Dismantling Cisco’s Conservation of Complexity Gambit

From the very beginning, Cisco Systems tightly embraced the use of complexity as a market differentiator. Creating a complicated CLI to configure networking gear instead of a relatively simple GUI – Wellfleet’s choice — was an early move down this path.   The next cab off this particular rank was the creation of the CCIE (Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert) program in the early 1990’s, which, in full disclosure, I had a hand in developing back in the day.  This program was explicitly designed to be as difficult and complicated as possible – mirroring the products themselves – so that a CCIE “diploma” on a cubicle wall would be considered a badge of honor and give bragging rights to its owner.  And, with something like 3-1/2-million CCIEs out there today, this particular bit of planned complexity was clearly a winner.

The inherent irony in all of this is that ante-Cisco life in networking was quite a simple place, really. (Show of hands anyone who remembers the two top bridging vendors, Halley Systems and Vitalink?)  But, at the end of the day, networks had to grow so that businesses and, eventually, the Internet, could run on them, and bridging technology simply Continue reading

Dismantling Cisco’s Conservation of Complexity Gambit

From the very beginning, Cisco Systems tightly embraced the use of complexity as a market differentiator. Creating a complicated CLI to configure networking gear instead of a relatively simple GUI – Wellfleet’s choice — was an early move down this path.   The next cab off this particular rank was the creation of the CCIE (Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert) program in the early 1990’s, which, in full disclosure, I had a hand in developing back in the day.  This program was explicitly designed to be as difficult and complicated as possible – mirroring the products themselves – so that a CCIE “diploma” on a cubicle wall would be considered a badge of honor and give bragging rights to its owner.  And, with something like 3-1/2-million CCIEs out there today, this particular bit of planned complexity was clearly a winner.

The inherent irony in all of this is that ante-Cisco life in networking was quite a simple place, really. (Show of hands anyone who remembers the two top bridging vendors, Halley Systems and Vitalink?)  But, at the end of the day, networks had to grow so that businesses and, eventually, the Internet, could run on them, and bridging technology simply Continue reading

You get TLS 1.3! You get TLS 1.3! Everyone gets TLS 1.3!

You get TLS 1.3! You get TLS 1.3! Everyone gets TLS 1.3!

It's no secret that Cloudflare has been a big proponent of TLS 1.3, the newest edition of the TLS protocol that improves both speed and security, since we have made it available to our customers starting in 2016. However, for the longest time TLS 1.3 has been a work-in-progress which meant that the feature was disabled by default in our customers’ dashboards, at least until all the kinks in the protocol could be resolved.

With the specification finally nearing its official publication, and after several years of work (as well as 28 draft versions), we are happy to announce that the TLS 1.3 feature on Cloudflare is out of beta and will be enabled by default for all new zones.

You get TLS 1.3! You get TLS 1.3! Everyone gets TLS 1.3!

For our Free and Pro customers not much changes, they already had TLS 1.3 enabled by default from the start. We have also decided to disable the 0-RTT feature by default for these plans (it was previously enabled by default as well), due to its inherent security properties. It will still be possible to explicitly enable it from the dashboard or the API (more on 0-RTT soon-ish in another blog post).

Our Business and Continue reading

Culture Shifts and Work Travel Learnings

I’ve seen a few Twitter threads recently about learning to live with the sudden plenty of working for tech companies. If you didn’t grow up that way, the adjustment takes time. It made me think about a few things I’ve learnt about corporate travel, and mistakes I’ve made along the way. People who grew in the corporate world instinctively know stuff I had to learn. Here’s some of the mistakes, and learnings:

Sudden Change of Scene

There’s been a few threads recently on Twitter related to the concept of “growing up poor, and learning how to adapt to working in well-paid industries.”

Here’s an example thread:

Read the thread - there’s some gems in there. Stuff like these hit home for me:

The Piikani Cultural and Digital Literacy Camp Program

The Piikani Nation in Southern Alberta, concerned they were in danger of losing their Blackfoot culture and traditions, sought out an innovative way to share it with younger generations. Elders and school officials in Piikani focused on how they could use technology to engage youth and preserve their knowledge and history. As a result, the Piikani First Nation, University of Alberta, First Nations Technical Service Advisory Group, and Piikani Board of Education created a youth-based project, the Piikani Cultural and Digital Literacy Camp Program, that combines digital technology and cultural and language studies for grade 9 students.

From the beginning, Piikani Elder Herman Many Guns and University of Alberta Assistant Professor Dr. Rob McMahon knew it was crucial to combine traditional Blackfoot and digital teaching styles in the program. To accomplish this, Herman reached out to community ceremonial Elders with transferred rights who could ensure the project followed traditional protocol. The partners decided to host a summer camp that would teach students about their culture, as well as gain digital skills, such as video production, editing, and data stewardship. Students apply these new digital skills to the preservation of the ancestral knowledge shared by the Elders at an outdoor Continue reading

Episode 27 – State Of The Podcast

In this episode we’re changing things up a bit. Eyvonne, Russ, and Jordan come together to chat a bit about the past year and share some exciting news about where we are heading as a podcast. Thank you for making Network Collective possible and we’re looking forward to producing even more great content over the coming year.

Jordan Martin
Host
Eyvonne Sharp
Host
Russ White
Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post Episode 27 – State Of The Podcast appeared first on Network Collective.

