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  • Human Infrastructure 347: Cloud Pollution, A New DNS Type, Firewall Migration and More

Human Infrastructure 347: Cloud Pollution, A New DNS Type, Firewall Migration and More

Author

Drew Conry-Murray
March 28, 2024

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

This dispatch comes to you from our boring dystopia. Steven Gonzalez Monserrate describes the global reality of operating the massive data centers that house the cloud. There’s electrical consumption, heat waste, water used for cooling, noise pollution, and hardware refuse on a massive scale with specific numbers documented in the article. What’s interesting is that the piece was originally published in February 2022--before AI really took off. The situation today is even more of everything Steven eloquently describes. - Ethan

Laura Chappell shares a new DNS record type defined in RFC 9460, the HTTPS record type. Laura’s a Wireshark expert, and shows the HTTPS resource record type in a DNS query. She also shows how to apply a display filter to find it--dns.qry.type == 65. RFC 9460, published in November 2023, also defines the SVCB resource record type. HTTPS and SVCB DNS records are used “to facilitate the lookup of  information needed to make connections to network services, such as  for HTTP origins. … By providing more information to the client before it attempts to establish a connection, these records offer potential benefits to both performance and privacy.” - Ethan

Markku Leiniö walks through the tmux utility, which is effectively keyboard multicasting. You can send your keystrokes to more than one device at a time. Of course, tmux is a bit cryptic like so many *Nix utilities, but not overly so. Markku shows you how to get started with tmux via easy instructions complemented by screenshots. - Ethan

Nvidia is the new darling of tech investors. The company is currently valued at about $2 trillion US dollars (on revenues of about $61 billion), and CEO Jensen Huang is garnering Steve Jobs-like adulation from attendees at the company’s annual events. This post reviews the steps Nvidia is taking to ensure it maintains its hold on the AI market, and provides some analysis of major announcements at the latest show, including the Blackwell chip and Nvidia Inference Microservices. - Drew

Cisco has announced the End of Life on multiple firewalls in the ASA and Firepower lines. Kelvin has pulled together summaries of migration options, including essential features and capabilities such as throughput, concurrent connections, and IPSec VPN throughput, if you want to stay within the Cisco family. - Drew

Webinar: State of Network Automation 2024 with EMA’s Shamus McGillicuddy

This on-demand session led by EMA’s VP of Research Shamus McGillicuddy dives deep into his latest research on network automation strategy and adoption across enterprises globally.

Featuring interviews and survey responses of 300+ networking practitioners and leaders, this webinar answers the questions:

  • Are companies prioritizing network automation in 2024?

  • What’s preventing teams from getting started with network automation?

  • How are executives evaluating their networking automation projects? (Funding, prioritization, impact)

  • What tools and technology are driving successful adoption of modern networking best practices?

TECH NEWS 📣

David Linthicum points out that just because Kubernetes is trendy, that doesn’t mean every organization should be running workloads on it. In David’s experience, Kubernetes’ complexity introduces tradeoffs that require an organization to perform a total cost of ownership analysis to understand whether Kubernetes is worth it for them. In many cases, it won’t be. - Ethan

Proof News reports on a test conducted by the AI Democracy Project in which election officials, journalists, and academics posed election-related questions, such as the location of polling places, to five different LLM-based AI services including ChatGPT 4, Claude, and Llama 2. This panel then reviewed the responses. The results do not inspire confidence. According to the story: “Overall, the AI models performed poorly on accuracy, with about half of their collective responses being ranked as inaccurate by a majority of testers. More than one-third of responses were rated as incomplete and/or harmful by the expert raters. A small portion of responses were rated as biased.” The article has more details, including responses from the companies operating these models. - Drew

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

It’s never too early to introduce your kids to Dune! Shared on X by @drawbrandondraw

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Go widescreen with your browser and watch the entire Starlink constellation modeled on your desktop. The model is interactive. You can see satellite names and orbits. You can also rotate the globe to any position and zoom in/out. There’s also data about any satellite you click on. As far as I could tell, you couldn’t launch a Wireshark instance on any of the satellites. 😂 - Ethan

Tracecat bills itself as an “open source Tines / Splunk SOAR alternative”. Designed for SecOps teams, Tracecat helps security folks automate investigations and other security tasks using AI. It’s early days for Tracecat. The founder state that in alpha release right now, and likely not suitable for production environments. - Ethan

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

The Ethernet Alliance is a pre-standard standards group where vendors with stake in the IEEE 802.1 standards get together to agree on Ethernet standards before they go to the IEEE meetings. Yes, it’s the pre-meeting meeting turned into an entire company. Anyway, once every year or two they produce the Ethernet Roadmap, which is sort of useful. The nomenclature of Ethernet interfaces is really useful. For example, did you know that 800G optical MMF Ethernet has four standards (so far) : VR4.2 SR4.2 VR8 SR8. Good to know. My personal favourite is 1.6Tbase-CR8. Yes, 1.6Tb over Twinax. Thank the spirits that copper has a future! - Greg

You don’t hear a lot about whitebox networks in 2024 but a huge amount of networking is done with whitebox. IP Infusion is spending money on marketing this, something that low cost, high value solutions don’t usually get. As a rough guide, marketing is generally needed for products that are low quality, hard to use, or bad features otherwise people wouldn’t buy them. - Greg

Speaking of whitebox, the open-source NOS project “Dent” held an event in October 2023 and has posted videos of the sessions. A series of blog posts summarize each session so you can pick the ones worth watching - a convenient way to avoid waffling. - Greg

Low code automation vendor with a multitude of API integrations Pliant will now automate your IT infrastructure under the flag of Big Blue. Pliant joins IBM’s growing software stable that includes SevOne, Cloud Pak for Network Automation, Hybrid Cloud Mesh, IBM NS1 Connect and Edge Application Manager. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. - Ethan

BackBox, which makes software for network automation, recently announced an upgrade to its Network Vulnerability Manager (NVM) feature. In its first release, NVM incorporated CVE information to help network engineers identify network devices with known vulnerabilities and get a risk score. With the latest upgrade, engineers can mark as ‘mitigated’ CVEs that have been addressed or are irrelevant to the organization. Marking CVEs as mitigated will automatically adjust the organization’s risk score. - Drew

BlueCat, which acquired Ideni and Men&Mice in 2023, has announced new features in products across its portfolio. These include support for new DNS record types, platform support for Nutanix, and improved support for “for third-party DNS and DHCP solutions by providing flexible deployment and management control to maintain network uptime.” Full details are in the press release linked above. - Drew

Disaggregated whitebox NOS provider DriveNets continues to certify various optics as fully manageable with their NOS. This time, certain Ciena optics are integrated, including some 400G coherent pluggable transceivers and the Ciena WaveLogic 5 Nano (WL5n) pluggables. If you’re not sure what DriveNets is all about, we’ve got a Heavy Networking podcast episode coming up soon with them. You’ll get an overview of what they do, and then we go pretty deep into how to use their solution to build a lossless Ethernet network for an AI computing data center. - Ethan 

LAST LAUGH 😆