IDG Contributor Network: Debunking today’s dominant automation myths

Automation is dominating a significant portion of the conversations trending among IT professionals. To those working in the industry, this comes as no surprise – the topic is not a new one. More and more enterprises are adopting automation as it quickly transforms from a luxury to a necessity.However, while there are well-defined benefits associated with automation, there are also important questions and misconceptions that remain. Smart IT teams must evaluate and analyze the pros, cons and impact of automation in their unique enterprise before moving forward.  The first step is debunking the most common automation myths with the facts.Myth: automation will completely replace jobs and employees This tops the list of the most significant automation myths. Some research studies do suggest that automation (especially in the form of robotics and artificial intelligence) will completely replace human jobs. This misconception must be clarified once and for all. There is no doubt that automation will have a noticeable impact on human jobs, but we can rest assured it will not replace them completely. Automation is assigning everyday tasks to computers to free up time for humans to be more creative and strategic.  This takes the meticulous tasks that Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Debunking today’s dominant automation myths

Automation is dominating a significant portion of the conversations trending among IT professionals. To those working in the industry, this comes as no surprise – the topic is not a new one. More and more enterprises are adopting automation as it quickly transforms from a luxury to a necessity.However, while there are well-defined benefits associated with automation, there are also important questions and misconceptions that remain. Smart IT teams must evaluate and analyze the pros, cons and impact of automation in their unique enterprise before moving forward.  The first step is debunking the most common automation myths with the facts.Myth: automation will completely replace jobs and employees This tops the list of the most significant automation myths. Some research studies do suggest that automation (especially in the form of robotics and artificial intelligence) will completely replace human jobs. This misconception must be clarified once and for all. There is no doubt that automation will have a noticeable impact on human jobs, but we can rest assured it will not replace them completely. Automation is assigning everyday tasks to computers to free up time for humans to be more creative and strategic.  This takes the meticulous tasks that Continue reading

Worth Reading: Chaos Engineering

Chaos engineering is, therefore, embracing the potential for failure and looking at it as an opportunity to become a more flexible, adaptable team with more flexible, adaptable architecture. And by accepting that you’ll have failure, you can control the failure and get to know your system — and by extension the team building it — better. —Jennifer Riggins @ The New Stack

Putting Docker Enterprise Edition on the Map with Kadaster and Capgemini

 As a government organization for the Netherlands, Kadaster is responsible for collecting and registering property and land rights, ships, aircraft and telecom networks. An important service for its citizens, registry information is available predominantly through online web services.

Beginning in 2011, Kadaster created a vision for their next generation technology platform which included a combination of SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS services. Today, Docker Enterprise Edition (Docker EE) is an essential part of this solution. At DockerCon Europe, Rick Peters from CapGemini discussed how they worked with Kadaster to deliver an agile application platform that now runs some of the most demanding workloads for the Dutch organization.

You can watch the talk here: 

Growth of Private Cloud Fuels Hunger for New Technologies

Beginning in 2012, Kadaster created one of the most successful private clouds in the Netherlands. Starting out as 300 virtual machines, the team did not think they would surpass 750 virtual machines, but blew well past that figure in just two years.

That rapid expansion was fueled by the easier self-service delivery model and the ability deploy apps more regularly and faster. Initially focused as a Java runtime platform powered by virtualization, the platform objectives shifted over Continue reading

Using two-factor SAML with Ansible Tower

In a previous post, I explained how Red Hat Ansible Tower works with SAML. A little known fact about Ansible Tower is that it supports two-factor SAML. More precisely, Ansible Tower can be configured to not disallow SAML with two-factor. Ansible Tower relies heavily on django-social-auth, which comes with a SAML backend, which relies heavily on python-saml. python-saml contains a default setting, specifically requestedAuthnContext, that, put simply, requests that the idp authenticate the user using a password. To reiterate, Ansible Tower will ask for the user to be authenticated by a password and not be given the choice to authenticate the user by two-factor.

In order to allow the IDP to choose two-factor, we need to not ask it to authenticate using password. More specifically, we need to not include the samlp:RequestedAuthnContext directive at all. Ansible Tower shouldn’t be making the presumption about the IDP’s authentication methods on the other side. Maybe the IDP supports calling the employee on the phone to authenticate. This is a decision that should be made by the IDP.

Let’s see how we make this happen. Create the file /etc/tower/conf.d/saml.py with the following content:

"SOCIAL_AUTH_SAML_SECURITY_CONFIG": {
	"requestedAuthnContext": False
}

Then issue Continue reading

25% off Logitech K780 Multi-Device Wireless Keyboard for Computer, Phone & Tablet – Deal Alert

Rewrite the rules of desktop typing. Logitech's K780 is the type-on-everything keyboard with full-size keys and a convenient number pad. Enjoy quiet, comfortable typing, on your Windows PC or Mac, and switch typing to your phone or tablet at the touch of a button. An integrated rubber stand holds your mobile devices within reach and always at the perfect typing angle. A generous two-year battery life virtually eliminates the need to switch out batteries. The K780 typically lists for $79.99, but right now is discounted 25% to $59.99. See this deal now on Amazon.To read this article in full, please click here

Open networking drives forward with Cumulus Linux 3.5

‘Tis the season for spreading holiday cheer! As mentioned a few weeks ago, we at Cumulus feel so thankful for all the great success in 2017. Our focus and stated goal has been to disrupt and transform the future of networking. We are pioneering a new generation of hyper-scale, automated and open networks designed to drive network agility in an era of digital transformation.

As 2017 comes to a close, we know many of you are excited to celebrate the holidays. We’d like to give you even more to cheer for this season by announcing a few exciting enhancements to Cumulus Linux with our 3.5 release — all designed to help you create an agile, open network that gives you the web-scale benefits of automation, interoperability, cost savings and choice.

