OpenStack Summit Vancouver recap: What we did and what’s next

A few weeks ago, I set out to the beautiful city of Vancouver’s convention center, along with a boatload of rocket turtles and a stellar team. It was a great time with a wonderful scenic view of the ocean. I’ve been at Cumulus a few months now, but I can’t help but enjoy looking around, seeing the friends I’ve made in the industry, and the friends and companies Cumulus has worked with over the years. It is exciting to have thousands of people coming together at OpenStack Summit Vancouver to work on a shared goal.

This year, we were lucky enough to have our very own Pete Lumbis take the stage with David Iles of Mellanox to present our joint solution around the latest SDN revolution, which is centered on creating efficient virtualized data center networks using VXLAN & EVPN.

In the next few paragraphs, I’ll share some highlights of the event, some photos, and a recap of that exact discussion. There was a lot to learn and discover, and I’m excited to share the details.

Day 1: Don’t you just love working with collaborative open source projects?

On our first day, lots of things were going on — we Continue reading

NetDevOpEd: Disaggregation is key to software vulnerability management

One critical decision that executives need to make when assessing their data center architecture is their approach to software vulnerability management across all network components. Vulnerability management primarily revolves around selecting an efficient and modern software management strategy. There are several ways to execute on a software management strategy, and I believe disaggregation is a critical first step in doing it right.

In this post, I want to take a minute to first share my thoughts on the vulnerability management trends I’ve noticed. I will argue that a) you need to prioritize the network in how you manage vulnerabilities and b) disaggregation is the only way to do it properly. We’ll also take a look at the reasons why I think we never had the right framework to manage software delivery, making vulnerability management a challenge on platforms that are closed in nature.

Operations at the core of vulnerability management

Three weeks ago, I joined 40,000 security professionals in San Francisco to attend the biggest gathering of security conscious professionals — RSA Conference. While there were several presentations and moments from the event that stood out, one that caught my eye was a presentation that discussed challenges in the industry Continue reading