What’s New in Ansible Tower 3.5

We're excited to announce that Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.5 is now generally available. In this release, there are several enhancements that can help improve automation practices. Engineering has been working hard to enhance Ansible Tower and here are a few things we're most excited about:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 support
• Support for external credential vaults via credential plugins
• Become plugins now supported in Ansible Tower

In addition to a number of enhancements that have been made, the Ansible Tower 3.5 release saw over 160 issues closed. Let’s go over the highlights in this release.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 support

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an innovative operating system, designed to provide a consistent foundation for the enterprise hybrid cloud. It offers one enterprise Linux experience  for applications across IT environments. With Ansible Tower 3.5 (and Ansible Engine 2.8), support for managing RHEL 8 nodes is baked in. Ansible Tower 3.5 can also be run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 as the control node for Red Hat Ansible Automation.

External credential vaults

Ansible Tower 3.5 brings support for external credential vaults. The existing credential store is still available for use. However, Continue reading

What’s New in Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.8

Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.8 is now available. This release features many improvements and enhancements (please refer to the CHANGELOG for more details). Also, new features worth highlighting here are Ansible content (Collections), BECOME being the default privilege escalation path, no longer depending on paramiko, and BECOME plugins, and other notable improvements and changes.

The future of how Ansible content is handled

The Ansible community is excited to provide new modules and plugins for Ansible users. This keeps Ansible maintainers busy; merging new code into repositories as fast as a team can. Occasionally, things get left behind. Content that could have been released ends up waiting for the next Ansible Engine release. Currently, the official Ansible Engine release process is the only way for users to utilize or consume new content easily.

As such, the Ansible community has begun the journey of providing our users with more flexibility to create and consume content. In Ansible Engine 2.8, modifications are in place for how Ansible Engine handles content not delivered in the official release. These changes allow for the creation of a new delivery method to users. This delivery method should not depend on Ansible maintainers to manage content Continue reading

Finding Common Ground on U.S. Net Neutrality

After more than a decade of regulatory ping pong, net neutrality’s future in the United States is still unclear.

Since 2004, FCC rulemakings have been caught in a vicious cycle. They have been passed, fought in court, and returned to the FCC with minor (and sometimes major) revisions. In the last few years there have also been numerous attempts to pass legislation, cementing net neutrality once and for all, but nothing has succeeded in Congress.

Recognizing the importance of finding a sustainable solution, the Internet Society proposed a collaborative process to help experts find common ground on this complex policy issue. Starting in June 2018, we convened an ideologically diverse group of experts to create a baseline set of principles for an open Internet. 

The Net Neutrality Experts’ Roundtable series included representatives from the technical community, edge providers, academia, Internet service providers, industry associations, and both left- and right-leaning civil society groups.

In a series of meetings over ten months, participants discussed how to create a sustainable solution for net neutrality that protect the interests of Internet users while fostering an environment that encourages investment and innovation. 

Ultimately, the group was able to create a consensus-driven set of bipartisan principles for an open Continue reading

Network monitoring in the hybrid cloud/multi-cloud era

Network monitoring in the enterprise has never been easy. Even before organizations began moving software and infrastructure to the cloud, a typical enterprise used four to 10 tools just to monitor and troubleshoot their own networks, according to analyst and consulting firm Enterprise Management Associates.The public cloud adds another complex wrinkle to network visibility. Traditional monitoring tools center around the health and performance of individual network elements. Today’s digital business era requires a more holistic view of networks with the ability to glean and correlate data from diverse cloud environments using big data analytics and machine learning. To read this article in full, please click here

Join Cloudflare & PicsArt at our meetup in Yerevan!

Cloudflare is partnering with PiscArt to create a meetup this month at PicsArt office in Yerevan.  We would love to invite you to join us to learn about the newest in the Internet industry. You'll join Cloudflare's users, stakeholders from the tech community, and Engineers from both Cloudflare and PicsArt.

