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The CCIE Times Are A Changing

Today is the day that the CCIE changes. A little, at least. The news hit just a little while ago that there are some changes to the way the CCIE certification and recertification process happens. Some of these are positive. Some of these are going to cause some insightful discussion. Let’s take a quick look at what’s changing and how it affects you. Note that these changes are not taking effect until February 24, 2020, which is in about 8 months.

Starting Your Engines

The first big change comes from the test that you take to get yourself ready for the lab. Historically, this has been a CCIE written exam. It’s a test of knowledge designed to make sure you’re ready to take the big lab. It’s also the test that has been used to recertify your CCIE status.

With the new change on Feb. 24th, the old CCIE written will go away. The test that is going to be used to qualify candidates to take the CCIE lab exam is the Core Technology exam from the CCNP track. The Core Technology exam in each CCNP track serves a dual purpose in the new Cisco certification program. If you’re Continue reading

BrandPost: Empowering Charitable Work with Scalable Cloud Networking Technology

Like most charitable organizations, The Salvation Army relies on volunteer help. Volunteers around the world serve people in need at service centers, retail stores, and satellite offices in metropolitan cities, rural communities, and at the scene of disaster areas. All of these locations have to stay online, connected, and sharing data, but with such a wide range of sites, networking is a challenge. Add in staff with varying levels of expertise and locations ranging in size from with one person at a small satellite office to hundreds at international headquarters, and you quickly have a very complicated situation on your hands.The wide variety of spaces and available talent to manage IT infrastructure has created a nightmare for network administrators trying to keep data flowing where it needs to go. That is, until the organization began upgrading to next-level networking, making configuration, setup, and maintenance of networks at each location far easier, and freeing up personnel—volunteer and otherwise—for more productive work.To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: Building the Network to Grow a Global Virtual Reality Company

This decade saw the spectacular rise of mobile devices as the platform of choice for everything from social media and gaming to customer service and online payments. Now it’s time for a new platform to revolutionize the way consumers and businesses engage with digital content. It’s time for the world to be introduced to the next generation of entertainment, shopping, healthcare, and more: augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR).According to research firm McKinsey, immersive computing could actually replace mobile devices. While it’s difficult to imagine anything approaching today’s ubiquity of smartphones, Goldman Sachs estimates that the emerging AR and VR industry could see up to $182 billion in annual revenue by 2025 –  a figure that far surpasses the current $88 billion in combined in-home entertainment and movie box office revenues.To read this article in full, please click here

Reaction: Overly Attached

In a recent edition of ACM Queue, Kate Matsudaira has an article discussing the problem of being overly attached to a project or solution.

The longer you work on one system or application, the deeper the attachment. For years you have been investing in it—adding new features, updating functionality, fixing bugs and corner cases, polishing, and refactoring. If the product serves a need, you likely reap satisfaction for a job well done (and maybe you even received some raises or promotions as a result of your great work).

Attachment is a two-edged sword—without some form of attachment, it seems there is no way to have pride in your work. On the other hand, attachment leads to poorly designed solutions. For instance, we all know the hyper-certified person who knows every in and out of a particular vendor’s solution, and hence solves every problem in terms of that vendor’s products. Or the person who knows a particular network automation system and, as a result, solves every problem through automation.

The most pernicious forms of attachment in the network engineering world are to a single technology or vendor. One of the cycles I have seen play out many times across the last Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Better Broadband Boosts Employment

High-speed jobs: A new study suggests that better broadband service lowers unemployment rates, Vice.com reports. Researchers from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and Oklahoma State University tracked broadband availability and unemployment rates in Tennessee and found that counties with access to high-speed broadband had a slightly lower unemployment rate than those with slower service.

More moderation: YouTube plans to remove white supremacist, hate speech and hoax videos, the Washington Post reports. The new policy will go farther than YouTube’s former prohibition on videos that promote violence or hatred against people based on their age, religious beliefs, gender, religion, immigration status and sexual orientation.

Encryption fight: Yandex, a provider of Internet-related services in Russia and the former Soviet Union, has reached an agreement with the Russian FSB security service on handing over encryption keys, Reuters reports. Details of the agreement weren’t immediately available. Yandex had originally resisted the FSB’s demand for encryption keys, Reuters says.

Bigger than the weather: U.S. residents believe fake news is a bigger problem than climate change or racism, according to a new survey detailed at Business Insider. Half of those surveyed said made-up news is a major problem, while just 46 said the Continue reading

Repost: Automation Without Simplification

The No Scripting Required to Start Your Automation Journey blog post generated lively discussions (and a bit of trolling from the anonymous peanut gallery). One of the threads focused on “how does automation work in real life IT department where it might be challenging to simplify operations before automating them due to many exceptions, legacy support…”

Here’s a great answer provided by another reader:

Read more ...