In our new release of Cumulus Linux 3.5, we bring you the following open networking benefits:

The industry’s most comprehensive VXLAN routing suite

Most legacy vendors offer either asymmetric routing or symmetric routing. For comparison, Cisco and Arista implement their VXLAN routing solution using symmetric mode. Juniper implements its VXLAN routing solution using asymmetric mode and some symmetric. With these different routing solutions, these vendor switches can’t operate Continue reading

The Network in 2018: Cloud, Containers, and Connections

Top 10 data center predictions: IDC

IDG The lifecycle of a data center is measured in decades, yet the tech that’s inside is changing constantly.“Today’s data centers are really out of sync with the equipment that’s inside them. It would be like using the enclosure for a 1984 Macintosh with the current generation of iMac. It just doesn’t jive very well. The power, cooling and space requirements have all morphed,” says Jennifer Cooke, research director for IDC's datacenter trends and strategies teamTo read this article in full, please click here

Top 10 data center predictions: IDC

IDG The lifecycle of a data center is measured in decades, yet the tech that’s inside is changing constantly.“Today’s data centers are really out of sync with the equipment that’s inside them. It would be like using the enclosure for a 1984 Macintosh with the current generation of iMac. It just doesn’t jive very well. The power, cooling and space requirements have all morphed,” says Jennifer Cooke, research director for IDC's datacenter trends and strategies teamTo read this article in full, please click here

Salt Deep Dive on Building Network Automation Solutions Online Course

In the first few sessions of the Building Network Automation Solutions online course we used Ansible as the tool-of-choice because it’s the easiest automation tool to get started with. Now that we’ve established the baseline, it’s time to explore the alternatives.

In a live session on February 27th 2018, Mircea Ulinic will describe Salt, an open source, general-purpose event-driven automation framework that we briefly discussed in Episode 77 of Software Gone Wild podcast.

BiB 20: Broadcom Tomahawk 3 Announced With 32x400G ports

Holy cow. Broadcom Tomahawk 3 is a 32 x 400G ASIC at lower power, latency and reduced cost/100G speed. Built for the cloud it signals the next generation of 200G/400G Ethernet is on its way.

The post BiB 20: Broadcom Tomahawk 3 Announced With 32x400G ports appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Introduction to Client VPN

Introduction to Metro Ethernet

Starting a new BCOP – “How to run and protect an email server on IPv6”

After the recent series of technical Best Current Operational Practices (BCOP) documents that we initiated and co-authored, it’s time for new one. This time on how to run an incoming email server on IPv6 and survive!

Back in 2010 we started the IPv6 series of BCOP documents, starting with the popular RIPE-501 that was superseded by the even more popular RIPE-554 that discusses how to specify IPv6 functionality and compliance when ordering ICT equipment. This document emerged from listening to the Internet community that is deploying IPv6, and figuring out the common problems in order to come up with recommendations on how to solve them.

The next most common issue that we heard about, was that helpdesks of network operators would melt down if they deployed IPv6 to their end customers as they don’t know anything about IPv6. So we built an online tool and wrote some helpdesk procedures on how to troubleshoot IPv6 issues when users call them – resulting in another useful document that was published as RIPE-631.

After addressing this, we then repeatedly heard questions about what size of IPv6 prefixes should be given to end-users and should it be assigned statically or dynamically. We therefore put Continue reading

Enterprise Security Spending Will Total $96.3B in 2018, Gartner Says

Companies are using multiple tools, leading to vendor fatigue and complex security environments.

Worth Reading: The Largest Deal in Tech history

Private equity firm Silver Lake Partners has an appetite for tech, and securing funding for Dell to take itself private and then go out and buy EMC and VMware is now going to take a backseat in terms of deal size – and in potential ripple effects in the datacenter – now that chip giant Broadcom is making an unsolicited bid, backed by Silver Lake, to take over often-times chip rival Qualcomm. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @ The Next Platform

Gartner report: Worldwide server sales revenue increases 16%

The drive toward the cloud is lifting all boats. The need for capacity and new servers combined to lift the server market in the third quarter, with more growth to come, especially for the “white box” vendors.Gartner reported worldwide server revenue grew by a very impressive 16 percent year over year in the third quarter of 2017, while unit shipments grew by 5.1 percent. That gulf between revenue and units means more higher-end, more decked-out servers are being sold than cheap, commodity hardware.Also on Network World: REVIEW: How rack servers from HPE, Dell and IBM stack up It helps that in recent months, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Dell EMC and Lenovo have all released new hardware, which is helping to drive sales as enterprises refresh their on-premises hardware. So all told, the third quarter was marked by new hardware and continued growth of the cloud.To read this article in full, please click here

Gartner report: Worldwide server sales revenue increases 16%

The drive toward the cloud is lifting all boats. The need for capacity and new servers combined to lift the server market in the third quarter, with more growth to come, especially for the “white box” vendors.Gartner reported worldwide server revenue grew by a very impressive 16 percent year over year in the third quarter of 2017, while unit shipments grew by 5.1 percent. That gulf between revenue and units means more higher-end, more decked-out servers are being sold than cheap, commodity hardware.Also on Network World: REVIEW: How rack servers from HPE, Dell and IBM stack up It helps that in recent months, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Dell EMC and Lenovo have all released new hardware, which is helping to drive sales as enterprises refresh their on-premises hardware. So all told, the third quarter was marked by new hardware and continued growth of the cloud.To read this article in full, please click here

LinkedIn’s Project Falco Swoops Up SONiC Switching Platform

The disaggregated data center project developed its own switch called Pigeon.