Tuesday, 4 June, 18:30-21:00

PicsArt office, Yerevan

Agenda:

• 18:30-19:00   Doors open, food and drinks    
• 19:00 - 19:30   Areg Harutyunyan, Engineering Lead of Argo Tunnel at Cloudflare, "Cloudflare Overview / Cloudflare Security: How Argo Tunnel and Cloudflare Access enable effortless security for your team"
• 19:30-20:00    Gerasim Hovhannisyan, Director IT Infrastructure Operations at PicsArt, "Scaling to 10PB Content Delivery with Cloudflare's Global Network"
• 20:00-20:30   Olga Skobeleva, Solutions Engineer at Cloudflare, "Security: the Serverless Future"
• 20:30-21:00   Networking, food and drinks

View Event Details & Register Here »

We'll hope to meet you soon. Here are some photos from the meetup at PicsArt last year:

IPv6 Support in Microsoft Azure

TL&DR: MIA

Six years ago, when I was talking about overlay virtual networks at Interop, I loved to joke that we must be living on a weird planet where Microsoft has the best overlay virtual networking implementation… at least as far as IPv6 goes.

Even then, their data plane implementation which was fully dual-stack-aware on both tenant- and underlay level was way ahead of what System Center could do.

Boosted race trees for low energy classification

Boosted race trees for low energy classification Tzimpragos et al., ASPLOS’19

We don’t talk about energy as often as we probably should on this blog, but it’s certainly true that our data centres and various IT systems consume an awful lot of it. So it’s interesting to see a paper using nano-Joules per prediction as an evaluation metric. The goal is to produce a low-energy hardware classifier for embedded applications doing local processing of sensor data. To get there, the authors question a whole bunch of received wisdom, beginning with this: do we really need to convert the analog sensor data into a digital signal?! Here’s another fun one: what if instead of being something you worked hard to avoid, you had to build your whole application based on the outcomes of data races??!

Typically, a sensor gathers analog information from the physical world and then converts it into a conventional digital signal… While this binary-represented integer is perfectly efficient for storage as bits in memory and for typical general purpose computing operations, it is unclear that this is the most efficient for our target application. One such possible representation is pure analog signalling.

Of course analog signalling comes Continue reading

With Cray buy, HPE rules but does not own the supercomputing market

Hewlett Packard Enterprise was already the leader in the high-performance computing (HPC) sector before its announced acquisition of supercomputer maker Cray earlier this month. Now it has a commanding lead, but there are still competitors to the giant.The news that HPE would shell out $1.3 billion to buy the company came just as Cray has announced plans to build three of the biggest systems yet – all exascale, and all at the same time for 2021 deployment.Sales had been slowing for HPC systems, but our government with its endless supply of money came to the rescue, throwing hundreds of millions at Cray for systems to be built at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.To read this article in full, please click here

With Cray buy, HPE rules but does not own the supercomputing market

Hewlett Packard Enterprise was already the leader in the high-performance computing (HPC) sector before its announced acquisition of supercomputer maker Cray earlier this month. Now it has a commanding lead, but there are still competitors to the giant.The news that HPE would shell out $1.3 billion to buy the company came just as Cray has announced plans to build three of the biggest systems yet – all exascale, and all at the same time for 2021 deployment.Sales had been slowing for HPC systems, but our government with its endless supply of money came to the rescue, throwing hundreds of millions at Cray for systems to be built at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.To read this article in full, please click here

Create lab lessons for the NRE Labs Antidote network emulator

The Antidote network emulator, part of the Network Reliability Engineering project, offers a web interface that presents network emulation scenarios to users as documented lessons. Each lesson is presented in a window running Jupyter Notebooks and contains commands that the user can click on to run them on the virtual nodes in the network emulation scenario.

The NRE Labs developers intend for Antidote to be used as an educational tool. Its lesson-focused user interface supports students’ learning progress. This post is a tutorial showing how to create and test two simple, but different, Antidote lessons.

Lab documentation

At the time I wrote this post, the Antidote documentation does not provide enough practical information about how to create new Antidote labs. However, useful information is spread around in a few different locations, which I list below:

• Read the documentation about Lesson Endpoints
• The NRE Labs blog and videos on the NRE Labs Community Resources page provide some useful information about building labs for Antidote
• The Tips and FAQs Page that includes useful information about building lessons
• Read the post on the NRE Labs blog about how NRE Labs implements curriculum as code
• You can also reverse-engineer existing lab lessons
• Look Continue reading

BrandPost: Moving to the Cloud? SD-WAN Matters!

