HashiCorp has expanded its Consul network control plane by widening its scope for different highly distributed services and environments — while simplifying and expanding its compliance and policy management capabilities.
By adding gateway options and compliance features with today’s release of Consul 1.8, HashiCorp has made the control plane able to manage many different environments in a single interface, the company says. These might include services and applications running in containers, Kubernetes or virtual machines (VMs) on bare metal, traditional data centers or multicloud environments that are often widely dispersed geographically.
“We are useful to customers because we offer a layer across [different environments] with a single management plane. The challenges customers have is they have many services that sit outside of service mesh, such as traditional applications, and need to bring them into the same fold,” HashiCorp, told The New Stack. “So how can services talk to your applications within your service mesh, and how do the applications in the service mesh talk out? Consul 1.8 solves that problem.”
Consul 1.8’s audit logging and single sign-on (SSO) features (which are part of the enterprise version) Continue reading
“Open source is free like a puppy,” said Aspen Mesh, provider of an enterprise version of the open source Linkerd, that is the only reason to turn to William Morgan, CEO of Buoyant. “This is more of a philosophical stance. However, if you want to have a commercial relationship with us, we will make sure the service mesh works for you, with services and integration and all that stuff.”
Taming Complexity
Service meshes are designed for very complex architectures. They only make sense for companies Continue reading
In 2016, when the digital media arm of the in increasingly large numbers.
“I remember the fear that the huge event we were experiencing could bring our platform down,” said recalled at HAProxy 2019. They kept watching the Grafana dashboard, searching for potential anomalies.
In the end, however, nothing bad happened. “We ended up drinking beers and eating pizzas,” he said. But Gallissot didn’t want to go through such a stressful experience again, and so started an initiative to move M6 to the cloud.
Like many organizations dealing with surges of traffic, M6 decided on Kubernetes as the platform for a multicloud architecture, to ease the process of easily scaling up and down traffic. And one of the most crucial parts of the Kubernetes setup is routing the incoming traffic to the appropriate services.
Kubernetes itself offers an option to capture the
Ian Baxter
Ian Baxter is the Vice President of Pre-Sales Engineering at IRONSCALES and has more than 20 years of extensive industry experience in the information security, technology and communications fields, having held various positions including both individual contributor and systems engineering management roles. During his career, Ian has regularly presented at various industry events on security topics such as threat prevention, ransomware, and best practices. Prior to IRONSCALES, Ian served as Americas' Director of Data Center Sales for NetApp covering Canada, Latin America and the US. He's also worked for large multinational technology companies such as Palo Alto Networks, Foundry Networks/Brocade, Alcatel Lucent, and Fore Systems/Marconi. Ian is originally from South Africa, and now resides in the United States.
Robert Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet, is renowned for many things, but perhaps none more so than his namesake law:
The need for faster and more reliable VPN connections has certainly spiked recently in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the massive shift of workers away from office hubs to home locations.
For developers who must rely on VPNs for data transfers, the act of loading code on git and other more mundane tasks can obviously take much longer depending on network saturation from remote locations. Productivity is obviously lost, as well as time, which is in short supply for so many these days.
Managed DNS support for VPNs can help to boost both network data transfer rates and robustness for VPNs, as well as other network infrastructure for any user, in addition to developers working remotely.
To that end, DNS solutions provider Terry Bernstein, NS1 director of product management, said.
The end result is improved VPN connectivity, which through load-balancing and steering connections at the DNS layer, are connected to the best performing endpoint. NS1’s DNS Continue reading
Welcome to The New Stack Context, a podcast where we discuss the latest news and perspectives in the world of cloud native computing. For this week’s episode, we spoke with The New Stack correspondent Jennifer Riggins about all of the reporting she and others on the TNS team have been doing recently on the effects that the COVID-19 global pandemic is having on the tech industry.
TNS editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside founder and TNS publisher Alex Williams and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.
