BrandPost: 4 Common Use Cases for SD-WAN

Now that the technology has been with us for some time, interest in and adoption of software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN) is heating up. It’s a good time to look at what’s driving organizations to implement SD-WAN and what type of organizations the technology is best suited for.  The technology has clearly taken off. A 2018 survey of 225 IT professionals by SevOne found 66% of respondents already had at least some percentage of their WAN software-defined, and nearly 50% had active SD-WAN projects. Perhaps most impressive, 17% of respondents said they’d connect 100 or more remote sites within 12 to 18 months.To read this article in full, please click here

GitLab Inhales $268M Series E, Valuation Hits $2.75B

[mini-update] Network Topology Visualization #2 – Using SNMP as data source and enhanced visuals

After a longer break, I managed to get back to my small visualization experiment from last time, and improve it a little. Firstly, the NETCONF interface was switched for a more standard SNMP one, even if that is not as cutting edge anymore. 

So without keeping you waiting, here is firs the visualization example, as you can see I was playing here a little and got inspired by the Mischief-makers map from Harry Potter. Of course if you do not like the visuals just re-do the CSS to get rid of it. 

Also, this time I made the code public using the much more common github.com here. 

Usage/Tutorial

Once you download this project from github, you will find several files in the directory, your starting point are the two configuration files called:

• config.ini  – holds SNMP configuration like community string and a list of IPs for each network device to be SNMP queried
• pyconfig.py – holds low level configuration on how to visualize the data recieved and how to order the devices detected into layers

Lets start with the config.ini, which is much smaller. Here is an example.

[DEFAULT]
SnmpVersion = 2c
SnmpCommunityString  Continue reading

VMworld US 2019: Networking and Security Recap

VMworld US 2019 has come to a close. If you didn’t attend, don’t worry as we still have VMworld Europe right around the corner. Join us November 4-7, 2019 to hear experts discuss cloud, networking and security, digital workspace, digital trends and more!  Register for VMworld Europe now.

Below is a quick recap and resources to check out from VMworld US 2019.

Stats from VMworld US 2019

• For networking and security we delivered 91 Breakout Sessions + 2 Showcase Keynotes
  • VMware NSX-T – Getting Started was the second most played video post-VMworld!
• VMware NSX was the #1 attended Hands-On-Lab (HOL), and there was a total of 1,922 labs taken on NSX
  • 17,277 NSX networks were created at HOL
• VMware NSX Intelligence won TechTarget’s Best of Show award – Judge’s Choice for Disruptive Technology

Congratulations to our NSX Intelligence team: Anirban Sengupta, Umesh Mahajan, Farzad Ghannadian, Kausum Kumar, Catherine Fan and Ray Budavari.

Surprise guest Michael Dell stopped by the Solutions Exchange to check out demos of what’s new from the networking and security business unit demoed by Chris McCain.

Technical Networking and Security Sessions from VMworld US 2019

Below is a list of sessions that jump into the NSX Continue reading

VMware Adds Oracle to Its Growing Cloud Harem

Cloudian Welcomes New Edgy Unit, Edgematrix

Arista Updates CloudVision, Integrates With Red Hat Ansible

SK Telecom Boasts 5G Standalone First in South Korea

Microsoft brings IBM iron to Azure for on-premises migrations

When Microsoft launched Azure as a cloud-based version of its Windows Server operating system, it didn't make it exclusively Windows. It also included Linux support, and in just a few years, the number of Linux instances now outnumbers Windows instances.It's nice to see Microsoft finally shed that not-invented-here attitude that was so toxic for so long, but the company's latest move is really surprising.Microsoft has partnered with a company called Skytap to offer IBM Power9 instances on its Azure cloud service to run Power-based systems inside of the Azure cloud, which will be offered as Azure virtual machines (VM) along with the Xeon and Epyc server instances that it already offers.To read this article in full, please click here

Microsoft brings IBM iron to Azure for on-premises migrations

When Microsoft launched Azure as a cloud-based version of its Windows Server operating system, it didn't make it exclusively Windows. It also included Linux support, and in just a few years, the number of Linux instances now outnumbers Windows instances.It's nice to see Microsoft finally shed that not-invented-here attitude that was so toxic for so long, but the company's latest move is really surprising.Microsoft has partnered with a company called Skytap to offer IBM Power9 instances on its Azure cloud service to run Power-based systems inside of the Azure cloud, which will be offered as Azure virtual machines (VM) along with the Xeon and Epyc server instances that it already offers.To read this article in full, please click here

Sponsored Post: Educative, PA File Sight, Etleap, PerfOps, InMemory.Net, Triplebyte, Stream, Scalyr

Who's Hiring? 

• Triplebyte lets exceptional software engineers skip screening steps at hundreds of top tech companies like Apple, Dropbox, Mixpanel, and Instacart. Make your job search O(1), not O(n). Apply here.


• Need excellent people? Advertise your job here! 

Cool Products and Services

• Grokking the System Design Interview is a popular course on Educative.io (taken by 20,000+ people) that's widely considered the best System Design interview resource on the Internet. It goes deep into real-world examples, offering detailed explanations and useful pointers on how to improve your approach. There's also a no questions asked 30-day return policy. Try a free preview today.


• PA File Sight - Actively protect servers from ransomware, audit file access to see who is deleting files, reading files or moving files, and detect file copy activity from the server. Historical audit reports and real-time alerts are built-in. Try the 30-day free trial!


