Ethan Banks

Author Archives: Ethan Banks

Book Review: Deep Work by Cal Newport

Deep Work by Cal Newport is highly recommended if you are an information worker who is less productive than you wish you were. I recommended Deep Work even more highly if you feel you are productive, but are not producing the sort of work you desperately want to be.

Understanding OpenStack: Capabilities & Challenges

In this episode of Network Matters with Ethan Banks, learn about the basics of OpenStack and why the open-source cloud platform has become so popular. Ethan explains exactly what OpenStack is, then dispels some of the myths around IT's expectations for OpenStack adoption.

Ethan is the co-host of the Future of Networking Summit at Interop Las Vegas. Learn more about the conference program or register for Interop, May 2-6 in Las Vegas.

Stop Thinking About SDN!

In this episode of Network Matters with Ethan Banks, learn why Ethan's advice to most enterprises is to stop thinking about SDN. Rather than viewing SDN as a shrink-wrapped magic solution, Ethan explains why enterprises need to focus on their specific business problems and the networking products that can solve them – SDN or not.

Ethan is the co-host of the Future of Networking Summit at Interop Las Vegas. Learn more about the conference program or register for Interop, May 2-6 in Las Vegas.

Will Public Cloud Make Us Prisoners Of Pricing?

Let's say the vast majority of compute workloads in the world migrates to public cloud. Will public cloud pricing then become extortionate? Seems plausible if you assume that the technical talent migrates to public cloud companies. In that scenario, public cloud consumers are beholden to their technical master and would have to pay whatever is asked so that they can get their business done. However, I think the situation is more complex than that...

So, You Want To Be A Manager

And so it was as a young man that I aspired to be a manager. Management looked like control to me. After all, I thought that as I acquired technical expertise in operating systems, security, and networking, I should be the one holding the reins. That’s logical, perhaps. But it’s naive.

Should Monitoring Systems Also Perform Mitigation?

Shiny red lights and sundry messages can tell us when a transaction time is too high, an interface is dropping too many packets, database commits are taking too long, or a WAN link’s jitter just went south. That information is wonderful, but doesn’t resolve the issue. A course of action is required.

Book Recommendation: Wasteland Blues

I am a fan of any sort of post-apocalyptic fiction. Movies. Books. Anime. Weird Al songs. You name it. If it posits a future after the world we know is gone, I'll give it a try. Thus it is that I recommend Wasteland Blues to you by Scott Christian Carr and my fellow Packet Pusher Andrew Conry-Murray.

Resolve is easy. Planning & execution are hard.

When we fail, we pity ourselves, have a consolation cookie or three, give up, and go back to a moribund contentment with the status quo. Maybe next year, we'll be more serious, we think. More determined. Yes, we'll try it all again at some future point when we can muster up the will to give it another go. This is all wrong. For me, difficulty in realizing goals has never been due to a lack of desire or will.
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