VMware spends $4.8B to grab Pivotal, Carbon Black to secure, develop integrated cloud world

All things cloud are major topics of conversation at the VMworld user conference next week, ratcheded up a notch by VMware's $4.8 billion plans to acquire cloud development firm Pivotal and security provider Carbon Black.VMware said during its quarterly financial call this week it would spend about $2.7 billion on Pivotal and its Cloud Foundry hybrid cloud development technology, and about $2.1 billion for the security technology of Carbon Black, which includes its Predictive Security Cloud and other endpoint-security software.  Both amounts represent the enterprise value of the deals the actual purchase prices will vary, experts said.To read this article in full, please click here

Technology Short Take 118

Welcome to Technology Short Take #118! Next week is VMworld US in San Francisco, CA, and I’ll be there live-blogging and meeting up with folks to discuss all things Kubernetes. If you’re going to be there, look me up! Otherwise, I leave you with this list of links and articles from around the Internet to keep you busy. Enjoy!

Networking

• Networking guru Ivan Pepelnjak has migrated his online presence to AWS; read more here.

Servers/Hardware

• Interesting (but otherwise not terribly useful) article on how to turn a MacBook into a touchscreen. Lack of a touch screen remains the MacBook line’s second most egregious shortcoming against competing products (the first being the awful keyboard).

Security

• I came across this article on tools and methods for auditing Kubernetes RBAC policies, which had some new tools I hadn’t seen before.
• This web developer security checklist has a nice list of some “current recommended practices” for properly securing web applications/sites.
• Daniele Antonioli, Nils Ole Tippenhauer, and Kasper Rasmussen discuss the KNOB attack (a Bluetooth vulnerability).

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

• My teammate John Harris has a great post on ensuring least privilege in Kubernetes using impersonation. Good stuff here.
• Alex Brand (also a teammate!) Continue reading

Red Hat Creates Service Mesh for OpenShift

Red Hat is unveiling its own service mesh for Jaeger project for tracing, and service mesh typically runs as a sidecar as a communication layer between services for microservices-based application architectures. It handles traffic management, policy enforcement and service identity and security. “We have taken the upstream Istio and written an Operator that handles the deployment and management of Istio itself. With the upstream version, you have to run all the sidecar containers with an escalated level of privilege — the Kubernetes equivalent of running things as a root user,” explained OpenShift Service Mesh, through having the Operator there and a CNI (container networking interface) plugin we wrote, you can run Istio and bring up those sidecar components without providing additional privileges to the application components of Istio itself,” he added. Its features include: Tracing and measurement: using Jaeger, developers can track a request between services from start to finish. Visualization and observability: Kiali Continue reading

Looking for the Ultimate Phone Holder? Here are Your Best Bets.

While it may seem like people have their cellphones glued to their hand or to their ear, the truth is that there are times when you need your hands free to attend to other tasks or activities (like driving). Having a great phone holder in your car, for instance, allows you to still use your phone even when your hands may be occupied. If you are looking for the ultimate phone holder, here are some of your best bets.

The Ultimate Phone Holder for Your Home or Desk

Making or taking a phone call when you are cooking, typing at your desk, or eating is something that happens on a regular basis. Having a cellphone phone holder for in your home can make multi-tasking, whether talking on the phone, doing research, or following a recipe, much easier. 

We recommend the Lamicall phone holder, which comes with the Lamicall phone dock. It has a low center of gravity (so your smartphone won’t tip over), rubber cushions to protect your phone from scratches, holds all phones 14mm or less, and is compatible with all phones 6 to 8 inches. The phone stand comes in black, red, silver, or gray. 

Continue reading

Video: Networking Challenges

Whenever you’re discussing a complex topic it’s worth adhering to two principles: (A) identify the challenges you’re trying to solve and (B) start as simple as you can and add complexity later.

