IDG Contributor Network: 5 software licensing challenges in the next generation network

Every day we hear how the network is changing. Virtualization, Cloud, Software-defined Networking, the Internet of Things — it’s clear big transformational change is happening.   The technical aspects of these solutions seem to get the most attention, but if you manage IT/Network cost and delivery for a living, your success may depend more on understanding the changing network business models that accompany these new technologies and how to adapt your IT operations.I’ve assembled below what I think are five of the top operational challenges facing IT managers in the next generation network. Some of these are blocking and tackling fundamentals (excuse the seasonal American football analogy), while others are more strategic in nature. I’ll present a short rationale for why these are my top 5. I’d love to hear your perspective.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Liveblog: Terraform Abstractions for Safety and Power

This is a liveblog for the HashiConf 2017 session titled “Terraform Abstractions for Safety and Power.” The speaker is Calvin French-Owen, Founder and co-CTO at Segment.

French-Owen starts by describing Segment, and providing a quick overview of Segment’s use of Terraform. Segment is all on AWS, and is leveraging ECS (Elastic Container Service) to schedule containers. Segment’s journey with Terraform started about 2.5 years ago. They now have 30-50 developers interacting with Terraform weekly, and Terraform is managing tens of thousands of AWS resources.

Digging into the meat of the presentation, French-Owens starts by answering the question, “Why is safety such a big deal?” There’s more to the puzzle than just preventing downtime. To illustrate that point, French-Owens shares some conclusions from an academic paper that explores why developers choose software programs. It turns out that to scale adoption, you must reduce the risk of adoption (developers avoid programs based on risk).

Naturally, French-Owens talks about how Terraform can “feel scary” since it’s so easy to destroy a bunch of infrastructure with only terraform destroy.

Before moving into a discussion on how to make Terraform feel less scary, French-Owens first covers some “Terraform nouns” (HCL, HashiCorp Configuration Continue reading

Cloudflare and Google Offer App Developers $100,000 in Cloud Platform Credits

When Cloudflare started, our company needed two things: an initial group of users, and the finances to fund our development. We know most developers face the same issues. The Cloudflare Apps Platform solves the first problem by allowing third parties to develop applications that can be delivered across Cloudflare's edge network to any of the six million sites powered by Cloudflare. The Cloudflare Developer Fund alleviates the second by giving developers the financial support they need to fund their company. Today, we are excited to announce another initiative that will make it possible for developers to make their app dreams a reality.

Cloudflare and Google Cloud are working together to offer developers the resources needed to quickly launch and scale Cloudflare Apps. This partnership will give any Cloudflare Apps developer the chance to access a wide range of benefits including $3k - $100k of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for one year at no cost. Some startups will also be eligible for 24/7 technical support, and access to GCP’s technical solutions team. This supports a core belief of the Cloudflare Apps initiative: we want developers to focus on building great Apps, not worry about paying for infrastructure. Hundreds of startups have Continue reading

BGP in Large-Scale Data Centers

The post BGP in Large-Scale Data Centers appeared first on Noction.

Liveblog: Journey to the Cloud with Packer and Terraform

This is a liveblog of the HashiConf 2017 breakout session titled “Journey to the Cloud with Packer and Terraform,” presented by Nadeem Ahmad, a senior software developer at Box.

Ahmad starts with a quick review of Box, but (thankfully) transitions quickly to his particular team at Box (the Productivity Engineering team). His team’s customers are the software developers at Box, and it’s his team’s job to help make them more productive and efficient. One of the tools that Ahmad’s team built was a tool called Cluster Runner, which is intended to streamline running unit and integration tests on the code the developers were writing.

This brings Ahmad to the crux of this presentation, which is telling the story of how Box went from a bare-metal environment to a cloud-based architecture. The purpose of this migration was to address some of the limitations of their bare-metal environment (inelastic, divergent host configurations over time, etc.). Box leveraged Platform9 to build an OpenStack-based private cloud, with the intent of switching to AWS, GCP, or Azure in the future as private cloud resources aged out.

Ahmad next goes into why Box selected the process they did; they wanted to move away from configuration Continue reading

Introducing oVirt 4.2.0 Alpha

On September 28, the oVirt project released version 4.2.0 Alpha, available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4, CentOS Linux 7.4, or similar.

