Ansible Tower 3.3 Available Now

We're happy to announce that Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.3 is now generally available. In this release, there are a number of enhancements that can help improve the automation in any organization. The team has been hard at work adding functionality with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, more granular permissions, scheduler improvements, support for multiple Ansible environments, and many other features.

Here are a few we are excited about!

Ansible Tower + OpenShift Container Platform

Push-button Ansible Tower deployment for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform users is now here! Ansible Tower 3.3 is now a supported offering on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. The new Ansible Tower pod service in Red Hat OpenShift makes it easy to add capacity to Ansible Tower by adding additional pods. This enables users to scale at runtime as needed. Best of all, Ansible Tower is configurable directly from Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

• Scale Ansible Tower up and down at runtime as needed
• Add capacity to Ansible Tower by adding additional pods

All configurable directly from the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform UI, CLI, and API.

More Granular Control

Ansible Tower now allows for even easier configuration of jobs for use Continue reading

Is QoS Becoming Irrelevant?

Alternatives to Nmap: from simple to advanced network scanning

This month marks the 20th anniversary of Nmap, the open-source network mapping tool that became the standard used by many IT professionals, but that can be a bit much if you only need to do general network maintenance and are intimidated by its command-line interface.There are alternatives – not many – that range in technical sophistication from tools with GUIs that can ease you into performing the essentials of network maintenance to more advanced software that is similar to Nmap itself.[ Also see reviews of Icinga, Observium, Nagios and Zabbix network-monitoring software.] Like Nmap, all these network tools are free.To read this article in full, please click here

Zabbix delivers effective, no-frills network monitoring

We took a look at open-source Zabbix network monitoring software version 3.4.9 and found it to be a solid, straightforward offering that’s easy to install, provides the configurability and granularity that enterprises demand, and delivers fast discovery.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Zabbix delivers effective, no-frills network monitoring

We took a look at open-source Zabbix network monitoring software version 3.4.9 and found it to be a solid, straightforward offering that’s easy to install, provides the configurability and granularity that enterprises demand, and delivers fast discovery.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Alternatives to Nmap: from simple to advanced network scanning

This month marks the 20th anniversary of Nmap, the open-source network mapping tool that became the standard used by many IT professionals, but that can be a bit much if you only need to do general network maintenance and are intimidated by its command-line interface.There are alternatives – not many – that range in technical sophistication from tools with GUIs that can ease you into performing the essentials of network maintenance to more advanced software that is similar to Nmap itself.[ Also see reviews of Icinga, Observium, Nagios and Zabbix network-monitoring software.] Like Nmap, all these network tools are free.To read this article in full, please click here

Adjusting System State with Infrastructure as Code

This is the second blog post in “thinking out loud while preparing Network Infrastructure as Code presentation for the network automation course” series. If you stumbled upon it, you might want to start here.

An anonymous commenter to my previous blog post on the topic hit the crux of the infrastructure-as-code challenge when he wrote: “It's hard to do a declarative approach with Ansible and the nice network vendor APIs.” Let’s see what he was trying to tell us.

QSYM: a practical concolic execution engine tailored for hybrid fuzzing

QSYM: a practical concolic execution engine tailored for hybrid fuzzing Yun et al., USENIX Security 2018

There are two main approaches to automated test case generated for uncovering bugs and vulnerabilities: fuzzing and concolic execution. Fuzzing is good at quickly exploring the input space, but can get stuck when trying to get past more complex conditional causes (i.e., when randomly generated inputs are unlikely to satisfy them). Concolic execution, which we saw in action earlier in the week, uses symbolic execution to uncover constraints and pass them to a solver. It can handle complex branch conditions, but it’s much slower. Hybrid fuzzers combine both coverage-guided fuzzing and concolic execution, bringing in the big guns (concolic) when the fuzzer gets stuck. In non-trivial real-world applications though, even the hybrid approach has been too slow. Until now.

For me, the attention grabbing paragraph in this paper is to be found on page 8 (752) in section 5.1. Google’s OSS-Fuzz was previously used to test a number of important real-world applications and libraries including libjpeg, libpng, libtiff, lepton, openjpge, tcpdump, file, libarchive, audiofile, ffmpeg, and binutils.

It is worth noting that Google’s OSS-Fuzz generated 10 trillion test inputs Continue reading

Open Source Eases AT&T’s Technical Burden

“If you asked me five years ago if I would be talking about open source I would have said you were crazy,” said Amy Wheelus, VP of Network Cloud at AT&T.