We did exactly that in the Introducing Networking Challenges part of How Networks Really Work webinar. We started with the simplest possible case of two computers connected with a cable… and even there identified a plethora of challenges that had to be solved more than half a century ago (and still have to be solved today no matter what magic software-defined technology someone pulls out of their wizard hat).

You need free ipSpace.net subscription to watch the video, or a paid ipSpace.net subscriptions to watch the rest of the webinar.

Learning to prove theorems via interacting with proof assistants

Learning to prove theorems via interacting with proof assistants Yang & Deng, ICML’19

Something a little different to end the week: deep learning meets theorem proving! It’s been a while since we gave formal methods some love on The Morning Paper, and this paper piqued my interest.

You’ve probably heard of Coq, a proof management system backed by about 30 years of research and developed out of INRIA. Here’s how the Coq home page introduces it:

Coq is a formal proof management system. It provides a formal language to write mathematical definitions, executable algorithms and theorems together with an environment for semi-interactive development of machine-checked proofs.

Certified programs can then be extracted to languages like OCaml, Haskell, and Scheme.

In fully automated theorem proving (ATP), after providing a suitable formalism and a theorem, the goal is to be able to push a button and have the system prove that the theorem is true (or false!). The state-of-the-art in ATP is still some way behind human experts though it two key areas: the scale of systems it can tackle, and the interpretability of the generated proofs.

What a typical theorem prover does… is to prove by resolution refutation: it Continue reading

Semiconductor startup Cerebras Systems launches massive AI chip

There are a host of different AI-related solutions for the data center, ranging from add-in cards to dedicated servers, like the Nvidia DGX-2. But a startup called Cerebras Systems has its own server offering that relies on a single massive processor rather than a slew of small ones working in parallel.Cerebras has taken the wraps off its Wafer Scale Engine (WSE), an AI chip that measures 8.46x8.46 inches, making it almost the size of an iPad and more than 50 times larger than a CPU or GPU. A typical CPU or GPU is about the size of a postage stamp.Now see how AI can boost data-center availability and efficiency. Cerebras won’t sell the chips to ODMs due to the challenges of building and cooling such a massive chip. Instead, it will come as part of a complete server to be installed in data centers, which it says will start shipping in October.To read this article in full, please click here

Semiconductor startup Cerebras Systems launches massive AI chip

There are a host of different AI-related solutions for the data center, ranging from add-in cards to dedicated servers, like the Nvidia DGX-2. But a startup called Cerebras Systems has its own server offering that relies on a single massive processor rather than a slew of small ones working in parallel.Cerebras has taken the wraps off its Wafer Scale Engine (WSE), an AI chip that measures 8.46x8.46 inches, making it almost the size of an iPad and more than 50 times larger than a CPU or GPU. A typical CPU or GPU is about the size of a postage stamp.Now see how AI can boost data-center availability and efficiency. Cerebras won’t sell the chips to ODMs due to the challenges of building and cooling such a massive chip. Instead, it will come as part of a complete server to be installed in data centers, which it says will start shipping in October.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware spends $4.2B to grab Pivotal, Carbon Black to secure, develop integrated cloud world

All things cloud are major topics of conversation at the VMworld user conference next week, ratcheded up a notch by VMware's $4.2 billion plans to acquire cloud development firm Pivotal and security provider Carbon Black.VMware said during its quarterly financial call this week it would spend about $2.7 billion on Pivotal and its Cloud Foundry hybrid cloud development technology, and about $2.1 billion for the security technology of Carbon Black, which includes its Predictive Security Cloud and other endpoint-security software.[ Check out What is hybrid cloud computing and learn what you need to know about multi-cloud. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] VMware has deep relationships with both companies. Carbon Black technology is part of VMware’s AppDefense endpoint security. Pivotal has a deeper relationship in that VMware and Dell, VMware’s parent company, spun out Pivotal in 2013.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware spends $4.2B to grab Pivotal, Carbon Black to secure, develop integrated cloud world

