Cross-vCenter NSX at the Center for Advanced Public Safety

Jason Foster is an IT Manager at the Center for Advanced Public Safety at the University of Alabama. The Center for Advanced Public Safety (CAPS) originally developed a software that provided crash reporting and data analytics software for the State of Alabama. Today, CAPS specializes in custom software mostly in the realm of law enforcement and public safety. They have created systems for many states and government agencies across the country.

Bryan Salek, Networking and Security Staff Systems Engineer, spoke with Jason about network virtualization and what led the Center for Advanced Public Safety to choosing VMware NSX Data Center and what the future holds for their IT transformation.

 

The Need for Secure and Resilient Infrastructure

As part of a large modernize data center initiative, the forward-thinking CAPS IT team began to investigate micro-segmentation. Security is a primary focus at CAPS due to the fact that the organization develops large software packages for various state agencies. The applications that CAPS writes and builds are hosted together, but contain confidential information and need to be segmented from one another.

Once CAPS rolled out the micro-segmentation use-case, the IT team decided to leverage NSX Data Center for disaster recovery purposes as Continue reading

The Network Sized Holes in Serverless

Until about 2017, the cloud was going to replace all on-premises data centers. As it turns out, however, the cloud has not replaced all on-premises data centers. Why not? Based on the paper under review, one potential answer is because containers in the cloud are still too much like “serverfull” computing. Developers must still create and manage what appear to be virtual machines, including:

  • Machine level redundancy, including georedundancy
  • Load balancing and request routing
  • Scaling up and down based on load
  • Monitoring and logging
  • System upgrades and security
  • Migration to new instances

Serverless solves these problems by placing applications directly onto the cloud, or rather a set of libraries within the cloud.

Jonas, Eric, Johann Schleier-Smith, Vikram Sreekanti, Chia-Che Tsai, Anurag Khandelwal, Qifan Pu, Vaishaal Shankar, et al. “Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing.” ArXiv:1902.03383 [Cs], February 9, 2019. http://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03383.

The authors define serverless by contrasting it with serverfull computing. While software is run based on an event in serverless, software runs until stopped in a cloud environment. While an application does not have a maximum run time in a serverfull environment, there is some maximum set by the provider in a serverless Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Four Visions of the Internet

Competing visions: The World Economic Forum’s blog looks at four competing visions of the Internet that it sees emerging. These include Silicon Valley’s open Internet, Beijing’s paternal Internet, Brussels’ bourgeois Internet, and Washington’s commercial Internet. Will one vision win out?

Searching for fakes: WhatsApp, the popular messaging app owned by Facebook, is testing reverse image search in its efforts to battle fake news, TheNextWeb reports.  The chat app may use Google APIs to compare the targeted image with similar pictures as a way to filter out doctored images.

Working against itself: An Artificial Intelligence that can right fake news articles may also be useful for spotting them, the MIT Technology Review says. Recently, OpenAI withheld the release of its new language model on fears that it could be used to spread misinformation, but researchers say the tool may be useful for the opposite effect.

Privacy laundering: Lawfareblog.com take a hard look at Facebook’s recent announcement that it was moving to end-to-end encryption. The social media giant won’t fix its privacy problems with the move, however, the article says. “Facebook’s business model is the quintessential example of ‘surveillance capitalism,’ with user data serving as the main product that Facebook sells to Continue reading

Datacenter RPCs can be general and fast

Datacenter RPCs can be general and fast Kalia et al., NSDI’19

We’ve seen a lot of exciting work exploiting combinations of RDMA, FPGAs, and programmable network switches in the quest for high performance distributed systems. I’m as guilty as anyone for getting excited about all of that. The wonderful thing about today’s paper, for which Kalia et al. won a best paper award at NSDI this year, is that it shows in many cases we don’t actually need to take on that extra complexity. Or to put it another way, it seriously raises the bar for when we should.

