From CCNA to SDN: Interview with David Bombal

A few weeks ago, I had an interesting video chat with David Bombal in which we covered a wide variety of topics including

  • What would you do if you started networking today?
  • How do you increase the value of your knowledge?
  • Networking hasn’t changed in the last 40 years and whatever you learn about networking will still be valid 20 years from now;
  • Why should I learn and implement network automation?
  • When should I start learning about network automation?

Note: David posted the whole list of topics with timestamps in the pinned comment under the video.

Enjoy the video

Fast Friday – Aruba Atmosphere 2019

A couple of quick thoughts that I’m having ahead of Aruba Atmosphere next week in Las Vegas, NV. Tech Field Day has a lot going on and you don’t want to miss a minute of the action for sure, especially on Wednesday at 3:15pm PST. In the meantime:

  • IoT is really starting to more down-market. Rather than being focused on enabling large machines with front-end devices to act as gateways we’re starting to see more and more IoT devices either come with integrated connective technology or interface with systems that do. Building control systems aren’t just for large corporations any more. You can automate an office on the cheap today. Just remember that any device that can talk can also listen. Security posture is going to be huge.
  • I remember some of the discussions that we had during the heady early days of SDN and how unimpressed wireless and mobility people were when they figured out how the controllers and dumb edge devices really worked. Most wireless pros have been there and done that already. However, recently there has been a lot of movement in the OpenConfig community around wireless devices. And that really has the wireless folks excited. Because Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For March 29th, 2019

Wake up! It's HighScalability time:

 

Uber's microservice Graph. Thousands of microservices. Crazy like a fox? Or just crazy? (@msuriar)

 

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 42 mostly 5 star reviews (100 on Goodreads). They'll learn a lot and love you for the hookup.

 

  • 1.5 billion: monthly What's App users; 80 billion: docker downloads in 6 years; 1 billion: players on the App Store. 300,000 games; 13.5 billion: Voyager 1 miles from earth; 11 years: Teeny-Tiny Bluetooth Transmitter; 500 million: Airbnb guests; 12.5 million bits: information learned by average adult; 7.7%: Amazon's share of US retail sales; 100 million: Stack Overflow monthly visitors; $156B: Consumer spending in apps across iOS and Google Play by 2023; 

  • Quotable Quotes:
    • John C. Lilly: When I say we may be our programs, nothing more, nothing less, I mean the substrate, the basic substratum under all else of our metaprograms is our programs. All we are as Continue reading

Instagram and Friday Photos

I’m making some changes to the Friday Photo series (which is why I’ve not posted any of these in a bit). I will be posting a small copy of each photo to Instagram, and a fuller image over on my smugmug page. I will be including a link to the smugmug version in the instagram post, but because of the way instragram sets things up you’ll have to copy the link out and paste it into a browser separately.

I will be going back through all my images and reprocessing them, so you will probably see duplicates from time to time.

IoT Security, Privacy Vital from the Outset

For any new technology to be trusted, it must be secure. That is why privacy and security are essential to the development of new technologies from the outset. They must not be an afterthought.

This is especially so for the Internet of Things (IoT) and the plethora of devices that are now available. These devices are gradually being integrated into daily life as we enjoy the benefits they bring. In a number of cases, we are also increasing our dependence on them, such as fitness monitors and home automation.

But poorly-secured IoT devices and services can serve as entry points for cyber attacks, compromising sensitive data and potentially threatening the safety of individual users, as well others.

Attacks on infrastructure and other users, fueled by networks of poorly-secured IoT devices, can affect the delivery of essential services such as healthcare and basic utilities, put the security and privacy of others at risk, and threaten the resilience of the Internet globally.

As concerns mount about the need for regulating the ecosystem and policymakers around the world consider ways to secure it throughout its product lifecycles, it is important to consider the risks this fast-growing technology poses, as well as what steps Continue reading

Top 5 Ways to Enhance Your DockerCon Experience

DockerCon 2019 is coming soon to San Francisco and and we’ve significantly improved your DockerCon experience based on your feedback. If you haven’t reserved your spot, head over to register today.

DockerCon 2019 is coming soon to San Francisco and and we’ve significantly improved your DockerCon experience based on your feedback. If you haven’t reserved your spot, head over to register today.

After each conference, our team goes through all of your feedback and brainstorms adjustments big and small to make sure DockerCon remains a special experience for you. To everyone that filled out the event survey – thank you! We know it can seem tedious but we appreciate the feedback.

With that in mind, we wanted to share some of the new changes you’ll see in San Francisco:

  1. Role-based Content: This year you can find dedicated tracks on how to use Docker for Developers and for IT Infrastructure & Operations teams. These tracks are led by Docker Captains, customers and Docker Solution Architects sharing their experiences and best practices in building and running apps in containers. And, to make the experience even better – we heard you – and have a new mobile app for attendees.
  2. One Global DockerCon Continue reading

How to manage your Linux environment

The configuration of your user account on a Linux system simplifies your use of the system in a multitude of ways. You can run commands without knowing where they're located. You can reuse previously run commands without worrying how the system is keeping track of them. You can look at your email, view man pages, and get back to your home directory easily no matter where you might have wandered off to in the file system. And, when needed, you can tweak your account settings so that it works even more to your liking.Linux environment settings come from a series of files — some are system-wide (meaning they affect all user accounts) and some are configured in files that are sitting in your home directory. The system-wide settings take effect when you log in and local ones take effect right afterwards, so the changes that you make in your account will override system-wide settings. For bash users, these files include these system files:To read this article in full, please click here

