Orange Matter: Automation Paralysis

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I’ve been blogging for Solarwinds recently, posting on Orange Matter, with a cross-post to the Thwack Geek Speak forum. This post examines how it’s easy to get so focused on automating the small stuff we have difficulty turning that into the more cohesive automation solution that we’d like to have.

This post appeared on Orange Matter as “Automation Paralysis: Why We Get Stuck Automating The Small Stuff“, but I’m also linking to the version posted on Thwack, mainly because that format allowed me to use more images and be slightly more irreverent. Irreverent? Moi? Of course.

Automation Paralysis

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: Automation Paralysis and give me a share/like. Thank you!

Get IoT Smart: Homework for Many Indonesians

Today’s guest post is from Bhredipta Socarana, an Intellectual Property lawyer based in Indonesia and a Youth@IGF Fellow.

As one of the most populated countries, Indonesia has grown as one of the biggest markets for technology development. From the import of various over-the-top platforms to the implementation of Artificial Intelligence, technology has changed the Indonesian livelihood, including my own. This is also the case for Internet of Things (IoT).

As an emerging country, Indonesia admittedly has not been an advance player in responding to technology improvement. Despite the heavy invasion of technology-related products, many Indonesians have homework to do, especially for IoT. The business player needs to be aware of the responsibility of manufacturing and distributing IoT, while the public must also be aware of the various risks that they may be exposed to using IoT products.

Through the rapid development of technology and the intention of the Indonesian government to push the public to enter the “Industrial Revolution 4.0,” it will be mostly impossible to prevent penetration of IoT to our life. This leaves the public with the need to get smart with IoT.

Privacy and cybersecurity are among the issues revolving around IoT, and the need to have a Continue reading

Technology Short Take 109

Welcome to Technology Short Take #109! This is the first Technology Short Take of 2019. It may be confirmation bias, but I’ve noticed of number of sites adding “Short Take”-type posts to their content lineup. I’ll take that as flattery, even if it wasn’t necessary intended that way. Enjoy!

Networking

  • Niran Even-Chen says service mesh is a form of virtualization. While I get what Niran is trying to say here, I’m not so sure I agree with the analogy. Sometimes analogies such as this are helpful, but sometimes the analogy brings unnecessary connotations that make understanding new concepts more difficult. One area where I do strongly agree with Niran is in switching your perspective: looking at service mesh from a developer’s perspective gives one quite a different viewpoint than viewing service mesh in an infrastructure light.
  • Jim Palmer has a detailed write-up on DHCP Option 51 and different behaviors from different DHCP clients.
  • Niels Hagoort talks about some network troubleshooting tools in a vSphere/ESXi environment.

Servers/Hardware

Nothing this time around, but I’ll stay alert for items to include next time.

Security

CLOS Topology

Edson Erwin invented this highly scalable and optimized way of connecting network nodes in the 1930s and Charles Clos made the telephone nodes interconnection design using that solution. It was even before we had IP networks. He invented it in order to optimize the architecture of telephony network systems back then. It was not used in IP based network for last few decades but it experienced a big comeback with new datacenter design in the last few years. It was first invented only for scalability requirements that it solved beautifully. In new datacenter design, CLOS topology of interconnecting network devices scalability

The post CLOS Topology appeared first on How Does Internet Work.

Firewall Ruleset Automation with CI Pipeline

One of my readers sent me a description of their automation system that manages firewall rulesets on Fortigate firewalls using NAPALM to manage device configurations.

In his own words:

We are now managing thousands of address objects, services and firewall policies using David Barroso’s FortiOS Napalm module. This works very well and with a few caveats (such as finding a way to enforce the ordering of firewall policies) we are able to manage all the configuration of our firewalls from a single Ansible playbook.

The did the right thing and implemented an abstracted data model using GitOps to manage it:

Read more ...

