PQ 144: Engineer Roundtable: Encryption, Code Style, Tech Over 40

Today on the Priority Queue we have a roundtable show. We’ve gathered a few engineers around the microphone to talk about their experiences and what’s on their minds.

We often hear this format is an audience favorite, so we plan to record more of these in the Priority Queue and Weekly channels, so keep an eye out.

Today we welcome Alex Clipper, Eric Gullickson, Matt Elliott, and Stafford Rau to the podcast. We discuss encryption, code styles to ensure that code written by networkers is up to snuff, and what it’s like to work in technology after a certain age.

Sponsor: Paessler AG

Paessler AG is the maker of PRTG Network Monitor. PRTG monitors your entire IT infrastructure 24/7 and alerts you to problems before users notice. Find out more about the monitoring software that helps system administrators work smarter, faster, better by visiting paessler.com today.

Show Links:

Understanding Media Access Control Security (MACsec) – Technical Documentation – Support – Juniper Networks

Thales L2 Encryption – Thales

Senetas – Senetas.com

What Is Optical Encryption? – Ciena

Certes Networks

Google Style Guides – GitHub

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New Approaches to Optimizing Workflow Automation

Workflow automation has been born of necessity and has evolved an increasingly sophisticated set of tools to manage the growing complexity of the automation itself.

The same theme keeps emerging across the broader spectrum of enterprise and research IT. For instance, we spoke recently about the need to profile software and algorithms when billions of events per iteration are generated from modern GPU systems. This is a similar challenge and fortunately, not all traditional or physical business processes fall into this scale bucket. Many are much less data intensive, but can have a such a critical impact in “time to

New Approaches to Optimizing Workflow Automation was written by James Cuff at The Next Platform.

Reclaiming 1.1.1.1 For The Internet

Hopefully by now you’ve seen the announcement that CloudFlare has opened a new DNS service at the address of 1.1.1.1. We covered a bit of it on this week’s episode of the Gestalt IT Rundown. Next to Gmail, it’s probably the best April Fool’s announcement I’ve seen. However, it would seem that the Internet isn’t quite ready for a DNS resolver service that’s easy to remember. And that’s thanks in part to the accumulation of bad address hygiene.

Not So Random Numbers

The address range of 1/8 is owned by APNIC. They’ve had it for many years now but have never announced it publicly. Nor have they ever made any assignments of addresses in that space to clients or customers. In a world where IPv4 space is at a premium, why would a RIR choose to lose 16 million addresses?

As it turns out, 1/8 is a pretty bad address space for two reasons. 1.1.1.1 and 1.2.3.4. These two addresses are responsible for most of the inadvertent announcements in the entire 1/8 space. 1.2.3.4 is easy to figure out. It’s the most common example IP address Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: The serverless cloud provider was last year – what can we expect to change?

Reno-based analyst Synergy Research Group released a review of the 2017 cloud market on January 4th. The report, which estimated the total scope of the industry at $180 billion, gauged the year-over-year growth rate of infrastructure as a service (cloud hosting) and platform as a service (combined cloud hardware and software) at 47%. Such astronomical growth in the infrastructure of cloud is fueling growth of data centers. The extent to which cloud is becoming the new form of infrastructure cannot be overstated, with Cisco predicting 95% of data center traffic will be through cloud infrastructure by 2021.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The serverless cloud provider was last year – what can we expect to change?

Reno-based analyst Synergy Research Group released a review of the 2017 cloud market on January 4th. The report, which estimated the total scope of the industry at $180 billion, gauged the year-over-year growth rate of infrastructure as a service (cloud hosting) and platform as a service (combined cloud hardware and software) at 47%. Such astronomical growth in the infrastructure of cloud is fueling growth of data centers. The extent to which cloud is becoming the new form of infrastructure cannot be overstated, with Cisco predicting 95% of data center traffic will be through cloud infrastructure by 2021.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The serverless cloud provider was last year – what can we expect to change?

