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Using Ansible and Ansible Tower with shared roles

Roles are an essential part of Ansible, and help in structuring your automation content. The idea is to have clearly defined roles for dedicated tasks. During your automation code, the roles will be called by the Ansible Playbooks.

Since roles usually have a well defined purpose, they make it easy to reuse your code for yourself, but also in your team. And you can even share roles with the global community. In fact, the Ansible community created Ansible Galaxy as a central place to display, search and view Ansible roles from thousands of people.

So what does a role look like? Basically it is a predefined structure of folders and files to hold your automation code. There is a folder for your templates, a folder to keep files with tasks, one for handlers, another one for your default variables, and so on:

tasks/ 
handlers/ 
files/ 
templates/ 
vars/ 
defaults/ 
meta/

In folders which contain Ansible code - like tasks, handlers, vars, defaults - there are main.yml files. Those contain the relevant Ansible bits. In case of the tasks directory, they often include other yaml files within the same directory. Roles even provide ways to test your automation code - in Continue reading

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EQUALS in Tech Awards: Recognizing Women’s Empowerment Initiatives

Celebrating the work of women who are making a difference in their communities by using the Internet is something that at the Internet Society we care about. Women are building businesses, learning new professions, sharing, and collaborating online. Women are creating new opportunities for themselves and their families by taking advantage of what the Internet has to offer.

And it’s important to continue recognizing the work of these women.

EQUALS in Tech Awards is an opportunity to do so. By providing a platform for outstanding initiatives, the awards are a key piece in increasing the visibility of projects that use the power of technology to empower women and girls all across the globe.

This year’s EQUALS in Tech Awards is looking for initiatives from all stakeholders that improve women’s access to technology, promote female leadership in the tech sector, and build relevant digital skills for women and girls. Research that produces reliable evidence to tackle the digital gender divide will be also recognized.

The awards are organized annually by the EQUALS Global Partnership, an multistakeholder initiative which seeks to achieve gender equality in the digital age.

The Internet Society is proud to be vice-chair of this global movement. As such we work side by side with over 60 other organizations, companies Continue reading

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Swim In Data At The Edge, Don’t Drown In It In the Datacenter

Analytics systems have been downing in data for years, and the edge is going to flood it unless the architecture changes. There is so much data that is going to be generated at the edge of the network that it can’t be practically moved back to the datacenter for processing in a timely enough fashion to be useful in a way that the gathering of the information was done in the first place.

That is the premise behind our expanding coverage of edge computing and what is evolving into a distributed, multi-tier data processing complex – you can’t really call …

Swim In Data At The Edge, Don’t Drown In It In the Datacenter was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

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Google’s Partner Interconnect connects SMBs to its data centers

If you are a large-scale enterprise, Google has a service called Dedicated Interconnect that offers 10Gbps connections between your data center and one of theirs. But what if you are a smaller firm and don’t need that kind of bandwidth and the expense that goes with it?Google now has you covered. The cloud giant recently announced Google Cloud Partner Interconnect, a means of establishing a direct connection between a SMB data center, with emphasis on the medium-sized business, and Google's hybrid cloud platform. The company did this in concert with 23 ISP partners around the globe.To read this article in full, please click here

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Google’s Partner Interconnect connects SMBs to its data centers

If you are a large-scale enterprise, Google has a service called Dedicated Interconnect that offers 10Gbps connections between your data center and one of theirs. But what if you are a smaller firm and don’t need that kind of bandwidth and the expense that goes with it?Google now has you covered. The cloud giant recently announced Google Cloud Partner Interconnect, a means of establishing a direct connection between a SMB data center, with emphasis on the medium-sized business, and Google's hybrid cloud platform. The company did this in concert with 23 ISP partners around the globe.To read this article in full, please click here

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Tackling Edge Computing Challenges

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Hyperconvergence breathes new life into desktop virtualization

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is one of those tantalizing technologies that looks great on paper, but hasn’t gained much traction over the years for a variety of financial, technical, cultural, even philosophical reasons.However, a relatively new framework called hyperconvergence, which combines compute, storage and networking in a single data center appliance, could breathe new life into VDI by reducing the cost and complexity associated with a VDI rollout.The argument in favor of VDI, also known as desktop virtualization or thin-client computing, makes perfect sense.To read this article in full, please click here

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Is OSPF Unpredictable or Just Unexpected?

I was listening to very interesting Future of Networking with Fred Baker a long while ago and enjoyed Fred’s perspectives and historical insight, until unfortunately Greg Ferro couldn’t possibly resist the usual bashing of traditional routing protocols and praising of intent-based (or flow-based or SDN or…) whatever.

Here’s what I understood he said around 35:17

Read more ...

