Automation for Reliability

Statistics says, the more often you do something, the higher the chances of a negative event occurring when you do it.

Applying this revelation, if you fly regularly, the chances increase of a delayed flight, or being involved in an incident or accident. A somewhat macabre reference perhaps.

Let’s take something real which happened to me this week (11th June 2018). Whilst working out of one of Juniper’s regional offices, I returned back to the hotel room to carry on working whilst putting my feet up. Something felt strange in the room but I couldn’t put my finger on the weirdness. After a couple of hours, I realised that all of my belongings were gone from the room. Everything! Thanks to a mix-up with the house keeping system, the maids threw my collection of travel items in to some bags ready for disposal. Thanks to a procedure that the hotel operates, for my items to be thrown to the garbage, a manager is required to sign off on the request. A process saved my belongings and I’m thankful that the managers knew this process and also knew where my stuff was likely to be. Before my items were returned, I Continue reading

Analytics with smart arrays: adaptive and efficient language-independent data

Analytics with smart arrays: adaptive and efficient language-independent data Psaroudakis et al., EuroSys’18

(If you don’t have ACM Digital Library access, the paper can be accessed either by following the link above directly from The Morning Paper blog site).

We’re going lower-level today, with a look at some work on adaptive data structures by Oracle. It’s motivated by a desire to speed up big data analytic workloads that are “increasingly limited by simple bottlenecks within the machine.” The initial focus is on array processing, but the ambition is to extend the work to more data types in time.

Modern servers have multiple interconnected sockets of multi-core processors. Each socket has local memory, accessible via a cache-coherent non-uniform memory access (ccNUMA) architecture. In the NUMA world the following hold true:

  • remote memory accesses are slower than local accesses
  • bandwidth to a socket’s memory and interconnect can be separately saturated
  • the bandwidth of an interconnect is often much lower than a socket’s local memory bandwidth

If we want to crunch through an array as fast as possible in a NUMA world, the optimum way of doing it depends on the details of the machine, and on the application Continue reading

Considerations Regarding Encryption and Exceptional Access Briefing

On June 12, 2018, the Internet Society hosted a briefing for Congressional staff on encryption and lawful access. Considerations Regarding Encryption and Exceptional Access offered an opportunity for participants to learn more about the technical aspects of encryption, risks associated with creating back doors, and other technical means for lawful access.

Before beginning the conversation, participants were given a primer on encryption, which offered high-level explanation of different kinds of encryption and exceptional access, and shown a video on end-to-end encryption, which used colors to explain how encryption keys are exchanged. Encryption experts, including Christine Runnegar (Senior Director, Internet Trust, Internet Society), Robyn Greene (Policy Counsel and Government Affairs Lead, Open Technology Institute), and Maurice Turner (Senior Technologist, Center for Democracy and Technology), then engaged in a two-hour, in-depth conversation with participants, answering questions and discussing global norms and policies.

The panelists emphasized that encryption is currently the most robust security tool in existence, but just as it gets more sophisticated, so too do hackers. Sooner or later this security tool will likely be bypassed and new tools will need to be created. Weakening encryption by creating keys for “backdoor” access that can evade its security measures makes any Continue reading

On the ‘net: Clarifying Disaggregation

Software Defined Networks (SDNs), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), white box, and large-scale fabrics built out of small fixed configuration devices are all trends that seem to be “top of mind” right now in the network engineering world. While these four trends appear to be completely different ideas, they are closely related through a single concept: disaggregation. This article will consider the meaning of disaggregation, and then how this single concept applies to the four previously noted movements. @SearchSDN

Federated Application Management in Docker Enterprise Edition

Today at DockerCon, we demonstrated new application management capabilities for Docker Enterprise Edition that will allow organizations to federate applications across Docker Enterprise Edition environments deployed on-premises and in the cloud as well as across cloud-hosted Kubernetes. This includes Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), AWS Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

A Single Control Plane for Multi-Cloud Deployments

Most enterprise organizations have a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy and the rise of containers has helped to make applications more portable. However, when organizations start to adopt containers as their default application format, they start to run into the challenges of managing multiple container environments, especially when each of them has a different set of access controls, governance policies, content repositories and operational models. For common hybrid and multi-cloud use cases like bursting applications to the cloud for additional capacity or migrating them from one site to another for availability or compliance reasons, organizations start to realize the need for a singular control plane for all containerized applications – no matter where it will be deployed.

Docker Enterprise Edition is the only enterprise-ready container platform that can deliver federated application management with a secure supply chain. Not only Continue reading

Extending Kubernetes to Windows Server with Docker Enterprise Edition

Docker and Microsoft have been working together since 2014 to bring containers to Windows and .NET applications. Today at DockerCon, we share the next step in this partnership with the preview and demonstration of Kubernetes on Windows Server with Docker Enterprise Edition.

