ISP Design – Building production MPLS networks with IP Infusion’s OcNOS.

Moving away from incumbent network vendors

One of the challenges service providers have faced in the last decade is lowering the cost per port or per MB while maintaining the same level of availability and service level.

And then add to that the constant pressure from subscribers to increase capacity and meet the rising demand for realtime content.

This can be an especially daunting task when routers with the feature sets ISPs need cost an absolute fortune – especially as new port speeds are released.

Whitebox, also called disaggregated networking, has started changing the rules of the game. ISPs are working to figure out how to integrate and move to production on disaggregated models to lower the cost of investing in higher speeds and feeds.

Whitebox often faces the perception problem of being more difficult to implement than traditional vendors – which is exactly why I wanted to highlight some of the work we’ve been doing at iparchitechs.com integrating whitebox into production ISP networks using IP Infusion’s OcNOS.

Things are really starting to heat up in the disaggregagted network space after the announcement by Amazon a few days ago that it intends to build and sell whitebox Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Network visibility and assurance for GDPR compliance

The EU General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, came into force on May 25. With every organization with customers and suppliers in the European Union now accountable for the way in which they handle or process personal data, much work has been done to ensure compliance by the deadline. As a result, all levels of a business are now concentrated on meeting the requirements of the new regulation, throwing the issue of data protection into focus like never before.When you consider how big and complex IT networks have become in recent times, however, it has become almost impossible to detect just when and how a security breach or network failure might occur. Unsurprisingly, network security and information assurance are crucial to GDPR compliance, with the regulation stating that measures must be put in place to mitigate the risk associated with assuring information integrity and availability in the face of threats such as malicious code or distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Network visibility and assurance for GDPR compliance

The EU General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, came into force on May 25. With every organization with customers and suppliers in the European Union now accountable for the way in which they handle or process personal data, much work has been done to ensure compliance by the deadline. As a result, all levels of a business are now concentrated on meeting the requirements of the new regulation, throwing the issue of data protection into focus like never before.When you consider how big and complex IT networks have become in recent times, however, it has become almost impossible to detect just when and how a security breach or network failure might occur. Unsurprisingly, network security and information assurance are crucial to GDPR compliance, with the regulation stating that measures must be put in place to mitigate the risk associated with assuring information integrity and availability in the face of threats such as malicious code or distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.To read this article in full, please click here

AWS Adds EC2 Compute Processing to Its Snowball Edge Device

By using Amazon compute EC2 instances on their Snowball Edge devices, customers can enable those devices to function as a mobile data center.

Corelight and Databricks Combine Forces for Threat Detection, Remediation, and Analytics

Both Corelight and Databricks are based on open source technologies — Corelight on Bro and Databricks on Apache Spark. While the open source technologies have been combined, this is the first time the companies' commercial versions of software will integrate.

Thoughts on Impostor Syndrome

How many times, on reading my blog, a book, or watching some video of mine over these many years (the first article I remember writing that was publicly available, many years ago, was the EIGRP white paper on Cisco Online, somewhere in 1997), have you thought—here is an engineer who has it all together, who knows technology in depth and breadth, and who symbolizes everything I think an engineer should be? And yet, how many times have you faced that feeling of self-doubt we call impostor synddome?

I am going to let you in on a little secret. I’m an impostor, too. After all these years, I still feel like I am going to be speaking in front of a crowd, explaining something at a meeting, I am going to hit publish on something, and the entire world is going to “see through the charade,” and realize I’m not all that good of an engineer. That I am an ordinary person, just doing ordinary things.

While I often think about these things, what has led me down the path of thinking about them this week is some reading I’ve been doing for a PhD seminar about human nature, work Continue reading

Orange Plucks Basefarm Cloud Biz for $410 Million

The deal will add data management, big data, and multi-cloud support to Orange Business Services. It also expands its footprint across Europe.

IDG Contributor Network: 6 sneaky ways cloud infrastructure providers lock you in

With more enterprises adopting multi-cloud and hybrid cloud computing strategies, it's more important than ever to avoid getting locked into just one cloud provider's tools and technologies. Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments offer many benefits. They include the ability to pick and choose which cloud vendor's add-on services are right for your business, as well as the ability to implement best-of-breed solutions when the time is right. Multi-cloud also adds redundancy and security because all of your proverbial eggs are not in one basket.Despite the trend toward multi-cloud, however, there are still plenty of ways to find yourself locked in. Here's a quick look at six common ways enterprises get locked into using one provider, along with some advice on how businesses can keep cloud implementations open and interoperable. To read this article in full, please click here

When Does Kubernetes Become Invisible And Ubiquitous?

The sign of a mature technology is not just how pervasive it is, but in how invisible and easy to use it is. …

When Does Kubernetes Become Invisible And Ubiquitous? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Happy Amazon Crash Day

On one of the biggest shopping days of the year for Amazon.com the company’s web site crapped out intermittently for hours yesterday.Instead of Prime Day purchases, many customers just got error messages and pictures of the dogs of Amazon, along with a message from Amazon that read: "Sorry, we're experiencing unusually heavy traffic. Please try again in a few seconds. Your items are still waiting in your cart," or “"Uh-Oh. Something went wrong on our end." [ Related: How to plan a software-defined data-center network.] Prime Day started at 3PM ET and the problems emerged almost immediately after.  Around 5 p.m., Amazon tweeted acknowledgement of the problem stating: “Some customers are having difficulty shopping and we are working to resolve this issue quickly.  Many are shopping successfully – in the first hour of Prime day in the US, customers have ordered more items compared to the first hour last year.”To read this article in full, please click here

