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Technology Short Take 119

Welcome to Technology Short Take #119! As usual, I’ve collected some articles and links from around the Internet pertaining to various data center- and cloud-related topics. This installation in the Tech Short Takes series is much shorter than usual, but hopefully I’ve managed to find something that proves to be helpful or informative! Now, on to the content!

Networking

• Chip Zoller has a write-up on doing HTTPS ingress with Enterprise PKS. Normally I’d put something like this in a different section, but this is as much a write-up on how to configure NSX-T correctly as it is about configuring Ingress objects in Kubernetes.
• I saw this headline, and immediately thought it was just “cloud native”-washing (i.e., tagging everything as “cloud native”). Fortunately, the diagrams illustrate that there is something substantive behind the headline. The “TL;DR” for those who are interested is that this solution bypasses the normal iptables layer involved in most Kubernetes implementations to load balance traffic directly to Pods in the cluster. Unfortunately, this appears to be GKE-specific.

Servers/Hardware

Nothing this time around. I’ll stay tuned for content to include next time!

Security

• The Kubernetes project recently underwent a security audit; more information on the Continue reading

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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.

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Wireless attacks on aircraft instrument landing systems

Wireless attacks on aircraft instrument landing systems Sathaye et al., USENIX Security Symposium 2019

It’s been a while since we last looked at security attacks against connected real-world entities (e.g., industrial machinery, light-bulbs, and cars). Today’s paper is a good reminder of just how important it is becoming to consider cyber threat models in what are primary physical systems, especially if you happen to be flying on an aeroplane – which I am right now as I write this!

The first fully operational Instrument Landing System (ILS) for planes was deployed in 1932. But assumptions we’ve been making since then (and until the present day, it appears!) no longer hold:

Security was never considered by design as historically the ability to transmit and receive wireless signals required considerable resources and knowledge. However, the widespread availability of powerful and low-cost software-defined radio platforms has altered the threat landscape. In fact, today the majority of wireless systems employed in modern aviation have been shown to be vulnerable to some form of cyber-physical attacks.

Both sections 1 and 6 in the paper give some eye-opening details of known attacks against aviation systems, but to date no-one Continue reading

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At the Grace Hopper Celebration, Learn Why Developers Love Docker

Lisa Dethmers-Pope and Amn Rahman at Docker also contributed to this blog post.

As a Technical Recruiter at Docker, I am excited to be a part of Grace Hopper Celebration. It is a marvelous opportunity to speak with many talented women in tech and to continue pursuing one of Docker’s most valued ambitions: further diversifying our team. The Docker team will be on the show floor at the Grace Hopper Celebration, the world’s largest gathering of women technologists the week of October 1st in Orlando, Florida.

Our Vice President of Human Resources, and our Senior Director of Product Management, along with representatives from our Talent Acquisition and Engineering teams will be there to connect with attendees. We will be showing how to easily build, run, and share an applications using the Docker platform, and talking about what it’s like to work in tech today. 

Supporting Women in Tech

While we’ve made strides in diversity within tech, the 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey shows we have work to do. According to the survey, only 7.5 percent of professional developers are women worldwide (it’s 11 percent of all developers in the U. Continue reading

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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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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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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.

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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.

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Take part in the 2020 IT Salary Survey

Whether you’re scouting out a new job or looking to fill a key IT role, access to salary data is an important tool. Help us help you by taking our 10-minute IT Salary Survey.

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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

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CrowdStrike-Ukraine Explained

Trump's conversation with the President of Ukraine mentions "CrowdStrike". I thought I'd explain this.


What was said?

This is the text from the conversation covered in this

“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it.”

Personally, I occasionally interrupt myself while speaking, so I'm not sure I'd criticize Trump here for his incoherence. But at the same time, we aren't quite sure what was meant. It's only meaningful in the greater context. Trump has talked before about CrowdStrike's investigation being wrong, a rich Ukrainian owning CrowdStrike, and a "server". He's talked a lot about these topics before.


Who is CrowdStrike?

They are a cybersecurity firm that, among other things, investigates hacker attacks. If you've been hacked by a nation state, then CrowdStrike is the sort of firm you'd hire to come and investigate what happened, and help prevent it from happening again.


Why is CrowdStrike mentioned?

Because they were the lead investigators in the DNC hack who came to the conclusion that Russia was responsible. The pro-Trump crowd believes this conclusion is Continue reading

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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

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CMC Networks Bolsters SD-WAN with Enea NFV Access

Enea's NFV Access platform will power CMC Network's Rapid Adaptive Network SD-WAN in Africa and the...

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Ericsson Bribery Scandal Cuts Deep, Surpassing $1B Penalty

Ericsson expects to pay $1.23 billion to cover a potential settlement and related costs to resolve...

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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

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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

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Cisco Warns of ‘Continued Attempts’ to Exploit Critical Bug

Cisco disclosed more than two dozen vulnerabilities in its network automation software and one...

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Designing Your First Application in Kubernetes, Part 4: Configuration

I reviewed the basic setup for building applications in Kubernetes in part 1 of this blog series, and discussed processes as pods and controllers in part 2. In part 3, I explained how to configure networking services in Kubernetes to allow pods to communicate reliably with each other. In this installment, I’ll explain how to identify and manage the environment-specific configurations expected by your application to ensure its portability between environments.

Factoring out Configuration

One of the core design principles of any containerized app must be portability. We absolutely do not want to reengineer our containers or even the controllers that manage them for every environment. One very common reason why an application may work in one place but not another is problems with the environment-specific configuration expected by that app.

A well-designed application should treat configuration like an independent object, separate from the containers themselves, that’s provisioned to them at runtime. That way, when you move your app from one environment to another, you don’t need to rewrite any of your containers or controllers; you simply provide a configuration object appropriate to this new environment, leaving everything else untouched.

When we design applications, we need to identify what Continue reading

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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

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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