Up next: Disposable IoT

What if every package shipped contained a $0.20 tracker chip that could report when and approximately where the package was opened?That's a service that internet-of-things wireless network operator Sigfox thinks its partners could offer over the next year.It demonstrated a prototype wireless module contained in a cardboard envelope at its partner meeting in Prague on Tuesday, triggering the sending of a text message when the envelope was opened.Ripping open the envelope, Sigfox scientific director Christophe Fourtet showed off what he described as "an ultra-thin battery, ultra-thin contacts, and an ultra-low cost module, a few tens of cents." Seconds later, his phone buzzed to report delivery of the package.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Up next: Disposable IoT

What if every package shipped contained a $0.20 tracker chip that could report when and approximately where the package was opened?That's a service that internet-of-things wireless network operator Sigfox thinks its partners could offer over the next year.It demonstrated a prototype wireless module contained in a cardboard envelope at its partner meeting in Prague on Tuesday, triggering the sending of a text message when the envelope was opened.Ripping open the envelope, Sigfox scientific director Christophe Fourtet showed off what he described as "an ultra-thin battery, ultra-thin contacts, and an ultra-low cost module, a few tens of cents." Seconds later, his phone buzzed to report delivery of the package.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Managing users on Linux systems

Your Linux users may not be raging bulls, but keeping them happy is always a challenge as it involves managing their accounts, monitoring their access rights, tracking down the solutions to problems they run into, and keeping them informed about important changes on the systems they use. Here are some of the tasks and tools that make the job a little easier.Configuring accounts Adding and removing accounts is the easier part of managing users, but there are still a lot of options to consider. Whether you use a desktop tool or go with command line options, the process is largely automated. You can set up a new user with a command as simple as adduser jdoe and a number of things will happen. John’s account will be created using the next available UID and likely populated with a number of files that help to configure his account. When you run the adduser command with a single argument (the new username), it will prompt for some additional information and explain what it is doing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BrandPost: When It Comes To SD-WANs, WAN Optimization Should Be A No-Brainer

As someone who has been following enterprise WAN architectures for decades, I find their evolution fascinating, especially the number of new technologies that have been deployed in isolation. For example, WAN optimization and SD-WANs are often discussed as separate solutions.  From my perspective, I can’t fathom why a business would deploy an SD-WAN and not implement WAN optimization as part of it.  If you’re going to go through the work of modernizing your WAN architecture, then why wouldn’t you integrate optimization technologies into your deployment right from the start?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ANSIBLE + MICROSOFT AZURE NEWS

Ansible + Azure

The Azure and Ansible teams are collaborating on several interesting projects that we want to share. And if you joined us for AnsibleFest San Francisco earlier this month, you met both teams and heard some of the news. More on that below.

MS Ignite 2017

If you use Ansible to manage Azure and Windows environments, then hopefully you can join us at Microsoft Ignite this week in Orlando.

Ansible’s Matt Davis will co-present with Microsoft’s Hari Jayaraman, to discuss popular DevOps tools customers use to implement infrastructure as code processes in Azure. And the Ansible team will be in the Red Hat booth (#527) to demo automating Azure environments or any other questions you may have. 

Session Info:

Infrastructure as Code

Friday, September 29

10:15 AM - 11:00 AM

Hyatt Regency Windermere W

New Azure Modules in 2.4

One of the many announcements at AnsibleFest included the 16 new Azure modules contributed by the Azure team. The focus of the team was to cover the base use cases for Ansible users running workloads at scale in Azure.

New modules were added to manage Azure services:

  • Availability sets
  • Scale sets
  • Authentication (ACS)
  • Functions
  • DNS
  • Load Balancer
  • Managed Disks

Continue reading

Celebrating 25 Years of Advocacy

It’s been a week of jubilation: The Internet Society celebrated 25 years of advocacy for an open, globally-connected, and secure Internet with events that crisscrossed the globe. The festivities kicked off at the University of California Los Angeles campus where in 1969 the first message was sent over ARPANET – the Internet’s predecessor.