Subscribe: Fireside.fm | Stitcher | Overcast | TuneIn
For this episode, we wanted to look at and not only discuss the changing patterns in network traffic that the global COVID-19 pandemic has wrought, due to factors such as people staying at home and working from home, and the sudden acceleration of e-learning. As Riggins writes in a recent post:
For a lot of tech and infrastructure teams, they not only are going through the stress of the collective trauma we’re sharing in, but they are struggling to keep up with ever-scaling, extreme strains on their systems. Simply put, Continue reading
If you deal with Kubernetes, you know that storage is one of the core building blocks of the cluster infrastructure. It is as important as the compute building block delivered by the worker nodes. Since the power of the cluster is always measured in terms of the number of worker nodes and their configuration, storage doesn’t get its share of attention.
Imagine this: you configured a powerful bare-metal cluster and want to run a highly available and mission-critical workload on it. Without a solid storage engine, your cluster is only good for running stateless and ephemeral workloads that don’t need persistence. But any enterprise application is a combination of both — stateless and stateful services. You wouldn’t be able to justify the investment made in the brand new Kubernetes cluster if you are unable to run end-to-end applications on it.
When you install the open source, up-steam Kubernetes distribution, it doesn’t come with a high-performance storage engine. Unlike managed Kubernetes services in the public cloud that come with default storage classes mapped to their respective block storage services, your cluster doesn’t have any storage class.
A persistent volume is to storage what a node is to compute.
Just like the Continue reading
Application performance management company Michael Olson, director of product marketing at New Relic, said.
“It’s very difficult to be able to quickly diagnose quickly detect, diagnose and ultimately Continue reading
How do companies manage the security implications of working from home, in a country where remote work has generally been frowned on? Devo, a data analytics and security platform with headquarters in Madrid, helps companies get visibility into their networks — something that has become even more critical as more companies rely on virtual private network (VPNs) to security connect team members working from home.
We spoke with Devo, and carloyuen from
With so many countries in lockdown and so many people working (and learning) from home, online usage has risen significantly but so far, the internet is holding up well.
Internet traffic is generally to 25% to 30% higher than usual, and what we do online is also changing. Internet usage often increases goes up in a typical month; for Akamai that’s usually 3% growth, in the last month it’s been 30%. In March 2019 their peak traffic was 82Tbps; this March it was 167Tbps and the sustained daily traffic rate is higher than last year’s peak for March. Internet exchanges in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London saw 10-20% increases in traffic around March 9th, which the exchange in Milan had a 40% increase the day Italy was quarantined.
Disturbingly, attacks are up too: Akamai Cloudflare tracks varies by city; it’s only up 11% in Berlin and 22% in London between early January and late March (and 17% up for the UK as whole), but it’s grown by 40% in New York and 48% in San Francisco and Silicon Continue reading
There’s been quite a bit of fanfare around quantum computing during the last few years, with experts predicting that quantum computers will help fuel the growing computational demands of artificial intelligence, as well as forming the backbone of an unhackable internet. But beyond the hype is the reality that quantum computers are still some ways from being commercially viable, as researchers continue to resolve issues like accuracy, size and how to build a superconducting electrical oscillators that are used in some quantum chips need to be cooled down to near-absolute zero temperatures, otherwise the problem of Quantum Device Lab at study co-author quantum entanglement, two particles become linked in a way so that whatever happens to one particle, it also immediately occurs to the other, no matter the distance.
Having proven that a cryogenically based, long-distance quantum network is indeed possible, the team is now working to construct a 30-meter (98.4-foot) quantum link.
See more over at ETH Zurich’s
Dragonfly, a peer-to-peer image and file-sharing technology developed by Cloud Native Computing Foundation. The software provides a way to quickly distribute images across large cloud native deployments, eliminating the dependency on a single registry to distribute all the copies of an image.
“Dragonfly is one of the backbone technologies for container platforms within Alibaba’s ecosystem, supporting billions of application deliveries each year, and in use by many enterprise customers around the world,” said Dragonfly in 2015, originally to ease file distribution. By 2017, when it was adopted to share containers within Kubernetes environments, it was being used by the Chinese cloud service to share 3.4PB each month. It was originally accepted into the OCI (Open Container Initiative). It can work with CNCF’s Prometheus and display them on a Helm can be used to install Dragonfly within a Kubernetes cluster.
