Integrating Ansible and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta

Ansible-and-RHEL

Red Hat is proud to announce that Ansible supports managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta hosts. Before you can manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta nodes with Ansible 2.7, though, you need to set the appropriate python interpreter. Ansible allows you to manage a huge range of hosts and devices, from legacy systems to beta-release testing platforms, by working with both Python 2 and Python 3. However, with Ansible 2.7 managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta, you must define which Python to use. When Ansible 2.8 is released, we plan for Ansible to automatically discover the correct Python to use on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta hosts.

Setting the Python interpreter on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta managed nodes

You can define the python interpreter Ansible should use on your Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta nodes with an inventory host_var, a group_var, a play, or an ad-hoc command. You must do this on every Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 node just as you would for any Python3 enabled host. To set the python interpreter in your inventory with a host_var:

[RHEL8hosts]
RHEL8.example.com ansible_python_interpreter=/usr/libexec/platform-python

This example directs Ansible to use Continue reading

Why Is The CCIE Lab Moving?

Cisco confirmed big CCIE rumor this week that the RTP lab was going to be moved to Richardson, TX.

The language Cisco used is pretty neutral. San Jose and RTP are being shut down as full time lab locations and everyone is moving to Richardson. We knew about this thanks to the detective work of Jeff Fry, who managed to figure this out over a week ago. Now that we know what is happening, why is it coming to pass?

They Don’t Build Them Like They Used To

Real estate is expensive. Anyone that’s ever bought a house will tell you that. Now, imagine that on a commercial scale. Many companies will get the minimum amount of building that they need to get by. Sometimes they’re bursting at the seams before they upgrade to a new facility.

Other companies are big about having lots of area. These are the companies that Continue reading

Introducing Apps with Workers

Introducing Apps with Workers

Since its inception, Cloudflare Apps has made it possible for website owners to install a tool or a service directly onto a domain they have that lives on the Cloudflare network.  As an App Developer, you’ve had the ability to deliver your product by modifying traffic and content of a user’s website using a combination of Javascript, HTML, CSS injection with the ability to modify Cloudflare features such as DNS.

Today we are announcing a public beta for our Cloudflare Apps with Workers!  If you are a developer who has been using Workers or Cloudflare Apps, this is a significant step forward to bring together our server-less platform allowing you the next wave of innovation in the Cloudflare marketplace.

Wait!  Yet more Workers news?  It’s already been a furious year of releases for Workers, from our GA launch in February to numerous improvements including the beta of Cache API and a flurry of updates during Cloudflare’s Birthday week, where we made available our K/V Storage and WASM support.  With this beta, developers can now package all Workers capabilities, deliver new worker-powered experiences to Cloudflare customers all within a few clicks via Cloudflare Apps.

Now your Apps can be more powerful, Continue reading

El Buen Fin: Tips to Shop Smart

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in the first edition of the International Internet and Entrepreneurship Forum (FIIE), in Monterrey, Mexico. The event was convened by NIC Mexico and other organizations of the Internet community of Latin America and the Caribbean as part of the activities of INCmty, an entrepreneurial festival with several years of tradition. The intersection between both topics is a fertile ground for reflection, especially in relation to the security of Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

IoT for Innovation and Entrepreneurship

The Internet has been known as a technology for facilitating innovation and entrepreneurship. The pace of technological development, together with the evolution of the Internet, has given rise to new solutions that seek to make life easier. Such is the case of the various devices connected to the Internet, which form the Internet of Things ecosystem.

Therefore, one of the issues addressed during the Forum was the role of IoT devices in the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the LAC region. There I took the opportunity to share the Internet Society’s vision of IoT security: we want people to benefit from the use of these devices in a trustworthy environment. The issue is particularly Continue reading

Securing the IoT has become business-critical

The IoT era has arrived.Here's some proof: 83% of organizations say the Internet of Things (IoT) is important to business today, and 92% say it will be in two years.That's according to a recent DigiCert survey conducted by ReRez Research of 700 organizations in five countries to better understand the IoT and IoT security.Anecdotally, I always find that markets have matured when it’s no longer an unusual thing. For example, a few years ago, it was hard to find IoT deployments that were outside of the traditional machine-to-machine industries such as manufacturing and oil and gas. Today, connected things are everywhere. Case in point: I recently interviewed the IT director at an entertainment venue and he walked me through all the connected things without ever saying “IoT.” The organization was connecting more things to improve customer experience, and it was treated as no big deal.To read this article in full, please click here

Securing the IoT has become business-critical

The IoT era has arrived.Here's some proof: 83% of organizations say the Internet of Things (IoT) is important to business today, and 92% say it will be in two years.That's according to a recent DigiCert survey conducted by ReRez Research of 700 organizations in five countries to better understand the IoT and IoT security.Anecdotally, I always find that markets have matured when it’s no longer an unusual thing. For example, a few years ago, it was hard to find IoT deployments that were outside of the traditional machine-to-machine industries such as manufacturing and oil and gas. Today, connected things are everywhere. Case in point: I recently interviewed the IT director at an entertainment venue and he walked me through all the connected things without ever saying “IoT.” The organization was connecting more things to improve customer experience, and it was treated as no big deal.To read this article in full, please click here

Announcing SSH Access through Cloudflare

Announcing SSH Access through Cloudflare

We held our annual Cloudflare Retreat last week. Over 750 team members from nearly a dozen offices spent three days learning, bonding and some of them got to smash a VPN piñata on stage with a baseball bat. Yes, you read that right.

