IDG Contributor Network: Bringing your Internet of Things infrastructure into the digital age

When Campofrio Food Group’s 17-year-old factory in Burgos, Spain, famously burned to the ground, the multinational meat processor turned tragedy into opportunity. With an eye on digital transformation, Campofrio rebuilt the facility as a connected factory, powered by the Internet of Things (IoT). This allowed the state-of-the-art, greenfield meat packing plant to automate processes and provide real-time data on materials, equipment and workers to uncover new business value.Such “blank canvas” opportunities to bring a factory into the digital age from the ground up don’t happen very often. Most IoT projects are implemented in existing, brownfield environments with traditional legacy systems, requiring an incremental approach. The goal of these gradual integrations has been to optimize or automate processes, gain some efficiencies, and move onto the next low-hanging fruit. But, this approach will not work if businesses want to capture IoT’s true transformational value: the creation of new business models, new revenue streams, new products and new markets.To read this article in full, please click here

Do you have too many microservices? – Five Design Attributes that can Help

This is a guest Post by Jake Lumetta, Founder and CEO, ButterCMS, an API-first CMS. For more content like this, follow @ButterCMS on Twitter and subscribe to our blog.

Are your microservices too small or too tightly coupled? Are you confident in your decision-making about service boundaries? In interviews with dozens of experienced CTOs, they offered design attributes that they consider when creating a set of microservices. This article distills that wisdom into five key principles to help you better design microservices.

The importance of microservice boundaries

The design attributes discussed below matter because reaping the benefits of microservices requires designing thoughtful microservice boundaries.

One of the major challenges when it comes to creating a new system with a microservice architecture. It came about when I mentioned that one of the core benefits of developing new systems with microservices is that the architecture allows developers to build and modify individual components independently — but problems can arise when it comes to minimizing the number of callbacks between each API. The solution according to McFadden, is to apply the appropriate service boundaries.

But in contrast to the sometimes difficult-to-grasp and abstract concept of domain driven design (DDD) —  a framework for Continue reading

ONOS measurement based control

ONOS traffic analytics describes how to run the ONOS SDN controller with a virtual network created using Mininet. The article also showed how to monitor network traffic using industry standard sFlow instrumentation available in Mininet and in physical switches.
This article uses the same ONOS / Mininet test bed to demonstrate how sFlow-RT real-time flow analytics can be used to push controls to the network through the ONOS REST API.  Leaf and spine traffic engineering using segment routing and SDN used real-time flow analytics to load balance an ONOS controlled physical network. In this example, we will use ONOS to filter DDoS attack traffic on a Mininet virtual network.

The following sFlow-RT script, ddos.js, detects DDoS attacks and programs ONOS filter rules to block the attacks:
var user = 'onos';
var password = 'rocks';
var onos = '192.168.123.1';
var controls = {};

setFlow('udp_reflection',
 {keys:'ipdestination,udpsourceport',value:'frames'});
setThreshold('udp_reflection_attack',
 {metric:'udp_reflection',value:100,byFlow:true,timeout:2});

setEventHandler(function(evt) {
 // don't consider inter-switch links
 var link = topologyInterfaceToLink(evt.agent,evt.dataSource);
 if(link) return;

 // get port information
 var port = topologyInterfaceToPort(evt.agent,evt.dataSource);
 if(!port) return;

 // need OpenFlow info to create ONOS filtering rule
 if(!port.dpid || !port.ofport) return;

 // we already have  Continue reading

Network-as-a-Service: A modern solution to today’s networking challenges

Traditional networking architectures over the past two decades or so prescribe that the hub of the network be build around a specific location, such as a data center or a company’s headquarters building. This location houses most of the equipment for compute, storage, communications, and security, and this is where enterprise applications are traditionally hosted. For people in branch and other remote locations, traffic is typically backhauled to this hub before going out to other locations, including to the cloud.Though that formula has been standard operating procedure for many years, it doesn’t fit the way of work for many enterprises today. For one thing, there has been a major migration to the cloud. Those enterprise applications that run the business are now hosted in cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, either as private applications or as SaaS apps such as Office 365 and Salesforce. In fact, companies often use multiple cloud platforms these days.To read this article in full, please click here

Network-as-a-Service: A modern solution to today’s networking challenges

Traditional networking architectures over the past two decades or so prescribe that the hub of the network be build around a specific location, such as a data center or a company’s headquarters building. This location houses most of the equipment for compute, storage, communications, and security, and this is where enterprise applications are traditionally hosted. For people in branch and other remote locations, traffic is typically backhauled to this hub before going out to other locations, including to the cloud.Though that formula has been standard operating procedure for many years, it doesn’t fit the way of work for many enterprises today. For one thing, there has been a major migration to the cloud. Those enterprise applications that run the business are now hosted in cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, either as private applications or as SaaS apps such as Office 365 and Salesforce. In fact, companies often use multiple cloud platforms these days.To read this article in full, please click here