Docker and Microsoft Advance Windows Containers

Docker and Microsoft brought container technology into Windows Server 2016, ensuring consistency for the same Docker Compose file and CLI commands across both Linux and Windows. Windows Server ships with a Docker Enterprise Edition engine, meaning all Windows containers today are based on Docker. Recognizing that most enterprise organizations have both Windows and Linux applications in their environment, we followed that up in 2017 with the ability to manage mixed Windows and Linux clusters in the same Docker Enterprise Edition environment, enabling support for hybrid applications and driving higher efficiencies and lower overhead for organizations. Using Swarm orchestration, operations teams could support different application teams with secure isolation between them, while also allowing Windows and Linux containers to communicate over a common overlay network.

Since then, Docker has seen the rapid rise of Windows containers as organizations recognize the benefits of containerization and want to apply them across their entire application Continue reading

Introducing an Easier Way To Design Applications in Docker Desktop

In today’s DockerCon keynote we previewed an upcoming Docker Desktop feature that will make it easier than ever to design your own container-based applications. For a certain set of developers, the current iteration of Docker Desktop has everything one might need to containerize an applications, but it does require an understanding of the Dockerfile and Compose file specifications in order to get started and the Docker CLI to build and run your applications.

But we’ve been thinking about ways to bring this capability to ALL developers. We want to make it easier to get started with containerization, and we want to make it even easier to share and collaborate and integrate container-based development in to more developers’ toolsets. This new guided workflow feature is a preview of what we’re working on and we wanted to share more details on the ideas we’ve incorporated and are thinking about for the future.

The first thing you’ll notice is this is a graphical tool. We’re not breaking anything that’s already working today – everything being created behind the scenes is still Dockerfiles and Compose – we’re just giving you a new way to get from Point A to Point B, because not everyone Continue reading

Red Hat Ansible Tower wins SIIA CODiE Award

Codie-Award

We are excited to share that Red Hat Ansible Tower was awarded a 2018 Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) CODiE Award in the Best DevOps Tool category. The award recognizes the best tools for supporting collaboration between developers and operations. Additionally, we proud to share that Ansible Tower was honored with the Best Overall Business Technology Solution award. This award represents the product with the highest scores of both rounds of judging across all 52 business technology categories.

The SIIA CODiE Awards are the industry's only peer-recognized awards program. Business technology leaders including senior executives, analysts, media, consultants and investors evaluate assigned products during the first-round review which determines the finalists. SIIA members then vote on the finalist products and the scores from both rounds are tabulated to select the winners. Finalists represent the best products, technologies, and services in software, information and business technology.

We would like to thank the Ansible community for their continued support, contributions and excitement for the solution. The community is at the heart of all Ansible products and these awards were made possible because of our tireless community that collaborates everyday to help more people experience the power of automation.

Congratulations to the Continue reading

Rackspace introduces data center colocation services

The effort around data center reduction has been to draw down everything, from hardware to facilities. Rackspace has an interesting new twist, though: Put your hardware in our data centers.The company announced a new data center colocation business this week, offering space, power, and network connectivity to customers who provide their own hardware. The facilities are in 10 locations around the world.It’s not a bad idea. The servers are the cheapest expense compared to facility costs, such as the physical building, power, and cooling.[ Learn how server disaggregation can boost data center efficiency and how Windows Server 2019 embraces hyperconverged data centers. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] 'Lift and shift' to the cloud The new business, dubbed Rackspace Colocation, is positioned as a way for enterprises to kick off their cloud journey by getting out of their self-managed data center to lower their expenses as they move to the cloud.To read this article in full, please click here

Rackspace introduces data center colocation services

The effort around data center reduction has been to draw down everything, from hardware to facilities. Rackspace has an interesting new twist, though: Put your hardware in our data centers.The company announced a new data center colocation business this week, offering space, power, and network connectivity to customers who provide their own hardware. The facilities are in 10 locations around the world.It’s not a bad idea. The servers are the cheapest expense compared to facility costs, such as the physical building, power, and cooling.[ Learn how server disaggregation can boost data center efficiency and how Windows Server 2019 embraces hyperconverged data centers. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] 'Lift and shift' to the cloud The new business, dubbed Rackspace Colocation, is positioned as a way for enterprises to kick off their cloud journey by getting out of their self-managed data center to lower their expenses as they move to the cloud.To read this article in full, please click here

Introducing the Internet Intelligence Map

Today, we are proud to announce a new website we’re calling the Internet Intelligence Map. This free site will help to democratize Internet analysis by exposing some of our internal capabilities to the general public in a single tool.

For over a decade, the members of Oracle’s Internet Intelligence team (first born as Renesys, more recently as Dyn Research, and now reborn with David Belson, former author of Akamai’s State of the Internet report) have helped to break some of the biggest stories about the Internet.  From the Internet shutdowns of the Arab Spring to the impacts of the latest submarine cable cut, our continuing mission is to help inform the public by reporting on the technical underpinnings of the Internet and its intersection with, and impact on, geopolitics and e-Commerce.

And since major Internet outages (whether intentional or accidental) will be with us for the foreseeable future, we believe offering a self-serve capability for some of the insights we produce is a great way to move towards a healthier and more accountable Internet.

The website has two sections: Country Statistics and Traffic Shifts.  The Country Statistics section reports any potential Internet disruptions Continue reading

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