A Short on How Zoom Works

 

Zoom scaled from 20 million to 300 million users virtually over night. What's incredible is from the outside they've shown little in the way of apparent growing pains, though on the inside it's a good bet a lot of craziness is going on.

Sure, Zoom has made some design decisions that made sense as a small spunky startup that don't make a lot of sense as a defacto standard, but that's to be expected. It's not a sign of bad architecture as many have suggested. It's just realistically how products evolve, especially when they must uplift over weeks, days, and even hours.

Sudden success invites scrutiny, so everyone wants to know how Zoom works. The problem is we don't know much, but we do have a few information sources:

Announcing the DockerCon LIVE Container Ecosystem Track

With just 2 weeks away from DockerCon LIVE going, LIVE, we are humbled by the tremendous response from almost 50,000 Docker developers and community members, from beginner to expert, who have registered for the event. 

DockerCon LIVE would not be complete without our ecosystem of partners who contribute to, and shape, the future of software development. They will be showcasing their products and solutions, and sharing the best practices they have culminated in working with the best developers and organizations across the globe. 

We are pleased to announce the agenda for our Container Ecosystem Track with sessions built just for devs. In addition to actionable takeaways, their sessions will feature interactive, live Q&A, and so much more. Check out the incredible lineup:

Access Logging Made Easy With Envoy and Fluent Bit – Carmen Puccio, Principal Solutions Architect | AWS

Docker Desktop + WSL 2 Integration Deep Dive – Simon Ferquel, Senior Software Developer | Docker | Microsoft

Experience Report: Running a Distributed System Across Kubernetes Clusters – Chris Seto, Software Engineer | Cockroach Labs

Securing Your Containerized Applications with NGINX – Kevin Jones, Senior Product Manager | NGINX

You Want To Kubernetes? You MUST Know Docker! – Angel Rivera, Continue reading

Gartner: IT spending will drop 8% as COVID-19 hits enterprise wallets

Gartner this week said that IT spending across the globe is projected to total $3.4 trillion in 2020, a decline of 8% from 2019 due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.In January Gartner had forecast Worldwide IT spending to total $3.9 trillion in 2020, an increase of 3.4% from 2019.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Gartner’s new forecast says all market segments from enterprise software to communications service will experience a decline in 2020, with devices and data-center systems experiencing the largest drops in spending. To read this article in full, please click here

Ansible and IBM Community Grid

The world is currently a very different place than it was only a few months ago and we have come up with some ideas on how we can help our community in dealing with this new reality. The Ansible team has started a “Here to Help” webinar series where myself and other Ansible engineers are spending time with smaller groups of people to try and help them with technical challenges: https://www.ansible.com/here-to-help-webinar-series. The goal of these webinars is strictly to help! Regardless of if folks are only using open source technologies and not Red Hat products, we want to use this time to help them solve automation challenges, and help us brainstorm use-cases that can help others.

Another idea we recently implemented is integrating IBM’s World Community Grid into our workshops. World Community Grid enables anyone with a Linux, Windows or Mac computer (or an Android smartphone for some projects)  to donate their unused computing power to advance scientific research on topics related to health and sustainability. In fact, one of their projects is specifically going to help combat COVID-19. This blog post will cover what our workshops are and how we can use idle CPU time to help Continue reading

How HashiCorp Widened the Reach of the Consul Service Mesh

HashiCorp has expanded its Consul network control plane by widening its scope for different highly distributed services and environments — while simplifying and expanding its compliance and policy management capabilities. By adding gateway options and compliance features with today’s release of Consul 1.8, HashiCorp has made the control plane able to manage many different environments in a single interface, the company says. These might include services and applications running in containers, Kubernetes or virtual machines (VMs) on bare metal, traditional data centers or multicloud environments that are often widely dispersed geographically. “We are useful to customers because we offer a layer across [different environments] with a single management plane. The challenges customers have is they have many services that sit outside of service mesh, such as traditional applications, and need to bring them into the same fold,” HashiCorp, told The New Stack. “So how can services talk to your applications within your service mesh, and how do the applications in the service mesh talk out? Consul 1.8 solves that problem.” Consul 1.8’s audit logging and single sign-on (SSO) features (which are part of the enterprise version) Continue reading

Ampere DGX Servers Pack A Wallop, Including AMD Epyc CPUs

A new CPU or GPU compute engine is always an exciting time for the datacenter because we get to see the results of years of work and clever thinking by hardware and software engineers who are trying to break through barriers with both their Dennard scaling and their Moore’s Law arms tied behind their backs.

Ampere DGX Servers Pack A Wallop, Including AMD Epyc CPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For May 14th, 2020

Hey, it's HighScalability time!

 

LOL. Who knew a birthday service could lead to an existential crisis?

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Without your support on Patreon this kind of Stuff can't happen. You are that important to the fate of the smart and thoughtful world.

Know someone who wants to understand the cloud? I wrote Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 just for them. On Amazon it has 111 mostly 5 star reviews. Here's a recent 100% organic non-GMO review:

Number Stuff:

Don't miss all that the Internet has to say on Scalability, click below and become eventually consistent with all scalability knowledge (which means this post has many more items to read so please keep on reading)...

Build an OpenStack/Ceph cluster with Cumulus Networks in GNS3: part 1

Introduction

I must have built OpenStack demos a dozen times or more over the past few years, for the purposes of learning, training others, or providing proof of concept environments to clients. However these environments always had one thing in common – they were purely demo environments, bearing little relation to how you would build OpenStack in a real production environment. Indeed, most of them were “all-in-one” environments, where every single service runs on a single node, and the loss of that node would mean the loss of the entire environment – never mind the lack of scalability!

