]; unpackPhase = "true"; buildPhase = '' xcaddy build --with github.com/caddy-dns/[email protected] ''; installPhase = '' mkdir -p $out/bin cp caddy $out/bin ''; }
Fixed-output derivations are an exception to this rule and get network access
during build. They need to specify their output hash. For example, the
fetchurl function produces a fixed-output derivation:
{ stdenv, fetchurl }: stdenv.mkDerivation rec { pname = "hello"; version = "2.12.1"; src Continue reading
Hello my friend,
We continue our blog series about learning Go (Golang) as second programming language, which you can use for network and IT infrastructure automation. Today we’ll talk about the basic data types and variables both in Python and Go
Any programming language, whether it is Python or Go (Golang), is a tool to implement your business logic. Whilst it is very important to be experienced with the tool, it is important also to understand the wide context of network automation, and this is where our trainings will kick start you:
We offer the following training programs in network automation for you:
During these trainings you will learn the following topics:
For most of the history of high performance computing, a supercomputer was a freestanding, isolated machine that was designed to run some simulation or model and the only link it needed to the outside world was a relatively small one to show some visualization. …
The Back End AI Network Puts Pressure On The Front End was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Over the last year, Cloudflare has begun formally verifying the correctness of our internal DNS addressing behavior — the logic that determines which IP address a DNS query receives when it hits our authoritative nameserver. This means that for every possible DNS query for a proxied domain we could receive, we try to mathematically prove properties about our DNS addressing behavior, even when different systems (owned by different teams) at Cloudflare have contradictory views on which IP addresses should be returned.
To achieve this, we formally verify the programs — written in a custom Lisp-like programming language — that our nameserver executes when it receives a DNS query. These programs determine which IP addresses to return. Whenever an engineer changes one of these programs, we run all the programs through our custom model checker (written in Racket + Rosette) to check for certain bugs (e.g., one program overshadowing another) before the programs are deployed.
Our formal verifier runs in production today, and is part of a larger addressing system called Topaz. In fact, it’s likely you’ve made a DNS query today that triggered a formally verified Topaz program.
This post is a technical description of how Continue reading
One of the key arguments against stretched clusters (and similar stupidities) I used in my Disaster Recovery Myths presentation was the SSD read latency versus cross-site round-trip time.
Thanks to Networking Notes, I found a great infographic I can use in my next presentation (bonus points: it also works great in a terminal when fetched with curl) and a site that checks the latency of your web site from various vantage points.
In this blog post, we will look at how to set up port mirroring on Juniper EX switches. The goal is to mirror all the traffic coming in and going out of one switch port to another port. By doing this, we can connect a laptop to the mirrored port and capture all the traffic. This is particularly useful when you can't directly capture traffic from a device, such as a CCTV camera, TV, or other similar devices. Let's get started.
In this example, we have a database server connected to port ge-1/0/1, and we want to mirror all traffic going in and out of this port to port ge-1/0/4, where our laptop is connected. With this setup, we can use Wireshark on the laptop to capture the mirrored traffic.
configure
edit forwarding-options
edit analyzer my_capture
set input ingress interface ge-1/0/1
set input egress interface ge-1/0/1
set output interface ge-1/0/4
commitThe ingress and egress parts of the configuration refer to the traffic coming into the port (ingress) and leaving the port (egress). Ideally, we want to capture traffic in both directions, but you have the option to mirror traffic in only one direction if needed.
If you Continue reading
Generative AI is still very much an emerging technology and it’s morphing and evolving rapidly, as is illustrated with the trend toward agentic AI, which we’ve written about previously. …
Cisco Puts Big AI Infrastructure Into Small Packages was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.