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HashiConf 2017 Day 2 Keynote

This is a liveblog of the day 2 keynote (general session) at HashiConf 2017 in Austin, TX. Speakers today will (apparently, based on the schedule) include someone from Amazon Web Services and Kelsey Hightower from Google.

The keynote starts off with a photo montage of attendees, sessions, and speakers from the previous day, focusing mostly on the evening party (a pretty traditional thing for most conferences). The photo montage is followed by a gentleman (he doesn’t identify himself) who kicks off the keynote by bringing out Seth Vargo, Director of Technical Advocacy at HashiCorp.

Vargo’s presentation is titled “The Ecological Impact of Compute,” and discusses the environmental impact of cloud computing and the pervasive use of computing/compute power around the world. Vargo presents statistics that show on-premises data centers actually consume more electricity than the mega-scale cloud providers, and that getting these people onto a cloud provider would actually reduce overall power consumption (and, by extension, environmental impacts related to power consumption). Toward the end of Vargo’s presentation, it starts to feel more like a sales pitch for Nomad couched in environmental awareness.

At this point, Vargo introduces Kelsey Hightower, Senior Developer Advocate from Google. Hightower’s talk is about “Hashinetes,” Continue reading

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Get Familiar with Docker Enterprise Edition Client Bundles

Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) is the only Containers as a Service (CaaS) Platform for IT that manages and secures diverse applications across disparate infrastructure, both on-premises and in the cloud.

There’s a little mentioned big feature in Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) that seems to always bring smiles to the room once it’s displayed. Before I tell you about it, let me first describe the use case. You’re a sysadmin managing a Docker cluster and you have the following requirements:

• Different individuals in your LDAP/AD need various levels of access to the containers/services in your cluster
• Some users need to be able to go inside the running containers.
• Some users just need to be able to see the logs
• You do NOT want to give SSH access to each host in your cluster.

Now, how do you achieve this? The answer, or feature rather, is a client bundle. When you do a docker version command you will see two entries. The client portion of the engine is able to connect to a local server AND a remote once a client bundle is invoked.

What is a client bundle?

A client bundle is a group of certificates downloadable directly from the Docker Universal Continue reading

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Episode 12 – The VAR Show

Value Added Resellers play a critical role as trusted adviser in the networking industry.  However, many customers don’t make the most of their VAR relationships.  In Episode 12, our hosts explore the VAR relationship with VAR engineers Zach Miller and Warren Jackson.  We explore the ups and downs VAR life for both resellers and customers.

 

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Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post Episode 12 – The VAR Show appeared first on Network Collective.

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Episode 12 – The VAR Show

Value Added Resellers play a critical role as trusted adviser in the networking industry.  However, many customers don’t make the most of their VAR relationships.  In Episode 12, our hosts explore the VAR relationship with VAR engineers Zach Miller and Warren Jackson.  We explore the ups and downs VAR life for both resellers and customers.

 

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Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post Episode 12 – The VAR Show appeared first on Network Collective.

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Netsil Taps Network Connections to Map Cloud, Container Traffic

Company claims its architecture provides superior APM against rivals AppDynamics and Dynatrace.

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Report confirms on-premises data center spending declined

Just a month ago we had research that indicated on-premises data center investments were dropping in priority as companies moved to the cloud. Now a second report confirms this suspicion that companies are de-emphasizing their on-premises data centers in favor of the cloud.The numbers come from Synergy Research, which show that spending on traditional, non-cloud data center hardware and software dropped 18 percent between the second quarters of 2015 and 2017. During that same period, public cloud spending grew 35 percent. The overall market for data center equipment grew by 5 percent to a total of more than $30 billion. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Report confirms on-premises data center spending declined

Just a month ago we had research that indicated on-premises data center investments were dropping in priority as companies moved to the cloud. Now a second report confirms this suspicion that companies are de-emphasizing their on-premises data centers in favor of the cloud.The numbers come from Synergy Research, which show that spending on traditional, non-cloud data center hardware and software dropped 18 percent between the second quarters of 2015 and 2017. During that same period, public cloud spending grew 35 percent. The overall market for data center equipment grew by 5 percent to a total of more than $30 billion. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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The Formidable FormBook Form Grabber

