What’s behind Amazon, Microsoft and Google’s aggressive cloud expansions

It wasn’t long ago that the big spectator sport in IaaS cloud computing was to watch a leading provider such as Microsoft or Amazon Web Services announce price cuts and then ready for its rivals to follow suit.The new game in town plays out in a similar way, except now the vendors are matching or one-upping each other with new data centers and cloud computing regions.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Winners and losers from the AWS-VMware deal | Mapping the cloud: Where does the public cloud actually live? +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What’s behind Amazon, Microsoft and Google’s aggressive cloud expansions

It wasn’t long ago that the big spectator sport in IaaS cloud computing was to watch a leading provider such as Microsoft or Amazon Web Services announce price cuts and then ready for its rivals to follow suit.The new game in town plays out in a similar way, except now the vendors are matching or one-upping each other with new data centers and cloud computing regions.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Winners and losers from the AWS-VMware deal | Mapping the cloud: Where does the public cloud actually live? +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Roqos Core router combines cybersecurity with parental controls

The home Wi-Fi router space continues to gain momentum, with additional startups aiming to provide devices that do more than just sit there and route traffic. The latest device that has arrived at the Cool Tools testing zone is the Roqos Core.Roqos has three goals with its device: First, to provide an easy setup for its Wi-Fi router, making it so that “even grandma can set it up”; second, to provide parents with a control system that lets them pause the Internet at the press of a button, and also give filtering and blocking controls; and third, provide a cloud-based cyber-securitiy system that monitors all network traffic through Deep Packet Inspection.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Roqos Core router combines cybersecurity with parental controls

The home Wi-Fi router space continues to gain momentum, with additional startups aiming to provide devices that do more than just sit there and route traffic. The latest device that has arrived at the Cool Tools testing zone is the Roqos Core.Roqos has three goals with its device: First, to provide an easy setup for its Wi-Fi router, making it so that “even grandma can set it up”; second, to provide parents with a control system that lets them pause the Internet at the press of a button, and also give filtering and blocking controls; and third, provide a cloud-based cyber-securitiy system that monitors all network traffic through Deep Packet Inspection.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

I switched to Google’s Pixel phone and survived

Google made a splash earlier this month when the company announced it would be shipping a dongle with every Pixel phone it sold that helps iPhone users migrate to its Android flagship.As a lifelong iPhone user, I decided to put Google to the test and find out how well that process really works. And after spending a weekend working through it, I came to a nuanced and messy conclusion. Broadly speaking, migrating works fine, but the nitty-gritty details of the process are painful to deal with.I expected the transition to be far from frictionless. After all, I use iCloud Photo Library to sync my photos, correspond with my friends using iMessage, track my exercise with an Apple Watch and use a Mac. Migrating wasn't going to be easy, but I wanted to give it a shot anyway and see whether the Pixel XL lived up to Google's hype.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The tricky, personal politics of cloud security

Everyone talks about the issue of security in the cloud, but the problem is far more complicated than it first appears. More than just a simple matter of protecting data, it may also be about protecting security jobs.+ Also on Network World: Cloud security: A mismatch for existing security processes and technology +This inherent contradiction was apparent in the results of a recent survey of 140 attendees at the Microsoft Ignite 2016 conference last month. Performed by Lieberman Software Corporation, the survey addressed how IT security professionals felt about the changes in the technology and how it affected their jobs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Younger consumers more likely to fall for tech support con jobs

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it's not older consumers who are most easily duped by technical support scams, a survey released today claimed.According to the poll's results, people between 25 and 34 were more than three times as likely to fall for the fake-out as those aged 55 to 64. And the youngest age group -- between 18 and 24 -- were little better than their slightly-older cohort; they were tricked by the scams more than two and a half times the rate of the group aged 66 and older.The survey, conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs this summer and paid for by Microsoft, queried 1,000 adults ages 18 and up in each of several countries, including the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany and India.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

6 tips to create your online career identity

Just like companies need to maintain their public image and protect their brand, so does anyone with a career in technology -- or any industry, for that matter."Your online identity is a form of capital, much like your intellectual capital and financial capital. To that end, it can be grown slowly and steadily over time, which will eventually produce the positive results you want," says Ford R. Myers, career coach, speaker and author of Get the Job You Want, Even When No One's Hiring.Technology has changed the way people find jobs and that it's become easier than ever for hiring managers and recruiters to search for top talent, rather than wait for them to submit a resume, according to Myers. That means, your dream job could easily come knocking at your inbox, but that is only true if recruiters and hiring managers can actually find you. By taking time to carefully craft your online identity and brand, Myers says you will stand out as a "tech-savvy, smart self-marketer." He offers six critical steps in crafting your online brand, so you can put your best professional foot forward and create the career you want.To read this article Continue reading

How to improve your odds of landing great talent

In an IT market starved for talent, it's not easy to find qualified candidates. In fact, only one out of every 100 candidates is hired, according to new research from recruiting and ATS software company Lever.Increasing your odds of success What can you do to increase the odds in your organization's favor? Look at where your candidates are coming from. The research revealed that candidates referred to the company have a one-in-16 chance of getting hired; candidates submitted by a recruiting agency or firm have a one-in-22 chance while a proactively sourced candidate's chances are one in 72. Candidates who apply via a company's career site or job posting have the worst chance of being hired; only one out of 152 applicants land a job that way, the research showed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Gartner’s 10 strategic predictions for 2017….and beyond