On 18 September, the 25 Under 25 award ceremony honored young people around the world for their extraordinary work. Born in the age of the Internet, these everyday heroes are passionate about using it to make a positive impact on their communities. Their projects include connecting people with disabilities to employment opportunities, using AI to identify fake news, and humanizing issues affecting refugees and the LGBT community.

Learn more about the 25 Under 25 awardees

Watch the 25 Under 25 Award Ceremony

Just a few hours later, the 2017 Internet Society Global Internet Report: Paths to Our Digital Future was launched. The interactive report, the result of in-depth interviews, roundtables, and surveys conducted in 160 countries and 21 regions around the world, offers a glimpse into how the future of the Internet might impact humanity. The report encourages you to explore paths to our digital future, asks thought-provoking Continue reading

BrandPost: Find the Path to Networking Nirvana

Almost all enterprise-class organizations are sitting atop a pile of existing network infrastructure, dealing with the headaches of a complex hardware lifecycle. Many would like to find a smooth path to a virtual networking future in which hardware is no longer a barrier to change, but instead a gateway to flexible network options. Ask enterprise IT decision makers these days to select from a menu of connectivity options and odds are the top choice will be an “All of the above” response. They want bandwidth on demand, a manageable number of connectivity options to suit a distributed workforce, scalability, and the lowest cost. That networking nirvana may not be as far in the future as you once thought.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

At Ignite, Microsoft extends hybrid cloud beyond just infrastructure

For years Microsoft has talked about, previewed and at some times delayed the release of its Azure Stack hybrid cloud computing platform.But this week at its Ignite conference in Orlando Microsoft announced that Azure Stack is now shipping to customers, and in doing so the company is pitching its hybrid cloud platform as being about more than just connecting customer data centers to the public cloud.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Azure Stack: Microsoft’s private-cloud platform and what IT pros need to know about it +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Exciting new things for Docker with Windows Server 1709

What a difference a year makes… last September, Microsoft and Docker launched Docker Enterprise Edition (EE), a Containers-as-a-Service platform for IT that manages and secures diverse applications across disparate infrastructures, for Windows Server 2016. Since then we’ve continued to work together and Windows Server 1709 contains several enhancements for Docker customers.

Docker Enterprise Edition Preview

To experiment with the new Docker and Windows features, a preview build of Docker is required. Here’s how to install it on Windows Server 1709 (this will also work on Insider builds):

Install-Module DockerProvider
Install-Package Docker -ProviderName DockerProvider -RequiredVersion preview

To run Docker Windows containers in production on any Windows Server version, please stick to Docker EE 17.06.

Docker Linux Containers on Windows

A key focus of Windows Server version 1709 is support for Linux containers on Windows. We’ve already blogged about how we’re supporting Linux containers on Windows with the LinuxKit project.

To try Linux Containers on Windows Server 1709, install the preview Docker package and enable the feature. The preview Docker EE package includes a full LinuxKit system (all 13MB of it) for use when running Docker Linux containers.

[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("LCOW_SUPPORTED", "1", "Machine")
Restart-Service Docker

To disable, just remove the environment variable:

[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("LCOW_SUPPORTED",  Continue reading

Yes to databases in containers – Microsoft SQL Server available on Docker Store

Microsoft SQL Server 2017 is now available for the first time on multiple platforms: Windows, Linux and Docker. Your databases can be in containers with no lengthy setup and no prerequisites, and using Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) to modernize your database delivery. The speed and efficiency benefits of Docker and containerizing apps that IT Pros and developers have been enjoying for years are now available to DBAs.

 

Try the Docker SQL Server lab now and see how database containers start in seconds, and how you can package your own schemas as Docker images.

