NetDevOpEd: Automation – start small, dream big

I’ve seen a number of blogs and articles describing what network automation is and what it entails, and in many cases, the descriptions end up frightening people who haven’t yet started down an automation path. The biggest question when starting any of these sorts of projects is the simplest: should you automate at all?

My answer to that first question (Spoiler alert: it’s yes, but let me explain why) is that it depends on your network itself. For years, before I was involved with networking at the operating system level, I worked on network management and automation products. Often, I’d tell my customers that if they were happy with the status quo, then I certainly wouldn’t force them down a particular path or to use a particular product. However, if you’re a bit fed up with the manual steps involved in updating a device operating system or configuring a device, then you should look into automation to save yourself time and headaches. Of course, if you only have three devices and they get updated yearly, maybe don’t bother. But if you believe automation will provide the solutions you’re looking for, there are some first steps for automation that you Continue reading

Docker Registry API to be standardized in OCI

We are excited to announce that the Docker Registry HTTP API V2 specification will be adopted in the Open Container Initiative (OCI), the organization under the Linux Foundation that provides the standards that fuel the containerization industry. The Docker team is proud to see another aspect of our technology stack become a de-facto standard. As we’ve done with our image format, we are happy to formally share and collaborate with the container ecosystem as part of the OCI community. Our distribution protocol is the underpinning of all container registries on the market and is so robust that it is leveraged over a billion times every two weeks as container content is distributed across the globe.

What does this protocol do?

Putting the protocol into perspective, part of the core functionality of Docker is the ability to push and pull images. From the first “Hello, World” moment, this concept is introduced to every user and is a large part of the Docker experience. While we normally sit back in our armchairs and marvel at this magical occurence, the amount of design and consideration that has gone into that simple capability can easily be overlooked.

When Docker was first released, the team Continue reading

Is the cloud already killing the enterprise data center?

“Friends don't let friends build data centers.”That slogan wasn’t even printed on a real T-shirt you could buy. It was just one of the choices in an online poll to choose what Amazon Web Services CTO Werner Vogels should wear. But it pretty much captured the mood at the AWS Summit San Francisco last week, where Vogels gave the opening keynote to some 9,000 cloud-loving attendees. On stage, Vogels crowed about multiple enterprises abandoning large numbers of data centers in order to move their workloads to the cloud. He cited Cox Automotive—the company behind Autotrader, Dealer.com, Kelley Blue Book, and many more car-shopping brands—“going all in on AWS” and closing more than 40 data centers. He noted that U.K. news provider News International is shutting down 60 data centers, and GE is closing approximately 30 data centers. And Vogels mentioned that the U.K.’s Ministry of Justice was moving to AWS, as well, though he didn’t say whether it was closing any data centers in the process.To read this article in full, please click here

Is the cloud already killing the enterprise data center?

“Friends don't let friends build data centers.”That slogan wasn’t even printed on a real T-shirt you could buy. It was just one of the choices in an online poll to choose what Amazon Web Services CTO Werner Vogels should wear. But it pretty much captured the mood at the AWS Summit San Francisco last week, where Vogels gave the opening keynote to some 9,000 cloud-loving attendees. On stage, Vogels crowed about multiple enterprises abandoning large numbers of data centers in order to move their workloads to the cloud. He cited Cox Automotive—the company behind Autotrader, Dealer.com, Kelley Blue Book, and many more car-shopping brands—“going all in on AWS” and closing more than 40 data centers. He noted that U.K. news provider News International is shutting down 60 data centers, and GE is closing approximately 30 data centers. And Vogels mentioned that the U.K.’s Ministry of Justice was moving to AWS, as well, though he didn’t say whether it was closing any data centers in the process.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Closing the PC/TC experience gap for good

When thin clients were first introduced to the market in 1995, there was a cultural backlash. Thin clients may have made working with company data less costly and more secure, but from the workers’ perspective, their PC was replaced by a little box connected by a serial cable, with limited graphics that was much slower than the PC they were used to working on every day.In those early days, even as we swapped the serial cables for network ones, shrunk the cases, and doubled the performance, it didn’t take long before thin clients were banished to niche use cases, becoming the territory of call centers, nurses’ stations and manufacturing plants—often to those workers’ disappointment.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Closing the PC/TC experience gap for good

When thin clients were first introduced to the market in 1995, there was a cultural backlash. Thin clients may have made working with company data less costly and more secure, but from the workers’ perspective, their PC was replaced by a little box connected by a serial cable, with limited graphics that was much slower than the PC they were used to working on every day.In those early days, even as we swapped the serial cables for network ones, shrunk the cases, and doubled the performance, it didn’t take long before thin clients were banished to niche use cases, becoming the territory of call centers, nurses’ stations and manufacturing plants—often to those workers’ disappointment.To read this article in full, please click here

Talking Up the Expanding Markets for GPU Compute

There is a direct correlation between the length of time that Nvidia co-founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang speaks during the opening keynote of each GPU Technology Conference and the total addressable market of accelerated computing based on GPUs.