ORLANDO -- Claiming a 78% accuracy rate based on prior years’ results, chief of research Daryl Plummer delivered Gartner’s 10 strategic predictions for the next three-to-five years at the company’s Symposium/ITExpo yesterday.The overarching theme, Plummer said, is digital disruption, which is not only happening, but is increasing in scale over time. Here are the 10 predictions:1. By 2020, 100 million consumers will shop in virtual reality. Plummer says the Pokemon Go phenomenon is the precursor to deeper experience and engagement on the part of consumers. The next step is head-mounted displays, followed by augmented reality. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2017, one in five major retailers will begin deploying augmented reality on their web sites. If you’re in retail, it’s something to think about.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Riverbed Enhances its SteelCentral Monitoring Platform

These new enhancements are blended into one cohesive system.

IDG Contributor Network: GoDaddy ups the WordPress ante

Interesting news today from GoDaddy that it is aggressively moving into the WordPress space and looking to own a far bigger chunk of the market for small businesses hosting WordPress sites.WordPress is, of course, the open-source blogging platform that hosts an incredible number of different sites. Statistics show that over 25 percent of the top 10 million websites worldwide are built on WordPress. Not bad for a formerly small project with no real commercial focus. And for GoDaddy, the hosting platform, WordPress already has a big footprint. Over 50 percent of GoDaddy’s hosting customers use the platform.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

12 Hot Programming Languages For Infrastructure Pros

VMware embraces containers with latest vSphere, Virtual SAN updates

New versions of VMware’s core management software including vSphere, Virtual SAN and the vRealize Suite expand support for application containers and make it easier for customers to manage workloads in IaaS public clouds from Microsoft and Amazon Web Services.The moves announced this week the company’s VMWorld Europe conference in Barcelona are significant because there’s been fodder in the market for years about what trends like increased use of the public cloud will mean for private cloud vendors and how the rise of application containers could kill virtual machines. Instead of fighting these innovations, VMware is embracing these innovations, says Raghu Raghuram, the company’s executive vice president of Software Defined Data Center.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Engineering Education: 5 Emerging Trends

IDG Contributor Network: Networks help you compress time

In his book The Seventh Sense, Joshua Cooper Ramo makes the thought-provoking statement that networks compress time. Nowhere is this more visible than with Amazon. Amazon reportedly releases more than 20,000 new features, capabilities and services to their customers a day, making changes to production every 11 seconds. Facebook does multiple releases a day, and Google does a large package of releases every week or two.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Networks help you compress time

In his book The Seventh Sense, Joshua Cooper Ramo makes the thought-provoking statement that networks compress time. Nowhere is this more visible than with Amazon. Amazon reportedly releases more than 20,000 new features, capabilities and services to their customers a day, making changes to production every 11 seconds. Facebook does multiple releases a day, and Google does a large package of releases every week or two.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ansible and Junos Notes

I’m working on a project to push out configs to Juniper devices and upgrade them if necessary.  In the first instance I thought about writing it all in Python, but there’s really no need because quite a lot of legwork has already been done for you in the form of ‘PyEz’ and the Junos Ansible core modules.

Juniper give you a few examples to get you started, but don’t really explain what each of the lines in the YAML file does, but I guess they expect you to figure that out.  Below are a few notes on things I discovered – perhaps obvious to some, but they might help someone else.

‘No module named jnpr.junos’ When Running Ansible

In the examples Juniper give, they don’t tell you that the Ansible module ‘Juniper.junos’ relies on a Python module called ‘jnpr.junos’.  (It is mentioned elsewhere if you look for it.)

So if you’ve done an ‘ansible-galaxy install Juniper.junos’ you could be forgiven for thinking that you’ve downloaded the modules you need.  You then gaily go on to have a crack at the example given above, but get this error:

$ ansible-playbook juniper-test.yml

PLAY [Get info] *********************************************************

TASK  Continue reading

Save the date: Leaf-and-Spine Fabric Design Workshop in Zurich

Do you believe in vendor-supplied black box (regardless of whether you call it ACI or SDDC) or in building your own data center fabric using solid design principles?

It should be an easy choice if believe a business should control its own destiny instead of being pulled around by vendor marketing (to paraphrase Russ White)

Asylum of WikiLeaks’ Assange not in question

The asylum granted to WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange by the government of Ecuador is not in question, despite possible differences of opinion between the two on the release of controversial documents by the whistleblowing site.Late Monday, the Ecuadorian government said that in the wake of speculation, it reaffirmed the continuation of asylum that it had extended to Assange for the last four years. It said that the protection would continue as long  as the circumstances that had led to that decision continues.Assange was given asylum by Ecuador in 2012 after he slipped into the country’s embassy in London, where he continues to be holed for fear of arrest by U.K. police, who have said that they have to arrest Assange if he steps out of the embassy to meet an extradition request from Sweden.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here