Calvin: fast distributed transactions for partitioned database systems

Calvin: fast distributed transactions for partitioned database systems Thomson et al., SIGMOD’12

Earlier this week we looked at Amazon’s Aurora. Today it’s the turn of Calvin, which is notably used by FaunaDB (strictly “_FaunaDB uses patent-pending technology inspired by Calvin…”). As the paper title suggests, the goal of Calvin is to put the ACID back into distributed databases. I’ve put these systems back-to-back because they are both vying for attention in the serverless world, but note that really this is an apples-to-oranges thing as Aurora scales out MySQL and PostgreSQL with single writer multi-reader models, whereas Calvin supports distributed transactions over distributed databases. A closer comparison with Calvin in the AWS world would be DynamoDB, which recently added limited transaction support (single region tables). Calvin is more commonly compared against Google’s Spanner. See Daniel Abadi on this topic (note that Abadi is one of the authors of the Calvin paper, and an advisor to FaunaDB), and also on “It’s time to move on from two-phase commit.”

Calvin [is] a transaction processing and replication layer designed to transform a generic, non-transactional, un-replicated data store into a fully ACID, consistently replicated distributed database system. Calvin supports horizontal scalability Continue reading

How to install and configure stunnel on Ubuntu

Overview

We all know how awesome stunnel is, but setting it up properly on Ubuntu (and on most other distros, really), can be a little tricky.

This post is dedicated to show you how to properly install and configure this magnificent piece of software on Ubuntu.

For this, I’ll be using Ubuntu 18.04 Server. There is a good chance however that the same procedure (maybe with slight adjustments), could work on other Ubuntu versions (or even other distros) as well. Please share your results with me so I can update this post.

Installing stunnel

This part should be simple enough. We’ll be using Ubuntu’s own repository:

sudo sh -c 'apt-get update && apt-get install stunnel4'

The installation process also comes with its own stunnel4 user, init script, and logrotate config (which we’ll take advantage of soon).

Moreover, couple of scripts are included in the package to deal with the ppp connections (to handle ppp status changes gracefully by restarting the stunnel process).

stunnel – manual mode

stunnel can be manually called with the config file as its argument and it will work.

For example, assuming the file is located at /etc/stunnel/stunnel.conf, the following command would run it: Continue reading

As memory prices plummet, PCIe is poised to overtake SATA for SSDs

A collapse in price for NAND flash memory and a shrinking gap between the prices of PCI Express-based and SATA-based solid-state drives (SSDs) means the shift to PCI Express SSDs will accelerate in 2019, with the newer, faster format replacing the old by years' end.According to the Taiwanese tech publication DigiTimes (the stories are now archived and unavailable without a subscription), falling NAND flash prices continue to drag down SSD prices, which will drive the adoption of SSDs in enterprise and data-center applications. This, in turn, will further drive the adoption of PCIe drives, which are a superior format to SATA.To read this article in full, please click here

As memory prices plummet, PCIe is poised to overtake SATA for SSDs

A collapse in NAND memory prices and a closing of the price gap between PCI Express-based and SATA-based solid-state drives (SSDs) means the shift to PCIe SSDs will accelerate in 2019, with the newer, faster format replacing the old by years' end.According to the Taiwanese tech publication DigiTimes (the stories are now archived and unavailable without a subscription), falling NAND flash prices continue to drag down SSD prices further, which will drive the adoption of SSDs in enterprise and data center applications. This, in turn, will further drive the adoption of PCI Express drives, which are a superior format to SATA.To read this article in full, please click here

Find the right AMI everytime: Make your AWS application work in any region

Ansible-Blog-Right-AMI-Everytime

With over 170 Amazon Web Services (AWS) modules, including 60 specifically for Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Ansible makes it easy to provision and manage AWS resources. Are you using resources on AWS and looking to diversify across regions to facilitate high availability and disaster recovery? Are you concerned about how Ansible handles differences among EC2 regions? This post will help you build Ansible Playbooks that operate smoothly across regions using the ec2_ami_facts module. In our example, we’ll spin up Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances in AWS.

To spin up an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), you must know the image’s ImageID, a unique identifier for that specific image. AMI ImageIDs use a human-unfriendly hex string to catalog the AMI. For example, ami-c998b6b2. Unfortunately AMI ImageIDs are unique per region, which means the ImageID for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in us-east-1 (Virginia) is not the same as the ImageID for the identical image in us-east-2 (Ohio). Some cloud operators use AWS CloudFormation templates, which include a catalog of AMI ImageIDs for every region, to make their deployment model work across regions. While this can work, it is a bit inflexible, needs constant maintenance of the CloudFormation template, and may work in one Continue reading

BrandPost: Robots in Retail are Real… and so is Edge Computing

I’ve seen plenty of articles touting the promise of edge computing technologies like AI and robotics in retail brick & mortar, but it wasn’t until this past weekend that I had my first encounter with an actual robot in a retail store. I was doing my usual weekly grocery shopping at my local Stop & Shop, and who comes strolling down the aisle, but…. Marty… the autonomous robot. He was friendly looking with his big googly eyes and was wearing a sign that explained he was there for safety, and that he was monitoring the aisles to report spills, debris, and other hazards to employees to improve my shopping experience. He caught the attention of most of the shoppers.To read this article in full, please click here

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