IAA Newsletters
We are in the process of activating a new Google Private Network Interconnect (PNI) in Melbourne. Activating the PNI will allow us to fill our Google caches from Google’s cloud location in Melbourne rather than carrying it all the way from Sydney. Our Google caches in Melbourne ingest as much as 5 Gbps of fill data during peak periods, so being able to source this data directly from Google’s cloud location in Melbourne will help significantly in ensuring our resources are used as efficiently as possible.
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With a planned route server refresh to keep up with the growing traffic across our network, we’re happy to report that we’ve just received some of our new hardware. Plans are now underway to run up and deploy them across each IX. Stay tuned for further updates in our newsletter and on our social media channels.
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Due to the growing demand for network capacity, we’re in the process of procuring hardware and planning the implementation of a 400Gbps backbone ring across Sydney. Backed by the Arista 7280DR3 series platform, this expanded backbone will ensure that our network has capacity to meet existing and future demand for our services across NSW-IX.
The 7280DR3 is part of the Arista 7000 Series that are purpose built for 25G, 100G and 400G systems and are designed to be of the highest performance environments. With 9.6Tbps wire speed performance and 16GB buffer, this piece of hardware supports 24 x 400G OSFP-DD or up to 96 x 100G.
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Earlier this month, we made the hard call to postpone the launch of the new IAA Member Portal due to a couple of updates that required adequate testing. The new launch date is now
Wednesday, 7 September 2022 at 7:00am AWST / 9:00am AEST.
We would like to remind all members to look out for the communications regarding the new portal, with the first being sent out last week. In the meantime, if you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with us at support@internet.asn.au
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The countdown is on for our second IAASysters program. We’ve changed the workshop’s content slightly this year, so attendees get more career planning and presentation skills training.
The sessions will be delivered by prominent industry professionals: Cheryl Alderman from Be Ultimate Coaching will run the Career Planning session. The session Cheryl ran earlier this year received overwhelmingly positive feedback from attendees, so we are very pleased Cheryl is able to join us again. Sarah Denholm from Improve Your Public Speaking will join us for the first time, running the Presentation Skills session. We’re looking forward to hearing from them both!
All attending staff are looking forward to meeting the next group of Systers and hope they will enjoy the workshop and AusNOG Conference. If you see the Systers around the conference – they will likely be the ones wearing the IAASyters t-shirts – feel free to say “hi” and introduce yourself.
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This month’s Meet the Member segment features another fantastic board member, Richard Thompson. Richard currently works as Cloudflare’s Engineering Manager, focusing on the edge network and backbone. He first joined IAA in November 2020 when he moved back into the region after living abroad and wanted an opportunity to get to know and work with the local Internet community. The opportunity to work with a group of like-minded individuals to improve the Internet ecosystem in Australia was one that he jumped at!
Richard’s journey into the industry began as an avid gamer, which sparked his interest in IT. Not knowing specifically what he wanted to do, he decided to start with a broad degree encompassing programming, networking, systems administration and a few other areas. From there, he decided that networking was something he wanted to pursue further, and these days most networking roles have elements of programming intertwined – a happy coincidence.
His career began while he was at university, working at a small ISP in Christchurch, New Zealand, called Snap Internet. He worked his way from a residential helpdesk role to a network engineering role, where he was heavily involved in building the national backbone. In 2015, he left for London, UK, where he took up a network engineering position with Cloudflare and has been there ever since. He thoroughly enjoys working for Cloudflare as he says it’s an exciting ride, and he’s watched the Cloudflare network grow from a handful of data centres to a network that spans hundreds of cities worldwide. He says, “building out a global backbone has been both challenging and rewarding… I find it rewarding seeing our team grow and succeed.”
Currently living in Christchurch, Richard enjoys exploring the outdoors with his fiancée and beloved rescue dog. One of his favourite pastimes is travelling and visiting new places, which he says is one of the reasons he enjoyed London so much – being able to jump on a short flight and be visiting somewhere quite different was amazing! It’s very different being back in New Zealand, but he assures us that there’s still plenty of exploring to be done both in New Zealand and on our beautiful big island, too.
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This year we will be continuing our tradition of running state based end of year member events. We’re opening registrations early this year, and if you would like to attend the event in your state, head over to the member portal to register.
End of Year Events:
Perth – Tuesday, 29 November 2022
MV River Bells Cocktail Cruise
Time: 5:45pm AWST – boarding commences, 6:00pm – 9:00pm AWST – cruise
Location: Barrack Street Jetty
Sydney – Thursday, 1 December 2022
End of Year Member Social
Time: 7:00pm AEDT
Location: The Sporting Globe x 4 Pines, King St Wharf
Adelaide – Wednesday, 7 December 2022
End of Year Member Social
Time: 5:30pm ACDT
Location: The Gallery, 30 Waymouth St, Adelaide
Melbourne – Thursday, 8 December 2022
End of Year Member Social
Time: 5:30pm AEDT
Location: TBC
Brisbane – Wednesday, 14 December 2022
End of Year Member Social
Time: 5:30pm AEST
Location: Pig ‘N’ Whistle Riverside, Riverside Centre, 123 Eagle Street, Brisbane
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Last week we held our first online event for 2022! We hosted this event as we wanted to give our members an idea of how this can be done without breaking the bank, as regulatory compliance usually comes at a significant cost for those who have to comply. We were fortunate to have a panel of experts and a last minute extra – from the Australian Federal Police – who discussed lawful intercept in Australia and the Open LI project from across the ditch.
The session kicked off with an introduction from Narelle Clark and moved quickly into Sophia Joo’s session. She provided an overview of how lawful interception works in Australia, including important information about the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979, the lawful intercept process, what your obligations are under the Act and began discussion on the cost of compliance. Richard Nelson followed on being the first of three panellists to discuss the Open LI project – a collaboration between the University of Waikato and industry participants – and how it got started. Shane Alcock – the Lead Software Developer for the project – provided an excellent technical overview of the project, and Dave Mill gave us practical insight into how to implement Open LI in an ISP and turn Shane’s software into something that gets everything you need done. The AFP representative, Mark Parncutt, helped to field questions giving attendees helpful and insightful information on lawful intercept here in Australia. The session ended with a useful discussion based on the audience’s questions.
Despite the event going well, we did run into a technical glitch prior to the event start with a Zoom feature, whereby it requested some registered attendees to register again. We apologise to those who missed it due to this unfortunate occurrence and can reassure everyone that careful testing was undertaken prior to the event, so it happened despite our best efforts. Thankfully, we recorded the session, which can be accessed via our YouTube channel.