Happy Amazon Crash Day

On one of the biggest shopping days of the year for Amazon.com the company’s web site crapped out intermittently for hours yesterday.Instead of Prime Day purchases, many customers just got error messages and pictures of the dogs of Amazon, along with a message from Amazon that read: "Sorry, we're experiencing unusually heavy traffic. Please try again in a few seconds. Your items are still waiting in your cart," or “"Uh-Oh. Something went wrong on our end." [ Related: How to plan a software-defined data-center network.] Prime Day started at 3PM ET and the problems emerged almost immediately after.  Around 5 p.m., Amazon tweeted acknowledgement of the problem stating: “Some customers are having difficulty shopping and we are working to resolve this issue quickly.  Many are shopping successfully – in the first hour of Prime day in the US, customers have ordered more items compared to the first hour last year.”To read this article in full, please click here

Google Building Trans-Atlantic Subsea Cable

BrandPost: How Cloud Migration Impacts Network Infrastructure

The Cloud ImperativeEnterprise IT is increasingly a multi-cloud affair. With Gartner projecting that 85 percent of enterprises are currently using a multi-cloud strategy, it seems difficult to find an enterprise that doesn’t. IT leaders are like conductors – orchestrating SaaS, PaaS, and on-premises code and data in increasingly virtualized, software-defined environment. With the cloud taking center stage, what impacts does migration of workloads have on infrastructure overall?Migration Challenges for InfrastructureAs IT strives to be more responsive to both lines of business and development teams seeking to spin up new instances and environments, workloads often need to move – and rapidly. But workload mobility has a downside, namely an increasing demand on the shared services on- and off-premises.To read this article in full, please click here

The Rise of Lifecycle Service Orchestration

This SDxCentral eBook looks at how LSO is evolving and why it will play an important part in the management and control of network services across different network domains.

Worth Reading: Source Address Dependent Routing

Having multiple connections to the Internet, or being multihomed, is often a must to avoid a single point of failure. But, it is not as simple as getting two connections to the Internet — most Internet Service Providers (ISP) apply anti-spoofing so all packets sent on one ISP uplink must use a source address from this ISP. —Eric Vyncke @APNIC

The Pursuit of Inspired Leadership

At Arista Networks, great technology and leadership inspires us to innovate and continue our mission to reinvent. It’s an ongoing journey to create the right leaders and disruptive technology for market transitions and Arista’s evolution. Today I digress a bit, as I was reading a 2017 Harvard Business Review article on the four key traits identified for successful CEOs. So much of it resonated with me with respect to the Arista way and our company culture. Let’s review how these traits apply to a fast-paced technology company like Arista.

The Pursuit of Inspired Leadership

At Arista Networks, great technology and leadership inspires us to innovate and continue our mission to reinvent. It’s an ongoing journey to create the right leaders and disruptive technology for market transitions and Arista’s evolution. Today I digress a bit, as I was reading a 2017 Harvard Business Review article on the four key traits identified for successful CEOs. So much of it resonated with me with respect to the Arista way and our company culture. Let’s review how these traits apply to a fast-paced technology company like Arista.

Dynamic Kubernetes Client for Ansible

tl;dr

We condensed the Python Kubernetes/OpenShift client from 400,000 lines of code to 500, while adding features and closing nearly all known bugs. The new Kubernetes modules shipping in Ansible 2.6 support all resources the Kubernetes server supports, and fix nearly all the bugs that were in the 2.5 k8s_raw and openshift_raw modules. If you want to control your Kubernetes infrastructure with Ansible, now is a very good time to give it a try.

Previous Approaches

For anyone who has not followed the process of adding Kubernetes support to Ansible, this is actually our third attempt. With this iteration, we have finally worked out a lot of the kinks that made the modules difficult to use. Here’s a brief synopsis of the history of the project:

Generated client, generated modules

Our first iteration was backed by a generated OpenShift Python client, based on the existing Kubernetes Python client. This Python client ingested the OpenAPI spec for the OpenShift/Kubernetes API and generated one or more modules per resource type. Due to the size of the API, this resulted in ~400,000 lines of generated code.

The Ansible Kubernetes modules were in turn generated from the generated client, so for Continue reading

Insider Threat Management Startup ObserveIT Closes $33M Series B

One-quarter of all security incidents involve insiders, according to Verizon’s annual Data Breach Investigations Report.

Innovative Approaches to Connecting Indigenous Communities

In November 2017, the Internet Society hosted its first Indigenous Connectivity Summit in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This event brought together over 200 Indigenous community members to talk about Internet access solutions, and the importance of connectivity for socioeconomic, health, community empowerment, education, and cultural and language preservation.

It was an incredible two days that resulted in new, meaningful relationships, partnerships, and opportunities for all those present. But the work isn’t done yet.

Connectivity in Indigenous communities continues to lag far behind non-Indigenous areas. Low speeds or non-existent service, high costs, and data caps plague many communities. In some Arctic communities in Canada, it is often cheaper and faster to mail a USB drive south, upload data, and mail it back North than it is to download the content on the slow and expensive services available.

To continue the conversation that was started in Santa Fe, the Internet Society will hold the second Indigenous Connectivity Summit in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, Canada on October 11-12. This event will bring together Indigenous community leaders, technical experts, researchers, policy makers, and service providers to address the unique connectivity issues Alaska Native, American Indian, Inuit, First Nation, and Métis communities face and how they Continue reading