COVID-19: Weekly health check of ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services

As COVID-19 continues to spread, forcing employees to work from home, the services of ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services a.k.a. unified communications as a service (UCaaS) providers are experiencing increased traffic.ThousandEyes is monitoring how these increases affect outages and the performance challenges these providers undergo. It will provide Network World a roundup of interesting events of the week in the delivery of these services, and Network World will provide a summary here. Stop back next week for another update, and see more details here.To read this article in full, please click here

History of Networking: An African Perspective of the Internet

Dawit Bekele began his journey with the Internet while at college—but on returning to Africa, he discovered there was very little connectivity. While he was not involved in the initial stages of engineering the Internet in Africa, he began as an early user and proponent of connecting his home continent, and is now part of the Internet Society, helping to grow connectivity.

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VMware cloud-management suite features Kubernetes, automation upgrades

VMware this week bolstered the on-premise and service-monitoring capabilities of its core cloud-management software with improved automation, Kubernetes and troubleshooting features.The features come in a new release of VMware’s vRealize Suite which is the company’s wide-ranging package of tools for helping customers manage virtual infrastructure and applications. Its features include artificial intelligence, machine learning, and DevOps tools such as Infrastructure as Code to provision, orchestrate, optimize and govern hybrid-cloud environments.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] “The overarching idea of vRealize is to help customers centrally control and govern cloud resources whether they be private, hybrid or SAAS and mitigate the risk of those rapidly growing virtual workloads,” said Ken Lee  senior director of product marketing for VMware. To read this article in full, please click here

How open networking can make supply chains more resilient

Supply chains are fragile things. They’re a web of suppliers and distributors, of storage and shipping facilities, and of resellers, all working at just the right speeds and with just the right margin of error to keep things flowing smoothly. But any fragile system is inevitably vulnerable to world events.

With the increasing requirement to support remote work, a robust, adaptable network is a business necessity. But it can be a challenge to source the networking equipment you need when global trade is disrupted. Open networking—where you’re not locked into specific network components—gives you many supplier and platform options to choose from, increasing your flexibility to deal with sudden and substantial change.

The lean supply chain

Lean manufacturing has become a common business practice. An IndustryWeek survey in 2016 ranked lean manufacturing systems as one of the most important technological advancements (second only to quality management systems).

Lean companies prioritize efficiency and work to reduce waste. This often means that they don’t stockpile components or keep a large inventory of completed products, which keeps money from being tied up in excess goods or unused warehouse space.

Companies source parts and labor from across the globe in an effort to trim Continue reading

Knowledge Sharing and Meaningful Conversation at InterCommunity 2020: Securing Global Routing

Recently, five routing security experts shared how they’ve been working to protect the Internet from the most common routing threats – by implementing and promoting the actions called for in Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security, or MANRS. They were all participants in InterCommunity, which gives the Internet Society community a way to connect for meaningful conversations about the issues that matter most to the Internet.

Want to join the InterCommunity conversation? Become an Internet Society member today!

This session of InterCommunity, “Securing Global Routing,” set out to increase awareness of MANRS, share good routing practices, and encourage more network operators to take the MANRS actions to make the Internet more secure for us all.

The speakers shared their network operations and capacity building knowledge while more than 200 participants participated live in the informative conversation.

Special thanks to Melchior Aelmans of Juniper Networks who moderated the discussion skillfully!

Here’s what the panelists had to say:

Abdul Awal, Bangladesh National DataCentre
Awal spoke about his goals in building technical capacity around Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) and raising awareness of MANRS principles in South Asia. He also discussed how we can help networks validate their routing Continue reading

The CloudVision Journey

The CloudVision Journey

Traditional networking has been transformed by cloud-networking principles. These principles drive an open, software-first approach to efficient automation, granular telemetry, and proactive analytics that have simplified traditional network operations. At Arista, we align our product strategy to these cloud networking principles and build our products based on modern software approaches. One such approach is the network-wide state and inference-driven architecture to manage networks with CloudVision. Arista’s strategic approach to automation, analytics, and change control has made CloudVision one of the favorite choices in the menu for our enterprise customers.

The CloudVision Journey

The CloudVision Journey

Traditional networking has been transformed by cloud-networking principles. These principles drive an open, software-first approach to efficient automation, granular telemetry, and proactive analytics that have simplified traditional network operations. At Arista, we align our product strategy to these cloud networking principles and build our products based on modern software approaches. One such approach is the network-wide state and inference-driven architecture to manage networks with CloudVision. Arista’s strategic approach to automation, analytics, and change control has made CloudVision one of the favorite choices in the menu for our enterprise customers.

