Ansible Tips and Tricks: Dealing with Unreliable Connections and Services

Red Hat Ansible Automation is widely known to automate and configure Linux and Windows hosts, as well as network automation for routers, switches, firewalls and load balancers. Plus, there are a variety of modules that deal with the cloud and the API around it such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Compute Engine.  And there are other modules that interact with Software as a Service (SaaS) tools like Slack or ServiceNow. Although the downtime for these APIs is very minimal, it does happen, and it is even more likely that the connection between your Ansible control host (where you are running Ansible from) and the cloud-centric API could be down.

In this blog post, I will cover some tips and tricks for dealing with unreliable connections to cloud-centric APIs and how I build Ansible Playbooks in a reliable manner. As a technical marketing engineer, I consider my customers the Red Hat field teams, and often Solutions Architects are running playbooks from unreliable hotel wireless, coffee shops and sometimes even airplanes! I have to make sure playbooks have some more robustness built in for these odd situations. It is hair-pulling frustrating to get through a 20 task Continue reading

Open-source containers move toward high-performance computing

Open-source containers are moving in a direction that many of us never anticipated.Long recognized as providing an effective way to package applications with all of their required components, some are also tackling one of the most challenging areas in the compute world today — high-performance computing (HPC). And while containers can bring a new level of efficiency to the world of HPC, they're also presenting new ways of working for enterprise IT organizations that are running HPC-like jobs.How containers work Containers offer many advantages to organizations seeking to distribute applications. By incorporating an application's many dependencies (libraries, etc.) into self-sustainable images, they avoid a lot of installation problems. The differences in OS distributions have no impact, so separate versions of applications don't have to be prepared and maintained, thus making developers' work considerably easier.To read this article in full, please click here

Open Source Containers in 2019

Open source containers are moving in a direction that many of us never anticipated. Long recognized as providing an effective way to package applications with all of their required components, some are also tackling one of the most challenging areas in the compute world today -- high performance computing or "HPC". And while containers can bring a new level of efficiency to the world of HPC, they're also presenting new ways of working for enterprise IT organizations that are running HPC-like jobs.How containers work Containers offer many advantages to organizations seeking to distribute applications. By incorporating an application's many dependencies (libraries, etc.) into self-sustainable images, they avoid a lot of installation problems. The differences in OS distributions have no impact, so separate versions of applications don't have to be prepared and maintained, thus making developers' work considerably easier.To read this article in full, please click here

Space data backbone gets U.S. approval

Soon we may have a space-based optical backbone capable of transferring data 1.5 times faster than Earth-based terrestrial fiber, now that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has given LeoSat the go-ahead to start its build-out.Moving “large quantities of data quickly and securely around the world, is fast outpacing the infrastructure in place to carry it,” says LeoSat in a press release announcing its FCC market-access grant last month. Upcoming LeoSat, will be a “a backbone in space for global business,” the company says.To read this article in full, please click here

Space data backbone gets U.S. approval

Soon we may have a space-based optical backbone capable of transferring data 1.5 times faster than Earth-based terrestrial fiber, now that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has given LeoSat the go-ahead to start its build-out.Moving “large quantities of data quickly and securely around the world, is fast outpacing the infrastructure in place to carry it,” says LeoSat in a press release announcing its FCC market-access grant last month. Upcoming LeoSat, will be a “a backbone in space for global business,” the company says.To read this article in full, please click here

Listing TOP 5 Processes – Top command

Continuing some exploration of Pandas, I realized in networking we often has to deal with Toptalkers, I dont have any Networking Realted Top Talker IP Data as such but wanted to see if this can checked on my Laptop’s current Processes comsuming CPU and Top processes which are repeated often.

Without dragging the topic

-> Took the text file it was delimited with space (TOP Command will generally Delimit)

-> Converted to Pandas Read FWF and then converted the file to CSV

-> Used CSV to read into specific %CPU coloumn and implemented SORT function in descending order.

