How d that lift and shift to the cloud go? Pretty good?

Workloads spun up in AWS? Getting used to Azure? Management happy because IT is all cloud-i-fied? Excellent.

That was day 1.

Now it s day 2, and you ve got some new problems to solve. Cost issues. Security issues. Operations issues. On today s Datanauts episode, we dig into your Day 2 cloud.

Our guest is Maish Saidel-Keesing, Cloud & DevOps Architect at CyberArk. We discuss the costs involved with lift-and-shift, including some you may not be anticipating. We also drill into security issues and auditing tools, and then look at how the cloud affects developer and operations teams.

Sponsor: ITProTV

Learn the skills to pass the most in-demand IT certs — from entry level to advanced — with ITProTV. Our extensive course library includes CEH v9, CISA, CompTIA A+, Mac Certified Support Professional, and more! Stream courses live & on-demand. Visit itpro.tv/data and use code DATANAUTS to try it FREE for 7 days, and receive 30% off your monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription.

Show Links:

Technodrone – Maish’s blog

5 AWS Certifications in 237 Days – Technodrone

The Cloud Walkabout AWS Continue reading

You ve got your traditional on-premises network. You know how it works. Lots of manual configuration and ticket-y stuff to get the job done when someone needs something.

And then you ve got your cloud network. You don t worry about that one as much. The devs provision what they need automatically, hitting APIs as they go, and you keep tabs on things from a watchful distance, helping out as needed.

What if you could operate your on-premises network like you do your public cloud network? What if your hybrid cloud was operationally consistent? Today on the Datanauts, sponsor Big Switch Networks makes some pretty big hybrid cloud networking announcements, and we quiz them on the why and how.

Our guest is Kyle Forster, founder of Big Switch.

We talk about Big Switch’s new products, including the ability to create an on-premises VPC within Big Switch’s data center fabric. The goal is to provide the same operational constructs within your own data center as you’d get in a public cloud like AWS, Azure, or Google.

Show Links:

Big Switch Networks

Big Switch Labs

Multi-Cloud Director Tech Demo

Big Cloud Fabric-Public Cloud Tech Demo

Big Switch Networks on Twitter

Big Switch Continue reading

Cloud native applications are designed to be managed by software in all stages. This includes ongoing health checks as well as initial deployments. Human bottlenecks should be eliminated as much as possible in the technology, processes, and policies.

That quote is from the O Reilly book Cloud Native Infrastructure. On today s Datanauts episode, we talk to Justin Garrison, one of the authors and a senior systems engineer.

We dive into the chapter about managing cloud native applications, including a general conversation about the definition of a cloud-native app–that is, an application managed by software rather than humans.

Then we discuss the challenges of managing a microservices architecture, explore the concept of sidecar proxies, and walk through the process of deploying a new cloud application into production.

We also look at troubleshooting tools and techniques, and examine the necessity of service discovery and resource scheduling.

Sponsor: Linux Academy

Linux Academy offers the most hands-on training content in AWS, Azure, OpenStack, Linux, DevOps, Containers, security, and Google Cloud. Beginners and advanced learners alike will find up-to-date courses in skills development and certification prep. Hands-on labs let you work in actual cloud environments. Find out about the newest courses available online–including Continue reading

There s a lot to be said about consuming technology remotely. Heck, the cloud is just that – someone else stands up infrastructure and services, and you consume them.

But what about for the desktop environment, which for many is their main working environment and something of a tug-of-war when it comes to ownership, management, and administration?

In today s episode of the Datanauts, join us as we de-mystify the exotic world of End User Compute, or EUC.

Our guest is Sean Massey, Senior Technical Architect at AHEAD. You can follow him on Twitter at seanpmassey and check out his blog at TheVirtualHorizon.com.

We discuss what EUC encompasses, including technologies such as VDI as well as mobile devices, laptops, and desktops. We also look at how SaaS and cloud apps affect end users and application delivery, and explore the impact of EUC/VDI on the data center.

Show Links:

Carl Stalhood – Filling gaps in EUC vendor documentation

The Virtual Horizon – Sean Massey’s blog

Sean Massey on Twitter

AWS security issues show up in tech news fairly often. Today, we talk with someone who wrote about AWS services other than S3 that were found exposed to the public. Could that be some of your services?

