On Saturday, the pacific island nation of Tonga was decimated by a massive volcanic eruption that was visible from space. At 5:27pm local time, the underwater volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai unexpectedly erupted, sending ash and debris for hundreds of miles. As of this writing, all internet and telephone communications between Tonga and the rest of the world are still down.

Load balancing means splitting up network traffic so that you can distribute it evenly across a group of backend servers. For example, if you run two web servers, both hosting a copy of the same website, then you can balance the traffic across them, sending half to one and half to the other. The goal of load balancing is to increase the availability of your website or web-based application by routing a portion of requests to each server.

In the first podcast episode of 2022, Avi welcomes Ron Winward to Network AF! Ron is the vice president of network services at INAP, global provider of secure, performance-oriented, hybrid infrastructure. Like Avi, Ron also grew up in Pennsylvania and is a member of the East Coast Access of Infrastructure.

Today, I’m excited to announce that Gerald Combs, the original creator and lead maintainer of Wireshark, has joined Sysdig. In addition, Sysdig is becoming the primary sponsor of Wireshark.