The Stupidity of Trying to Be Like Google
Someone recommended me a fantastic book on corporate stupidity. Here’s just one of the million small gems it contains:
For instance, many companies conclude that they need to be more innovative. To increase their rates of innovation, they look at firms well known for being innovative, such as Google, then dispatch their executives to Silicon Valley to visit tech companies’ corporate campuses in the hope that they will learn something.
Not surprisingly, the book authors observed the same behavior in those companies as I did a while ago when I was still teaching SDN workshops:
They often ignore the fact that Google is an entirely different sector to them, and the lessons in view probably of limited value. They also overlook that even if they do learn something, actually implementing it within their organization is likely to be difficult, if not impossible.
Finally a warning: that book will make you laugh or cry hysterically (or both), so take it in small daily doses.
The Stupidity of Trying to Be Like Google
Someone recommended me a fantastic book on corporate stupidity. Here’s just one of the million small gems it contains:
For instance, many companies conclude that they need to be more innovative. To increase their rates of innovation, they look at firms well known for being innovative, such as Google, then dispatch their executives to Silicon Valley to visit tech companies’ corporate campuses in the hope that they will learn something.
Not surprisingly, the book authors observed the same behavior in those companies as I did a while ago when I was still teaching SDN workshops:
They often ignore the fact that Google is an entirely different sector to them, and the lessons in view probably of limited value. They also overlook that even if they do learn something, actually implementing it within their organization is likely to be difficult, if not impossible.
Finally a warning: that book will make you laugh or cry hysterically (or both), so take it in small daily doses.
Remote workers – rapid and cost-effective VPN scale with ZeroTier, OPNSense and FRRouting.
Overview
This would probably be a relevant topic on any given day in the world of IT, but given the current global pandemic due to COVID-19 (aka coronavirus), it’s become especially important.
IT departments are scrambling to figure out how to react with capacity to connect entire companies remotely for extended periods of time.
With a traditional vendor solution that centers around a router or firewall that’s racked in a data center somewhere, this can be difficult to solve for a few reasons.
Challenges:
- Hardware capacity – most firewalls or routers have a fixed capacity for VPN sessions that must be deployed into a cluster to scale.
- Software licensing – taking a company of thousands and suddenly extending licensing to account for the entire company is a financial hurdle for most companies.
- Time to deploy – assuming both hardware and software licensing challenges can be dealt with in a timely manner, it may take weeks or months to deploy the additional capacity.
Luckily, IT is much more focused on software and cloud solutions these days then putting out boxes for everything.
Open source and cloud solutions when used together can provide an incredible amount of scale and performance without a Continue reading
Production-ready automation — the how and why
Last week Cumulus announced the launch of our exciting production-ready solution. This suite of automation scripts provides customers with a quick and validated way to leverage automation for day 1 deployment and day 2 operations. Plus, it’s open source. So it’s completely free to access and use, and it will only expand and improve over time.
Amidst all of the excitement, I wanted to take an opportunity to dive into some of the details of why and how we ended up with such a unique solution. So here we go.
Let’s start with what brought us here
Like most good technology solutions, production-ready automation started with an evaluation of customer challenges.
Challenge #1: First and foremost, we want to produce features and products that help our customers build better networks — networks that are scalable, agile, flexible and efficient. Automation is a huge part of the story and we believe having a feature-rich, Linux-based operating system makes automation even better.
That said, no matter what type of operating system you’re running, most engineers have to piece together scripts and playbooks to build something custom that will hopefully (fingers crossed!) work with their new operating system. This is tedious at Continue reading
Building Your Own Junos Router With cRPD and LinuxKit
Lately I’ve been looking at some tools to make it easier to package containerized applications as lightweight virtual machines, to get the best of both worlds: the developer experience of a Dockerfile with the added protection of a hypervisor. As part of this process, I’ve been digging into Juniper’s containerized routing stack called cRPD, and trying to get that into a virtual form factor, so that I can effectively have a Linux router that happens to use the Junos routing stack.Daily Roundup: Coronavirus Cancels Dell, Other Events
Coronavirus cancelled Dell and other events; Cisco won big in Telia SD-WAN deal; and HPE delivered...
