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Category Archives for "Networking"

Getting DevNet Associate (200-901) Certified

Earlier this week I got DevNet Associate certified, using the online testing offering. The TL DR of this post is going to be this:

I have no affiliation with Pluralsight or anyone else, by the way. It’s just that it happens that Nick’s content is there. This may sound like a very simple plan but it has worked for me and many before me. If you follow his plan, you will be prepared to take the test and have an excellent chance of passing.

Now, for the longer version of this post. As with any certification, you need to check the blueprint and assess your current skill level pertaining to those topics. The DevNet Associate has these major areas of topics:

  • Software development and design (15%)
  • Understanding and using APIs (20%)
  • Cisco platforms and development (15%)
  • Application deployment and security (15%)
  • Infrastructure and automation (20%)
  • Network fundamentals (15%)

With my background as a networking expert, this means that I don’t need to spend much time on network fundamentals. For the rest of the blueprint, Continue reading

Coping With The Learning Treadmill

Networking can feel like it’s a never ending game of catch up when it comes to learning. During our live stream with Tim McConnaughy we chat about this learning treadmill and how to navigate the never ending need to learn in this industry.

https://carpe-dmvpn.com/ (Tim’s Site)

See more content like this on our Youtube channel.

The post Coping With The Learning Treadmill appeared first on Network Collective.

Interesting: Differential Availability

Someone pointed me to a high-level overview of Google’s Spanner database which included this gem:

A second refinement is that there are many other sources of outages, some of which take out the users in addition to Spanner (“fate sharing”). We actually care about the differential availability, in which the user is up (and making a request) to notice that Spanner is down. This number is strictly higher (more available) than Spanner’s actual availability — that is, you have to hear the tree fall to count it as a problem.

In other words, it doesn’t matter if your distributed database fails if its user are also gone. Keep this concept in mind every time you’re designing a high availability solution – some corner cases are simply not worth solving.

Interesting: Differential Availability

Someone pointed me to a high-level overview of Google’s Spanner database which included this gem:

A second refinement is that there are many other sources of outages, some of which take out the users in addition to Spanner (“fate sharing”). We actually care about the differential availability, in which the user is up (and making a request) to notice that Spanner is down. This number is strictly higher (more available) than Spanner’s actual availability — that is, you have to hear the tree fall to count it as a problem.

In other words, it doesn’t matter if your distributed database fails if its user are also gone. Keep this concept in mind every time you’re designing a high availability solution – some corner cases are simply not worth solving.

Seeking Knowledge and Willful Ignorance

I had a great time recording a fun episode of Seeking Truth in Networking, an awesome podcast with my friends Derick Winkworth and Brandon Heller. We talked a lot about a variety of different topics, but the one I want to spend a few more minutes on here came in the first five minutes. Brandon asked me what question I liked to be asked and I mentioned that love to be asked about learning. My explanation included the following line:

I feel like the gap between people that don’t understand something and the willfully ignorant is that ability to take a step out and say “I don’t know the answer to this but I’m going to find out.”

I’ve always said that true learners are the ones that don’t accept the unknown. They want to find the answer. They want to be able to understand something as completely as they can. Those that I consider to be willfully ignorant choose not to do that.

Note that there is a difference between incidentally ignorant and willfully ignorant. People who are incidentally ignorant are unaware they don’t know something. They haven’t had the opportunity to learn or change their thought Continue reading

Explore VMware’s Virtual Cloud Network Vision with Tom Gillis

The past year has been filled with challenges. It’s been difficult to adapt to the new realities of how we work, how users access applications, and how we build out and scale our network infrastructures. But challenges lead to opportunities. In his Virtual Cloud Network keynote at VMworld 2020, Tom Gillis, general manager of the networking and security business unit at VMware, urged participants to rethink how they operate and then come up with new processes and approaches that will help them move faster into the future.

In his presentation, Gillis describes how forward-thinking companies are able to:

  1. Take the corporate network and stretch it into remote users’ living rooms,
  2. Deliver public cloud experiences to on-premises data centers, and
  3. Bridge the virtual and physical worlds in a true hybrid cloud environment with consistent policy and management enforcement.

With these capabilities (and there are VMware customers doing this today!), organizations can deploy a completed workload to any user across any infrastructure, including all the necessary networking and security bells and whistles, with a single click.

VMware enables this new approach via its Virtual Cloud Networking (VCN) portfolio. Whether through our SD-WAN technology delivering a LAN-like experience to distributed users, or Continue reading

Weekend Reads 120420

CrowdSec is an open source security engine that analyzes visitor behavior and provides an adapted response to all kinds of attacks. It parses logs from any source and applies heuristic scenarios to identify aggressive behavior and protect against most attack classes.

The “network perimeter” is an increasingly meaningless term; the perimeter is everywhere and the network is constantly interacting with employees, workloads and even the networks of both suppliers and customers. Integration enables success, but it also means that prevention of information security compromise events.

As cryptographic analysis and related technologies advance, the signing algorithms at the heart of DNSSEC have to keep up. Moritz Müller and colleagues take a look at barriers on the road to more secure algorithms and discuss ways to make the journey faster.

When a website you visit asks permission to send notifications and you approve the request, the resulting messages that pop up appear outside of the browser. For example, on Microsoft Windows systems they typically show up in the bottom right corner of the screen — just above the system clock. These so-called “push notifications” rely on an Internet standard designed to work similarly across different operating systems and web browsers.