This stands to reason since the market for GPU compute is expanding. We won’t discuss which is the cause and which is the effect. Or maybe we will.

It all started with offloading the parallel chunks of HPC applications from CPUs to GPUs in the early 2000s in academia, which were then first used in production HPC centers a decade …

Talking Up the Expanding Markets for GPU Compute was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Internet Shutdowns cannot be a solution to political challenges in Chad

The Internet Society is concerned with the continuous disruptions of Internet and social media services in Chad in the month of April, 2018.

Internet shutdowns are not a solution to political and economic challenges.

Government ordered disruptions have been reported from 2nd of April 2018, in the context of political protests and unrest across the country.  This is not the first time Internet access has been suspended in Chad. In January 2018, the Internet was disrupted following demonstrations organized by civil society organizations. Again in 2016, Chad experienced an eight-month social media cutoff following controversial elections in 2016.

While we recognize that the Chadian government has a duty to maintain public order, there is little evidence on the benefits of shutdowns in preventing any sort of violent protests. On the other hand, there is growing evidence on the collateral damages resulting from taking people off the network.

One of these damages is economic. These disruptions have been estimated to have costed the country €18 million (approximately 13 billion CFA francs), according to Internet Without Borders. These are extremely conservative numbers that do not even take into account a set of cumulative economic factors.

Shutdowns also affect thousands of local entrepreneurs Continue reading

On the ‘web: How to Bridge the Network Skills Gap

The landscape is littered with training for all these new skills, but there is little time, or guidance, through the process of retraining into these new skills. The process of retraining, far too often, feels like leaving all your old skills behind and learning completely new ones. The seeming wide array of paths the average engineer faces, combined with the uncertainty of which of these paths forward represent the real future, can seem overwhelming. @TechTarget

NSX-T Automation with Terraform

NSX-T Automation with Terraform Do you want to maintain your network and security infrastructure as a code? Do you want to automate NSX-T? One more option has been just added for you! Following my previous post about NSX-T: OpenAPI and SDKs you might have figured out how easy it is to generate different language bindings for NSX-T. Thankfully to this, we... Read more →

NSX-T Automation with Terraform

Do you want to maintain your network and security infrastructure as a code? Do you want to automate NSX-T? One more option has been just added for you!

Following my previous post about NSX-T: OpenAPI and SDKs you might have figured out how easy it is to generate different language bindings for NSX-T. Thankfully to this, we have generated Go Lang NSX-T SDK that we use as a foundation of the new NSX-T Terraform provider.

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as a code software by HashiCorp. It allows creation, modification, and deletion of an infrastructure using a high-level configuration files that can be shared between team members, treated as a code, edited, reviewed, and versioned. These configuration files are written in HCL(HashiCorp Configuration Language) which is actually JSON with some fine-tuning. Plain JSON can be also used.

There are several important components in Terraform:

1. Providers are responsible for managing the lifecycle of the resources: create, read, update, delete. The Providers usually require some sort of configuration to provide authentication, endpoint URLs, etc. By default, resources are matched with the provider with the start of the name. For example, a resource nsxt_logical_switch is associated with provider called nsxt.

Example of Continue reading

Will Chapel Mark Next Great Awakening for Parallel Programmers?

Just because supercomputers are engineered to be far more powerful over time does not necessarily mean programmer productivity will follow the same curve. Added performance means more complexity, which for parallel programmers means working harder, especially when accelerators are thrown into the mix.

It was with all of this in mind that DARPA’s High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) project rolled out in 2009 to support higher performance but more usable HPC systems. This is the era that spawned systems like Blue Waters, for instance, and various co-design efforts from IBM and Intel to make parallelism within broader reach to the …

Will Chapel Mark Next Great Awakening for Parallel Programmers? was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

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