This pre-release version should not be used in production, and is not feature complete.

oVirt is the open source virtualization solution that provides an awesome KVM management interface for multi-node virtualization. This maintenance version is super stable and there are some nice new features.

what's new in oVirt 4.2.0?

Here's an overview of the new main features:

The Administration Portal has been redesigned from scratch using Patternfly, a widely adopted standard in web application design that promotes consistency and usability across IT applications, through UX patterns and widgets. The result is a cleaner, more intuitive and user-friendly user interface. The old horizontal menu has been replaced by a two-level vertical menu. The system tree is gone, and its functionality has been integrated into the vertical menus. Here are some screenshots:

Dashboard

Virtual Machines View

Adding a New Virtual Machine

Storage View

An all new VM Portal for non-admin users - designed with React-based UI and Patternfly principles - replaces the existing User Portal. Built with performance and ease of use in mind, Continue reading

Recognizing Internet visionaries, innovators, and leaders from around the world

As the Internet Society celebrates 25 years of advocacy for an open, globally-connected, and secure Internet, we are honored to recognize some of the trailblazers who have fueled the Internet’s historic growth.

On September 18, the Internet Society gathered to honor the fourth class of Internet Hall of Fame Inductees at UCLA, where nearly 50 years ago the first message was sent over the Internet’s predecessor, the ARPANET.  Over the years, the Internet has evolved thanks to the tireless efforts of individuals, including these inductees, who believed in the potential of an open Internet.

Representing 10 countries, the 14 individuals who comprise the 2017 inductee class are computer scientists, academics, inventors and authors who have advanced the Internet with key technical contributions,  fostered its global reach and increased the general public’s understanding of how it works—in turn accelerating global accessibility and usage among us all.

Ultimately, the success of the Internet depends on the people behind it, and these inductees personify the pioneering spirit of the ‘Innovators’ and ‘Global Connectors’ that have been so instrumental in bringing us this unprecedented technology. They are some of the earliest Internet evangelists and their work has been the foundation for so Continue reading

Hyperconvergence’s Missing Piece

Help managing IoT ranges from full-stack offerings to platform services

The tech industry’s approach to becoming a part of the IoT landscape is reminiscent of a quilting bee – a large number of participants approaching a central problem from a wide array of different angles and taking on different areas of responsibility.And that’s a good fit for the IoT market – companies have wildly diverse sets of needs, requiring a commensurately diverse set of technological capabilities. A factory might need a sophisticated, integrated system that can both manage complicated manufacturing equipment and track products, while a nearby hospital might need to bring expensive medical equipment onto the network.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: 3 real-world examples of IoT rolled out in the enterprise; 5 IoT trends that will define 2018+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HashiConf 2017 Day 1 Keynote

This is a liveblog from the day 1 keynote (general session) at HashiConf 2017 in Austin, TX. I’m attending HashiConf this year as an “ordinary attendee” (not working or speaking), and so I’m looking forward to being able to actually sit in on sessions for a change.

At 9:43am, the keynote kicks off with someone (I don’t know who, he doesn’t identify himself) who provides some logistics about the event, the Wi-Fi, asking attendees to tweet, etc. After a couple minutes, he brings out Mitchell Hashimoto, Founder and co-CTO of HashiCorp, onto the stage.

Hashimoto starts out his talk by reviewing a bit of the history and growth of both HashiConf (and, indirectly, HashiCorp). Last year, HashiCorp has grown from about 50 employees to now over 130 employees. HashiCorp has also seen significant community growth, Hashimoto says, and he reviews the growth in in the use of HashiCorp’s products (Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, Vault, Consul, and Nomad). Hashimoto also reviews the growth in their commercial products (Consul Enterprise, Vault Enterprise, and Terraform Enterprise). Hashimoto also discusses HashiCorp’s commitment to open source software and the desire to properly balance commercial (paid) products versus free (open source) projects.

Hashimoto now transitions his discussion Continue reading

New Website Features

One of the reasons I migrated this site to Hugo a little over a month ago was that Hugo offered the ability to do things with the site that I couldn’t (easily) do with Jekyll (via GitHub Pages). Over the last few days, I’ve taken advantage of Hugo’s flexibility to add a couple new features to the site.