First Wave of Spiking Neural Network Hardware Hits

Over the last several years we have seen many new hardware architectures emerge for deep learning training but this year, inference will have its turn in the spotlight. …

First Wave of Spiking Neural Network Hardware Hits was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .

Verizon to Launch Pre-Standard 5G in Four Markets on October 1st

When it launches, the operator will be the first service provider globally to commercially launch 5G. However, it is using its own proprietary pre-standard 5G gear.

ONAP Casablanca Pushes Toward November Release

The third release has a more equitable feature set provided by AT&T, the other founding carrier members, and more recent additions.

IDG Contributor Network: Are you seeing what I’m seeing?

Enterprises are investing in their networks at an accelerating rate. As legacy IT on-premises infrastructure gives way to hybrid cloud and virtualized environments, and an escalating data tsunami drives data center expansions, increasing investments of time and money are raising the stakes ever higher. Unfortunately, end users’ expectations for service are growing as well, piling additional demands onto network operators and engineers who are already wrestling with network migration challenges.Yet despite the fact that the enterprise networking environment is rapidly changing, IT support teams are still using the same network performance metrics to monitor their networks and evaluate whether or not service delivery is up to par. The problem is that they’re using a one-dimensional tool to measure a subjective experience that tool was not designed to even understand, much less aid in troubleshooting.  It’s kind of like trying to tighten a screw with a hammer.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Are you seeing what I’m seeing?

Enterprises are investing in their networks at an accelerating rate. As legacy IT on-premises infrastructure gives way to hybrid cloud and virtualized environments, and an escalating data tsunami drives data center expansions, increasing investments of time and money are raising the stakes ever higher. Unfortunately, end users’ expectations for service are growing as well, piling additional demands onto network operators and engineers who are already wrestling with network migration challenges.Yet despite the fact that the enterprise networking environment is rapidly changing, IT support teams are still using the same network performance metrics to monitor their networks and evaluate whether or not service delivery is up to par. The problem is that they’re using a one-dimensional tool to measure a subjective experience that tool was not designed to even understand, much less aid in troubleshooting.  It’s kind of like trying to tighten a screw with a hammer.To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: DevOps and Blame

The three pillars of DevOps are flow, feedback, and continuous improvement. How can an organization or a team improve if its members are focused on finding someone to blame? For a DevOps culture to succeed, blame must be eliminated. —Dawn Parzych @opensource.com

Vapor IO secures new funding for major U.S. rollout

Vapor IO, the edge computing specialist that builds mini data centers for deployment at locations such as cell phone towers, has secured Series C financing, which the company says will help accelerate the deployment of its Kinetic Edge Platform as a national network for edge colocation.Vapor IO has been all about developing a model for a distributed network of edge colocation sites, with micro modular data centers in containers about the size of a shipping container. The company had been working with Crown Castle, the nation’s largest provider of shared wireless infrastructure, on an edge collaboration project under the name Project Volutus.Vapor IO has now acquired the assets of Project Volutus from Crown Castle and will offer it under the brand name The Kinetic Edge. It uses both wired and wireless connections to create a low-latency network of its colocation sites, allowing cloud providers, wireless carriers and web-scale companies to deliver cloud-based edge computing applications via its data centers.To read this article in full, please click here

Vapor IO secures new funding for major U.S. rollout

Vapor IO, the edge computing specialist that builds mini data centers for deployment at locations such as cell phone towers, has secured Series C financing, which the company says will help accelerate the deployment of its Kinetic Edge Platform as a national network for edge colocation.Vapor IO has been all about developing a model for a distributed network of edge colocation sites, with micro modular data centers in containers about the size of a shipping container. The company had been working with Crown Castle, the nation’s largest provider of shared wireless infrastructure, on an edge collaboration project under the name Project Volutus.Vapor IO has now acquired the assets of Project Volutus from Crown Castle and will offer it under the brand name The Kinetic Edge. It uses both wired and wireless connections to create a low-latency network of its colocation sites, allowing cloud providers, wireless carriers and web-scale companies to deliver cloud-based edge computing applications via its data centers.To read this article in full, please click here

AT&T’s Airship Plans Gain Altitude, Seek Maturity

For Airship, the most pressing issue is minimizing the impact on network operations during more frequent update cycles.

Research Brief: Cutting through the SD-WAN Confusion: A Handy Guide for Enterprises

SDxCentral's latest research brief is aimed at providing enterprises contemplating purchasing SD-WAN solutions with a concrete five-step process and a set of core considerations critical to success.

Packet Closes $25M Series B, Builds Edge Network

Thao Nyugen works for Packet as director of hardware platforms. Coming from Facebook, he led the development and deployment of over 1 million Open Compute Project servers in the last eight years.