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Copenhagen & London developers, join us for five events this May

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Skyway: connecting managed heaps in distributed big data systems

Skyway: connecting managed heaps in distributed big data systems Nguyen et al., ASPLOS’18

Yesterday we saw how to make Java objects persistent using NVM-backed heaps with Espresso. One of the drawbacks of using that as a persistence mechanism is that they’re only stored in the memory of a single node. If only there was some way to create a cluster of JVMs, and efficiently copy objects across remote heaps in the cluster… Meet Skyway!

Skyway is aimed at JVM-based big data systems (think Spark, Flink) that end up spending a lot of their time serializing and deserializing objects to move them around the cluster (e.g., to and from workers – see ‘Making sense of performance in data analytics frameworks’). Java comes with a default serialization mechanism, and there are also many third party libraries. Kyro is the recommended library for use with Spark.

Consider a small Spark cluster (3 worker nodes each with a 20 GB heap) running a triangle counting algorithm over the LiveJournal graph (about 1.2GB). With both the standard Java serializers and Kyro, serialization and deserialization combined account for a significant portion of the overall execution time (more than 30%).

Where Continue reading

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Juniper Preaches Multicloud To Win Contrail Converts In The Enterprise

Juniper has enhanced Contrail Enterprise Multicloud to provide a single policy and management platform to handle networking for workloads in private and public clouds.

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How to Make Money in SDN

Automation and virtualization reduce costs and time to market for new services. And software allows companies to moving to an “everything-as-a-service” business model.

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U.S. Justice Department Investigates Huawei

The bad news just won't stop for Huawei. This latest investigation seems similar to the case against ZTE because it involves selling equipment to Iran.

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ADVA Trials Use ONAP, ONOS to Control Optical Network Assets

ADVA is not part of ONAP, but wants to support carriers like Verizon that are committed to the platform.

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We’ve Added a New AWS Big Data Course to Our Video Library!

Cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) are leading the way to cloud adoption across all industries, changing the way organizations interact with their data. Board rooms already know they need to move to the cloud so it’s important to understand the how’s and the why’s of your cloud journey. AWS has built and made available powerful tools and services to support the most demanding big data workloads. You no longer need to be a data scientist to take advantage of complex data analytics tools, as AWS has made these tools within reach both from a technical and cost perspective to the masses.

Why You Should Watch:

If you’d like to learn how to minimize the complexity of big data pipelines, this course is for you.
Growing your skills in big data and analytics positions you to help fill the massive skills gap that exist for this high wage in-demand job sector.

What You’ll Learn:

The AWS Certified Big Data Specialty course is designed to give students a solid foundation of AWS Services related to a big data pipeline. The hands-on exercises in this course demonstrates the speed of innovation that can be gained using the AWS Cloud services. Continue reading

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Recruiting The Puppet Masters Of Infrastructure

All kinds of convergence is going on in infrastructure these days, with the mashing up of servers and storage or servers and networking, or sometimes all three at once. This convergence is not just occurring at the system hardware or basic system software level. It is also happening up and down the software stack, with a lot of codebases branching out from various starting points and building platforms of one kind or another.

Some platforms stay down at the server hardware level – think of the Cisco Systems UCS blade server, which mashes up servers and networking – while others …

Recruiting The Puppet Masters Of Infrastructure was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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No, Ray Ozzie hasn’t solved crypto backdoors

According to this Wired article, Ray Ozzie may have a solution to the crypto backdoor problem. No, he hasn't. He's only solving the part we already know how to solve. He's deliberately ignoring the stuff we don't know how to solve. We know how to make backdoors, we just don't know how to secure them.


The vault doesn't scale

Yes, Apple has a vault where they've successfully protected important keys. No, it doesn't mean this vault scales. The more people and the more often you have to touch the vault, the less secure it becomes. We are talking thousands of requests per day from 100,000 different law enforcement agencies around the world. We are unlikely to protect this against incompetence and mistakes. We are definitely unable to secure this against deliberate attack.

A good analogy to Ozzie's solution is LetsEncrypt for getting SSL certificates for your website, which is fairly scalable, using a private key locked in a vault for signing hundreds of thousands of certificates. That this scales seems to validate Ozzie's proposal.

But at the same time, LetsEncrypt is easily subverted. LetsEncrypt uses DNS to verify your identity. But spoofing DNS is easy, as was recently shown in Continue reading

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Ericsson: 70% of Service Providers Will Focus on Cellular IoT

The service providers interviewed believe that cellular IoT technologies, such as Cat-M1 and NB-IoT, will be “game changers.”

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Juniper Unveils Contrail Software to Compete With Cisco, VMware

Contrail Enterprise Multi-Cloud focuses on the data center as part of Juniper's overall strategy to help enterprises deal with multiple clouds.

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Nokia Puts a Physical Box at the Edge to Support Cloud, 5G

The box runs a real-time OPNFV-compatible, OpenStack-distribution built to run in small data centers or at base station locations.