 

If you’ve ever sat through a SQL Server install, you know why this is a big deal: SQL Server takes a while to set up, and running multiple independent SQL Server instances on the same host is not simple. This complicates maintaining dev, test and CI/CD systems where tests and experiments might break the SQL Server instance.

With SQL Server in Docker containers, all that changes. Getting SQL Server is as simple as running `docker image pull`, and you can start as many instances on a host as you want, each of them fresh and clean, and tear them back down when you’re done.

Database engines Continue reading

The Serverless Revolution Will Make Us All Developers

At Build 2017, Microsoft’s annual and influential developer event, CEO Satya Nadella introduced the idea of the “intelligent cloud” and “intelligent edge.” This vision of software’s immediate future considers the plethora of smart devices – cell phones, appliances, home environment controls, business machinery and the like – that permeate and, in large part, orchestrate our daily lives.

We all know about the Internet of Things. Today, the ability to glean valuable business insights from seemingly mundane device telemetry is impressive. Consider the case of the connected cows. Researchers at a farm attached pedometers to dairy cows, largely to monitor …

The Serverless Revolution Will Make Us All Developers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Adcash – 1 Trillion HTTP Requests Per Month

This is a guest post by Arnaud Granal, CTO at Adcash.

Adcash is a worldwide advertising platform. It belongs to a category called DSP (demand-side platform). A DSP is a platform where anyone can buy traffic from many different adnetworks.

The advertising ecosystem is very fragmented behind the two leaders (Google and Facebook) and DSPs help to solve this fragmentation problem.

If you want to run a campaign across 50 adnetworks, then you can imagine the hassle to do it on each adnetwork (different targetings, minimum to spend, quality issues, etc). What we do, is consolidate the ad inventory of the internet in one place and expose it through a self-service unified interface.

We are a technology provider; if you want to buy native advertisement, if you want to buy popups, if you want to buy banners, then it is your choice. The platform is free to use, we take a % on the success.

A platform like Adcash has to run on a very lean budget, you do not earn big money, you get micro-cents per transaction. It is not unusual to earn less than 0.0001 USD per impression.

Oh, by the way, we have 100 ms Continue reading

Pub/Sub model could connect IoT devices without carrier networks

Three characteristics of the Internet of Things (IoT) differentiate it from industrial automation. IoT devices are inexpensive. IoT devices can be ubiquitously connected everyplace and anyplace. IoT devices have inexpensive or zero-cost deployment. It explains why we see so few IoT networks and why most of the industrial IoT forecasts are measurements of industrial automation that we have had for decades.The first one, with the exception of the issue of strong security, is easy. The second two, though, in New Jersey parlance — says easy does hard.Ubiquitous connectivity is talked about, and there is a glimmer of hope presented by Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN) such as Senet that focus on both low-cost technology and a business model for entrepreneurial partners to deploy networks. But waiting for carriers to perfect and deploy 5G networks to build IoT solutions will delay innovators and prevent early adopters from building proof-of-concept and prototype networks essential for the iterative learning of technical methods, business cases and making financial projections of the benefits of IoT.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Pub/Sub model could connect IoT devices without carrier networks

Three characteristics of the Internet of Things (IoT) differentiate it from industrial automation. IoT devices are inexpensive. IoT devices can be ubiquitously connected everyplace and anyplace. IoT devices have inexpensive or zero-cost deployment. It explains why we see so few IoT networks and why most of the industrial IoT forecasts are measurements of industrial automation that we have had for decades.The first one, with the exception of the issue of strong security, is easy. The second two, though, in New Jersey parlance — says easy does hard.Ubiquitous connectivity is talked about, and there is a glimmer of hope presented by Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN) such as Senet that focus on both low-cost technology and a business model for entrepreneurial partners to deploy networks. But waiting for carriers to perfect and deploy 5G networks to build IoT solutions will delay innovators and prevent early adopters from building proof-of-concept and prototype networks essential for the iterative learning of technical methods, business cases and making financial projections of the benefits of IoT.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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