Automation Field Guide: Quick AWS NextCloud Instance

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This is a practical use story utilizing Ansible to solve a small hurdle in an everyday workflow. 

Code for this can be found here. 

In this post, I’ll be sharing a practical situation where Ansible makes tasks easier. The Getting Started team works with organizations who may be putting together a proof-of-concept to evaluate Red Hat® Ansible® Tower. If troubleshooting gets into the weeds, it can include sharing documentation, instructions for common setup scenarios, or going through system settings to make sure everything’s in order.

Sometimes there's no other way: we need to get a full environment report from the system to troubleshoot, mostly in the form of a sosreport. We found that getting the report to us can be challenging, so we had to find a reliable way for people to send us their log files. A file drop web app that could be spun up on demand fit the need nicely. A Nextcloud install with a CentOS LAMP stack turned out to be a great tool, using Ansible to automate the provisioning and installation for us. Because this little trick proved so helpful, I wanted to share how I put the short playbook together, Continue reading

5 Strategies to Promote Your App

5 Strategies to Promote Your App

5 Strategies to Promote Your App

Brady Gentile from Cloudflare's product team wrote an App Developer Playbook, embedded within the developer documentation page. He decided to write it after he and his team conducted several app developer interviews, finding that many developers wanted to learn how to better promote their apps.

They wanted to help app authors out in the areas outside of developer core expertise. Social media posting, community outreach, email deployment, SEO, blog posting and syndication, etc. can be daunting.

I wanted to take a moment to highlight some of the tips from the App Developer Playbook because I think Brady did a great job of providing clear ways to approach promotional strategies.

5 Promotional Strategies

1. Share with online communities

Your app’s potential audience likely reads community-aggregated news sites such as HackerNews, Product Hunt, or reddit. Sharing your app across these websites is a great way for users to find your app.

5 Strategies to Promote Your App

For apps that are interesting to developers, designers, scientists, entrepreneurs, etc., be sure to share your work with the Hacker News community. Be sure to follow the official guidelines when posting and when engaging with the community. It may be tempting to ask your friends to upvote Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For October 27th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 


Perfect! Now, imagine a little dog snuck under Big Dog's cone of shame and covered the food with its own cone of shame, and it won't leave. That's deadlock. Imagine a stream of little dogs sneaking under Big Dog's cone so Big Dog nevers gets a bite. That's livelock.

 

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon.

 

  • $100 billion: projected 2021 combined app store spend; 11 TB: SSD; 16: billion dollar disasters in the US this year; 8: meter long 3D printed bridge; 43%: employees who worry about losing their job due to their age; 125 TFLOPS: new AWS EC2 P3 instances; 7%: global Internet traffic flowing over QUIC; 50%: improvement in new in-package DRAM cache-management scheme; 43%: CockroachDB speed improvement executing parallel SQL statements; 325 billion: hours spent in Android apps in Q3; 4.5 million: C++ programmers; 3 trillion: ops per second in Pixel's Image Processing Unit; 80%: drop in Facebook referrals; 1,300 years: longest running business in the world; 40: age when tech Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: How IoT is shaping the smart office of the future

The Internet of Things (IoT) has already firmly embedded itself into America’s homes, industries, and infrastructure, and now it’s tackling that final frontier of the market, the office. Increasingly, America’s savviest businesses are adopting IoT tech into their office environments to ease their employees’ workloads, save serious money on overhead and by reducing fraud, and to gather valuable data which can be used to optimize their operations.So how exactly are IoT solutions being applied to office dilemmas, and is the increasingly trendy “smart office” anything more than a temporary fad? A quick look at the union between smart tech and America’s workspaces shows that this phenomenon is anything but temporary, and will fundamentally reshape how we work and run our businesses well into the future.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco adds telemetry to storage networks

Fiber Channel (FC) storage networks have always been somewhat of a black box. Servers and storage devices are plugged in, and things magically seem to work.For the most part, storage-area networks (SANs) are reliable and perform well – and they better because the applications that rely of FC-SANs are typically the most important ones in the company. But what happens when things aren’t working? A poorly performing SAN might mean that the database with critical customer information isn’t available or financial records can’t be pulled up. Also on Network World: 10 Most important open source networking projects Historically, troubleshooting SANs has been difficult because the FC switches give off little data that can be used to identify the source of a problem. Typically, engineers would need to deploy a physical test access port (TAP) or packet broker in front of the product to capture the data. This may seem like a reasonable strategy until one prices out TAPs and learns the price per port is about 5-10x a FC port. Companies that go down this route often buy a few and deploy them only when there is a problem. This causes the engineering team to always be in Continue reading

Can We Expand the Multistakeholder Model for Internet Governance? A Feasibility Report

What can be done to expand the usage of the multistakeholder model for Internet governance?

