Weekend Reads 051019

If you can’t address your customers and the people interacting with your network face to face, at least know where they are — anywhere in the world, anytime you want to. —Jonathan Zhang

In August 2018, Opensource.com posted a poll with seven options asking readers: What was the most important moment in the history of Linux? —Alan Formy-Duval

Stanford University’s “Silicon Genesis” is a collection of over 100 oral histories and interviews with the people who created Silicon Valley’s semiconductor industry. —David Cassel

Today’s enterprises make use of applications and services that live on-premises, in public clouds and even in edge data centers. IT has entered the multicloud era and connecting the modern enterprise isn’t easy. —aganesan

I don’t have a lot of good news for you. The truth is there’s nothing we can do to protect our data from being stolen by cybercriminals and others. —Bruce Schneier

Open source code is vital to software development at most organizations, but that doesn’t mean that enterprises have figured out how to use open source without inadvertently introducing vulnerabilities into their code. —Curtis Franklin, Jr

World Password Day is a day in which companies around the world post blogs with advice, Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For May 10th, 2019

Wake up! It's HighScalability time:

 

Deep-sky mosaic, created from nearly 7,500 individual exposures, provides a wide portrait of the distant universe, containing 265,000 galaxies that stretch back through 13.3 billion years of time to just 500 million years after the big bang. (hubblesite)

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? I'd greatly appreciate your support on Patreon. I wrote Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10 for people who need to understand the cloud. And who doesn't these days? On Amazon it has 45 mostly 5 star reviews (107 on Goodreads). They'll learn a lot and hold you in awe.

 

Number Stuff:

  • 36%: of the world touches a Facebook app every month, 2 years over a life time
  • $84.4: average yearly Facebook ad revenue per user in North America
  • 1%: performers raked in 60% of all concert-ticket revenue world-wide in 2017—more than double their share in 1982
  • ...

Quotable Stuff:

  • @mjpt777: APIs to IO need to be asynchronous and support batching otherwise the latency of calls dominate throughput and latency profile under burst conditions. Languages need to evolve to better support asynchronous interfaces and have state machine support, not try to paper over Continue reading

IT And The Exception Mentality

If you work in IT, you probably have a lot in common with other IT people. You work long hours. You have the attitude that every problem can be fixed. You understand technology well enough to know how processes and systems work. It’s fairly common in our line of work because the best IT people tend to think logically and want to solve issues. But there’s something else that I see a lot in IT people. We tend to focus on the exceptions to the rules.

Odd Thing Out

A perfectly good example of this is automation. We’ve slowly been building toward a future when software and scripting does the menial work of network administration and engineering. We’ve invested dollars and hours into making interfaces into systems that allow us to repeat tasks over and over again without intervention. We see it in other areas, like paperwork processing and auto manufacturing. There are those in IT, especially in networking, that resist that change.

If you pin them down on it, sometimes the answers are cut and dried. Loss of job, immaturity of software, and even unfamiliarity with programming are common replies. However, I’ve also heard a more common response growing Continue reading

Feedback: Data Center Interconnects

Got this feedback from a networking engineer watching the Data Center Interconnects webinar:

This webinar is an excellent overview regarding current DCI design challenges. I would highly recommend to watch it for anyone working in the networking and datacenter space. Sober networkers should watch it thoughtfully at least two times. L2 DCI fans should watch it once in a month, until reaching a solid grasp.

If only life would be as easy as that ;) Most people prefer to be blissfully ignorant of the infrastructure supporting their business, while at the same time pretending they know an awful lot about other people's jobs (see also: Dunning-Kruger effect)

Distributed consensus revised – Part III

Distributed consensus revised (part III) Howard, PhD thesis

With all the ground work laid, the second half of the thesis progressively generalises the Paxos algorithm: weakening the quorum intersection requirements; reusing intersections to allow decisions to be reached with fewer participants; weakening the value selection rules; and sharing phases to take best advantage of the generalisation.

The result of this thesis is a family of approaches to achieving distributed consensus, which generalise over the most popular existing algorithms such as Paxos and Fast Paxos.

Quorum intersection revised

Classic Paxos requires all quorums to intersect, but this turns out to be a stronger condition than is actually required to guarantee safety and progress.

Our first finding is that it is only necessary for phase one quorums and phase two quorums to intersect. There is no need to require that phase one quorums intersect with each other nor that phase two quorums intersect with each other.

This finding (‘revision A’) was also discussed in the Flexible Paxos paper that we’ve covered in a previous edition of The Morning Paper. So long as one quorum member is around to carry the learnings from phase one into phase two, we’re good (the thesis itself Continue reading

Kernel of Truth season 2 episode 7: Certifications

Subscribe to Kernel of Truth on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Cast Box and Sticher!

Click here for our previous episode.

In a recent podcast, we talked with our friend Angelo Luciani from Nutanix about the value of being part of a community and what that can mean for your career. We continue along that train of thought in this podcast but pivot over to the topic industry certifications. Host Brian talks again to Nick Mitchell and Eric Pulvino, two of our consultants who’ve not only taken certifications throughout their career but worked on and helped to create our open networking certification. Listen as they discuss the value of them, if any, what works for certifications and what doesn’t, who should be taking certifications and more!

