Weekly Wrap: Ericsson Bribery Scandal Cuts Deep, Surpassing $1B Penalty

The Certification Ladder

Are you climbing the certification ladder? If you’re in IT the odds are good that you are. Some people are just starting out and see certifications as a way to get the knowledge they need to do their job. Others see certs as a way to get out of a job they don’t like. Still others have plenty of certifications but want to get the ones at the top of their field. This last group are the ones that I want to spend some time talking about.

Pushing The Limit

Expert-level certifications aren’t easy on purpose. They’re supposed to represent the gap between being good at something and going above and beyond. For some that involves some kind of practical test of skills like the CCIE. For others it involves a board interview process like the VCDX. Or it could even involve a combination of things like the CWNE does with board review and documentation submissions.

Expert certifications aren’t designed to be powered through in a short amount of time. That’s because it’s difficult to become an expert at something without putting in the practice time. For some tests, that means meeting some minimum requirements. You can only attempt your Continue reading

Workers Sites: Extending the Workers platform with our own serverless building blocks

As of today, with the Wrangler CLI, you can now deploy entire websites directly to Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV. If you can statically generate the assets for your site, think create-react-app, Jekyll, or even the WP2Static plugin, you can deploy it to our entire global network, which spans 194 cities in more than 90 countries.

While you could deploy an entire site directly to Workers before, it wasn’t the easiest process. So, the Workers Developer Experience Team came up with a solution to make deploying static assets a significantly better experience.

Using our Workers command-line tool Wrangler, we've made it possible to deploy any static site to Workers in three easy steps: run wrangler init --site, configure the newly created wrangler.toml file with your account and project details, and then publish it to Cloudflare's edge with wrangler publish. If you want to explore how this works, check out our new Workers Sites tutorial for create-react-app, where we cover how this new functionality allows you to deploy without needing to write any additional code!

While in hindsight the path we took to get to this point might not seem the most straightforward, it really highlights the flexibility Continue reading

Workers Sites: Deploy Your Website Directly on our Network

Performance on the web has always been a battle against the speed of light — accessing a site from London that is served from Seattle, WA means every single asset request has to travel over seven thousand miles. The first breakthrough in the web performance battle was HTTP/1.1 connection keep-alive and browsers opening multiple connections. The next breakthrough was the CDN, bringing your static assets closer to your end users by caching them in data centers closer to them. Today, with Workers Sites, we’re excited to announce the next big breakthrough — entire sites distributed directly onto the edge of the Internet.

Deploying to the edge of the network

Why isn’t just caching assets sufficient? Yes, caching improves performance, but significant performance improvement comes with a series of headaches. The CDN can make a guess at which assets it should cache, but that is just a guess. Configuring your site for maximum performance has always been an error-prone process, requiring a wide collection of esoteric rules and headers. Even when perfectly configured, almost nothing is cached forever, precious requests still often need to travel all the way to your origin (wherever it may be). Cache invalidation is, after all, Continue reading

Net2Text: Natural-Language Interface to Network Operations

Sick-and-tired of intent-based GUIs that are barely better than CiscoWorks on steroids? How about asking Siri-like assistant queries about network state in somewhat-limited English and getting replies back in full-blown sentences?

Warning: you might be reentering the land of unicorns driving flying DeLoreans... but then keep in mind what Arthur Clarke had to say on this topic ;).

Welcome to Net2Text, another proof-of-concept tool created by the group led by Laurent Vanbever… who joined us for a short chat to discuss it, resulting in Episode 105 of Software Gone Wild.

Storage trends: What’s the best uses for Optane (aka 3D XPoint memory)?

While 3D XPoint memory has been shipping as Optane from Intel for two years, it hasn't found a great deal of traction, but a new server DIMM and an upcoming Micron product release may change that.

Storage trends: What’s the best uses for Optane?

While 3D XPoint memory has been shipping as Optane from Intel for two years, it hasn't found a great deal of traction, but a new server DIMM and an upcoming Micron product release may change that.

Storage trends: What’s the best uses for Optane (aka 3D XPoint memory)?

While 3D XPoint memory has been shipping as Optane from Intel for two years, it hasn't found a great deal of traction, but a new server DIMM and an upcoming Micron product release may change that.

Storage trends: What’s the best uses for Optane?

While 3D XPoint memory has been shipping as Optane from Intel for two years, it hasn't found a great deal of traction, but a new server DIMM and an upcoming Micron product release may change that.

