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The networks category covers networking protocols, data transmission methods, network addressing, and network security. Understanding network fundamentals is crucial for designing, implementing, and managing reliable and secure communication systems.

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NETWORKS

SDN vs traditional networks: revolution or evolution?

SDN is definitely a buzzword in the networking world. Software-defined networks are now gaining momentum among enterprises. But is this a truly disruptive technology that is going to replace legacy networks? Or is it a logical step forward in the evolution of the network? In this blog post I will discuss these questions. As I see it in the introduction to SDN, this is an evolutionary step for networks, not a revolution. Considering the benefits SDN technology offers or even starting to adopt it does not mean sweeping aside the traditional network as we know it.
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NETWORKS

What are the benefits of SD-WAN? In a word, legion

Software-defined WAN is becoming increasingly popular, and for good reason—it effectively solves a number of important challenges posed by traditional WAN architecture. Reduced costs, increased application performance, more flexible network topology, faster deployment and improved security are the main benefits SD-WAN offers. Read on to learn more.A WAN, or Wide Area Network, is the computer network spanning a wide geographical area (regions, countries or even world). You need a WAN when you have a number of geographically distributed local networks that need to communicate with each other.
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NETWORKS

Edge computing and virtualization — living on the edge

Cloud offers considerable benefits to businesses. Yet in some cases where low latency is critical, it has serious drawbacks. An emerging paradigm of edge computing is the answer to these problems. In 2016, Cisco announced the beginning of the Zettabyte Era. Since then, the amount of data produced and processed has increased zettafold, if you will. This is especially true when you look at M2M applications (machine-to-machine or more commonly referred to as Internet of Things—IoT) such as video surveillance, healthcare monitoring, the smart home, smart meters and the like.
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NETWORKS

The difference between SDN and NFV — a simple guide

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies are similar and can easily be mistaken for one another. Given their growing popularity of late, it is good to know what SDN and NFV stand for, why they are so popular and what business benefits you can expect from them. In 2016, Cisco published the report “The Zettabyte Era: Trends and Analysis” announcing that by the end of 2016 annual global IP traffic would pass a zettabyte. To be mathematically precise, a zettabyte is a measure of storage capacity equal to 1021 (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) bytes.
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SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
NETWORKS

SmartNICs with P4 support

In the first part of this blogpost we discuss the idea of using smartNIC solutions to optimize network performance in a data center. In the second part, we review the currently available (July 2020) smartNIC solutions that can be programmed with P4. A paradigm of edge-computing has been gaining in popularity of late. The term itself can refer to many sub-technologies and have many meanings. One of them is the existence, next to the centralized, large data center, of those small or very small, located closer to the end-user.
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SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
NETWORKS

P4 Network Programming Language — what is it all about?

The programming language P4 is gaining in popularity in the network industry and is considered the next step in the SDN evolution. In this blog post, I will take a closer look at P4 and try to show why it is so important. Network devices like switches or routers are most commonly designed ”bottom-up.” The switch vendors that offer products to their clients usually rely on external chips from 3rd party silicon vendors. The chip is the heart of the system and in practice determines how device OS is realized and what functionality it can offer.
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QUALITY ASSURANCE
NETWORKS

A traffic generator for measuring network performance

It is probably the cloud that first comes to mind when you think about the architecture of modern services. It is an obvious choice for building large, distributed systems from scratch, as well as for the many enterprises migrating their infrastructure and services to the cloud. It is all very appealing, and modern, and intelligent. But that does not mean there are not serious challenges in going cloud. How should the infrastructure in use be tested? How can network performance be measured reliably in a cloud environment?
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NETWORKS

Kubernetes workloads — using multiple networks

Since there is no separate networking object among Kubernetes objects enabling the running of multiple networks, a workaround is required. Using a Container Network Interface (CNI) is a good place to start. Read this blog post to learn how you can use it to get multiple networks for Kubernetes workloads. I also describe my proposal for changes in source code that will enable native handling of multiple networks in Kubernetes. This blog post is based on the presentation which Doug Smith from Red Hat and I gave at the KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America 2019 conference.
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NETWORKS

Seamlessly transitioning to CNFs with Tungsten Fabric

Cloud-native Network Functions (CNFs), by all appearances, seem to be the next big trend in network architecture. They are a logical step forward in the evolution of network architecture. Networks were initially based on physical hardware like routers, load balancers and firewalls. Such physical equipment was then replaced by today’s standard, VMs to create Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs). Now, a lot of research is going into moving these functions into containers. In such a scenario, a container orchestration platform would be responsible for hosting CNFs.
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