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

Take a Network Break! In this week’s show, Dell EMC rolls out new branch hardware to run VNFs, the Sonic switch OS gets its turn in the open networking spotlight, and Innovium announces sampling of its Teralynx programmable ASIC.

The IEEE ratifies a standard for 25Gbps over single-mode fiber, Dropbox embraces security researchers, and Micro Focus suffers a massive drop in value.

Cryptojacking roars onto the threat scene, and Orbitz reports that attackers may have breached a legacy site, exposing up to 880,000 customers.

Get links to all these stories after our sponsor message.

Sponsor: ThousandEyes

ThousandEyes gives you performance visibility from every user to every app over any network, both internal and external, so you can migrate to the cloud, transform your WAN, troubleshoot faster and deliver exceptional user experiences. Sign up for a free account at thousandeyes.com/packetpushers and choose a free ThousandEyes t-shirt!

Show Links:

Dell EMC Takes on Cisco, Launches Open uCPE for SD-WAN – SDX Central

Dell EMC Takes Open Networking to the Edge for Next-Generation Access – Dell EMC

Innovium announces OCP SAI and open-source SONiC solution to accelerate TERALYNX market adoption – Innovium

Apstra Demonstrates Open Networking SONiC over Mellanox at OCP Summit Continue reading

On today’s show we explore whitebox switching in the enterprise with our sponsor Pica8.

Pica8 makes a network OS for data centers and enterprises, which customers can run on a variety of third-party switches including Dell, HPE, and Edgecore.

Our guests are  James Liao, CEO and co-founder of Pica8; and Sharad Ahlawat, VP of Technology.

We get details about Pica8’s switch OS, called PicOS, and find out how Pica8 differentiates itself from other OSs.

We also talk about how SDN has to change to be useful, such as targeting specific use cases. We look at the state of the whitebox market, the role of open source, and why Pica8 is shifting its focus to enterprise customers.

Show Links:

Pica8.com

Pica8 on Twitter

Pica8 on LinkedIn

Pica8 on Facebook