More and more we’ve been seeing references to a malware family known as FormBook. Per its advertisements it is an infostealer that steals form data from various web browsers and other applications. It is also a keylogger and can take screenshots. The malware code is […]

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#FuerzaMexico: A way to help Mexico Earthquake victims

Photo Credit: United Nations Photo (Flickr)

On September 19, 1985 Mexico City was hit with the most damaging earthquake in its history. Yesterday -exactly 32 years later- Mexico’s capital and neighbouring areas were hit again by a large earthquake that caused significant damage. While the scale of the destruction is still being assessed, countless people passed away and the lives of many have been disrupted. Today, many heroes are on the streets focusing on recovery and relief.

We at Cloudflare want to make it easy for people to help out those affected in central Mexico. The Mexico Earthquake app will allow visitors to your site to donate to one of the charities helping those impacted.

The Mexico Earthquake App takes two clicks to install and requires no code change. The charities listed are two well respected organizations that are on the ground helping people now.

Install Now

If you wanted to add your own custom list of charities for disaster relief or other causes, feel free to fork the source of this app and make your own.

#FuerzaMéxico: Una manera de apoyar a los damnificados del SismoMX

El 19 de septiembre de 1985 la Ciudad de México fue afectada por Continue reading

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IDG Contributor Network: Why chipmakers are taking IoT security Into their own hands

While much of the talk about the Internet of Things today concerns the economic growth and impending social change being fostered by it, IoT investors and enthusiast alike are increasingly turning their attention towards network security. One critical aspect of this security-debate, keeping the microchips which essentially “run” our connected society secure, is getting the much-needed attention it deserves for the first time.So what exactly are chipmakers doing to keep their products, and the IoT-at-large, secure? Are our networks still vulnerable to the kinds of botnet attacks which rocked the world as recently as a few months ago, and can they even really be secured? A quick dive into the world of chipmakers shows just how seriously today’s top innovators are taking the issue of IoT security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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IDG Contributor Network: When evaluating SD-WAN, look beyond the features table

Like many IT products, SD-WAN products can sound insanely alike. Sit through presentations and read through the literature and then ask yourself what’s the practical difference between each vendor’s implementation? It can be difficult question to answer even for people in the business of answering those questions.A common approach for an initial cut in an evaluation process is to reduce the product list by focusing on features. By creating a table of specific product specifications, assigning a weighted scoring, many of my customer have come up with a score and by extension a tool for eliminating some products from their selection process.Such an approach while valuable in some respects, is insufficient even for an initial cut. There are too many elements to a purchase that are not measured by a features table. Or, there might be important unfamiliar features that you forget to include in the table.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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IDG Contributor Network: When evaluating SD-WAN, look beyond the features table

Like many IT products, SD-WAN products can sound insanely alike. Sit through presentations and read through the literature and then ask yourself what’s the practical difference between each vendor’s implementation? It can be difficult question to answer even for people in the business of answering those questions.A common approach for an initial cut in an evaluation process is to reduce the product list by focusing on features. By creating a table of specific product specifications, assigning a weighted scoring, many of my customer have come up with a score and by extension a tool for eliminating some products from their selection process.Such an approach while valuable in some respects, is insufficient even for an initial cut. There are too many elements to a purchase that are not measured by a features table. Or, there might be important unfamiliar features that you forget to include in the table.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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9 Insightful Networking Blogs to Follow

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Arista Any Cloud Networking – Our Next Frontier

The modern cloud networking world is vastly different from traditional enterprise IT, and the gap is getting wider everyday. How does one truly scale across millions of machines and workloads globally? A decade ago, Arista pioneered the new software driven networking era and the same challenges now exist not only across the LAN intra-datacenters but also inter-datacenters via wide area networks (WANS). Although we have never promoted “SD-LAN” nor understood the “SD-WAN” hype, Arista has redefined software driven networking and pioneered the convergence between LANs and WANS.