Collaborative decision making has been at the heart of how the Internet has grown and developed since its earliest days. Multistakeholder approaches are used across the Internet ecosystem and have helped create the opportunities made possible by the Internet today. But as we outlined in our Global Internet Report 2017, more work is needed to expand the use of multistakeholder processes in order to tackle some of the most pressing challenges facing the future of the Internet.

As I wrote last summer, the Internet Society commissioned a feasibility study on expanding the use of the multistakeholder model for Internet governance , including three focus areas:

  • Demonstrating the efficacy of the model
  • Capacity building
  • Research

I would like to thank Larry Strickling and Grace Abuhamad, who have led this work. Their report is based on interviews with a wide range ICT experts from academia, industry, the technical community, civil society and governments.  It details a possible framework for such an initiative, as well as the resources required. It also makes clear that any new initiative should support and complement existing initiatives such as the Internet Governance Forum Continue reading

Scary Linux commands for Halloween

With Halloween so fast approaching, it’s time for a little focus on the spookier side of Linux. What commands might bring up images of ghosts, witches and zombies? Which might encourage the spirit of trick or treat?crypt Well, we’ve always got crypt. Despite its name, crypt is not an underground vault or a burial pit for trashed files, but a command that encrypts file content. These days “crypt” is generally implemented as a script that emulates the older crypt command by calling a binary called mcrypt to do its work. Using the mycrypt command directly is an even better option. $ mcrypt x Enter the passphrase (maximum of 512 characters) Please use a combination of upper and lower case letters and numbers. Enter passphrase: Enter passphrase: File x was encrypted. Note that the mcrypt command creates a second file with an added ".nc" extension. It doesn't overwrite the file you are encrypting.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Raw sockets in IPv6

As part of a measurement experiment, we wanted an implementation of an IPv6 UDP server and a TCP server that generated fragmented IPv6 packets. However, as an added condition, we wanted the application to directly control the packet fragmentation function. The conventional standard socket interface masks any visibility to the underlying packet transactions, and therefore cannot be used for this experiment. —Geoff Huston @Potaroo

MetLife Uses Docker Enterprise Edition to Self Fund Containerization

MetLife is a 150 year old company in the business of securing promises and the information management of over 100M customers and their insurance policies. As a global company, MetLife delivers promises into every corner of the world – some of them built to last a lifetime. With this rich legacy comes a diverse portfolio of IT infrastructure to maintain those promises.

In April, Aaron Aedes from MetLife spoke about their first foray into Docker containerization with a new application, GSSP, delivered through Azure. Six months later, MetLife returns to the DockerCon stage to share their journey since this initial deployment motivated them to find other ways to leverage Docker Enterprise Edition [EE] within MetLife.

Jeff Murr, Director of Engineering for Containers and Open Source at MetLife spoke in the Day 1 DockerCon keynote session about how they are looking to scale containerization with Docker as they scale . He states that new technology typically adds more cost and overhead to an already taxed IT budget. But the Docker Modernize Traditional Apps [MTA] Program presented an opportunity to reduce the costs of their existing applications.

The MTA project at MetLife started with a single Linux Java-based application that handled the “Do Not Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: How consumer demand is driving development of the Internet of Things

Few industries are as impacted by consumer demand as the Internet of Things (IoT) and the plethora of sectors reliant on in; when consumers demand a new gadget or a new service, an innovative startup springs up seemingly overnight to meet those demands. Similarly, few consumer goods are as customizable or responsive to changing user preferences as the gadgets and software that make up the commercial IoT. So how can savvy IoT enthusiast rely on consumer demand to better the IoT businesses?One can’t find success in the field of IT or within the IoT in general without understanding how crucial consumer demand is to the industry as a whole. More than anything else, this demand is driving the extraordinarily rapid development of the IoT, which could reach a dizzying 50 billion connections by 2020, according to Brookings.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