All things cloud are major topics of conversation at the VMworld user conference next week, ratcheded up a notch by VMware's $4.2 billion plans to acquire cloud development firm Pivotal and security provider Carbon Black.VMware said during its quarterly financial call this week it would spend about $2.7 billion on Pivotal and its Cloud Foundry hybrid cloud development technology, and about $2.1 billion for the security technology of Carbon Black, which includes its Predictive Security Cloud and other endpoint-security software.[ Check out What is hybrid cloud computing and learn what you need to know about multi-cloud. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] VMware has deep relationships with both companies. Carbon Black technology is part of VMware’s AppDefense endpoint security. Pivotal has a deeper relationship in that VMware and Dell, VMware’s parent company, spun out Pivotal in 2013.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware Buys Carbon Black for $2.1B and Pivotal for $2.7B

Big Cloud Fabric: Ideal Underlay for VMware NSX-T

Texas ransomware attacks: to pay or not to pay? | TECH(feed)

Nearly two dozen cities in Texas have been hit by a ransomware attack executed by a single threat actor. These attacks beg the question: Is it ever worth it to pay a cyber attacker’s ransom? In this episode of TECH(feed), Juliet discusses the pattern of ransomware attacks on local governments, how municipalities have responded and how to prevent a ransomware attack in the first place.

AfPIF Day Three: A Record Number of Women

It’s been a record-breaking year: 97 women attended AfPIF 2019, the highest ever, showing the fruits of diversity efforts from organizers and sponsors.

In the last three years, there have been fellowships targeting women in engineering, supported by organizations like Workonline, Google, LINX, and Akamai. There’s also been a working lunch, where participants discuss the best way AfPIF can be more inclusive to women.

As the curtains fell on the tenth edition of AfPIF, it was clear that the future is looking bright, with 367 men and women attending, representing 59 countries: 202 from Africa, 36 from Europe, 16 from America, and 13 from Asia.

The first panel of the day was dedicated to looking back at the challenges in the last ten years, identifying the opportunities going forward, and what we all must do in order to guarantee business growth and better connectivity for the region.

One of the key points was that the traditional telco model is changing, and companies will have to adapt in order to stay relevant. Seacom, for instance is exploring other business opportunities as the demand for traditional infrastructure falls and local content grows, leading to formation of ISPs that can survive largely Continue reading

Edge Internet Economy Will Hit $4.1 Trillion by 2030, Study Says

AT&T Polishes Its Hybrid Cloud Strategy

InfoBlox Pushes DDI to Branch Offices

Don’t Pick an Ops Platform Your Devs Won’t Use

In all of the excitement and buzz around Kubernetes, one important factor in the conversation that seems to be glossed over is how and where containerized applications are built. Going back to Docker’s roots, it was developers who were the first ones to adopt Docker containers. It solved their own local development issues and made it easier and faster to get applications out the door.

Fast forward 5 years, and developers are more important than ever. They build modern apps and modernize existing apps that are the backbone of organizations. If you’re in IT operations and selecting application platforms, one of the  biggest mistakes you can make is making this decision in isolation, without development buy-in. 

Avoiding Shadow IT, Round 2

In the early days of public cloud, developers started going around IT to get fast access to computing resources, creating the first round of “Shadow IT”.  Today, most large enterprises have embraced cloud applications and infrastructure, and work collaboratively across application development and operations teams to serve their needs.

But there’s a risk we’ll invite the same thing to happen again by making a container platform decision that doesn’t involve your developers. Here are 3 reasons to Continue reading

IPv6 Buzz 033: ARIN’s Role In IPv6 Address Allocation

IPv6 Buzz 033: ARIN’s Role In IPv6 Address Allocation

ARIN is the official network numbers register for IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, as well as ASNs, for North America. The IPv6 Buzz crew talk with Mark Kosters, ARIN's CTO, about its role in providing IPv6 address resources, policy, and advocacy.

The post IPv6 Buzz 033: ARIN’s Role In IPv6 Address Allocation appeared first on Packet Pushers.