Full Stack Journey 027: Understanding Infrastructure As Code And Terraform With Curt Micol

Infrastructure as code treats your infrastructure like software objects. Terraform is a tool that applies this concept to automating the configuration of large-scale systems. On today's Full Stack Journey, guest Curt Micol shares his insights on the benefits of infrastructure as code and explores the notion of "defensive Terraform."

The post Full Stack Journey 027: Understanding Infrastructure As Code And Terraform With Curt Micol appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Future Thinking: Payal Malik of the Competition Commission of India

Last year, the Internet Society unveiled the 2017 Global Internet Report: Paths to Our Digital Future. The interactive report identifies the drivers affecting tomorrow’s Internet and their impact on Media & Society, Digital Divides, and Personal Rights & Freedoms. We interviewed Payal Malik to hear her perspective on the forces shaping the Internet’s future.

Payal Malik is the Economics Adviser and Head of the Economics Division (Chief Economist) at the Competition Commission of India. She is on secondment from the University of Delhi, where she is an associate professor of Economics. Her areas of expertise are competition law, policy and regulation. She has many years of economic consulting experience in network industries such as power and telecommunication, information and communication technologies (ICTs), innovation systems, and infrastructure. She was previously a senior research fellow at LIRNEasia and a senior consultant at the Center for Infrastructure and Regulation, National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), India. At NCAER she was a lead researcher on various infrastructure development projects, including telecoms, electricity, highways, and water and sanitation. She was also on the team that drafted the Electricity Act of India, ushering competition into the sector.

The Internet Society: This year we’re focusing our annual Continue reading

What will be hot for Cisco in 2019?

IDG Software, software, and more software. That seems to be the mantra for Cisco in 2019 as the company pushes software-defined WANs, cloud partnerships, improved application programs, and its over-arching drive to sell more subscription-based software licenses.As the year closed on Cisco’s first quarter 2019 financials, the company was indeed touting its software growth, saying subscriptions were 57 percent of total software revenue, up five points year over year, and its application software businesses was up 18 percent to $1.42 billion. The company also said its security business, which is mostly software, rose 11 percent year over year to $651 million.To read this article in full, please click here

What will be hot for Cisco in 2019?

IDG Software, software, and more software. That seems to be the mantra for Cisco in 2019 as the company pushes software-defined WANs, cloud partnerships, improved application programs, and its over-arching drive to sell more subscription-based software licenses.As the year closed on Cisco’s first quarter 2019 financials, the company was indeed touting its software growth, saying subscriptions were 57 percent of total software revenue, up five points year over year, and its application software businesses was up 18 percent to $1.42 billion. The company also said its security business, which is mostly software, rose 11 percent year over year to $651 million.To read this article in full, please click here

What will be hot for Cisco in 2019?

Software, software, and more software. That seems to be the mantra for Cisco in 2019 as the company pushes software-defined WANs, cloud partnerships, improved application programs, and its over-arching drive to sell more subscription-based software licenses.As the year closed on Cisco’s first quarter 2019 financials, the company was indeed touting its software growth, saying subscriptions were 57 percent of total software revenue, up five points year over year, and its application software businesses was up 18 percent to $1.42 billion. The company also said its security business, which is mostly software, rose 11 percent year over year to $651 million.To read this article in full, please click here

OMG, VXLAN Is Still Insecure

A friend of mine told me about a “VXLAN is insecure, the sky is falling” presentation from RIPE-77 which claims that you can (under certain circumstances) inject packets into VXLAN virtual networks from the Internet.

Welcome back, Captain Obvious. Anyone looking at the VXLAN packet could immediately figure out that there’s no security in VXLAN. I pointed that out several times in my blog posts and presentations, including Cloud Computing Networking (EuroNOG, September 2011) and NSX Architecture webinar (August 2013).

Read more ...

What’s the Time?

Computers have always had clocks. Knowing the time is important to many computer functions. In a networked world its not only important to know the time, but its equally important to know the right time. But how accurate are all these computer clocks? Lets find out.

Layer 3 can do it better. I’m convinced. You should be too.

There are lots of reasons why we have a tendency to stick to what we know best, but when new solutions present themselves, as the decision makers, we have to make sure we’re still bringing the best solution to our business and our customers. This post will highlight the virtues of building an IP based fabric of point to point routed links arranged in a Clos spine and leaf topology and why it is superior to legacy layer 2 hierarchical designs in the data center.

