What Makes IoT A Security Risk?

IoT security is a pretty hot topic in today’s world. That’s because the increasing number of smart devices is causing issues with security professionals everywhere. Consumer IoT devices are expected to top 20 billion by 2020. And each of these smart devices represents an attack surface. Or does it?

Hello, Dave

Adding intelligence to a device increases the number of ways that it can compromised. Take a simple thermostat, for example. The most basic themostat is about as dumb as you can get. It uses the expansion properties of metal to trigger switches inside of the housing. You set a dial or a switch and it takes care of the rest. Once you start adding things like programmability or cloud connection, you increase the number of ways that you can access the device. Maybe it’s a webpage or an app. Maybe you can access it via wireless or Bluetooth. No matter how you do it, it’s more available than the simple version of the thermostat.

What about industrial IoT devices? The same rule applies. In this case, we’re often adding remote access to Supervisory Control And Data Acquistion (SCADA) systems. There’s a big market from enterprise IT providers to create Continue reading

What’s New in Ansible Tower 3.4

 

Red Hat Ansible Tower 3-4

We hope that 2019 will be a great year and the Ansible team is here to start it off right. We're happy to announce that Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.4 is now generally available. In this release, there are several enhancements that can help improve automation practices. Engineering has been working hard to enhance Red Hat Ansible Tower. We're most excited about workflows enhancements, job slices, and some other nifty features. Let’s dive a little deeper into what we’re excited about in this release.


Workflow Enhancements

The enhancements to workflows in Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.4 are a combination of internal and customer requested features. This is designed to bring needed hybrid cloud management capabilities to engineers and administrators around the globe.

Workflow Convergence

Workflow convergence enables a convergence step that tracks the completion of multiple workflow jobs before continuing. For example, when deploying application updates there might be a need to wait until a group of nodes drains from a load balancer pool before having a service stopped on any node in the group. This helps enable a more complete dependency chain for jobs inside workflows.

Ansiblt-Tower-Covergence-Workflows

Nested Workflows

Workflows have been able to have job templates Continue reading

Survey: Enterprises want end-to-end management of SD-WAN

(Editor’s note: Recent research by Enterprise Management Associates takes a look at how enterprises view currently available SD-WAN products. This article by Shamus McGillicuddy, EMA’s research director for network management, details highlights of  “Wide-Area Network Transformation: How Enterprises Succeed with Software-Defined WAN,” a report based on EMA’s survey of 305 WAN decision-makers at distributed enterprises. EMA has posted a free webinar  about the report.) To read this article in full, please click here

Survey: Enterprises want end-to-end management of SD-WAN

(Editor’s note: Recent research by Enterprise Management Associates takes a look at how enterprises view currently available SD-WAN products. This article by Shamus McGillicuddy, EMA’s research director for network management, details highlights of  “Wide-Area Network Transformation: How Enterprises Succeed with Software-Defined WAN,” a report based on EMA’s survey of 305 WAN decision-makers at distributed enterprises. EMA has posted a free webinar  about the report.) To read this article in full, please click here

SD-WAN Reality Gap

Here’s some feedback I got from a subscriber who got pulled into an SD-WAN project:

I realized (thanks to you) that it’s really important to understand the basics of how things work. It helped me for example at my work when my boss came with the idea “we’ll start selling SD-WAN and this is the customer wish list”. Looked like business-as-usual until I realized I’ve never seen so big a difference between reality, customer wishes and what was promised to customer by sales guys I never met. And the networking engineers are supposed to save the day afterwards…

How did your first SD-WAN deployment go? Please write a comment!

Neural Ordinary Differential Equations

Neural ordinary differential equations Chen et al., NeurIPS’18

‘Neural Ordinary Differential Equations’ won a best paper award at NeurIPS last month. It’s not an easy piece (at least not for me!), but in the spirit of ‘deliberate practice’ that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to be gained from trying to understand as much as possible.

In addition to the paper itself, I found the following additional resources to be helpful:

Neural networks as differential equations

Consider a multi-layered neural network. We have an input layer and an output layer, and inbetween them, some number of hidden layers. As an input feeds forward through the network, it is progressively transformed, one layer at a time, from the input to the ultimate output. Each network layer is a step on that journey. If we take a small number of big steps, we end up with a rough approximation to the true transformation function we’d like to learn. If we take a much Continue reading

MySQL High Availability Framework Explained – Part II

In Part I, we introduced a High Availability (HA) framework for MySQL hosting and discussed various components and their functionality. Now in Part II, we will discuss the details of MySQL semisynchronous replication and the related configuration settings that help us ensure redundancy and consistency of the data in our HA setup. Make sure to check back in for Part III where we will review various failure scenarios that could arise and the way the framework responds and recovers from these conditions. What is MySQL Semisynchronous Replication? Simply put, in a MySQL semisynchronous replication configuration, the master commits transactions to the storage engine only after receiving acknowledgement from at least one of the slaves. The slaves would provide acknowledgement only after the events are received and copied to the relay logs and also flushed to the disk. This guarantees that for all transactions committed and returned to the client, the data exists on at least 2 nodes. The term ‘semi’ in semisynchronous (replication) is due to the fact that the master commits the transactions once the events are received and flushed to relay log, but not necessarily committed to the data files on the slave. This is in contrast to Continue reading

Slow MySQL Start Time in GTID mode? Binary Log File Size May Be The Issue

Have you been experiencing slow MySQL startup times in GTID mode? We recently ran into this issue on one of our MySQL hosting deployments and set out to solve the problem. In this blog, we break down the issue that could be slowing down your MySQL restart times, how to debug for your deployment, and what you can do to decrease your start time and improve your understanding of GTID-based replication.

How We Found The Problem

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