The latest feature added to Cloudflare Access let us celebrate the replacement of our clunky VPN with a faster, safer way to reach our internal applications. You can now place applications that require SSH connections, like your source control repository, behind Cloudflare Access. We’re excited to release that same feature so that your team can also destroy your own VPN (piñata not included).

Announcing SSH Access through Cloudflare

How we smashed our VPN

We built Access to replace our corporate VPN. We started with browser-based applications, moved to CLI operations, and then began adding a growing list of single sign-on integrations. Our teammates added single sign-on support to the Cloudflare dashboard by combining Access and our serverless product, Workers. We improved the daily workflow of every team member each time we moved another application behind Access. However, SSH connections held us back. Whenever we needed to push code or review a pull request, we had to fall back to our Continue reading

Network operations: A new role for AI and ML

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are still viewed with skepticism by many in IT, despite a decades-long long history, continuing advances within academia and industry, and numerous successful applications. But it’s not hard to understand why: The very concept of an algorithm running on a digital computer being able to duplicate and even improve upon the knowledge and judgement of a highly-experienced professional – and, via machine learning, improve these results over time – still sounds at the very least a bit off in the future. And yet, thanks to advances in AI/ML algorithms and significant gains in processor and storage performance and especially the price/performance of solutions available today, AI and ML are already hard at work in network operations, as we’ll explore below.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Network operations: A new role for AI and ML

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are still viewed with skepticism by many in IT, despite a decades-long long history, continuing advances within academia and industry, and numerous successful applications. But it’s not hard to understand why: The very concept of an algorithm running on a digital computer being able to duplicate and even improve upon the knowledge and judgement of a highly-experienced professional – and, via machine learning, improve these results over time – still sounds at the very least a bit off in the future. And yet, thanks to advances in AI/ML algorithms and significant gains in processor and storage performance and especially the price/performance of solutions available today, AI and ML are already hard at work in network operations, as we’ll explore below.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Segment Routing and MPLS VPN

MPLS VPN and Segment Routing. Many people have been asking what are the differences between MPLS VPN and Segment Routing.       In fact, this is a wrong question, because Segment Routing provides transport, MPLS VPN provides Service.   They are not mutually exclusive but they are complementary. In order to create end to …

The post Segment Routing and MPLS VPN appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Segment Routing and MPLS VPN

MPLS VPN and Segment Routing. Many people have been asking what are the differences between MPLS VPN and Segment Routing.       In fact, this is a wrong question, because Segment Routing provides transport, MPLS VPN provides Service.   They are not mutually exclusive but they are complementary. In order to create end to …

The post Segment Routing and MPLS VPN appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Segment Routing and MPLS VPN

MPLS VPN and Segment Routing. Many people have been asking what are the differences between MPLS VPN and Segment Routing.       In fact, this is a wrong question, because Segment Routing provides transport, MPLS VPN provides Service.   They are not mutually exclusive but they are complementary. In order to create end to […]

The post Segment Routing and MPLS VPN appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Don’t Let the Automation Snowflakes Stop You

You know that time of year when snowflakes mean more than description of uniqueness of your networking infrastructure? Some people love to complain about that season and how the weather hinders them, others put on sturdy winter boots and down jackets, change tires on their car, and have tons of fun.

Network automation is no different. Sometimes you can persuade your peers that it makes sense to simplify and standardize the infrastructure to make it easier to abstract and automate (consider that an equivalent of going to a tropic island with shiny beaches and everlasting summer), other times you have to take out your winter boots and make the best out of what you got.

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Overload control for scaling WeChat microservices

Overload control for scaling WeChat microservices Zhou et al., SoCC’18

There are two reasons to love this paper. First off, we get some insights into the backend that powers WeChat; and secondly the authors share the design of the battle hardened overload control system DAGOR that has been in production at WeChat for five years. This system has been specifically designed to take into account the peculiarities of microservice architectures. If you’re looking to put a strategy in place for your own microservices, you could do a lot worse than start here.

WeChat

The WeChat backend at this point consists of over 3000 mobile services, including instant messaging, social networking, mobile payment, and third-party authorization. The platform sees between 10^{10} - 10^{11} external requests per day. Each such request can triggers many more internal microservice requests, such that the WeChat backend as a whole needs to handle hundreds of millions of requests per second.

WeChat’s microservice system accommodates more than 3000 services running on over 20,000 machines in the WeChat business system, and these numbers keep increasing as WeChat is becoming immensely popular… As WeChat is ever actively evolving, its microservice system has been undergoing fast iteration of service updates. For instance, Continue reading

Spectrum shake-up to deliver more Wi-Fi, connections

The United States' Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to expand available spectrum in order to increase bandwidth for connected devices, such as IoT and broadband data, including those communicating via Wi-Fi. One reason is because ISPs want to get into wireless, and they are putting pressure on. The expansion, however, will be good for all Internet of Things (IoT), too.A number of significant unlicensed bandwidth blocks are, or will be, available, including at 6GHz, 5.9GHz, and 3.5GHz. Potential stumbles include that interference mitigation needs to be resolved in a couple instances.[ Also read: Wi-Fi 6 is coming to a router near you. | Get regularly scheduled insights: Sign up for Network World newsletters. ] 6GHz In the first block, the FCC is proposing making available a large 1200 megahertz of spectrum in the 6GHz band for devices, including IoT sensors, and Wi-Fi, which predominantly uses 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz now.To read this article in full, please click here