Having been tasked with building a prototype OpenStack environment for an internal proof of concept, I decided that it was time to start looking at how to build OpenStack “properly”. However I had a problem – I didn’t have at my disposal the half-dozen or so physical nodes one might typically build a production cluster on, never mind a highly resilient switch core for the network. The on-going lockdown in which I write this didn’t help – in fact it made obtaining hardware more difficult.

I’ve always been inspired by the “cldemo” environments on Cumulus Networks’ GitHub and my first thought was Continue reading

Announcing the Launch of the Global Encryption Coalition

Logo of Global Encryption Coalition

Today, more than 30 civil society organizations joined in launching the Global Encryption Coalition, to promote and defend encryption in key countries and multilateral gatherings where it is under threat. The new coalition is led by a Steering Committee consisting of the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), the Internet Society, and Global Partners Digital.

“The spread of COVID-19 has underlined the necessity of secure, private internet communications. Those who are fortunate enough to have strong internet connections are likely sharing increasing amounts of sensitive data online. At the same time, governments around the world are considering policies that put the security of that data at risk,” said Greg Nojeim, CDT’s Senior Counsel and Director of the Freedom, Security and Technology Project. “Encryption enables people to have private and secure digital lives.”

Working together with a membership that will quickly grow to include companies and technologists, CDT and the Coalition will help activists on the ground in key countries where it is under threat, like Canada, Australia, India, and Brazil, beat back proposals that would weaken encryption. “The Coalition will alert technologists to encryption threats around the world, and create mechanisms through which they can deliver expert analysis Continue reading

IPv6 Buzz 051: How The Work-From-Home Movement Affects IPv6 And The Internet

The IPv6 Buzz crew examine how the recent increase in working from home have affected Internet traffic as a whole--and IPv6 in particular. Will recent developments push IPv6 closer to a "tipping point"? What is VPN breakout and how is it impacted by IPv6? They discuss these topics and more.

The post IPv6 Buzz 051: How The Work-From-Home Movement Affects IPv6 And The Internet appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Feedback from Another SD-WAN Fan

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I rarely get emails along the lines of “I deployed SD-WAN and it was the best thing we did in the last decade” (trust me, I would publish those if they’d come from a semi-trusted source).

What I usually get are sad experiences from people being exposed to vendor brainwashing or deployments that failed to meet expectations (but according to Systems Engineering Director working for an aggressive SD-WAN vendor that’s just because they didn’t do their research, and thus did everything wrong).

Here’s another story coming from Adrian Giacometti.

What is IoT? The internet of things explained

The internet of things (IoT) is a catch-all term for the growing number of electronics that aren't traditional computing devices, but are connected to the internet to send data, receive instructions or both.There's an incredibly broad range of ‘things’ that fall under the IoT umbrella: Internet-connected ‘smart’ versions of traditional appliances such as refrigerators and light bulbs; gadgets that could only exist in an internet-enabled world such as Alexa-style digital assistants; and internet-enabled sensors that are transforming factories, healthcare, transportation, distribution centers and farms.What is the internet of things? The IoT brings internet connectivity, data processing and analytics to the world of physical objects. For consumers, this means interacting with the global information network without the intermediary of a keyboard and screen (Alexa, for example).To read this article in full, please click here

How IoT will rescue aviation

A biotech company that develops sensors to detect explosives and other chemicals on planes and in airports is teaming up with Airbus to create a sensor that could detect passengers who are positive for COVID-19.California-based Koniku and Airbus, which have been working since 2017 on contactless equipment that sniffs out chemicals, are trying to adapt that technology to sniff out pathogens, says Osh Agabi, founder and CEO of Koniku, in a blog post.To read this article in full, please click here

Day Two Cloud 048: Migrating Your Data Center To The Cloud

If you're thinking about migrating applications from your data center to the cloud, prepare to do a lot of planning. Today's Day Two Cloud podcast delves into the gritty details with guest Sarah Lean, a Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. We discuss migration business drivers, what apps are better off staying on prem, tips to minimize migration pain, and more.

The post Day Two Cloud 048: Migrating Your Data Center To The Cloud appeared first on Packet Pushers.

CISSP is at most equivalent to a 2-year associates degree

There are few college programs for "cybersecurity". Instead, people rely upon industry "certifications", programs that attempt to certify a person has the requisite skills. The most popular is known as the "CISSP". In the news today, European authorities decided a "CISSP was equivalent to a masters degree". I think this news is garbled. Looking into the details, studying things like "UK NARIK RQF level 11", it seems instead that equivalency isn't with master's "degrees" so much as with post-graduate professional awards and certifications that are common in industry. Even then, it places CISSP at too high a level: it's an entry level certification that doesn't require a college degree, and teaches students only familiarity with buzzwords used in the industry rather than the deeper level of understanding of how things work.


Recognition of equivalent qualifications and skills

The outrage over this has been "equivalent to a master's degree". I don't think this is the case. Instead, it seems "equivalent to professional awards and recognition".

The background behind this is how countries recognize "equivalent" work done in other countries. For example, a German Diplom from a university is a bit more than a U.S. bachelor's degree, but a bit less than Continue reading

The Hedge Episode 35: Peter Jones and Single Pair Ethernet

When you think of new Ethernet standards, you probably think about faster and optical. There is, however, an entire world of buildings out there with older copper cabling, particularly in the industrial realm, that could see dramatic improvements in productivity if their control and monitoring systems could be moved to IP. In these cases, what is needed is an Ethernet standard that runs over a single copper pair, and yet offers enough speed to support industrial use cases. Peter Jones joins Jeremy Filliben and Russ White to discuss single pair Ethernet.

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