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IBM brings blockchain to Red Hat OpenShift; adds Apache CouchDB for hybrid cloud customers

IBM continued its Red Hat and open-source integration work this week by adding Red Hat OpenShift support to its blockchain platform and bringing a Kubernetes Operator for Apache CouchDB along side its hybrid-cloud services offering. The ability to deploy IBM Blockchain on Red Hat OpenShift, the company’s flagship enterprise Kubernetes platform, means IBM Blockchain developers will have the ability  to deploy secure software, either on-premises, in public clouds or in hybrid cloud architectures.To read this article in full, please click here

Gremlin’s Scenarios Simulate Common Outages for Chaos Engineering

There are two things that seem to motivate developers — a speedy, self-explanatory onboarding experience and a bit of friendly competition. Certainly, Gremlin chaos as a service’s new Scenarios features seems to check both boxes. The Scenarios feature, which launched Thursday at the company’s Lorne Kligerman. The idea for Scenarios pulled from their former chaotic lives as well as from customer success and developer advocates. “We know things will fail today. We Continue reading

CMC Networks Bolsters SD-WAN with Enea NFV Access

Ericsson Bribery Scandal Cuts Deep, Surpassing $1B Penalty

Data center gear will increasingly move off-premises

I've said that colocation and downsizing in favor of the cloud is happening, and the latest research from 451 Research confirms the trend. More than half of global utilized racks will be located at off-premises facilities, such as cloud and colocation sites, by the end of 2024, the company found.As companies get out of data center ownership, hardware will move to colocation sites like Equinix and DRT or cloud providers. The result is the total worldwide data center installed-base growth will see a dip of 0.1% CAGR between 2019-2024, according to the report, but overall total capacity in terms of space, power, and racks will continue to shift toward larger data centers.To read this article in full, please click here

Data center gear will increasingly move off-premises

I've said that colocation and downsizing in favor of the cloud is happening, and the latest research from 451 Research confirms the trend. More than half of global utilized racks will be located at off-premises facilities, such as cloud and colocation sites, by the end of 2024, the company found.As companies get out of data center ownership, hardware will move to colocation sites like Equinix and DRT or cloud providers. The result is the total worldwide data center installed-base growth will see a dip of 0.1% CAGR between 2019-2024, according to the report, but overall total capacity in terms of space, power, and racks will continue to shift toward larger data centers.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco Warns of ‘Continued Attempts’ to Exploit Critical Bug

Cisco: 13 IOS, IOS XE security flaws you should patch now

Cisco this week warned its IOS and IOS XE customers of 13 vulnerabilities in the operating system software they should patch as soon as possible.All of the vulnerabilities – revealed in the company’s semiannual IOS and IOS XE Software Security Advisory Bundle – have a security impact rating (SIR) of "high". Successful exploitation of the vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to gain unauthorized access to, conduct a command injection attack on, or cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device, Cisco stated. "How to determine if Wi-Fi 6 is right for you" Two of the vulnerabilities affect both Cisco IOS Software and Cisco IOS XE Software. Two others affect Cisco IOS Software, and eight of the vulnerabilities affect Cisco IOS XE Software. The final one affects the Cisco IOx application environment. Cisco has confirmed that none of the vulnerabilities affect Cisco IOS XR Software or Cisco NX-OS Software.  Cisco has released software updates that address these problems.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco: 13 IOS, IOS XE security flaws you should patch now

Cisco this week warned its IOS and IOS XE customers of 13 vulnerabilities in the operating system software they should patch as soon as possible.All of the vulnerabilities – revealed in the company’s semiannual IOS and IOS XE Software Security Advisory Bundle – have a security impact rating (SIR) of "high". Successful exploitation of the vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to gain unauthorized access to, conduct a command injection attack on, or cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device, Cisco stated. "How to determine if Wi-Fi 6 is right for you" Two of the vulnerabilities affect both Cisco IOS Software and Cisco IOS XE Software. Two others affect Cisco IOS Software, and eight of the vulnerabilities affect Cisco IOS XE Software. The final one affects the Cisco IOx application environment. Cisco has confirmed that none of the vulnerabilities affect Cisco IOS XR Software or Cisco NX-OS Software.  Cisco has released software updates that address these problems.To read this article in full, please click here

Deep Dive: How Do Banks Score on Privacy and Security?

In April 2019 the Internet Society’s Online Trust Alliance published its 10th annual Online Trust Audit & Honor Roll assessing the security and privacy of 1,200 top organizations. The Banking sector includes the top 100 banks in the U.S., based on assets according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Banks had a standout year, with a dramatic increase in scores across the board. Let’s take a closer look.

Overall, 73% of banks made the Honor Roll, putting the banking sector 4th behind the News and Media (78%), Consumer Services (85%), and the U.S. Federal Government (91%) sectors. In the previous Audit, only 27% made the grade. This large jump is due to improvements in all three scoring categories: email authentication, site security, and privacy.

Email 

Banks, like most sectors, came close to 100% adoption in the two main email security technologies studied in the Audit: SPF (93%) and DKIM (87%). In addition, banks saw a marked improvement in how many sites implemented both both technologies at 87% in 2018, up from 60% in 2017. This puts banks among the most improved sectors in this area.

DMARC builds on SPF and DKIM results, provides a means for Continue reading