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How to Build a Highly Productive Remote Team (or Team of Contractors) with Cloudflare for Teams
Much of IT has been built on two outdated assumptions about how work is done. First, that employees all sit in the same building or branch offices. Second, that those employees will work full-time at the same company for years.
Both of these assumptions are no longer true.
Employees now work from anywhere. In the course of writing this blog post, I opened review tickets in our internal JIRA from my dining table at home. I reviewed internal wiki pages on my phone during my commute on the train. And I spent time reviewing some marketing materials in staging in our CMS.
In a past job, I would have suffered trying to connect to these tools through a VPN. That would have slowed down my work on a laptop and made it nearly impossible to use a phone to catch up on my commute.
The second challenge is ramp-up. I joined Cloudflare a few months ago. As a member of the marketing team, I work closely with our product organization and there are several dozen tools that I need to do that.
I’m hardly alone. The rise of SaaS and custom internal applications means that employees need access to all Continue reading
Video: Writing to Enhance your Networking Career.
David Coleman talks about how writing boosted his career in this 30 minute presentation. He chose a path of writing books that led him into bigger career with vendors and wider communities. He had some excellent tip on grammar and style which is rarely discussed. I wrote an ebook about the mechanics of writing blog […]
The post Video: Writing to Enhance your Networking Career. appeared first on EtherealMind.
COVID-19 Pushes Microsoft, Dell, Red Hat to Virtualize Events
All three of those vendors have shifted planned events from a physical setting to a virtual one in...
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Telia Taps Cisco Viptela SD-WAN
The operator says the ability to remotely provision Viptela on customer's existing WAN hardware...
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Mighty Morphin HPE Unleashes Container Platform
Tom Phelan, a fellow for big data and storage organization at HPE, said the container platform’s...
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Tech Bytes: Measuring End User Experience Of SaaS And Web Apps With ThousandEyes (Sponsored)
Today's Tech Bytes podcast explores end user experience with sponsor ThousandEyes. ThousandEyes offers end point agents that measuring application experience and network performance from the end-user perspective. These agents capture real-time session data or run scheduled synthetic tests to provide visibility into the performance of SaaS applications as well as local network conditions.Tech Bytes: Measuring End User Experience Of SaaS And Web Apps With ThousandEyes (Sponsored)
Today's Tech Bytes podcast explores end user experience with sponsor ThousandEyes. ThousandEyes offers end point agents that measuring application experience and network performance from the end-user perspective. These agents capture real-time session data or run scheduled synthetic tests to provide visibility into the performance of SaaS applications as well as local network conditions.
The post Tech Bytes: Measuring End User Experience Of SaaS And Web Apps With ThousandEyes (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Forging A Path to Continuous, Risk-based Security with VMware NSX Service Mesh
The shift to multi-cloud, microservices-based architectures is well underway across enterprises. VMware NSX has long provided secure connectivity between private and public clouds while offering consistent policy management within hybrid cloud environment with our Service-defined Firewall. More than a year ago, VMware NSX-T expanded beyond just supporting ESX-based VMs to cover workloads running on bare metal servers, multiple hypervisors, and containers.
However, as the adage goes, the only constant is change. So, it goes with application architectures. As enterprises embrace cloud-native architectures, applications are becoming even more distributed and heterogenous. We see this particularly in some of our forward leaning customers – payment providers, financial institutions, retailers, technology vendors, etc. – are they’re driving us to further evolve our security thinking.