-> Finally Took Counter from Collections Module and implemented it on the list.

output looksl something like this

Pandas are effective and easy, I will continue to explore some functions so as to build some scripts in day to day activities.

-Rakesh

Are Telcos Secure ? Not provably, so No.

Why did we trust telco networks until now ?

The post Are Telcos Secure ? Not provably, so No. appeared first on EtherealMind.

Debunking Four Myths about Flow Data

Automation, Big Data and AI

The final topic David Gee and Christoph Jaggi mentioned in their interview was big data and AI (see also: automated workflows, hygiene of network automation and network automation security):

Two other concurrent buzzwords are big data and artificial intelligence. Can they be helpful for automation?

Big Data can provide a rich pool of event-sourcing information and, as infrastructures get more complex, it’s essential that automation triggers are as accurate as possible.

Microsoft Storage Spaces Is Hot Garbage For Parity Storage

I love parity storage. Whether it’s traditional RAID 5/6, erasure coding, raidz/raid2z, whatever. It gives you redundancy on your data without requiring double the drives that mirroring or mirroring+stripping would require.

The drawback is write performance is not as good as mirroring+stripping, but for my purposes (lots of video files, cold storage, etc.) parity is perfect.

In my primary storage array, I use double redundancy on my parity, so effectively N+2. I can lose any 2 drives without losing any data.

I had a simple Storage Spaces mirror on my Windows 10 Pro desktop which consisted of (2) 5 TB drives using ReFS. This had four problems:

• It was getting close to full
• The drives were getting old
• ReFS isn’t support anymore on Windows 10 Pro (need Windows 10 Workstation)
• Dropbox (which I use extensively) is dropping support for ReFS-based file systems.

ReFS had some nice features such as checksumming (though for data checksumming, you had to turn it on), but given the type of data I store on it, the checksumming isn’t that important (longer-lived data is stored either on Dropbox and/or my ZFS array). I do require Dropbox, so back to NTFS it is.

I Continue reading

New chip techniques are needed for the new computing workloads

Over the next two to three years, we will see an explosion of new complex processors that not only do the general-purpose computing we commonly see today (scalar and vector/graphics processing), but also do a significant amount of matrix and spatial data analysis (e.g., augmented reality/virtual reality, visual response systems, artificial intelligence/machine learning, specialized signal processing, communications, autonomous sensors, etc.).In the past, we expected all newer-generation chips to add features/functions as they were being designed. But that approach is becoming problematic. As we scale Moore’s Law closer to the edge of physical possibility (from 10nm to 7, then 5), it becomes increasingly lengthy and costly to perfect the new processes. What was generally about 12 months between processing improvement steps now is closer to two years, and newer process factories can cost upwards of $10 billion or more.To read this article in full, please click here

New chip techniques are needed for the new computing workloads

Over the next two to three years, we will see an explosion of new complex processors that not only do the general-purpose computing we commonly see today (scalar and vector/graphics processing), but also do a significant amount of matrix and spatial data analysis (e.g., augmented reality/virtual reality, visual response systems, artificial intelligence/machine learning, specialized signal processing, communications, autonomous sensors, etc.).In the past, we expected all newer-generation chips to add features/functions as they were being designed. But that approach is becoming problematic. As we scale Moore’s Law closer to the edge of physical possibility (from 10nm to 7, then 5), it becomes increasingly lengthy and costly to perfect the new processes. What was generally about 12 months between processing improvement steps now is closer to two years, and newer process factories can cost upwards of $10 billion or more.To read this article in full, please click here

Short Take: Nerd Knobs

Real World Serverless: Serverless Use Cases and Best Practices

Cloudflare Workers has had a very busy 2018. Throughout the year, Workers moved from beta to general availability, continued to expand its footprint as Cloudflare grew to 155 locations, and added new features and services to help developers create increasingly advanced applications.