eRPC (efficient RPC) is a new general-purpose remote procedure call (RPC) library that offers performance comparable to specialized systems, while running on commodity CPUs in traditional datacenter networks based on either lossy Ethernet or lossless fabrics… We port a production grade implementation of Raft state machine replication to eRPC without modifying the core Raft source code. We achieve 5.5 µs of replication latency on lossy Ethernet, which is faster than or comparable to specialized replication systems that use programmable switches, FPGAs, or RDMA.

eRPC just needs good old UDP. Lossy Ethernet is just fine (no need for fancy lossness Continue reading

Spousetivities at Oktane 2019

It should come as no surprise to anyone that I’m a huge supporter of Spousetivities, and not just because it was my wife, Crystal Lowe, who launched this movement. What started as the gathering of a few folks at VMworld 2008 has grown over the last 11 years, and this year marks the appearance of Spousetivities at an entirely new conference: Oktane 2019!

Oktane is the conference for Okta, a well-known provider of identity services, and the event is happening in San Francisco from April 1 through April 4 (at Moscone West). This year, Okta is bringing Spousetivities in to add activities for those traveling to San Francisco with conference attendees.

What sort of activities are planned? The Oktane19 Spousetivities landing page has full details, but here’s a quick peek:

  • A wine tour in Sonoma/Napa with private transportation (lunch is included, of course!)
  • A walking food tour of San Francisco combined with a bus tour of the city and tickets to Beach Blanket Babylon
  • A whale watching tour

…and more!

If you’re attending Oktane19 and are bringing along a spouse, domestic partner, family member, or even just a friend—I’d definitely recommend signing them up for Spousetivities. Continue reading

Looking Ahead: My 2019 Projects

It’s been a little while now since I published my 2018 project report card, which assessed my progress against my 2018 project goals. I’ve been giving a fair amount of thought to the areas where I’d like to focus my professional (technical) development this coming year, and I think I’ve come up with some project goals that align both with where I am professionally right now and where I want to be technically as I grow and evolve. This is a really difficult balance to strike, and we’ll see at the end of the year how well I did.

Without further ado, here’s my list of 2019 project goals, along with an optional stretch goal (where it makes sense).

  1. Make at least one code contribution to an open source project. For the last few years, I’ve listed various programming- and development-related project goals. In all such cases, I haven’t done well with those goals because they were too vague, and—as I pointed out in previous project report cards—these less-than-ideal results are probably due to the way programming skills tend to be learned (by solving a problem/challenge instead of just learning language semantics and syntax). So, in an effort to Continue reading

Exec: How SDN, SD-WAN, security fit in VMware’s strategy

It has been just 10 months since Tom Gillis became VMware's senior vice president and general manager of its networking and security business, and in that time he has overseen some major changes in the company’s core products.Most recent is a milestone release of the company’s NSX-T Data Center software, making it VMware’s primary networking platform for organizations looking to support multivendor cloud-native applications, bare-metal workloads as well as the growing hybrid and multi-cloud worlds.To read this article in full, please click here

Exec: How SDN, SD-WAN, security fit in VMware’s strategy

It has been just 10 months since Tom Gillis became VMware's senior vice president and general manager of its networking and security business, and in that time he has overseen some major changes in the company’s core products.Most recent is a milestone release of the company’s NSX-T Data Center software, making it VMware’s primary networking platform for organizations looking to support multivendor cloud-native applications, bare-metal workloads as well as the growing hybrid and multi-cloud worlds.To read this article in full, please click here

Exec: How SDN, SD-WAN, security fit in VMware’s strategy

It has been just 10 months since Tom Gillis became VMware's senior vice president and general manager of its networking and security business, and in that time he has overseen some major changes in the company’s core products.Most recent is a milestone release of the company’s NSX-T Data Center software, making it VMware’s primary networking platform for organizations looking to support multivendor cloud-native applications, bare-metal workloads as well as the growing hybrid and multi-cloud worlds.To read this article in full, please click here

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