Network-as-a-Service: A modern solution to today’s networking challenges

Traditional networking architectures over the past two decades or so prescribe that the hub of the network be build around a specific location, such as a data center or a company’s headquarters building. This location houses most of the equipment for compute, storage, communications, and security, and this is where enterprise applications are traditionally hosted. For people in branch and other remote locations, traffic is typically backhauled to this hub before going out to other locations, including to the cloud.Though that formula has been standard operating procedure for many years, it doesn’t fit the way of work for many enterprises today. For one thing, there has been a major migration to the cloud. Those enterprise applications that run the business are now hosted in cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, either as private applications or as SaaS apps such as Office 365 and Salesforce. In fact, companies often use multiple cloud platforms these days.To read this article in full, please click here

ACE Submarine Cable Cut Impacts Ten Countries

The ACE (African Coast to Europe) submarine cable runs along the west coast of Africa between France and South Africa, connecting 22 countries. It extends over 17,000 km, and has a potential capacity of 5.12 Tbps. The cable system is managed by a consortium of 19 telecommunications operators & administrations, and the first phase entered service in December 2012. While it may not have been completely problem-free over the last 5+ years, online searches do not return any published reports of significant outages caused by damage to the cable.

However, on March 30, damage to the cable disrupted Internet connectivity to a number of connected countries, with reported problems posted to social media over the next several days. These posts indicated that the ACE submarine cable was cut near Noukachott, Mauritania, but did not provide any specific information about what severed the cable.

Of the 22 countries listed as having landing points for the ACE Submarine Cable, 10 had significant disruptions evident in Oracle’s Continue reading

Integrating the configuration build – Next steps

Hi,

The last post link below, I got introduced to a CI System and basics of it.

https://r2079.wordpress.com/2018/04/03/using-travis-ci-continuous-
integration-with-github/

This post goes further in actually using the CI system.

All the code is hosted here

https://github.com/yukthr/auts.git

-> Requirement is very simple

This is a very basic program which introduces anyone to Jinja2 and
 yaml syntaxing 


Problem  - Have two interfaces ge-0/0/0 and ge-0/0/1, we have to use 
Yaml / Jinja2 and Pyez to develop the configurational 
syntax for this and later on a CI system need to validate the build. 

The code hosted in Github above.
intf.yml    - will have all the interfaces 
template.j2 - will have the appropriate Jinja2 
template.py - will have the python program combining these two

So, we write the code 





Finally build the CI file, but here we also buld the dependencies 
because when CI starts to validate it needs to have all the 
appropriate software installed. It amuses me to the point, 
it spins up the VM and then install the dependencies and then

it validates our code. I have come a long way from manual 
verificaitons / lab testing / CI testing now




This is how  Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: What Larry, Moe and Curly can teach us about network security and SD-WAN agility

In comedy, unexpected actions make for good fun. The pratfalls. The eye pokes. But in networking, the unexpected is hardly funny. And yet it was the antics of the Three Stooges that came to mind as I reviewed the results of Cato Networks’ latest networking survey.The survey canvassed more than 700 enterprise IT buyers from around the globe about the drivers and challenges facing their networking and security deployments. What we observed serves as a promise and warning for anyone considering SD-WAN.SD-WAN is supposed to be the answer to network complexity. And like any good slapstick setup, we can almost see how SD-WAN meets that objective. As an overlay aggregating traffic from MPLS, broadband and any other underlying data transport, SD-WAN hides the complexity of a building a network from multiple data transports. Policies provide the intelligence for SD-WAN to select the optimum network for each application freeing IT from making those calculations and changes manually, if that was even possible.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: What Larry, Moe and Curly can teach us about network security and SD-WAN agility

In comedy, unexpected actions make for good fun. The pratfalls. The eye pokes. But in networking, the unexpected is hardly funny. And yet it was the antics of the Three Stooges that came to mind as I reviewed the results of Cato Networks’ latest networking survey.The survey canvassed more than 700 enterprise IT buyers from around the globe about the drivers and challenges facing their networking and security deployments. What we observed serves as a promise and warning for anyone considering SD-WAN.SD-WAN is supposed to be the answer to network complexity. And like any good slapstick setup, we can almost see how SD-WAN meets that objective. As an overlay aggregating traffic from MPLS, broadband and any other underlying data transport, SD-WAN hides the complexity of a building a network from multiple data transports. Policies provide the intelligence for SD-WAN to select the optimum network for each application freeing IT from making those calculations and changes manually, if that was even possible.To read this article in full, please click here

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

Layer 2-Encryptors For Metro And Carrier Ethernet WANs And MANs – Inside-IT (PDF)

Thales L2 Encryption – Thales

Senetas – Senetas.com

What Is Optical Encryption? – Ciena

Certes Networks

Google Style Guides – GitHub

Continue reading

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

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