IDG Contributor Network: MPLS or IPsec VPN: which is the best?

Scouring the online IT forums, it’s hard not to get sucked-in to all the talk about how MPLS is too expensive and can easily be replaced with high-bandwidth, fiber Internet circuits and an IPsec VPN. If you currently have an MPLS network, it almost makes you want to throw a blanket over it and hope nobody notices your “antiquated” Wide Area Network. [blushing]The final straw was when you read how username Pauly-Packet-Loss just saved thousands by scrapping his company’s MPLS and it works great. [single tear rolls down your cheek]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: MPLS or IPsec VPN: which is the best?

Scouring the online IT forums, it’s hard not to get sucked-in to all the talk about how MPLS is too expensive and can easily be replaced with high-bandwidth, fiber Internet circuits and an IPsec VPN. If you currently have an MPLS network, it almost makes you want to throw a blanket over it and hope nobody notices your “antiquated” Wide Area Network. [blushing]The final straw was when you read how username Pauly-Packet-Loss just saved thousands by scrapping his company’s MPLS and it works great. [single tear rolls down your cheek]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Video: Using REST API with PowerShell

PowerShell is a great scripting environment if your vendor provided PowerShell libraries to control their software or devices… but what if all you got is REST API (example: Nexus switches)?

We’ll conveniently ignore the challenges of managing devices that use 30-year-old non-scriptable CLI.

Read more ...

Welcome to the new Internet Society website!

It’s my enormous pleasure to welcome you to the new Internet Society website.

The completely new-look, new-feel website is a far cry from our old site. Many months in the making, it’s been designed and built with some key attributes in mind. We’ve simplified and improved the structure to make things easier to find. It highlights the issues we work on and shows the news and resources you need in those areas. We’ve made the site mobile friendly and accessible to accepted standards. We’ve also introduced a cleaner design containing more graphics and more visual components to bring our content to life.

We’ve consolidated pages where it makes sense to do so to provide a sleeker, more streamlined experience. We’ve made it easier to find information about what we do regionally and around the world. Importantly, “Take Action” is now prominent throughout the site to help you understand what you can do to support our work and shape the future of the Internet.

What’s more, we’re doing all this in three languages – English, French and Spanish!

Everything about the site is different, and – I hope you agree – refreshing. It delivers an engaging experience and draws attention Continue reading

Worth Reading: Retrieval and relevance

Our expectations for search have gotten higher and higher since Google has gotten better and better. These days, very few people search beyond the first page. If those search results aren’t good enough, they’ll either try again or they’ll quit. As Search Engine Watch reports, “Page 1 results garnered 92 percent of all traffic from the average search, with traffic dropping off by 95 percent for Page 2.” —Faizan Ahmed @ Free Code Camp

The post Worth Reading: Retrieval and relevance appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Reaction: Networking Vendors are Only Good for the Free Lunch

I ran into an article over at the Register this week which painted the entire networking industry, from vendors to standards bodies, with a rather broad brush. While there are true bits and pieces in the piece, some balance seems to be in order. The article recaps a presentation by Peyton Koran at Electronic Arts (I suspect the Register spiced things up a little for effect); the line of argument seems to run something like this—

  • Vendors are only paying attention to larger customers, and/or a large group of customers asking for the same thing; if you are not in either group, then you get no service from any vendor
  • Vendors further bake secret sauce into their hardware, making it impossible to get what you want from your network without buying from them
  • Standards bodies are too slow, and hence useless
  • People are working around this, and getting to the inter-operable networks they really want, by moving to the cloud
  • There is another way: just treat your networking gear like servers, and write your own protocols—after all you probably already have programmers on staff who know how to do this

Let’s think about these a little more deeply.

Vendors only Continue reading

Have you noticed there’s a lot more collaboration going on these days? Why?

 

Thanks to zero marginal cost digital production methods, we're seeing content markets—for the first time—develop in conditions free from supply and price constraints.

In the process we've learned something: consumers have an unquenchable thirst for new content; content creators are willing to oblige with an equally prodigious stream of new content; platforms that best control access to the customer are the biggest winners; the reward for content creators varies drastically by medium and platform.

For consumers, life is now a streaming fixed priced buffet of unending variety and diversion.

For producers, the changes have been terrifying. Old modes have crumbled, leaving everyone scrambling to figure out what, if anything, comes next.

To adapt, content creators are learning to exploit capture loops, bundling, and collaboration to extract money from a digital economy that has collectively decided it rarely wants to pay artists directly for their content anymore.

The most highly evolved form of digital content platform strategies can be found in the book market. Why? Because Amazon.

Kindle Unlimited is the Clear Platform Winner

IDG Contributor Network: How IoT is impacting mobile app development

Innovators of all stripes have tapped into the Internet of Things (IoT) as they develop the best products and services of the 21st century, but few have made as much use of the IoT as today’s mobile app developers have. By exploiting the ubiquity of today’s IoT, mobile app developers are finding hordes of new customers by the day, and show little signs of slowing down their industry’s growth.So how exactly are these app developers using the IoT to make their jobs easier? What are the common habits of successful developers, and what IoT flukes have they learned to avoid? A quick look at how the IoT and mobile development go hand in hand shows just how far this duo could go in the tech world.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Preview: Linux Containers on Windows

Microsoft is getting ready for the next big update for Windows Server (check out today’s complimentary Microsoft blog post) and some of the new features are very exciting for Docker users. One of the most important enhancements is that Docker can now run Linux containers on Windows, using Hyper-V technology.

Running Docker Linux containers on Windows requires a minimal Linux kernel and userland to host the container processes. This is exactly what the LinuxKit toolkit was designed for: creating secure, lean and portable Linux subsystems that can provide Linux container functionality as a component of a container platform.

We’ve been busy prototyping LinuxKit support for Docker Linux containers on Windows and have a working preview for you to try. This is still a work in progress, and requires either the recently announced  “Windows Server Insider” or Windows 10 Insider builds.

 

Running Docker Linux Containers on Windows with LinuxKit

The instructions below have been tested on Windows 10 and Windows Server Insider builds 16278 and 16281.

Be sure to install Docker for Windows (Windows 10) or Docker Enterprise Edition (Windows Server Insider) before starting.

Setup Docker and LinuxKit

A preview build of  LinuxKit is available by simply running Continue reading

Custom Server Makers Set The Datacenter Pace

Makers of tightly coupled, shared memory machines can make all of the arguments they want about how it is much more efficient and easier to program these NUMA machines than it is to do distributed computing across a cluster of more loosely coupled boxes, but for the most part, the IT market doesn’t care.

Distributed computing, in its more modern implementation of frameworks running on virtual machines or containers – or both – is by far the norm, both in the datacenter and on the public clouds. You don’t have to look any further than the latest server sales statistics …

Custom Server Makers Set The Datacenter Pace was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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