QCT Open Data Center Technology Poised to Help Telcos ‘Win 5G Battles’

QCT Open Data Center Technology Poised to Help Telcos ‘Win 5G Battles’ SAN JOSE, California — Quanta Cloud Technology’s (QCT) latest data center technology brings the benefits of disaggregation and composable infrastructure to cloud service providers and telco service providers, said Mike Yang, president of QCT at today’s Q.synergy 2017 event. The Rackgo R portfolio is based on the Intel Rack Scale Design (RSD) software framework, which... Read more →

Devaluing Data Exposures

I had a great time this week recording the first episode of a new series with my co-worker Rich Stroffolino. The Gestalt IT Rundown is hopefully the start of some fun news stories with a hint of snark and humor thrown in.

One of the things I discussed in this episode was my belief that no data is truly secure any more. Thanks to recent attacks like WannaCry and Bad Rabbit and the rise of other state-sponsored hacking and malware attacks, I’m totally behind the idea that soon everyone will know everything about me and there’s nothing that anyone can do about it.

Just Pick Up The Phone

Personal data is important. Some pieces of personal data are sacrificed for the greater good. Anyone who is in IT or works in an area where they deal with spam emails and robocalls has probably paused for a moment before putting contact information down on a form. I have an old Hotmail address I use to catch spam if I’m relative certain that something looks shady. I give out my home phone number freely because I never answer it. These pieces of personal data have been sacrificed in order to provide me Continue reading

IoT market keeps growing, with no end in sight

With all the hype it’s getting, you might think the Internet of Things (IoT) simply couldn’t gain any more momentum. Well, think again, because new market research and a wave of global IoT investments from sovereign nations and top-name companies keeps on accelerating the IoT momentum.Growth, growth and more growth First off, IHS Markit has published a new ebook in which it predicts serious growth for IoT: “The number of connected IoT devices worldwide will jump 12 percent on average annually, from nearly 27 billion in 2017 to 125 billion in 2030.”According to the ebook, titled “The Internet of Things: a movement, not a market,” (pdf) that growth “is impacting virtually all stages of industry and nearly all market areas — from raw materials to production to distribution and even the consumption of final goods.” To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware NSX/Kubernetes and F5 – A Cloud Native App Integration

Introduction

When Bob Dylan wrote back in the 60’s “times they are a-changin” it’s very possible he knew how true that would be today.  Last week, we saw a few things announced in the container technology space during the DockerCon event in Copenhagen – but one thing that I believe came as a surprise to many was Docker’s announcement to begin including Kubernetes in Docker Enterprise edition sometime in early 2018.  This doesn’t concede or mark the death of Docker’s own scheduling and orchestration platform, Docker Swarm, but it does underscore what we’ve heard from many of our customers for quite some time now – almost every IT organization that is using/evaluating containers has jumped on the Kubernetes bandwagon.  In fact, many of you are probably already familiar with the integration supported today with NSX-T 2.0 and Kubernetes from the post that Yves did earlier in the year…

In the past few years, we’ve heard a lot about this idea of digital transformation and what it means for today’s enterprise.  Typically, a part of this transformation is something called infrastructure modernization, and this happens because most IT environments today have some hurdles that need to Continue reading

Technology Short Take 89

Welcome to Technology Short Take 89! I have a collection of newer materials and some older materials this time around, but hopefully all of them are still useful. (I needed to do some housekeeping on my Instapaper account, which is where I bookmark stuff that frequently lands here.) Enjoy!

Networking

  • This is a slightly older post providing an overview of container networking, but still quite relevant. Julia has a very conversational style that works well when explaining new topics to readers, I think.
  • Russell Bryant has a post on Open Virtual Network (OVN), a project within the Open vSwitch (OVS) community. If you’re not familiar with OVN, this is a good post with which to start.

Servers/Hardware

Hmm…I didn’t find anything again this time around. Perhaps I should remove this section?

Security

  • This blog post discusses some of the new network security functionality available in vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) version 1.2; specifically, the new container network firewall functionality.
  • The NIST and DHS have teamed up on some efforts to secure BGP; more information is available in this article.
  • When I was using Fedora, I needed some useful information on firewall-cmd, and found this article to Continue reading
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