Platform Transition Update - NDT Dataset, Tables, & Views
If you’ve been following our blog over the last few months, you know M-Lab has been working toward a complete server platform upgrade. As of November 20, 2019, all M-Lab servers are now managed by Kubernetes, running Docker container services for all experiments. This transition has greatly improved our platform management, this post addresses the short term impact on downstream data users and applications, and outlines a temporary solution and our longer term for new NDT tables/views.
Running Your Own ndt-server
If you’ve followed the M-Lab blog over the past year and a half, you’ll know that we’ve been engineering and testing a massive upgrade to our server software and how it’s managed and deployed [1] [2] [3] [4]. That’s been a ton of work, and our team is excited to now complete the migration from the PLC/vserver platform to the new k8s stack.
We expect some great derivative outcomes of migrating to Docker and Kubernetes both for ourselves in managing the platform and measurement tests we host, and for the community as well. In particular, the NDT server was completely rewritten in Golang, and being fully “dockerized” the server is now portable and usable outside of the M-Lab platform by others. This is really exciting because not only can M-Lab use our tools to measure the public Internet, but anyone can run our server now to measure their network privately using the same methods and tools. This post kicks off a series of blogs that will demonstrate various ways to use M-Lab server and client tools, starting with ndt-server.
Supporting Internet Self Determination at the 2019 Indigenous Connectivity Summit
Last week M-Lab was honored to attend and contribute at the 2019 Indigenous Connectivity Summit (ICS), presented by Internet Society, in Hilo, Hawai’i; and a community network training and building event in the soverign lands of indigenous Hawaiian people, Pu’uhonua o Waimanalo, on the island of Oahu.
M-Lab 2.0 Platform: Global Pilot Assessment
We deployed the new M-Lab platform to 1/3rd of the M-Lab fleet, and now we need to assess whether or not it is a performance regression, relative to the old platform. As long as we can be sure the performance of the new platform does not constitute a regression, then we can roll out the new platform and be confident that we have not made anything worse.