Upcoming Events and Webinars (September 2019)

We’re back from the summer break for real - the first autumn 2019 ipSpace.net event takes place today: I’ll talk about the fallacies of distributed computing.

September will be an intensive month:

• We’re starting the autumn 2019 network automation course on September 3^rd;
• A week after that (September 10^th) I’ll run a day-long VMware NSX workshop in Zurich;
• Azure Networking webinar series is starting on September 12^th and continuing on September 24^th;
• Lukas Krattiger will talk about service insertion in leaf-and-spine fabrics on September 17^th.

Of course, we’ll keep going… our event calendar is fully packed till mid-November. More about that in a month.

To Be Always Surfing On Tectonic Shifts

If you think about it for a minute, it is amazing that any of the old-time IT suppliers, like IBM and Hewlett Packard, and to a certain extent now Microsoft and Dell, have persisted in the datacenter for decades or, in the case of Big Blue, for more than a century. …

To Be Always Surfing On Tectonic Shifts was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

VMware touts hyperscale SD-WAN

SAN FRANCISCO –  VMware teamed with Dell/EMC this week to deliver an SD-WAN service that promises to greatly simplify setting up and supporting wide-area-network connectivity.The Dell EMC SD-WAN Solution is a package of VMware software with Dell hardware and software that will be managed by Dell and sold as a package by both companies and their partners.The package, introduced at the VMworld event here, includes VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud software available as a subscription coupled with appliances available in multiple configurations capable of handling 10Mbps to 10Gbps of traffic, depending on customer need, said Sanjay Uppal, vice president and general manager of VMware’s VeloCloud Business Unit.To read this article in full, please click here

HPE’s Paul Miller: Unlike Dell, We Give You Choice

How Will Open Source Deal With Success?

Complete a survey on enterprise purchasing for a shot at $500

IDG is conducting its annual Customer Engagement survey on how businesses make buying decisions for their major enterprise IT purchases. The survey should take no more than 10 minutes of your time, and it's confidential. Neither your name nor your company's name will be associated with your answers.In return for filling out the survey, you can enter to win a $500 cash prize. For complete sweepstakes rules, click here.To read this article in full, please click here

Sprint Spikes 5G Launch on LA Beach

Check Point Expands CloudGuard to SD-WAN Security

Cisco Makes CloudCenter Management Tool SaaSy

How Customer Success Managers Advocate for and Engage with Customers

“Hi! My name is Cosmin and I am your Customer Success Manager here at Cloudflare” is how I usually introduce myself and almost always I get met by a blank stare. It could be the name (it’s uncommon, to say the least) but in actual fact, many Customer Success professionals go through the same experience. Could it be that the title doesn’t give away much? What does ‘Customer Success Manager’ actually mean? Is that how they call Customer Support nowadays? And in fact, isn’t everyone in a business responsible for ‘customer success’?

Well let me explain..

Customer Success is a relatively new function that is becoming increasingly popular with XaaS businesses (XaaS stands for Anything as a Service).  With any XaaS product, it is no longer the case that you make a significant investment in a perpetual license and are left to figure out how to implement it, how to use it and what else it can do. XaaS businesses operate a subscription model whereby if the product is not actually solving your problem, you can just stop the subscription and move on. Businesses operating a subscription model need to ensure that there is continuous and even increasing Continue reading

Why you Have to Fail Fearlessly to Succeed: The Citizens Bank Story of Innovation with Docker

We had the chance recently to sit down with the Citizens Bank mortgage division and ask them how they’ve incorporated innovation into a regulated and traditional business that is still very much paper-based.

The most important lesson they’ve learned: you have to be willing to “fail fearlessly,” but to do that, you also have to minimize the consequences and cost of failure so you can constantly try new ideas. With Docker Enterprise, the team has been able to take ideas from concept to production in as little as a day.

Here’s what they told us. You can also catch the highlights in this 2 minute video:

On focus: 

Matt Rider, CIO Mortgage Division: Our focus is changing the mortgage technology experience at the front end with the borrower and on the back end for the loan officers and the processors. How do we bring those two together? How do we reduce the aggravation that comes with obtaining a mortgage?

On founding an “innovation team” . . .

Matt: When I came here I recognized that we were never going to achieve our vision if we kept doing things the same way. We wanted to reduce the aggravation that comes with obtaining a mortgage. Continue reading

Simple Complicated Complexity

In this episode Jordan shares his thoughts on some of the nuanced differences between simple, complicated, and complex network designs. These are terms and descriptions that get thrown around a lot in our industry but do you really understand what they are or how they should impact your design?

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post Simple Complicated Complexity appeared first on Network Collective.

SDSC Doubles Up Performance With Expanse Supercomputer

The San Diego Supercomputing Center is overdue for a new supercomputer and thanks to a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation, next year it will finally get one. …

SDSC Doubles Up Performance With Expanse Supercomputer was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.