Could be. The numbers are pretty impressive. Stay tuned, and find out how to determine whether or not your EBS snapshots, RDS snapshots, AMIs, or ElasticSearch clusters are accidentally public.

Our guest is Scott Piper, an AWS security consultant for Summit Route. You can follow him on Twitter at @0xdabbad00.

We start by exploring the types of AWS resources that can be unintentionally exposed to the public Internet, how to find them, and how to lock them down.

Then we talk about general practices such as vulnerability scanning, how to minimize human error when configuring AWS services, and drill into options such as CloudMapper and Security Monkey, open-source tools to help administrators find and control AWS resources.

Show Links:

Scott Piper on Twitter

Scott Piper’s blog – Duo.com

Scott Piper on GitHub – GitHub

Beyond S3: Exposed Resources on AWS – Duo.com

flAWS Challenge

CloudMapper – GitHub

CloudTracker – GitHub

Netflix Security Monkey – GitHub

Datanauts 086: AWS Identity & Access Continue reading

Today on the Datanauts podcast, we review the state of Ethernet fabrics in 2018.

Between 2010 and 2012, before SDN became the new marketing hotness, it seemed like vendors were churning out Ethernet fabric products for the data center. Everyone had at least one fabric, and some had two or three.

As time has marched on, many of those Ethernet fabrics have dropped off the map. To catch us up and review what Ethernet fabric means today is Stefan Fouant. Stefan is the Chief Architect at Copper River Technologies, a Juniper Ambassador, a quadruple JNCIE, and author of the book Day One: Junos Fusion Data Center Up and Running.

We look at the status of Ethernet fabric protocols such as TRILL and SPB. We also dig into BGP EVPN, the latest hot fabric.

We also discuss the characteristics of a fabric, look at reasons why a fabric might make sense in your data center, and explore inter-fabric connectivity.

Show Links:

Day One: Junos Fusion Data Center Up and Running – Stefan Fouant

Shortest Path First – Stefan Fouant’s blog

Stefan Fouant on Twitter

Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) – IETF

Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) – Wikipedia

BGP MPLS-Based Continue reading

The robotic production facilities on board the Datanauts’ dreadnought cruiser are really great at making scout drones for identifying rich mineral deposits. Sadly, our probe production numbers are fairly low right now, because every single build is done by hand.

Blasphemy! We need a way to simply define the end state of our drone creation and then let an orchestration engine handle all of the building. Plus, if the design changes, we need to make sure all of the existing drones are retrofitted to take advantage of the new improvements! What can be done?!

Our guest today is Ned Bellavance. We pick Ned’s brain about infrastructure as code and his hands-on experience with HashiCorp’s Terraform.

Find Out More About Terraform

• Datanauts Episode 71 with Mitchell Hashimoto
  http://packetpushers.net/podcast/podcasts/datanauts-071-everything-code-hashicorp/
• Datanauts Episode 92 with Brett Johnson
  http://packetpushers.net/podcast/podcasts/datanauts-092-microsoft-mcsa-lab-creation-chef/
• Hashicorp Training
  https://www.hashicorp.com/training

Follow Ned Bellavance

• Ned’s Courses On PluralSight
  https://www.pluralsight.com/authors/edward-bellavance
• Ned’s Blog
  https://nedinthecloud.com/
• The Buffer Overflow Podcast
  https://www.anexinet.com/resources/podcasts/buffer-overflow/
• The Anexipod Podcast
  https://www.anexinet.com/resources/podcasts/anexipod/

On this episode of Datanauts, we chat with Brandon Olin, the creator of PoshBot, a PowerShell based chatbot for ops teams. What does PoshBot do? How was PoshBot built? How do chatbots impact Brandon’s delivery model?

ChatBots?

Bots have been around for a long time. They re really handy, too, often being able to answer simple questions by submitting a special command that has some sort of prefix or identifier associated with them. Especially if you re on Twitch and want to know how long your favorite streamer has been online.

Maybe that isn t the most helpful thing in the world, but what if we changed the narrative to be all about operations and how talking to a bot (with your peers watching) could actually up-level your day-to-day enjoyment of IT?

That’s our conversation today.

What is PoshBot?

PoshBot is a chat bot written in PowerShell. It makes extensive use of classes introduced in PowerShell 5.0. PowerShell modules are loaded into PoshBot and instantly become available as bot commands. PoshBot currently supports connecting to Slack to provide you with awesome ChatOps goodness.

