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

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

Workers Sites: Deploy Your Website Directly on our Network
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

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

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.

Listen to the podcast

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

At the Grace Hopper Celebration, Learn Why Developers Love Docker

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

Docker hosted a Women’s Summit at DockerCon 2019.

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

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

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

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

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

Read More »

© SDxCentral, LLC. Use of this feed is limited to personal, non-commercial use and is governed by SDxCentral's Terms of Use (https://www.sdxcentral.com/legal/terms-of-service/). Publishing this feed for public or commercial use and/or misrepresentation by a third party is prohibited.

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...

Read More »

© SDxCentral, LLC. Use of this feed is limited to personal, non-commercial use and is governed by SDxCentral's Terms of Use (https://www.sdxcentral.com/legal/terms-of-service/). Publishing this feed for public or commercial use and/or misrepresentation by a third party is prohibited.

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

Read More »

© SDxCentral, LLC. Use of this feed is limited to personal, non-commercial use and is governed by SDxCentral's Terms of Use (https://www.sdxcentral.com/legal/terms-of-service/). Publishing this feed for public or commercial use and/or misrepresentation by a third party is prohibited.

1 … 1,138 1,139 1,140 1,141 1,142 … 3,841