• For heads of IT/Engineering responsible for building an analytics infrastructure, Etleap is an ETL solution for creating perfect data pipelines from day one. Unlike older enterprise solutions, Etleap doesn’t require extensive engineering work to set up, maintain, and scale. It automates most ETL setup and Continue reading

Sri Lanka Chapter Tackles Internet Restrictions and Cybersecurity Threats

Since its establishment nine years ago, the Internet Society Sri Lanka Chapter has been a key stakeholder in ensuring a free, open, and safe Internet in Sri Lanka.

During the 2018 religious riots and the 2019 Easter bombings in Sri Lanka, when access to social media networks and messaging services was blocked, the Sri Lanka Chapter worked closely with government, media, academia, the private sector, and the general public to inform them about the impact of such restrictions on the Internet. In the aftermath of the 2018 religious riots, the Sri Lanka Chapter issued an appeal letter to the Presidential Secretariat on behalf of Internet Society members in Sri Lanka to lift the social media ban. Earlier this year, after the Easter bombings, the Sri Lanka Chapter organized an online meeting to engage in dialogue with different groups, including government and media agencies, informing them about the wide-ranging economic and social consequences of Internet restrictions, and raising the awareness that preventing online access is rarely an effective solution to conflicts and unrest.

In the attempt to control the spread of misinformation and hate speech, and cut off communications between organizers of attacks, the Internet restrictions also prevented people from connecting Continue reading

Facing the Great Reckoning Head-On – danah boyd – Medium

Searing speech from dana boyd. How she keeps on going is amazing to me.

The post Facing the Great Reckoning Head-On – danah boyd – Medium appeared first on EtherealMind.

How We Design Features for Wrangler, the Cloudflare Workers CLI

The most recent update to Wrangler, version 1.3.1, introduces important new features for developers building Cloudflare Workers — from built-in deployment environments to first class support for Workers KV. Wrangler is Cloudflare’s first officially supported CLI. Branching into this field of software has been a novel experience for us engineers and product folks on the Cloudflare Workers team.

As part of the 1.3.1 release, the folks on the Workers Developer Experience team dove into the thought process that goes into building out features for a CLI and thinking like users. Because while we wish building a CLI were as easy as our teammate Avery tweeted...

… it brings design challenges that many of us have never encountered. To overcome these challenges successfully requires deep empathy for users across the entire team, as well as the ability to address ambiguous questions related to how developers write Workers.

Wrangler, meet Workers KV

Our new KV functionality introduced a host of new features, from creating KV Continue reading

All about U.S. tech antitrust investigations | TECH(feed)

Four large tech companies -- Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook are under investigation in the U.S. for allegedly anticompetitive behavior. These antitrust investigations on both the federal and state levels are aimed at uncovering the practices these companies engage in to eliminate competition. In this episode of TECH(feed), Juliet discusses the House investigation into big tech and how Congress plans to investigate potential wrongdoing by these companies.

BrandPost: A great SD-WAN orchestrator makes the network simpler to manage

Keeping an SD-WAN in Harmony with the Business Requires a Great Orchestrator According to Merriam-Webster, orchestration is defined as 1: the arrangement of a musical composition for performance by an orchestra (a group of musicians including especially string players organized to perform ensemble music); 2: harmonious organizationIf you’ve ever attended the symphony, you have probably noticed the vibrant movement of the conductor waving his baton in front of the orchestra. The conductor has one of the most visible jobs in the music world, but despite this, many concertgoers are likely unclear about what the conductor is really doing. The conductor’s job is to assign different instruments to the musicians that play the different elements that make up the musical composition. The primary goal of the conductor is to orchestrate harmony across all of the instruments so that every instrument is audible. However, the conductor doesn’t simply keep the orchestra in time or harmony, most importantly, he serves as a messenger for the composer. The conductor intrinsically understands the music and communicates it to the musicians using his baton so that the orchestra can transmit a cohesive view of the music to the audience.To read this article in full, Continue reading

Cisco, Apple team up to make iPhone 11 better for WiFi 6

The benefits of Apple and Cisco collaborating to make the iPhone perform better across business wireless networks will continue to grow as the iPhone 11 embraces WiFi 6.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Formalisation of Automation: WIP

For the last five or six years, I’ve not really done any networking and have focussed on software, automation and the mechanisation of processes so that they may be manifested as network driving workflows. I try to keep up with networking technology and working for Juniper has really made me level up in this aspect. I’m lucky to be surrounded by an army of real experts and it’s humbling. What’s still a thorn in my side is the beginner expert community around automation, and I’m working to bring awareness to this through providing questions and insight with methodologies to bootstrap the journey. More on that another time. This paragraph is to position some emotions for what’s about to follow!

To get to the crux of this post, now shift your view to your every day life. How many times a day does an app crash on your phone, laptop or tablet? When was the last time a feature wasn’t available on your TV because you didn’t upgrade to the latest version of software? Right at the beginning of my career, I worked in real time electronics. Machinery that should not die randomly, or just become obsolete because of the hardware Continue reading

Bringing Cloud Principles to The Enterprise

As legacy applications evolveto the cloud, hosted and multi cloud architectures blending on-premises data and applications with elastic scale-out and rapidly deployed cloud capabilities, legacy networking tools have been challenged causing them to become cumbersome and unreliable. The shift to cloud native architectures with containers, serverless instances and edge IoT sensors feeding in critical data, has significantly increased the number of devices that need to be managed. Meanwhile shrinking the amount of time available for provisioning, upgrades and change controls has become an issue. 

Review: Blue Hexagon may make you rethink perimeter security

This fully functional, fully trained cybersecurity tool is ready on day 1 to spot threats on whatever network it’s charged with protecting.