For More Information About PoshBot

• PoshBot on GitHub, Home of the PoshBot Project
  https://github.com/poshbotio
• PoshBot Continue reading

It turns out you can t do it all in the cloud. And thus, we have the rise of edge computing, in which data is collected, processed, and analyzed close to the source of its creation and close to where people and systems need it.

The goals of edge computing include improving performance, reducing the costs and time of data transmission, and creating new applications to take advantage of that data.

Our guide to edge computing is Alex Marcham. Alex is a technologist, writer and researcher. You can find his work at NetworkArchitecture2020.com.

We level-set with a working definition of edge computing, examine the notion of locality and what it means for edge computing, and discuss latency issues.

We explore edge computing use cases such as industrial processes and video surveillance, and dive into the infrastructure that drives this technology.

Show Links:

Network Architecture 2020

Alex Marcham on Twitter

The Datanauts travel to a galaxy of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The good ship InfoSight is piloted by sponsor HPE Nimble Storage as we explore automating infrastructure on today s episode.

Our guest is Ryan Brown, Enterprise Storage Architect and Chief Technologist for Storage in Canada at HPE.

We talk about InfoSight, HPE’s cloud-based predictive analytics platform that works with HPE’s Nimble Storage arrays, and soon to work with other products from HPE. InfoSight applies machine learning and AI to help customers better manage storage resources and predict problems before they affect the business.

We look at the kind of information that InfoSight gathers, how it collects that information and ships it to the cloud, and how it’s protected.

We also delve into the value that InfoSight can provide for resource allocation and operational benefits such as preventing outages, maintaining uptime, and improving performance.

Show Links:

HPE InfoSight

HPE InfoSight at Tech Field Day

Whether by choice or circumstance, it’s inevitable you’ll find yourself looking for a new job.

On today’s Datanauts episode we break down the job hunt process to help you understand what you want, what you have to offer, and how to make the most of your application.

Our guest is Doug Lane, a tech/ops professional who’s been working in IT for 25 years. He’s also recently gone through the process of finding and getting a new job.  You can follow him on Twitter at @debuggist.

Doug shares his experiences and tips about how he approached the job search. We start by talking about honestly understanding your own strengths and weaknesses, and then thinking about what kind of job it is you really want.

We also discuss how to evaluate job descriptions, and how to nail the application process.

While performing a routine sensor sweep of the Gargleblaster nebula, the crew of the Datanauts starship noticed that many of the tasks are manual in nature and could, with a little effort, be automated with some scripting.

However, every time we moved on from one part of the nebula to another, a different error would crop up with the script s code. Isn t there some way that we can automatically test our code to make sure that more time is spent drinking a frothy ale instead of all this debugging?

On today’s episode with talk with Adam Bertram, a Microsoft MVP and author of The Pester Book.

He is currently a Senior Systems Automation Engineer working with PowerShell, Desired State Configuration, and various other DevOps tools to coordinate reliable software deployments for a biotech company. You can find his work at adamtheautomator.com.

We start by defining a unit test for scripts, and how unit testing differs from integration, functional, regression tests, and others.

Then we dive into why you’d want to test your scripts (testing isn’t just for developers!), and how to create these tests.

We also talk about the notion of test-driven development, and dive Continue reading

Today on the Datanauts podcast, we land on planet Mentorship to drive around in our exploratory rovers. Why? Mentoring came up on Twitter a while back.

Some of you are for it. You invest in your co-workers and your organization by sharing with others what you know. Some of you are against mentoring, arguing that you don t have the time and aren t getting paid to teach other people.

And then the Twitterverse connected us to Don Jones, who wrote a book called, Be The Master. Seems like a great excuse to fire up the microphone on our rovers and explore planet Mentorship in more detail.

Besides being an author, Don is an an IT pro and PowerShell expert who has created a variety of PowerShell training materials.

We talk about how a master/apprenticeship approach can be more effective than formal education, selfish reasons for being a mentor, how to address imposter syndrome, and how to get support for mentorship at work.

Show Links:

Don Jones.com

Be The Master.com

Don Jones on Twitter

Become The Master Or Go Away – Don Jones.com

Be the Master with Don Jones – RunAsRadio

If you work for a Value Added Reseller (VAR) as an engineer, the value being added is YOU.

What is VAR life? Projects, customer meetings, deadlines, bills of materials, RFP responses, and trying to turn the promises of sales unicorns into an actual design you can install for the customer.