Datanauts 134: Preventing Failures With AI And HPE InfoSight (Sponsored)

The Datanauts travel to a galaxy of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The good ship InfoSight is piloted by sponsor HPE Nimble Storage as we explore automating infrastructure on today s episode.

Our guest is Ryan Brown, Enterprise Storage Architect and Chief Technologist for Storage in Canada at HPE.

We talk about InfoSight, HPE’s cloud-based predictive analytics platform that works with HPE’s Nimble Storage arrays, and soon to work with other products from HPE. InfoSight applies machine learning and AI to help customers better manage storage resources and predict problems before they affect the business.

We look at the kind of information that InfoSight gathers, how it collects that information and ships it to the cloud, and how it’s protected.

We also delve into the value that InfoSight can provide for resource allocation and operational benefits such as preventing outages, maintaining uptime, and improving performance.

Show Links:

HPE InfoSight

HPE InfoSight at Tech Field Day

The post Datanauts 134: Preventing Failures With AI And HPE InfoSight (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Easy Integration Using Ansible Tower and Red Hat Insights

Welcome to another entry in the Getting Started Series! In our previous post, we covered how to get started with Ansible and Windows.

In this post we’re going to discuss how you can launch automatically generated playbooks to correct compliance, security and patching issues found in your inventory by Red Hat Insights. To start off, let’s do a brief overview of the magic sauce that is Insights. 

What is Insights?

Red Hat Insights is a predictive IT risk analytics tool that helps enable users to proactively identify, prioritize, and resolve vulnerabilities in their environments before business operations are affected. It does this by evaluating select files on a system, getting smarter and better at predicting outcomes with each piece of information it takes in.

Insights conducts an in-depth analysis of customers’ IT infrastructure and compares this information against Red Hat’s constantly expanding knowledge base to identify key risks and vulnerabilities. If a susceptibility or risk is found, Insights has the ability to generate a playbook for most critical problems detected, which can then be used in Ansible Tower to resolve any issues.

Ansible and Insights?

So if Insights makes Ansible Playbooks...how do you use them in Ansible Tower? Continue reading

How Cisco’s Multigigabit Technology can increase network speeds

If you remember, in a previous Switch IT Up blog post I referenced Wireless AC and Wave 2 — some of the things that we could expect and some of the problems we could run up against. Things like having enough bandwidth to our APs to support a 6.8 gig connection.So, what can be done about that?Well, in 2015, Cisco introduced its Catalyst Multigigabit Technology, along with a new group of products, that address that issue and allow users to get more than just that 1 gig speed that most people have in their closets or in their infrastructure. How can users leverage that and still use their preexisting infrastructure rather than having to rip everything out and replace it?To read this article in full, please click here

How Cisco’s Multigigabit Technology can increase network speeds

If you remember, in a previous Switch IT Up blog post I referenced Wireless AC and Wave 2 — some of the things that we could expect and some of the problems we could run up against. Things like having enough bandwidth to our APs to support a 6.8 gig connection.So, what can be done about that?Well, in 2015, Cisco introduced its Catalyst Multigigabit Technology, along with a new group of products, that address that issue and allow users to get more than just that 1 gig speed that most people have in their closets or in their infrastructure. How can users leverage that and still use their preexisting infrastructure rather than having to rip everything out and replace it?To read this article in full, please click here

Together Let’s #SwitchItOn and #KeepItOn! The Internet Society Releases Joint Statement with Access Now

This week the Internet Society is at RightsCon, one of the world’s leading conferences on human rights in the digital age. The event brings together business leaders, policy makers, government representatives, technologists, and human rights defenders from around the world.

We are proud to stand together with Access Now in our belief that a globally connected, secure and trusted Internet is the foundation for exercising our online rights. We are proud to release this joint statement calling for an open Internet that includes everyone.

Please support our call to the nations of the world to #SwitchItOn and #KeepItOn.

Read the statement here

Visit our #SwitchItOn page and find out more about Community Networks.

Image © Nyani Quarmyne: Ucha Seturi (left), Murmani Tcharelidze and a helpful visiting journalist giving raising a tower near Koklata in Tusheti, Georgia, on 23 July 2017.

The post Together Let’s #SwitchItOn and #KeepItOn! The Internet Society Releases Joint Statement with Access Now appeared first on Internet Society.

DockerCon SF 18 and Spousetivities

DockerCon SF 18 is set to kick off in San Francisco at the Moscone Center from June 12 to June 15. This marks the return of DockerCon to San Francisco after being held in other venues for the last couple of years. Also returning to San Francisco is Spousetivities, which has organized activities for spouses, significant others/domestic partners, friends, and family members traveling with conference attendees!

Registration is open right now, so hurry on over and sign up for one or more activities. What’s that—you’re wondering what’s been planned? Here’s a quick overview:

  • The activities kick off on Tuesday, June 12, with a tour of Monterey and Carmel. I must admit I’m a bit jealous; I’d love to have the opportunity to visit Cannery Row and see the canneries that inspired John Steinbeck. Join this tour and you’ll have that opportunity! This is a full-day activity, leaving the InterContinental at 8pm and returning around 7pm that evening. Lunch is included, of course.
  • On Wednesday, June 13, Spousetivities has arranged for private transportation to the Sonoma Valley for some wine tastings! You’ll visit a couple different wineries and get to enjoy lunch in Sonoma. This event will wrap up back Continue reading
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