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Arista Any Cloud Networking – Our Next Frontier

The modern cloud networking world is vastly different from traditional enterprise IT, and the gap is getting wider everyday. How does one truly scale across millions of machines and workloads globally? A decade ago, Arista pioneered the new software driven networking era and the same challenges now exist not only across the LAN intra-datacenters but also inter-datacenters via wide area networks (WANS). Although we have never promoted “SD-LAN” nor understood the “SD-WAN” hype, Arista has redefined software driven networking and pioneered the convergence between LANs and WANS.

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REVIEW: Mojo wireless intrusion prevention system

Network managers don't need a primer on the threats that could befall their networks, from man-in-the-middle threats from rogue APs to the global ransomware epidemic. It's a bad situation that shows no signs of improving any time soon. It's not surprising, then, that Wireless Intrusion Prevention Systems are becoming increasingly popular.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

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Start Your Network Automation Journey by Mastering Fundamentals

If you’re a long-time reader of my blog you probably know that I believe in learning the fundamentals before trying to do anything else (like Google-and-Paste spaghetti wall approach), so you could imagine my delight when I got this feedback from an engineer watching (free) Network Programmability 101 webinar:

I was expecting a technical webinar, so I was a little bit disappointed at first with a “meta” webinar, but as I got through I was more than happy; learning such a meta sphere or getting to know other mindsets is very useful for me. The webinar pushed me to think outside of my little world and to open my mind.

That's exactly what I'm trying to achieve with the high-level webinars. So glad to hear it worked ;))

Read more ...

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Troubleshooting with Docker Swarm + NetQ

Say you are a network engineer, and you recently were told your company will be building applications using a distributed/microservices architecture with containers moving forward. You know how important this is for the developers — it gives them tremendous flexibility to develop and deploy money making applications. However, what does this mean for the network? It can be much more technically challenging to plan, operate, and manage a network with containers than a traditional network. The containers may need to talk with each other and to the outside world, and you won’t even know IF they exist, let alone WHERE they exist! Yet, the network engineer is responsible for the containers connectivity and high availability.

Since the containers are deployed inside a host — on a virtual ethernet network — they can be invisible to network engineers. Orchestration tools such as Docker Swarm, Apache Mesos or Kubernetes make it very easy to spin up and take down containers from various hosts on a network – and may even do this without human intervention. Many containers are also ephemeral and the traffic patterns between the servers hosting containers can be very dynamic and constantly shifting throughout the network.

Cumulus Networks understands Continue reading

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The Power9 Rollout Begins With Summit And Sierra

At the end of July, Oak Ridge National Laboratories started receiving the first racks of servers that will eventually be expanded to become the “Summit” supercomputer, the long-awaited replacement to the “Titan” hybrid CPU-GPU system that was built by Cray and installed back in the fall of 2012. So, technically speaking, IBM has begun shipping its Power9-based “Witherspoon” system, the kicker to the Power8-based “Minksy” machine that Big Blue unveiled in September 2016 as a precursor and a testbed for the Power9 iron.

Given that IBM is shipping Summit nodes to Oak Ridge and has also started shipping similar (but …

The Power9 Rollout Begins With Summit And Sierra was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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Microsoft launches data security technology for Windows Server, Azure

Data is at its greatest risk of being compromised when it is being used, when moving from a secure database around the servers or apps in memory. So, Microsoft is launching a new technology for Windows Server and Azure that protects the data while it’s being processed. Microsoft claims the service, called Azure confidential computing, makes it the first public cloud provider to offer encryption of data while in use. Encrypting data while it is being manipulated is pretty CPU-intensive, and there is no word on the performance impact of this service. “Despite advanced cybersecurity controls and mitigations, some customers are reluctant to move their most sensitive data to the cloud for fear of attacks against their data when it is in use,” Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure CTO, wrote in a company blog post. “With confidential computing, they can move the data to Azure knowing that it is safe not only at rest, but also in use from [various] threats.” To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here