As Brian mentions in the podcast, we have a social game going on for 2019 where you can win some fun prizes. Part of the game includes some flash give-aways of free CCOMP certification exam registration and more!  Head over to our EPIC Year Game page to learn more or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

Guest Bios

Brian O’Sullivan: Brian currently heads Product Management for Cumulus Linux. For 15 or so Continue reading

Cisco adds AMP to SD-WAN for ISR/ASR routers

Cisco has added support for Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) to its million-plus ISR/ASR edge routers, in an effort to reinforce branch and core network malware protection at across the SD-WAN.Cisco last year added its Viptela SD-WAN technology to the IOS XE version 16.9.1 software that runs its core ISR/ASR routers such as the ISR models 1000, 4000 and ASR 5000, in use by organizations worldwide. Cisco bought Viptela in 2017.  More about SD-WAN How to buy SD-WAN technology: Key questions to consider when selecting a supplier How to pick an off-site data-backup method SD-Branch: What it is and why you’ll need it What are the options for security SD-WAN? The release of Cisco IOS XE offered an instant upgrade path for creating cloud-controlled SD-WAN fabrics to connect distributed offices, people, devices and applications operating on the installed base, Cisco said. At the time Cisco said that Cisco SD-WAN on edge routers builds a secure virtual IP fabric by combining routing, segmentation, security, policy and orchestration.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco adds AMP to SD-WAN for ISR/ASR routers

Cisco has added support for Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) to its million-plus ISR/ASR edge routers, in an effort to reinforce branch and core network malware protection at across the SD-WAN.Cisco last year added its Viptela SD-WAN technology to the IOS XE version 16.9.1 software that runs its core ISR/ASR routers such as the ISR models 1000, 4000 and ASR 5000, in use by organizations worldwide. Cisco bought Viptela in 2017.  More about SD-WAN How to buy SD-WAN technology: Key questions to consider when selecting a supplier How to pick an off-site data-backup method SD-Branch: What it is and why you’ll need it What are the options for security SD-WAN? The release of Cisco IOS XE offered an instant upgrade path for creating cloud-controlled SD-WAN fabrics to connect distributed offices, people, devices and applications operating on the installed base, Cisco said. At the time Cisco said that Cisco SD-WAN on edge routers builds a secure virtual IP fabric by combining routing, segmentation, security, policy and orchestration.To read this article in full, please click here

Network Disaggregation Live Lesson

For those of you interested in the world of network disaggregation, the LiveLesson Dinesh Dutt and I recorded back in January is up on Safari Books Online as a “rough cut.” I’m not entirely certain when the official release will be available, but the rough cut versions are usually pretty good anyway. The one humorous mistake I see on the current page is the topic is listed as “travel.” Well, I do travel a lot, but I’ve never made a video on travel.

The rough cut is here.

When it comes to uptime, not all cloud providers are created equal

The cloud is not just important; it's mission-critical for many companies. More and more IT and business leaders I talk to look at public cloud as a core component of their digital transformation strategies — using it as part of their hybrid cloud or public cloud implementation.That raises the bar on cloud reliability, as a cloud outage means important services are not available to the business. If this is a business-critical service, the company may not be able to operate while that key service is offline.Because of the growing importance of the cloud, it’s critical that buyers have visibility into the reliability number for the cloud providers. The challenge is the cloud providers don't disclose the disruptions in a consistent manner. In fact, some are confusing to the point where it’s difficult to glean any kind of meaningful conclusion.To read this article in full, please click here

When it comes to uptime, not all cloud providers are created equal

The cloud is not just important; it's mission-critical for many companies. More and more IT and business leaders I talk to look at public cloud as a core component of their digital transformation strategies — using it as part of their hybrid cloud or public cloud implementation.That raises the bar on cloud reliability, as a cloud outage means important services are not available to the business. If this is a business-critical service, the company may not be able to operate while that key service is offline.Because of the growing importance of the cloud, it’s critical that buyers have visibility into the reliability number for the cloud providers. The challenge is the cloud providers don't disclose the disruptions in a consistent manner. In fact, some are confusing to the point where it’s difficult to glean any kind of meaningful conclusion.To read this article in full, please click here

CLI Still Sucks for Automation

Using network CLI for automation has always been fragile. But it keeps surprising me with the way it breaks. This time, it was a combination of Ansible, Arista, replace: config and terminal length used as a config command.

The Problem

I often hang out in the NTC Slack channel. A user reported they were having a problem with Ansible and EOS. Basic changes worked, but when they used eos_config with the replace: config option, it just timed out. We knew basic authentication & connectivity was fine, it had to be something else.

But it made no sense, because these modules are widely used. What’s going on?

Background #1: Pagination

Some commands produce more than one screen’s worth of output - for example, show run can be hundreds of lines long. Most screens don’t have hundreds of lines, so pagination is used. The network Continue reading

CLI Still Sucks for Automation

Using network CLI for automation has always been fragile. But it keeps surprising me with the way it breaks. This time, it was a combination of Ansible, Arista, replace: config and terminal length used as a config command.

The Problem

I often hang out in the NTC Slack channel. A user reported they were having a problem with Ansible and EOS. Basic changes worked, but when they used eos_config with the replace: config option, it just timed out. We knew basic authentication & connectivity was fine, it had to be something else.

But it made no sense, because these modules are widely used. What’s going on?

Background #1: Pagination

Some commands produce more than one screen’s worth of output - for example, show run can be hundreds of lines long. Most screens don’t have hundreds of lines, so pagination is used. The network Continue reading

CLI Still Sucks for Automation

Using network CLI for automation has always been fragile. But it keeps surprising me with the way it breaks. This time, it was a combination of Ansible, Arista, replace: config and terminal length used as a config command.

The Problem

I often hang out in the NTC Slack channel. A user reported they were having a problem with Ansible and EOS. Basic changes worked, but when they used eos_config with the replace: config option, it just timed out. We knew basic authentication & connectivity was fine, it had to be something else.

But it made no sense, because these modules are widely used. What’s going on?

Background #1: Pagination

Some commands produce more than one screen’s worth of output - for example, show run can be hundreds of lines long. Most screens don’t have hundreds of lines, so pagination is used. The network Continue reading

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