BrandPost: Digital Transformation: IT Leaders Discuss SD-WAN’s Emerging Role

The digital economy is here, and the ability to innovatively meet ever evolving customer expectations has become the new reality.  For most organizations accomplishing this goal starts with digital transformation.In order to realize digital transformation benefits, companies need to move beyond a legacy network and invest in next generation components, according to participants in a recent IDG TechTalk Twitter chat.Unfortunately, past investments in legacy technology are still serving as a significant road block. A1) Issues such as technical debt, legacy security problems, poor/inconsistent Ops & maintenance, and a long list of infrastructure/bandwidth inadequacies can hold back #DigitalTransformation. #IdgTechTalkTo read this article in full, please click here

Automation Workflow Patterns

Workflows vary from seriously simple to notoriously complex and as humans, we might not even consciously observe the subtleties of what a workflow comprises of. Workflows are the source of control semantics and comprise of many elements, some obvious some not so. This post is a primer to help you think about the kind of workflows you encounter drawn from my experiences. This post offers a view with conviction backed by experience.

To set the tone, workflows have logical flow, temporal behaviour, consume and transmit data, for processing triggers, acting on decision points and returning states. Since the 1970s, I believe we haven’t actually come that far from a workflow orchestration standpoint. Atomic units of code exist that do one thing well, a real win for the 1970s and good automation systems understand how to instantiate, feed these atomic blobs of logic data and grab their exit state and content. On a *nix system, it’s possible to use bash to create a single chain of tasks using the | operator. One blob of logic effectively feeds it’s output to the next blob of logic. Who needs an orchestrator? It’s sensible to include detection logic within each blob of code to Continue reading

Heavy Networking 454: Analyzing Encrypted Traffic In The TLS 1.3 Era With ExtraHop (Sponsored)

Today's Heavy Networking examines packet analysis with sponsor ExtraHop. We drill into the company's marketing claims about deep analysis at line rate with Mike Ernst, VP of Sales Engineering. We also tackle how ExtraHop handles encrypted traffic, incuding TLS 1.3 and Perfect Forward Secrecy. Mike promises to keep his inner salesperson on mute for this conversation.

The post Heavy Networking 454: Analyzing Encrypted Traffic In The TLS 1.3 Era With ExtraHop (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Weekend Reads 060619

When most people speak of exascale supercomputers, they tend to focus on the computational aspect of these systems. That’s certainly understandable inasmuch as exascale has been generally equated with performing calculations at the level of exaflops. —Michael Feldman

Although it was originally developed by Google, Kohn said Kubernetes has been built on a decade of learning and incorporates a host of technologies from other companies. “There is no vendor lock-in,” he said. “Google has encouraged developers from other companies to take part.” —Cliff Saran

The exposed areas needing improvement by ICANN — both the organization as well as its global community of stakeholders — provide a target-rich environment. —Greg Thomas

The market-dominating behavior of four of the biggest tech companies now appear to be in the crosshairs of the U.S. government, but the big question for consumers and investors is, will anything actually change this time around? —Therese Poletti

On the one hand, testing is all too often the roadblock that stands between highly accelerated Dev processes and highly automated ops-driven delivery processes. But on the other hand, testing is essential for ensuring that the release doesn’t place the business at risk — undermining the very “customer experience” Continue reading

New switches, Wi-Fi gear to advance Arista’s campus architecture

Arista is rolling out more products and services in its continued assault on both the campus network and enterprise hybrid-cloud environments.In particular, the company is readying a new family of what it describes as its first purpose-built campus leaf switches as well as a Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) access point that fit into its overall grand plan called Cognitive Campus, with which the company says customers can more easily automate deployment, configuration, troubleshooting and deploying security. [ Read also: How to plan a software-defined data-center network ] Arista is also fashioning an alliance with Microsoft to better support enterprise use of hybrid cloud.To read this article in full, please click here

New switches, Wi-Fi gear to advance Arista’s campus architecture

Arista is rolling out more products and services in its continued assault on both the campus network and enterprise hybrid-cloud environments.In particular, the company is readying a new family of what it describes as its first purpose-built campus leaf switches as well as a Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) access point that fit into its overall grand plan called Cognitive Campus, with which the company says customers can more easily automate deployment, configuration, troubleshooting and deploying security. [ Read also: How to plan a software-defined data-center network ] Arista is also fashioning an alliance with Microsoft to better support enterprise use of hybrid cloud.To read this article in full, please click here

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