Customers are containerizing their new applications with Kubernetes, and exploring solutions such as VMware Tanzu, Project Pacific, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, and other platforms and managed services. They leverage a mix of open source and multiple SaaS services for various functions such as observability, analytics, and cost optimization. Yet, they also need to communicate with their existing VM-based applications. These customers want a common framework for identity, policy, and compliance, one that can deal with assets that are Continue reading
Network Break 274: Let’s Encrypt Revokes Millions Of Certificates; Microsoft Pitches SMB Over QUIC
Let's Encrypt revokes millions of digital certs, Microsoft proposes SMB over QUIC for file access without a VPN (and an easier way to get through firewalls), big vendors offer extended free trials of conferencing software for companies considering remote work, Microsoft pays hourly workers full salaries during work slowdowns, and more. We analyze these and other stories on the latest Network Break podcast.
The post Network Break 274: Let’s Encrypt Revokes Millions Of Certificates; Microsoft Pitches SMB Over QUIC appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Network Break 274: Let’s Encrypt Revokes Millions Of Certificates; Microsoft Pitches SMB Over QUIC
Let's Encrypt revokes millions of digital certs, Microsoft proposes SMB over QUIC for file access without a VPN (and an easier way to get through firewalls), big vendors offer extended free trials of conferencing software for companies considering remote work, Microsoft pays hourly workers full salaries during work slowdowns, and more. We analyze these and other stories on the latest Network Break podcast.The Week in Internet News: New Bill May Weaken Encryption
Unintended consequences: New legislation in the U.S. Senate to crack down on child exploitation online may lead to limits on encryption, many critics say. The EARN IT Act would give Attorney General William Barr the authority to create new rules to protect children, potentially including encryption backdoors, as Barr as called for, Wired.com reports. The bill put new conditions on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which has for years protected websites from lawsuits targeting user-generated content and comments.
Voluntary steps: Meanwhile, Google, Facebook Microsoft, Twitter, Snap, and Roblox have agreed to adopt 11 voluntary principles to prevent online child sexual exploitation, CNet notes, although some critics have also suggested these rules are the first step toward weakening encryption.
Not so fast: In other encryption news, security certificate issuer Let’s Encrypt has delayed a plan to revoke more than 1 million certificates because of a recently discovered bug in its CAA (Certification Authority Authorization) code, Ars Technica reports. But because of confusion over a very short window for websites to renew their certificates, Let’s Encrypt gave them more time.
Bad certificates: Meanwhile, hackers have come up with a way to disguise malware as security certificate updates, Continue reading
Cisco Deploys SDN, Optical Transport for 5G in Asia
Bharti Airtel is preparing to deploy 5G with an “IP over Ethernet over fiber” network that it...
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Cloudflare for Teams Free for Small Businesses During Coronavirus Emergency
There are a lot of people and businesses worldwide that are currently suffering, so I don't want to waste any time in getting to the point.
Beginning today, we are making our Cloudflare for Teams products free to small businesses around the world. Teams enables remote workers to operate securely and easily. We will continue this policy for at least the next 6 months. We're doing this to help ensure that small businesses that implement work from home policies in order to combat the spread of the virus can ensure business continuity. You can learn more and apply at: https://www.cloudflare.com/smallbusiness
We've also helped launch an online hub where small businesses can see technology services available to them for free or a substantial discount from multiple companies, during the Coronavirus Emergency: https://openforbusiness.org
To understand more about why we're doing this, read on.
The IT Strain of WFH
We have a team at Cloudflare carefully monitoring the spread of the SARS-Coronavirus-2, which is responsible for the COVID-19 respiratory disease. Like at many other companies, we have heeded the advice of medical professionals and government agencies and are increasingly allowing employees to work from home in impacted regions in order Continue reading
Automation Story: Zero-Touch Provisioning
Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP) is a solved problem if you believe the networking vendors… and yet numerous network automation projects involve at least some ZTP functionality. It seems that smart organizations investing in premium people (instead of premium vendors) prefer the Unix way of solving problems: take a number of small versatile tools, and put them together to build a solution that fits your requirements.
Anne Baretta did exactly that and combined Oxidized, FreeZTP, Ansible and custom web UI to build a ZTP solution that addresses the needs of his organization.
Notes
- Patrick Ogenstad covered numerous ZTP details in our network automation course.