Unsupervised learning of artistic styles with archetypal style analysis

Unsupervised learning of artistic styles with archetypal style analysis Wynen et al., NeurIPS’18

I’ve always enjoyed following work on artistic style transfer. The visual nature makes it easy to gain an appreciation for what is going on and the results are very impressive. It also something that’s been unfolding within the timespan of The Morning Paper, if we peg the beginning to the work of Gatys et al. in 2015. See for example the posts on ‘Texture Networks’ and ‘Deep photo style transfer.’

Beyond direct style transfer, the objective of the work described in today’s paper choice is to uncover representations of styles (archetypes) themselves. Given a large collection of paintings,…

… Our objective is to automatically discover, summarize, and manipulate artistic styles present in the collection.

This is achieved using an unsupervised learning technique called archetypal analysis. We can recover archetypes from a collection of paintings, and we can also go the other way; taking a painting and decomposing it into a combination of archetypes. And of course if we then manipulate the composition of archetypes, we can manipulate the style of an image.

To visualise what an archetype ‘looks like’ the authors synthesise Continue reading

No Time Like the Present for Network Automation

The time has come for IT to once again dive into the world of homegrown automation for running their networks.

Network teams have a love/hate relationship with automation, and have had for decades. Time after time, they have tentatively extended the reach of automation, working with everything from PERL scripts, CLIs, and screen scrapes to Python and proper APIs in an effort to reduce the tedium of managing the enterprise campus, WAN, and data center networks. When network teams find ways to waste less time on rote work, they make IT more responsive.

Time after time, though, something goes wrong with the cobbled together systems. Soon, rolling back and correcting mistakes or nursing along the automation as platforms and environments evolve takes more time and effort than is ultimately saved by using it. IT folks pull back and wait for better circumstances, tools, and platforms. Eventually they get some of what they want via new consoles and management tools that hide within them some of the automation IT sought. Then the cycle starts up anew.

Now, the confluence of several trends in IT has made it clear that it is automation time again. First and foremost, the focus on digital Continue reading

Blending into software infrastructure


Electronic networks existed long before electronic compute and storage.   Early on, the network was simple wires and switch boards, and the endpoints were humans.  Telegraphs transcoded taps into on/off voltage on the wire and back to audible clicks.   Telephones transcoded voice into amplitude modulated voltage and back to voice. 

Since then, the network has existed as a unique entity apart from the things it connected.  Until now.  

Less than two decades ago most applications were built in vertical silos.  Each application got its own servers, storage, database and so on.  The only thing applications shared was the network.  The network was the closest thing to a shared resource pool — the original “cloud”.  With increasing digital transformation, other services were also pooled, such as storage and database.  However each application interfaced with these pooled resources and with other applications directly.  Applications had little in common other than Continue reading

Upgrading Cloud Infrastructure Made Easier and Safer Using Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV

Upgrading Cloud Infrastructure Made Easier and Safer Using Cloudflare Workers and Workers KV

This is a guest post by Ben Chartrand, who is a Development Manager at Timely. You can check out some of Ben's other Workers projects on his GitHub and his blog.

At Timely we started a project to migrate our web applications from legacy Azure services to a modern PaaS offering. In theory it meant no code changes.

We decided to start with our webhooks. All our endpoints can be grouped into four categories:

  1. Integration with internal tools i.e. HelpScout, monitoring endpoint for PagerDuty
  2. Payment confirmations
  3. Calendar integrations i.e. Google Calendar
  4. SMS confirmations

Despite their limited number, these are vitally important. We did a lot of testing but it was clear we’d only really know if everything was working once we had production traffic. How could we migrate traffic?

Option 1

Change the CNAME to point to the new hosting infrastructure. This is high risk. DNS takes time to propagate so, if we needed to roll back, it would take time. We would also be shifting over everything at once.

Option 2

Use a traffic manager to shift a percentage of traffic using Cloudflare Load Balancing. We could start at, say, 5% traffic to the new infrastructure Continue reading

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