Managing process accounting on Linux

Process accounting is a method of recording and summarizing commands and processes. It's an option on Linux systems, but you have to enable it and use a particular command to view the details collected. This post covers the commands involved and offers some suggestions on making the views even more useful.To start, understand that process accounting is different than what you see when running the ps command. It shows details on commands that have completed –- not those that are currently running. It also shows a lot more details than you would see by looking at your users' command history files and keeps all the collected data in a single file on the system.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM details next-gen POWER10 processor

IBM on Monday took the wraps off its latest POWER RISC CPU family, optimized for enterprise hybrid-cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI) inferencing, along with a number of other improvements.Power is the last of the Unix processors from the 1990s, when Sun Microsystems, HP, SGI, and IBM all had competing Unixes and RISC processors to go with them. Unix gave way to Linux and RISC gave way to x86, but IBM holds on.This is IBM's first 7-nanometer processor, and IBM claims it will deliver an up-to-three-times improvement in capacity and processor energy efficiency within the same power envelope as its POWER9 predecessor. The processor comes in a 15-core design (actually 16-cores but one is not used) and allows for single or dual chip models, so IBM can put two processors in the same form factor. Each core can have up to eight threads, and each socket supports up to 4TB of memory.To read this article in full, please click here

Avaya repositions itself as cloud provider for unified communications

Unified communications vendor Avaya is rebranding its entire communications portfolio under the Avaya OneCloud name, effectively positioning itself as a cloud services provider.Avaya OneCloud spans the entire Avaya product line, which is focused on contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS), unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS), and communications-platform-as-a-service (CPaaS). Avaya offers a range of operational, consumption and commercial models that can be deployed on-premises as well as through Avaya's private and public cloud offerings."Global organizations increasingly rely on us as they adapt to a work-from-anywhere world, and we are delivering our offerings in a more impactful way," said Simon Harrison, Avaya senior vice president and chief marketing officer, in a statement. "Avaya OneCloud enables them to consume and deploy apps in the way they want, to achieve their ambitions and build their brands through improved experiences."To read this article in full, please click here

Unsolicited Multicast: Random Thoughts on the LFN White Paper

A short while back, the Linux Foundation (Networking), or LFN, published a white paper about the open source networking ecosystem. Rather than review the paper, or try to find a single theme, I decided to just write down “random thoughts” as I read through it. This is the (rather experimental) result.

The paper lists five goals of the project which can be reduced to three: reducing costs, increasing operator’s control over the network, and increasing security (by increasing code inspection). One interesting bit is the pairing of cost reduction with increasing control. Increasing control over a network generally means treating it less like an opaque box and more like a disaggregated set of components, each of which can be tuned in some way to improve the fit between network services, network performance, and business requirements. The less a network is an opaque box, however, the more time and effort required to manage it. This only makes sense—tuning a network to perform better requires time and talent, both of which cost money.

The offsetting point here is disaggregation and using open source can save money—although in my experience it never does. Again, running disaggregated software and hardware requires time and talent, Continue reading

Amazon Braket lets customers try out quantum computing

AWS has announced the availability of a new service that lets customers tap into and experiment with quantum computing simulators and access quantum hardware from D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti.The managed service, Amazon Braket, offers customers a development environment where they can explore and build quantum algorithms, test them on quantum circuit simulators, and run them on different quantum hardware technologies, AWS said in a statement about the service. The Braket service includes Jupyter notebooks that come pre-installed with the Amazon Braket SDK and example tutorials.To read this article in full, please click here

Deploying a Minecraft Docker Server to the cloud

One of the simplest examples that people have used over the years of demoing Docker is quickly standing up and running a Minecraft server. This shows the power of using Docker and has a pretty practical application!

Recently I wanted to set up a server but I wanted to persist one and as I have given away my last raspberry pi I needed to find a new way to do this. I decided that I would have a go at running this in Azure using the $200 free credits you get in your first month.

The first thing I decided to do was to check out the existing Docker Images for Minecraft servers to see if there were any that looked good to use, to do this I went to Docker Hub and searched for minecraft:

I liked the look of minecraft-server repo, so I clicked through to have a look at the image and link through to the Github repo.

To start I decide to just test out running this locally on my machine with the ‘simple get started’ Docker Run command:

$ docker run -d -p 25565:25565 --name mc -e EULA=TRUE
 itzg/minecraft-server

In the Docker Desktop Dashboard, I Continue reading

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