SDxCentral’s Top 10 Articles — August 2018
Cisco targets 1 million routers for SD-WAN; a Cisco SVP shakeup; and Arista's (surprising) first acquisition.
Imagine Yourself on the DockerCon Stage
We want to hear from you
Share your story of how Docker and containers work for you at DockerCon EU in Barcelona Dec 3-5, 2018. DockerCon is the industry-leading container conference where thought leaders and the community of developers, IT professionals, architects and business leaders come together to learn, discover and engage with each other. Part of the learning experience is hearing about the possibilities of containerization from other teams using containers.
Don’t be shy about proposing your idea – no topic is too small or too big. For every presentation given, there are hundreds of people who learn and relate to the experience and insights that you share. Some of the best talks have come from people just like you — and for some, DockerCon is their very first time public speaking. Our team is standing by to help with any first timers’ jitters too!
The deadline to submit a topic is just around the corner: Sept. 8, 2018
What do people want to hear about?
DockerCon provides a variety of breakouts to address the needs of both developers and IT teams whether they are new to containers or about to scale a global deployment.
My Experience As an APrIGF18 Fellow
The 2018 Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (APrIGF) took place last month in Vanuatu. Tripti Jain, who attended as an APrIGF Fellow, shared her experiences.
This was my first experience at AprIGF, my first fellowship and also my first time as a speaker on a panel. Believe me, I was anxious and scared but thanks to the APrIGF community: organizers, members, participants and fellows, everyone made me feel at home a thousand miles away from my abode. I had one of the best learning weeks and couldn’t have asked for a better venue to learn with little to no distractions around and beautiful sunsets to watch while walking back to our rooms everyday. Fellows were facilitated with everything that we could have needed: cozy rooms, good food, articulate speakers and joyful socials every night.
One of the perks of being a fellow at APrIGF 2018 was that my learning experience began weeks before even getting to Vanuatu. All the fellows were required to participate and go through a basic course on Internet Governance by the Internet Society. This course was one of my personal favorite bits of the fellowship. I learnt a lot through this exercise. There are Continue reading
Fortinet Adds Network Access Control for IoT Security to Its Security Fabric
The company acquired NAC vendor Bradford Networks earlier this summer. Today it’s essentially rebranding Bradford’s technology as FortiNAC.
Book Review: REST API Design Rulebook
REST API Design Rulebook (written by Mark Masse and published by O’Reilly Media; more details here) is an older book, published in late 2011. However, having never attempted to design a REST API before, I found lots of useful information inside that really helped shape my understanding of REST APIs and REST API design.
(In case you’re wondering why I was reading a book about REST API design, this ties into my 2018 project list and the software development project I recently launched.)
Overall, I found the book quite helpful and useful. If I had one complaint about the book, it would be the book’s repeated insistence on referring to WRML (Web Resource Modeling Language), which—as I understand it—is a proposed solution by the book’s author to some of the challenges around REST API design. I get that the author is sold on the value of WRML, but at times the book felt very much like a WRML commercial.
Aside from that one complaint, the book’s organization into a set of “rules” helped make the material reasonably consumable, and I appreciated the review of key terms at the end of each chapter.
I do still have some Continue reading
Planning Your First IoT Network
Organizations that get an IoT project started on the right foot can avoid major headaches down the road. Here's some advice to help you move forward with ease.
SILVER PEAK SD-WAN WITH DELL EMC VEP – PART 2: Deployment Options
Continuing from where we left off in part 1, we will start with a look at some of the implementation details, before looking at DeploymentIntroducing Network4dev
Intro
Some of you may have heard it through the grapevine but it’s time to make my plans known. I have founded a new website called Network4dev which has been setup by my friend Cristian Sirbu.
What is it?
Network4dev is a web site about networking mainly for people that are developers, systems administrators or that spend most of their time working on applications. The goal is to provide short, concise and to the point articles on different networking topics. The articles will stay at a technical level suitable for someone that is not mainly into networking.
Why?
In todays IT infrastructures it’s important to break down silos. We in networking must understand a bit about compute, storage, virtualization, applications and automation. It is equally important for someone working with applications to understand a bit about networking.