IoT roundup: Smart buildings, airport headaches and off to Paris

This week’s internet of things roundup takes a trip to the airport to learn how IoT can ease security line angst and then jets off for Paris and India.

IDG Contributor Network: Monitoring the Amazon wildfires with satellites, IoT sensors and GIS

The Amazon spans 2.1 million square miles of rain forest spread over nine countries. And on its edges are miles of agricultural fields, whose farmers routinely burn in order to control pests and weeds, and to encourage new growth.Brazil is the largest cattle exporter in the world with over 200 million head of cattle. Ranchers often set fires to clear land for grazing, reports the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. However, these long-practiced techniques have raised concerns of the threat that accidental forest fires could pose during drought years. Climate change, which is beginning to show its effects around the world, could exacerbate this threat.To read this article in full, please click here

Animal Innovations in Pet Care Supplements

It has been said over and over that all your pet needs is food, water, a clean environment, and love to be healthy and happy. While that is a nice sentiment, it isn’t exactly true. For years now, people have known that certain chemical and fillers in dog and cat foods are harmful to their pets, but did you know that flea and tick products, pet shampoos, and even dietary supplements that are made for pets made actually make them sick or shorten their lifespan too? 

Thankfully, we’ve come a long way with new animal innovations in supplements that we can provide our pets. Just as we’ve learned that natural vitamins and supplements are better for our health and the health of our families, we are now discovering that natural organic supplements and products are better for our pets’ health as well. Keep reading to learn more!

Natural and Organic is Better

Many pet owners notice that after using flea and tick products on their pets, some pets tend to develop rashes, itchy skin, and hair loss. These symptoms have been associated with toxic chemicals in these types of products. Many pets also have severe reactions to pet shampoos Continue reading

What is phishing? Learn how this attack works

Phishing is a method of trying to gather personal information using deceptive e-mails and websites. Here's what you need to know about this increasingly sophisticated form of cyberattack.

The Case for Complementary Local Access Networks by the Community, for the Community

Back in 2010, I conceptualised and started a pilot project to see how we could introduce Internet connectivity to unserved and underserved rural areas. The ICT4D community – along with a number of international organisations – had been talking about how getting people online could transform lives, but most of the solutions appeared to be either top-down or boiler-plated.

My idea was simple – work together with a local partner to find a rural location where getting people online could make a difference, ensure people from the community were trained to operate and maintain the network (rather than being dependent on outsiders), use cheap easy-to-find WiFi equipment (so if things break down, the nearest town would have spares), and then train the community, empowering them to create and use various digital services. Essentially, this was a network for the people, by the people.

Thus was born our award-winning Wireless For Communities (W4C) initiative. We have had a tremendous amount of success with the programme – having deployed and inspired literally hundreds of networks in South Asia and helped connect the most marginalised of communities. This has also become a global programme for the Internet Society Continue reading

REST API 3. Basics cheat sheet (Ansible, Bash, Postman, and Python) for PATCH/PUT using NetBox

Hello my friend,

This is the third and the last article about REST API basics. In the previous articles, you have learned how to collect information and create/delete new entries. Today you will learn how to modify existing entries.

1
2
3
4
5
No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a 

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any 

means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission of the author.

Disclaimer

This article is a continuation of the two previous: GET and POST/DELETE. You should start with that to get the full picture.

What are we going to test?

You will learn how to use two requests:

1. PATCH for modifying information for existing entries
2. PUT for modifying information for existing entries

As you might remember, the interaction with the REST API is described by CRUD model, what stands for Create, Read, Update, and Delete. In this concept, Update operation is represented by PATCH and PUT HTTP methods. Later in this article you will figure out what is the difference between PATCH and PUT. It is significant.

To put the context, we will Continue reading

Interactive checks for coordination avoidance

Interactive checks for coordination avoidance Whittaker & Hellerstein et al., VLDB’19

I am so pleased to see a database systems paper addressing the concerns of the application developer!

To the developer, a strongly consistent system behaves exactly like a single-threaded system running on a single node, so reasoning about the behaviour of the system is simple¹. Unfortunately strong consistency is at odds with performance… On the other hand weak consistency models… put a tremendous burden on the application designer to reason about the complex interleavings of operations that are allowed by these weak consistency models.

To be able to reason effectively about a system, it’s tremendously helpful to be able to rely on some things that we know will always be true. The fancy word for those is invariants, because whatever happens they never vary. A example class of application invariants is database integrity constraints. Unfortunately, under weak consistency models finding solid ground to reason about invariants is really hard:

Even if every transaction executing in a weakly consistent system individually maintains an application invariant, the system as a whole can produce invariant-violating states.

In a distributed setting with weak consistency, an object is replicated across a Continue reading