It’s not only possible, but far easier to build, maintain and operate a pure IP based fabric than you might think. The secret is that by pushing layer 2 broadcast domains as far out to the edges as possible, the data center network can be simpler, more reliable and easier to scale. For context, consider the existing layer 2 hierarchical model illustrated below:


This design depends heavily on MLAG. The peer link is compulsory between two switches providing an MLAG. An individual link failure on the peer link would be more consequential than any of the other links. Ideally, we try to avoid linchpin situations like this. This design does provide redundancy, but depending on Continue reading

VMware NSX Cloud at AWS re:Invent 2018

Howdy… if you have managed to check-in and get your AWS re:Invent pass, congratulations! Looks like running between AWS sessions across hotels in Las Vegas is the new Turkey Trot – welcome to the “Cloud First” world! Amongst all the craziness, we just wanted to take a moment and send a note to you from the NSX team.

As all of you know, NSX Cloud supports Azure and AWS since our latest NSX release – NSX 2.3. NSX Cloud will be showcased at the NSX demo pod at the VMware booth (Booth#2201) at AWS re:Invent (Sands Expo, Venetian). Our product experts are looking forward to meeting customers, answering product and use-case questions, and showcasing demos.

During the event, there will be multiple theatre presentations on NSX Cloud with a lot of swags to grab. For customer/partner meetings on NSX Cloud during the event, please reach out to the PM team (Percy Wadia, Shiva Somasundaram and Amol Tipnis). If you would like to take a look at all the Past Blogs and YouTube Videos on NSX Cloud, we have got it sorted for you.

 

Big Announcements:

The excitement is going to continue even after re:Invent as we will Continue reading

VMware NSX Cloud Now in AWS Solution Space

We are excited to announce that NSX Cloud, the VMware networking and security solution for AWS-native applications and hybrid-cloud, is now available in the AWS Solution Space! AWS created the Solution Space as a place for AWS Partner Network (APN) Technology Partners to showcase customer-ready solutions that combine AWS services with partner technologies and, optionally, consulting offers from APN consulting Partners. This is an especially notable milestone for NSX Cloud because it will be one of the first offerings in the Networking category for Solution Space.

NSX Cloud will be featured at AWS re:Invent this week, so be sure to stop by our theater sessions at the VMware booth (#2201) on Tuesday at 3:30pm or Thursday at 11:30am. We look forward to seeing you there, and are giving away an exciting prize to a lucky winner at each session!

What is NSX Cloud?

NSX Cloud is an extension of VMware’s NSX Data Center technology that brings the NSX networking and security framework to cloud-native applications in AWS. With NSX Cloud, IT administrators can apply the exact same networking and security policies they use in the data center to AWS-native applications, and they can manage those applications through the same interface Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: 3 types of IoT platform analytics

Enterprises rely on their IoT platforms for many services. One of the most important is analytics. In layman’s terms, IoT analytics is the science and art of trying to find patterns in the massive quantity of data generated by connected assets. Or a more careful definition from MachNation’s IoT platform testing lab might be, analytics is the ability of a platform administrator or operator to monitor trends, identify abnormalities, and produce business insights from ingested IoT data.As a first step to identifying a best-in-class IoT platform for analytics, an enterprise should deploy the various platform analytics services. In particular, the enterprise should at least configure an on-platform analytics service for live streaming and stored/historical data; configure a platform for live streaming external analytics service integrations; and then export on-platform data to an external analytics service. These configuration tests will help an enterprise determine if an IoT platform vendor has designed exceptional or lackluster management tools and usability into its platform.To read this article in full, please click here

BiB 059: Recover From Cyber Attacks & Ransomware With Dell EMC

In this briefing, Dell EMC focused on their Cyber Recovery 18.1 product. You might be thinking, “Oh, another backup product. I already have one of those.” Sort of. Cyber Recovery is more than simply backup, and it’s more than what a decent disaster recovery plan gets you. The Cyber Recovery Vault is an orchestrated Data Domain storage platform that provides an isolated copy of known good data that can be used to recover from a security breach.

The post BiB 059: Recover From Cyber Attacks & Ransomware With Dell EMC appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Lessons from Andromeda

A common complaint I hear among network engineers is that the lessons and techniques used by truly huge scale networks simply are not applicable to more “standard scale” networks. The key point, however, is balance—to look for the ideas and concepts that are interesting and at least somewhat novel, and then see how they might be applied to products and systems in all networks. Learning concepts can help you understand design patterns you might encounter almost anywhere. One recent paper, for instance, details Andromeda, a large scale networking system designed and operated by Google, one of the few truly huge networks in the world—

Andromeda is designed around a flexible hierarchy of flow processing paths. Flows are mapped to a programming path dynamically based on feature and performance requirements.

While the paper describes the general compute environment, and the forwarding process on individual nodes, the most interesting part from a network engineering perspective is hoverboard. While this concept behind hoverboard has been implemented in previous systems, it is usually hidden under the covers of a vertically integrated system, and therefore not normally something you see the inner workings of. To understand hoverboard, you have to begin with a little theory Continue reading

1 … 1,414 1,415 1,416 1,417 1,418 … 3,866