New functionality that I’ve added includes:

1. Category- and tag-specific RSS feeds: Hugo can easily generate category- and tag-specific RSS feeds, enabling readers to subscribe to the RSS feed for a particular category or tag. On the taxonomy list pages—these are the pages that list all the posts found in a particular category or tag—there’s now a small link to the RSS feed for that specific category or tag. (As an example, checkout the list of posts in the “General” category.)

2. (Truly) Related posts: The “Related Posts” section at the bottom of posts has returned, thanks to new functionality found in Hugo 0.27 (functionality that was, apparently, inspired in part by my experiences—see the docs page). This section lists 3 posts that are considered by Hugo to be related, based on the category and tags assigned to the posts.

It’s Continue reading

Improving BGP Convergence without Tweaking BGP Timers

One of the perks of my online courses is the lifetime access to course Slack team, and you’d amazed by the variety of questions asked there. Not so long ago I got one on BGP timers:

The BGP timers I’m using in my network are 5 and 15 seconds, and I am not sure if it's a good practice to reduce them even more.

You should always ask yourself this set of questions before tweaking a nerd knob:

Network Access Control- NAC (Aruba Vs Cisco)

Watch the Internet Hall of Fame (IHOF) Awards Tonight From L.A.

Who will be inducted into the 2017 Internet Hall of Fame? Who will be recognized for their contributions to the Internet? Find out today at 5:30pm PDT (00:30 UTC) through live video streams. There are multiple options to watch:

InterCommunity 2017 live stream

Livestream.com

YouTube

Facebook Live

The IHOF award ceremony will be recorded and available for later viewing on Livestream, YouTube and Facebook.

Additionally, there is a live transcription service:

View live transcript

You can also follow IHOF activity on Twitter via the @Internet_HOF account and #IHOF2017 hashtag.

The IHOF awards ceremony begins 24 hours of our InterCommunity 2017 event. View the ICOMM 2017 schedule to see what will be happening over the time.

The post Watch the Internet Hall of Fame (IHOF) Awards Tonight From L.A. appeared first on Internet Society.

Is M8 The Last Hurrah For Oracle Sparc?

Intel is not the only system maker that is looking to converge its processor lines to make life a bit simpler for itself and for its customers as well as to save some money on engineering work. Oracle has just announced its Sparc M8 processor, and while this is an interesting chip, what is also interesting is that a Sparc T8 companion processor aimed at entry and midrange systems was not already introduced and does not appear to be in the works.

There is plenty a little weird here. The new Sparc T8 systems are, in fact, going to be …

Is M8 The Last Hurrah For Oracle Sparc? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Pivotal Greenplum Analytic Database Adds Multicloud Support

Alibaba and Tencent have integrated the open source technology into their clouds.

Ericsson’s Rima Qureshi Will Become Verizon’s Chief Strategy Officer

She joins former Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg who also moved to Verizon.

Worth Reading: Signposts on the roadmap to 10TB/sec

The world of Ethernet switching and routing used to be more predictable than just about any other part of the datacenter, but for the past decade the old adage – ten times the bandwidth for three times the cost – has not held. While 100 Gb/sec Ethernet was launched in 2010 and saw a fair amount of uptake amongst telecom suppliers for their backbones, the hyperscalers decided, quite correctly, that 100 Gb/sec Ethernet was too expensive and opted for 40 Gb/sec instead. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @ The Next Platform

The post Worth Reading: Signposts on the roadmap to 10TB/sec appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Chambers stepping down from Cisco’s board

John Chambers, who served two decades as CEO of Cisco and for the last two years has been executive chairman, announced today that he will be leaving Cisco’s board of directors this year.Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins will be appointed chairman of Cisco’s board of directors when Chambers vacates the position.(Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins is seen on the left in the above photo with outgoing Executive Chairman John Chambers.) “With Chuck Robbins as CEO and Chairman, the company is now clearly his,” says Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research, a Cisco watcher. “Robbins will have the ability to move the company in the direction he wants to.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Chambers stepping down from Cisco’s board

John Chambers, who served two decades as CEO of Cisco and for the last two years has been executive chairman, announced today that he will be leaving Cisco’s board of directors this year.Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins will be appointed chairman of Cisco’s board of directors when Chambers vacates the position.(Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins is seen on the left in the above photo with outgoing Executive Chairman John Chambers.) “With Chuck Robbins as CEO and Chairman, the company is now clearly his,” says Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research, a Cisco watcher. “Robbins will have the ability to move the company in the direction he wants to.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here