For people in networking learning about apps and automation, there are many initiatives such as Devnet, but there isn’t much available for a people working with apps to learn about networking. Most of the networking content out there is aimed for people in networking (naturally). I don’t expect a person not in networking to go after for example the CCNA or to read Continue reading
Is BGP Good Enough?
In a recent podcast, Ivan and Dinesh ask why there is a lot of interest in running link state protocols on data center fabrics. They begin with this point: if you have less than a few hundred switches, it really doesn’t matter what routing protocol you run on your data center fabric. Beyond this, there do not seem to be any problems to be solved that BGP cannot solve, so… why bother with a link state protocol? After all, BGP is much simpler than any link state protocol, and we should always solve all our problems with the simplest protocol possible.
- BGP is both simple and complex, depending on your perspective
- BGP is sometimes too much, and sometimes too little for data center fabrics
- We are danger of treating every problem as a nail, because we have decided BGP is the ultimate hammer
Will these these contentions stand up to a rigorous challenge?
I will begin with the last contention first—BGP is simpler than any link state protocol. Consider the core protocol semantics of BGP and a link state protocol. In a link state protocol, every network device must have a synchronized copy of the Link State Continue reading
JNCIA-Junos
I recently completed the entry level Juniper certification. I thought it would be a good idea to study for something other than the mighty Cisco, so Juniper’s JNCIA-Junos seemed like a good choice.
It was a very fair exam I can highly recommend.
Next up is AWS Solution Architect Associate. Need to get some cloud skills as thats where everything is going right? 
The Week in Internet News: More Communities Building Their Own Broadband Networks
Build-your-own broadband: Small towns in the United States and the United Kingdom are increasingly bypassing large ISPs and building their own broadband networks, according to two recent stories. Reuters notes that rural communities in the U.K. are building networks to improve speeds and expand coverage, while Wired.com reports that independent broadband networks are proliferating across the United States in small towns, with speeds often exceeding a gigabit per second.
Where the IT jobs are: If you understand blockchain or Artificial Intelligence, job recruiters are looking for you. SHRM.org, the website for the Society of Human Resource Management, notes there’s been a 500 percent increase in blockchain-related job postings on Stack Overflow in the past year. Meanwhile, the Economic Times of India reports that AI experts are getting job offers that include major salary increases.
Power grid and IoT security don’t mix: Princeton researchers have suggested that insecure IoT devices could be used against the power grid, potentially leading to local power outages or even widescale blackouts, SecurityBoulevard.com reports. During a recent conference, the researchers demonstrated how an IoT botnet of Internet-connected high wattage devices could give attackers the ability to launch large-scale attacks on the Continue reading
Do We Need Leaf-and-Spine Fabrics?
Evil CCIE left a lengthy comment on one of my blog posts including this interesting observation:
It's always interesting to hear all kind of reasons from people to deploy CLOS fabrics in DC in Enterprise segment typically that I deal with while they mostly don't have clue about why they should be doing it in first place. […] Usually a good justification is DC to support high amount of East-West Traffic....but really? […] Ask them if they even have any benchmarks or tools to measure that in first place :)
What he wrote proves that most networking practitioners never move beyond regurgitating vendor marketing (because that’s so much easier than making the first step toward becoming an engineer by figuring out how technology really works).
Read more ...Fear the reaper: characterization and fast detection of card skimmers
Fear the reaper: characterization and fast detection of card skimmers Scaife et al., USENIX Security 2018
Until I can get my hands on a Skim Reaper I’m not sure I’ll ever trust an ATM or other exposed card reading device (e.g., at garages) again!
Scaife et al. conduct a study of skimming devices found by the NYPD Financial Crimes Task Force over a 16 month period. The bad news is that you and I don’t really have much chance of detecting a deployed card skimming device (most of the folk wisdom about how to do so doesn’t really work). The good news is that the Skim Reaper detection device developed in this research project was able to effectively detect 100% of the devices supplied by the NYPD. That’s great if you happen to have a Skim Reaper handy to test with before using an ATM. The NYPD are now actively using a set of such devices in the field.
Card skimmers and why they’re so hard for end-users to detect
Almost as well-know as (credit and debit) cards themselves is the ease with which fraud can be committed against them. Attackers often acquire card data using skimmers Continue reading