We’ve worked for VARs at one time or another, as has our guest Eric Gullickson, who is now Enterprise Architect at Vortex Optics. We thought we d run down the good, the bad, and the ugly of the VAR life on this episode of the Datanauts podcast.

We start the show by distinguishing the different roles a VAR can have. Then we dive into the good, which includes access to new technology, paid certifications, a flexible work schedule, and exposure to a wide variety of businesses and operating environments.

For the bad, the Datanauts and Eric discuss the blunt reality that you have to generate profit, and you may find yourself having to navigate the competing interests of manufacturers, sales, distributors, and customers.

On the ugly side, we swap stories about greasy salespeople, bad project management, and other nightmares.

Show Links:

Eric Gullickson.com

Eric Gullickson on Twitter

Today the Datanauts explore three key concepts to make cloud management and operations more bearable: automation, understanding new services and capabilities, and security.

Our guest is Kenneth Hui, Technical Marketing Engineer at Rubrik. Ken blogs at Cloud Architect Musings. While our conversation focuses primarily on AWS, many of the principles discussed will apply to any cloud platform.

In part one we parse automation, infrastructure-as-code, and DevOps to understand how these concepts are related, how they differ, and why culture and human behavior matter more than labels.

Part two explores the latest offerings in AWS including serverless, container support, and machine learning.

Part three tackles cloud security essentials including encryption, not exposing S3 buckets, and best practices.

Show Links:

Infrastructure as Code: A Reason to Smile – Thoughtworks.com

DevOps Culture (Part 1) – IT Revolution

The AWS Love/Hate Relationship with Data Gravity – Cloud Architect Musings

Data Encryption in the Cloud, Part 1: Why You Should Care – Cloud Architect Musings

Last Week In AWS – Newsletter

Unsecured server exposed thousands of FedEx customer records – ZDNet

Vault Project – Vault.io

AWS Blogs – Amazon

AWS Security – Amazon

AWS Security Best Practices – Amazon

AWS Faragate – Continue reading

Today, the Datanauts revisit the world of Kubernetes and container scheduling, but we also loop in Serverless or Functions as a Service (FaaS) along with building an incredibly famous project that has literally no code.

Our guest is Kelsey Hightower, a Google employee as well as a Kubernetes advocate and expert. We talk with Kelsey about the latest evolution of Kubernetes, whether the notion of Kubernetes lock-in is a concern, and how it’s being used in production.

We also delve into serverless computing or Functions as a Service (FaaS) and discuss the technology’s development and adoption. We also explore Kelsey’s latest project, No Code.

Last but not least, we look at how containers and orchestration affects the interaction between Devs and Ops, and how to embrace the new world of application design.

Show Links:

Kelsey Hightower on GitHub

Kelsey Hightower on Twitter

Kubernetes Up And Running – Amazon

Kubernetes The Hard Way – GitHub

Datanauts 058: Kubernetes A Deep-Dive Introduction

Datanauts 042: Understanding Serverless Architecture

Datanauts 047: A Serverless Architecture Follow-Up

Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces Kubernetes as First Graduated Project – CNCF

Serverless Ops: What do we do when the server goes away? – Serverless Ops

Security Center Continue reading

Today on the Datanauts we crack open our cabinet of curiosities to explore a variety of subjects, ideas, and blogs gleaned from the Internet.

Topics include Site Reliability Engineering, AWS vs. Amazon for your cloud career, the pros and cons of abstraction, and the ups and downs of industry certifications.

Check out the show links for more details on everything we discuss.

Show Links:

You need SRE skills to thrive in a serverless world Kelsey Hightower – A Cloud Guru

AWS Vs. Azure: Which One s Right for Your Cloud Career? – SimpliLearn

OpenFaaS.com

The CNCF takes steps toward serverless computing – Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Serverless Working Group – GitHub

PowerShell Summit

How Self-Sufficient Do You Want to Be? – IP Space

The Law of Leaky Abstractions – Joel on Software

The Network Collective

Rehashing Certifications – Rule 11 Reader

Computer Networking Problems And Solutions – Rush White and Ethan Banks

Building Next-Generation Data Center – IP Space

RedHat to acquire CoreOS – RedHat

On-call doesn’t have to suck – Medium

Open source project trends for 2018 – GitHub Blog

The State of the Octoverse 2017 – GitHub