This is the first in a two-part blog series that will explore how enterprises can realize the full transformation promise of the cloud by shifting to a business first networking model powered by a business-driven SD-WAN. The focus for this installment will be on automating secure IPsec connectivity and intelligently steering traffic to cloud providers. Over the past several years we’ve seen a major shift in data center strategies where enterprise IT organizations are shifting applications and workloads to cloud, whether private or public. More and more, enterprises are leveraging software as-a-service (SaaS) applications and infrastructure as-a-service (IaaS) cloud services from leading providers like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This represents a dramatic shift in enterprise data traffic patterns as fewer and fewer applications are hosted within the walls of the traditional corporate data center. To read this article in full, please click here

Stopping SharePoint’s CVE-2019-0604

On Saturday, 11th May 2019, we got the news of a critical web vulnerability being actively exploited in the wild by advanced persistent threats (APTs), affecting Microsoft’s SharePoint server (versions 2010 through 2019).

This was CVE-2019-0604, a Remote Code Execution vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint Servers which was not previously known to be exploitable via the web.

Several cyber security centres including the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security and Saudi Arabia’s National Center put out alerts for this threat, indicating it was being exploited to download and execute malicious code which would in turn take complete control of servers.

The affected software versions:

• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 Service Pack 2
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2013 Service Pack 1
• Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Service Pack 2
• Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 Service Pack 1
• Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise Server 2016
• Microsoft SharePoint Server 2019

Introduction

The vulnerability was initially given a critical CVSS v3 rating of 8.8 on the Zero Day Initiative advisory (however the advisory states authentication is required). This would imply only an insider threat, someone who has authorisation within SharePoint, such as an employee, on the local network could exploit the vulnerability.

We discovered that was not always Continue reading

Virtual Design Clinic 5 – Continues

Open, free and ready for you to join.

The post Virtual Design Clinic 5 – Continues appeared first on EtherealMind.

Service Fabrics

Wiwynn Launches Telco Edge Platform Based On OCP OpenEdge

Who Wins and Loses if Sprint and T-Mobile Merge?

Tower Workflow Convergence

In Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.1 we released a feature called Workflows. The feature, effectively, allowed users to compose job templates into arbitrary graph trees. A simple workflow we saw users creating was a linear pipeline; similar to the workflow below.

The workflow feature also allowed branching. Each branch can run in parallel.

But something was missing. The ability to wait for previous parallel operations to finish before proceeding. If this existed, you could simplify the above workflow (see below).

In Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.4 the above workflow is now possible with the introduction of the Workflow Convergence feature.

For you computer sciencey folks, workflows are no longer restricted to a tree, you can create a DAG. More simply, we call this convergence; two nodes are allowed to point to the same downstream node. The concept is best shown through an example. Above, we have a workflow with 3 nodes. The first two job templates run in parallel. When they both finish the 3rd downstream, convergence node, will trigger.

In this blog post we will cover the changes to workflow failure scenarios, how workflow node failure and success propagate, how this affects the runtime graph and how Continue reading

Orange and Nokia Play 5G Doubles at French Open

Orange Matter: Automating the Automators

I’ve been blogging for Solarwinds recently, posting on Orange Matter, with a cross-post to the Thwack Geek Speak forum. APIs are critical to operating infrastructure programmatically, but ultimately we need to add one or more layers of API-based middleware to make the solution usable and flexible.

This post appeared on Orange Matter as “Automating The Automators“, but I’m also linking to the version posted on Thwack, mainly because that format allows me to use more images and be slightly more irreverent; you don’t want to miss the great artwork on this one.

I’d love it if you were to take a moment to visit and read, and maybe even comment!

If you liked this post, please do click through to the source at Orange Matter: Automating the Automators and give me a share/like. Thank you!

IDG Contributor Network: Managed WAN and the cloud-native SD-WAN

In recent years, a significant number of organizations have transformed their wide area network (WAN). Many of these organizations have some kind of cloud-presence across on-premise data centers and remote site locations.The vast majority of organizations that I have consulted with have over 10 locations. And it is common to have headquarters in both the US and Europe, along with remote site locations spanning North America, Europe, and Asia.A WAN transformation project requires this diversity to be taken into consideration when choosing the best SD-WAN vendor to satisfy both; networking and security requirements. Fundamentally, SD-WAN is not just about physical connectivity, there are many more related aspects.To read this article in full, please click here