To cap off 2018 we decided hit the road (and then head to the airport) with our Real World Serverless event series in San Francisco, Austin, London, Singapore, Sydney, and Melbourne. It was a great time sharing serverless application development insights we’ve discovered over the past year as well as demonstrating how to build applications with new services like our key value store, Cloudflare Workers KV.

Below is a recording from our Singapore Real World Serverless event. It included three talks about Serverless technology featuring Tim Obezuk, Stanley Tan, and Remy Guercio from Cloudflare. They spoke about the fundamentals of serverless technology, twelve factors of serverless application development, and achieving no ops at scale with network-based serverless.

If you’d like to join us in person to talk about serverless, we’ll be announcing 2019 event locations starting in the new year.

About the talks

Fundamentals of Serverless Technology - Tim Obezuk (0:00-13:56)

Tim explores the anatomy of Continue reading

GE Spins Off Its Digital Business, Including Predix, Into a Separate Company

GE Digital CEO Bill Ruh departs the company "to pursue other opportunities."

AT&T’s Extensive SDN Plans Pave Way for 5G

AT&T CTO Andre Fuetsch said the carrier is at 63 percent SDN control of its network operations that can be virtualized, pushing toward its goal of 65 percent control by year-end.

Empowering Moroccan Cooperatives to Participate in the Digital Economy

KASBUY is a web platform to help Moroccan cooperatives, especially ones from women, to promote their handicrafts on international online markets. It will allow any registered cooperative, after following a well-defined and transparent process, to have its own online space to sell its products and manage its business and inventory management activities.

The project is supported by the Internet Society Beyond the Net Funding Programme and developed by the Internet Society Morocco Chapter in partnership with the public organization ODCO (Office du Développement de Coopération) and the private IT company Maghreb-SI.

Through the KASBUY platform, we aim to build an international community around Moroccan crafts and local products. The platform targets small women’s cooperatives that produce handicrafts and wish to reach a large audience through the Internet. In general, these cooperatives find it very difficult to sell their products either because of lack of visibility of their products, or because of the lack of competence in the digital payment process. The platform will provide more opportunities to sell their products.

The project aims to:

• Help cooperatives to overcome the difficulties of selling their local products
• Ensure stable salaries for cooperative members
• Develop the cooperatives in a sustainable way, and support Continue reading

Helping Rural Libraries in Armenia to Embrace the Digital Age

Although there are a large number of rural libraries in Armenia, the majority of them do not have computers or Internet access. Librarians are forced to deal with manual book circulation and lack of management programs. Residents are mostly unaware of the resources housed in the libraries. It became evident that libraries needed a technological shift to break from their current working routines and embrace change.

In 2015, The Internet Society Armenia Chapter started a pilot project to provide rural libraries with computers, software and training. The project team installed 20 computers with library management programs and estimated that, in order to cover all libraries, they needed to reach the number of about 1,000 computers.

In 2017, the Chapter started Computers, services and Wi-Fi Internet for rural libraries, a project supported by the Internet Society Beyond the Net Funding Programme, that aimed to install more computers to improve the librarians operation and provide lightweight library management programs as well as WiFi access for visitors. The project was presented at the national IGF on October 10, 2018.

Igor Mkrtumyan, President of the Armenia Chapter, explains how their project is helping to address the needs of rural communities within the Continue reading

Tech Bytes: How Silver Peak’s SD-WAN Helped Gentherm Beat Global MPLS Hassles

Today's Tech Bytes, sponsored by Silver Peak, discusses how SD-WAN can give you more leverage over your MPLS providers and improve performance for users. Our guest is Bruce Jarrett, Infrastructure Team Lead and Network Architect at Gentherm.

The post Tech Bytes: How Silver Peak’s SD-WAN Helped Gentherm Beat Global MPLS Hassles appeared first on Packet Pushers.

VMware Helps Make-a-Wish Foundation Save Millions on IT

On average, it takes $10,500 for a wish. And the Foundation must balance the need to grant wishes with the need to update its IT infrastructure.