Cisco Live the final countdown, Last minute tips!
With Cisco Live 2015 literally right around the corner, now is the perfect time to grab a few last minute items! Portable chargers – The days a long, much longer than you expect and let’s face it smartphone batteries don’t last as long as we would like. While there are charging stations at CLUS it’s […]
Worth Reading 06:04
It’s been a bit of a crazy week — out to SFO, where I saw a lot of old friends, for NANOG. I picked up the top shirt on my pile this morning, and discovered it’s an old NANOG shirt, SFO in 2004 (!). The good news is the NANOG folks get their videos on line really fast — and all of them are worth watching. The channel is here, but I’d like to especially point out the talks on active monitoring, QUIC, and OpenConnect. Yes, my presentation is there, too.
One point to remember is that as the “network guy,” you stand between people and their funny cat videos. While people get mad about plumbing, they seem to get irate about their network access — because it’s all virtual it all seems so easy, I guess. It doesn’t help that the modern face of IT tends to be large companies that have a virtual monopoly and totally horrible customer service. But whatever the reason, it means you have to be extra careful not to step on people’s toes when you’re doing network engineering — the perception doesn’t have to be reality to impact your life.
Notes from NANOG 64
Some notes from NANOG 64, held in San Francisco in early June.Video: Scale-Out NAT
Network Address Translation (NAT) is one of those stateful services that’s almost impossible to scale out, because you have to distribute the state of the service (NAT mappings) across all potential ingress and egress points.
Midokura implemented distributed stateful services architecture in their Midonet product, but faced severe scalability challenges, which they claim to have solved with more intelligent state distribution.
Read more ...What outsourcing engagement model is right for you?
Outsourcing should be a strategic partnership, not a simple hand-off of duties to a third-party. Getting that right requires smart preparation.
Implemented correctly, strategic partnerships are a happy collaboration where expectations of delivery and results are clear from the start. By bringing in outside minds, it’s possible to innovate and drive your product to levels beyond what your internal team might have accomplished. New ideas can come from anywhere.
+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD IT outsourcing deal values hit 10-year low +
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Week in Review
This week was a busy one. I had the opportunity to speak at a local NYC Ansible meetup, to a group of high school computer science students, and then on a panel at AnsibleFest yesterday in New York. Here is a short recap.
NYC Ansible Meetup - Tuesday June 2
Clearly the presentation was about network automation with Ansible. That probably goes without saying since it was an Ansible meetup! I’ve used these slides in other presentations throughout the year, so some are repetitive, but they usually hit some key points on the topic of network automation. Unfortunately, I did not know this was being streamed lived when it took place, but luckily the organizers recorded it too. Link is below.
Note: the presentation doesn’t start until about the 30:30 mark. From there on out, it’s about half presentation and then half live demo of using Ansible for Network Automation.
Here is the link to the video: Network Automation with Ansible
High School Talk - Wednesday June 3
A local high school about 20 mins from where I grew up asked me to come in to talk about a career in IT. The school is the Pascack Valley Regional Continue reading
Your next digital security guard should be more like RoboCop
This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.
Humans are clearly incapable of monitoring and identifying every threat on today’s vast and complex networks using traditional security tools. We need to enhance human capabilities by augmenting them with machine intelligence. Mixing man and machine – in some ways, similar to what OmniCorp did with RoboCop – can heighten our ability to identify and stop a threat before it’s too late.
The “dumb” tools that organizations rely on today are simply ineffective. There are two consistent, yet still surprising things that make this ineptitude fairly apparent. The first is the amount of time hackers have free reign within a system before being detected: eight months at Premera and P.F. Chang’s, six months at Nieman Marcus, five months at Home Depot, and the list goes on.
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Beyond Alerts: Using orchestration to realize network self-healing
Managing modern networked systems and applications is daunting because infrastructure is complex and things can go wrong in so many parts of the technology stack -- servers, storage, network devices, applications, hypervisors, APIs, DNS, etc. How can you address the challenge?
A good place to start: problems that can solve themselves, should.
This is called “self-healing” in the systems management space. As our systems are increasingly virtualized, the opportunity to have our systems work around and self-correct issues has grown greatly in recent years.
The simplest example of self-healing is automatically restarting a service or process that stops or otherwise becomes unresponsive. It is important to keep in mind that this is a workaround and that automated activity of all sorts needs to be logged and monitored, in turn. If an application leaks memory such that it needs to be automatically restarted several times a day, that restart is not the fix, it’s a Band-Aid that is mitigating the impact while the developers responsible fix the application.
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