Reno-based analyst Synergy Research Group released a review of the 2017 cloud market on January 4th. The report, which estimated the total scope of the industry at $180 billion, gauged the year-over-year growth rate of infrastructure as a service (cloud hosting) and platform as a service (combined cloud hardware and software) at 47%. Such astronomical growth in the infrastructure of cloud is fueling growth of data centers. The extent to which cloud is becoming the new form of infrastructure cannot be overstated, with Cisco predicting 95% of data center traffic will be through cloud infrastructure by 2021.To read this article in full, please click here

Argo Tunnel: A Private Link to the Public Internet

Argo Tunnel: A Private Link to the Public Internet

Argo Tunnel: A Private Link to the Public Internet
Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Today we’re introducing Argo Tunnel, a private connection between your web server and Cloudflare. Tunnel makes it so that only traffic that routes through Cloudflare can reach your server.

You can think of Argo Tunnel as a virtual P.O. box. It lets someone send you packets without knowing your real address. In other words, it’s a private link. Only Cloudflare can see the server and communicate with it, and for the rest of the internet, it’s unroutable, as if the server is not even there.

How this used to be done

This type of private deployment used to be accomplished with GRE tunnels. But GRE tunnels are expensive and slow, they don’t really make sense in a 2018 internet.

GRE is a tunneling protocol for sending data between two servers by simulating a physical link. Configuring a GRE tunnel requires coordination between network administrators from both sides of the connection. It is an expensive service that is usually only available for large corporations with dedicated budgets. The GRE protocol encapsulates packets inside other packets, which means that you will have to either lower the MTU of your origin servers, or have your router do Continue reading

How the Lenca are Restoring the Past to Build their Future

The Internet has the potential to enable Indigenous communities to continue living on remote traditional lands without diminishing their access to services and information. The potential can go a long way towards closing the digital divide and offers new opportunities while preserving Indigenous culture.

In the ongoing debate about what difference the digital makes to the concept of Indigeneity itself, the voices of Indigenous people are what has been missing. It should be left up to community members to be caught up in this age of information and build the future on their own terms.

This is the story of Lenca people of Azacualpa, an Indigenous community of Yamaranguila in Intibucá, Honduras. In June 2017 they decided to start their relationship with technology by creating Radio Azacualpa, a radio station run by women, with the support of Cultural Survival’s Community Media Grants Project. It was a dream come true.

The radio tagline “La voz de las Mujeres” – the voice of women –  says it all. “One of our goals as a radio station is to achieve recognition of our rights as women and to achieve equality,” explains Maria Santos, leader of the Azacualpa community.

In 2018, the Lenca decided Continue reading

AWS Puts More Muscle Behind Machine Learning And Database

Amazon Web Services essentially sparked the public cloud race a dozen years ago when it first launched the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service and then in short order the Simple Storage Service (S3), giving enterprises access to the large amount compute and storage resources that its giant retail business leaned on.

Since that time, AWS has grown rapidly in the number of services it offers, the number of customers it serves, the amount of money it brings in and the number of competitors – including Microsoft, IBM, Google, Alibaba, and Oracle – looking to chip away

AWS Puts More Muscle Behind Machine Learning And Database was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

VMware Cloud on AWS with Direct Connect: NSX Networking and vMotion to the Cloud with Demo

Check out my prior below blogs here on VMware Network Virtualization blog on how NSX is leveraged in VMware Cloud on AWS to provide all the networking and security features. These prior blogs provide a foundation that this blog post builds on. In this blog post I discuss how AWS Direct Connect can be leveraged with VMware Cloud on AWS to provide high bandwidth, low latency connectivity to a SDDC deployed in VMware Cloud on AWS. This is one of my favorite features as it provides high bandwidth, low latency connectivity from on-prem directly into the customer’s VMware Cloud on AWS VPC enabling better and consistent connectivity/performance while also enabling live migration/vMotion from on-prem to cloud! I want to to thank my colleague, Venky Deshpande, who helped with some of the details in this post. Continue reading

Where Is My Feature Request?

Getting a feature request implemented by your vendor can be a long and painful process. In this post we will take a look at some of the reasons feature request processes take so long and what a customer can do to avoid some of the pain and suffering.