Open source Continue reading

Building A Network (no, the other kind)

A conversation in the Network Collective Slack prompted some conversation about how to build a network. No, not the packet switched networks that we’re all so familiar with, but rather a personal network of peers. Not everyone has the privilege to attend trade shows and conferences throughout the year, and all of us have lacked that privilege for a while now due to Covid, so how does one build a pervasive network without in-person events. We also discuss some methods to set yourself apart from the crowd in ways that don’t include peer relationships.

 

Thank you to Bluecat Networks for sponsoring today’s episode. Bluecat is putting together some great content and a great community surrounding the topics of DNS, DHCP, and IPAM. You can join the Network VIP community and register for the next roundtable by going to bluecatnetworks.com/certainty.
Thank you to Unimus for sponsoring today’s episode. Unimus is a fast to deploy and easy to use Network Automation and Configuration Management solution. You can learn more about how you can start automating your network in under 15 minutes at unimus.net/nc.
Tony Efantis
Host
Jordan Martin
Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Continue reading

AWS enlists partners to encourage mainframe-to-cloud migration

AWS has turned up the drumbeat to move workloads off of the mainframe and into its cloud. At its weeks-long re:Invent virtual event, Amazon Web Services said it would soon expand its Competency Program to include even more services to migrate mainframe workloads to the cloud. The services are an expansion of mainframe migration services AWS has had on its menu for the past few years.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] AWS says its Competency Program is designed to identify, validate, and promote AWS partners with demonstrated technical expertise in a given area.  In this case users looking to migrate will have access to products and services from core AWS partners, the company wrote in a blog about the new service.To read this article in full, please click here

AWS enlists partners to encourage mainframe-to-cloud migration

AWS has turned up the drumbeat to move workloads off of the mainframe and into its cloud. At its weeks-long re:Invent virtual event, Amazon Web Services said it would soon expand its AWS Competency Program to include even more services to migrate mainframe workloads to the cloud. The services are an expansion of mainframe migration services AWS has had on its menu for the past few years.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] AWS says its Competency Program is designed to identify, validate, and promote AWS partners with demonstrated technical expertise in a given area.  In this case users looking to migrate will have access to products and services from core AWS partners, the company wrote in a blog about the new service.To read this article in full, please click here

Pure Storage offers on-demand storage service

Pure Storage, the all-flash array storage provider, has expanded its Pure-as-a-Service offering to include flexible, pay-as-you-go options for bridging public and private clouds.The company launched Pure-as-a-Service late last year, but it was based on its previous Evergreen service, which had a per-use model for clients looking to move from capex to opex economics. It provides block, file, and object data management capabilities under a single unified subscription.First stage Pure-as-a-Service was formally known as Evergreen Storage Service (ES2), which was launched out of a pilot program begun in 2016. The company notes that one of the challenges facing the industry is that "products on subscription" is often used interchangeably with true services, the difference being the former is a financial model while the latter is more of a cloud economic, operational, and customer experience model. To read this article in full, please click here

Getting grounded in AWS cloud skills

With more and more data-center workloads being shifted to the cloud, it’s important for enterprise IT staff to learn cloud skills not only to stay relevant within their organizations but also to prepare for career advancement and better salaries.One way to accomplish this is to learn the ins and outs of working in specific cloud providers’ environments. This is a brief description of how to get grounded in AWS.According to training firm Global Knowledge, the pay associated with two of the dozens of AWS certifications ranks among the top 15 IT certifications—AWS Certified Solutions Architect—Associate ($149,446) and AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner ($131,465).To read this article in full, please click here

New White Paper: Considerations for Mandating Open Interfaces

People all around the world depend on the Internet to live their lives and do their jobs. Behind the surface of applications, online services depend on “interoperability” – the ability of software to work together.

For instance, this is what allows you to send a document from the Outlook account on your iPhone to a friend’s Gmail, then edit the document on a Samsung tablet before saving it in Alibaba cloud, and finally posting it on Twitter using an application like Hootsuite.

But as we recognized in the 2019 Global Internet Report, trends of consolidation in the Internet economy, particularly at the application layer and in web services, have spurred concerns and public debates on the need to regulate Big Tech. Among the proposed measures by policymakers, academics, and other thought leaders across the world is for software services and systems to be legally required to provide interoperability or open interfaces. Today we release a new white paper on this topic, with the aim to support and add depth to the discussions about the key considerations involved.

The general sentiment among competition experts, policymakers and other stakeholders is that existing competition policy is not addressing the economic and societal Continue reading

An introduction to three-phase power and PDUs

An introduction to three-phase power and PDUs

Our fleet of over 200 locations comprises various generations of servers and routers. And with the ever changing landscape of services and computing demands, it’s imperative that we manage power in our data centers right. This blog is a brief Electrical Engineering 101 session going over specifically how power distribution units (PDU) work, along with some good practices on how we use them. It appears to me that we could all use a bit more knowledge on this topic, and more love and appreciation of something that’s critical but usually taken for granted, like hot showers and opposable thumbs.

A PDU is a device used in data centers to distribute power to multiple rack-mounted machines. It’s an industrial grade power strip typically designed to power an average consumption of about seven US households. Advanced models have monitoring features and can be accessed via SSH or webGUI to turn on and off power outlets. How we choose a PDU depends on what country the data center is and what it provides in terms of voltage, phase, and plug type.

An introduction to three-phase power and PDUs

For each of our racks, all of our dual power-supply (PSU) servers are cabled to one of the two vertically mounted PDUs. Continue reading

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