Project maintainers come from Alibaba, ByteDance, eBay, and Meitu. Overall it has 67 contributors from 21 organizations. It has been downloaded over 100,000 times from Docker Hub and has massed 6,000 GitHub stars.
Learn more about Dragonfly, visit liggraphy from
It is too early to determine to what extent our lives will change in the future once the Coronavirus pandemic has run its full course. However, in the software industry, some possible outcomes are beginning to emerge, including consolidation and the potential for great changes to take place — both good and bad.
As a harbinger of what may come, SaltStack, a leading automation network infrastructure provider, evoked historical examples of pandemics and plagues in the past. He discussed what changes they wrought on ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire and the Renaissance era, while drawing parallels with the software industry. Patch also shared with The New Stack in this Q&A how software engineers’ lives have hardly changed, the folly of forcing workers to come to the office when they really do not need to and his observations of network infrastructure saturation in the wake of the
Istio has emerged as one of the most frequently utilized service mesh technologies for securing and controlling network traffic within containers and Kubernetes. Its powerful feature set makes it instrumental in solving a number of real issues users regularly encounter when running microservices. Following the standard three-month period since the release of Istio 1.4, Istio 1.5 introduces an impressive number of improvements that increase automation and provide tooling to help further operationalize the platform.
With major architectural changes and several API updates under the hood, Istio 1.5 provides new capabilities that improve the user experience and functionality of the platform. The following highlights will help organizations optimize Istio for configuration management, architecture support, and overall performance.
Configuration Management
Karen Bruner
Karen Bruner is a Principal DevOps Engineer for StackRox, where she drives automation and advocates for operationalizing the product. Previously, Karen has held DevOps and site reliability engineering roles at Clari, Ooyala, LinkedIn, and Yahoo. She started her career working in Hollywood in the digital effects industry and has a film credit in “Babe” for Internet Bandit. She spends her spare time rendering puns in yarn, learning obscure fiber crafts, and tripping over cats.
Istioctl
Istio 1. Continue reading
Imagine, if you will, you’re participating in a Eric Yuan has put a freeze on feature updates, in order to address the security issues. Zoom’s promise was to address the problem within the next 90 days, when Yuan said, “Over the next 90 days, we are committed to dedicating the resources needed to better identify, address, and fix issues proactively. We are also committed to being transparent throughout this process. We want to do what it takes to maintain your trust.”
Another writer for The New Stack, Jennifer Riggins Continue reading
Software intelligence company Alois Reitbauer, vice president and chief technology strategist for Dynatrace, shared his observations about what the company is seeing.
While Reitbauer usually splits his time between living and working in the United States and Europe, Reitbauer spoke with The New Stack from his remote-location home in Austria.
What traffic changes are your customers seeing due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic?
It’s definitely important to know we’re experiencing a perfect storm scenario right now. We all need to be on the same page for what’s going to happen.
We have certainly ramped up our monitoring of networks recently. So the way you can describe the situation for many websites now is it’s just like Black Friday, where all people go really wild on a certain number of sites. The only difference with Black Friday- or Super Bowl-like surges in traffic compared to the saturation COVID-19 might cause is that nobody knows when it’s happening.
We Continue reading
This week and next, The News Stack will be running a series of posts on the value that a service mesh brings to Kubernetes deployments. Here is the first installment. Check back often for more updates.
As we explore all the tools and additional infrastructure layers that complement Kubernetes, it’s important to remember: None of this is to imply that Kubernetes is lacking. Kubernetes is a powerful tool to dramatically simplify running containerized applications, but there are many things that it was simply never intended to do. Service meshes are an example of a complementary piece of the infrastructure, handling things that Kubernetes can not and was never intended to do.
“The Kubernetes team at Google and the Istio team at Google were neighbors and were discussing these things,” explained Tetrate and one of the original creators of the William Morgan, CEO of Linkerd. “It’s because Kubernetes is really good but it has a well-defined scope.”
A service mesh is Continue reading