8 Use Cases for Modernizing and Automating Workflows

Use Cases for Modernizing and Automating

Managing an organization’s many tools and business processes is becoming increasingly complicated as technology expands. Whether your teams are performing their weekly system reboot, or looking to configure instances to a desired state, it’s no secret that automation is critical to increase speed, efficiency, productivity, and accuracy. Listed below are several instances1 where automation can help across your enterprise.


  • Weekly system reboot: There’s nothing worse than doing the same thing for 8 hours a day! Eliminate repetitive, manual processes with automation.
  • Enforce security guidelines: Rules are rules. It’s best to automate in an effort to achieve strict security standards.
  • Monitor configuration drift: Use check mode with Ansible tasks to enforce desired settings and see if your configuration has drifted.
  • Disaster recovery: Disaster recovery can involve a wide range of components. Act across different variables of the technology stack to identify problems and eliminate cross team dependencies.
  • Command blaster: Remarkably easy to write, you can run commands across your environment for any number of servers.
  • Database binary patching: Several databases use outdated binary sets. Patch the binaries in accordance with the release of the latest patch.
  • Instance provisioning: Use modules for several cloud providers to create new instances and tailor Continue reading

Network Automation Engineer Persona: Part One

This is the first post of a series on the persona between “network engineer” and “developer”. This role does not exist in myth, but it is a natural evolutionary step forwards. This position inherits skills from both ends of the scale, but in itself is an emerging role in organisations globally.

Why describe personas? They are important because:

1. They provide a roadmap for a career
2. They provide a set of skill requirements to master for a role matching the persona
3. They provide a set of tool consumption and usage hints
4. They provide a viewing glass to defining thought processes

Some of the challenges both vendors and network technology consumers are facing today are related to the set of evolving personas in our field, therefore it’s crucial to understand them properly. Remember when you wanted to be a network engineer? You became the persona and worked your way through a set of learnings. Your thoughts and habits changed, along with your recognition and self awareness.

Evolution of Roles

Every industry evolves and some industries disappear. The need to move packets about on the Internet hasn’t evolved out of existence just yet; our current highly generalized reality is: Continue reading

Examining network connections on Linux systems

There are a lot of commands available on Linux for looking at network settings and connections. In today's post, we're going to run through some very handy commands and see how they work.One very useful command is the ifquery command. This command should give you a quick list of network interfaces. However, you might only see something like this -- showing only the loopback interface: $ ifquery --list lo If this is the case, your /etc/network/interfaces file doesn't include information on network interfaces except for the loopback interface. You can add lines like the last two in the example below -- assuming DHCP is used to assign addresses -- if you'd like it to be more useful.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT spending increases for software-defined storage, on-demand services

Two new spending reports paint a rosy picture for some IT vendors, but it isn’t looking so great for the traditional players.At Gartner’s Symposium & ITxpo last week, the firm released a report stating the global IT market is expected to reach $3.7 trillion next year, a 4.3 percent increase over the $3.5 billion expected for this year.Spending on traditional data center hardware and systems is expected to stay flat, continuing a trend we’ve seen for a while now as businesses ramp up spending on three on-demand services: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and communication as a service (CaaS).Also on Network World: Report confirms on-premises data center spending declined "The IT buying landscape is changing: Digital business transformation is an effort to create connected, platforms and new industry revenue streams," analyst John-David Lovelock wrote in the report. "Organizations that are not creating new digital business models or new ways to engage constituents or customers are falling behind. Those vendors that do not move more quickly than their clients will be left behind." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT spending increases for software-defined storage, on-demand services

Two new spending reports paint a rosy picture for some IT vendors, but it isn’t looking so great for the traditional players.At Gartner’s Symposium & ITxpo last week, the firm released a report stating the global IT market is expected to reach $3.7 trillion next year, a 4.3 percent increase over the $3.5 billion expected for this year.Spending on traditional data center hardware and systems is expected to stay flat, continuing a trend we’ve seen for a while now as businesses ramp up spending on three on-demand services: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and communication as a service (CaaS).Also on Network World: Report confirms on-premises data center spending declined "The IT buying landscape is changing: Digital business transformation is an effort to create connected, platforms and new industry revenue streams," analyst John-David Lovelock wrote in the report. "Organizations that are not creating new digital business models or new ways to engage constituents or customers are falling behind. Those vendors that do not move more quickly than their clients will be left behind." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A Community Network in the Remote Georgian Region of Tusheti

About a year ago, Internet Society partnered with its Georgian Chapter, Small and Medium Telecom Operators Association of Georgia, Freenet LTD Association, Internet Development Initiative and Tusheti Development Fund to help the remote and mountainous region of Tusheti to build access to the Internet. The network was recently completed as a true community effort and became fully operational in August.

Impact

When the Internet Society team visited the village of Omalo in Tusheti two weeks ago for an official launch ceremony, the Internet speeds measured at 4-5 Mbps. A dramatic change to a region, where many villages are not even covered by mobile signal!

During our brief stay in Omalo the impact of the newly established Internet connection was not evident at first glance. Apart from a couple of visible repeaters on the surrounding mountains, people were getting on with their usual daily chores while a group of tourists travelled past on horseback. The local community, however, was exuding a sense of achievement and optimism. The recently established Internet access opens new opportunities for tourism and cultural preservation, and provides an essential communication channel for healthcare and potential emergency situations.

Partnership

The engine behind this effort was a solid Continue reading

Microburst: Update on the HTML Home Network Diagram

Moving Packets - Microburst

 

Last week I published an article called Making a Clickable HTML Network Diagram using OmniGraffle. One of the questions I was asked was whether I’d tried doing the same in draw.io or Gliffy. I have not, although I do use Gliffy a fair amount, and I have dabbled with draw.io.

Thankfully, Keith Miller (@packetologist) is on hand to provide the answer! Keith has put together an article mirroring a similar process using the free (and platform-agnostic) draw.io. Definitely worth a read, and a great example of a free tool making our lives way easier.

Link: CLICKABLE HTML NETWORK DIAGRAMS WITH DRAW.IO

Thanks, Keith for the excellent demonstration!

If you liked this post, please do click through to the source at Microburst: Update on the HTML Home Network Diagram and give me a share/like. Thank you!

Adminstravia 20171009

Where’s Russ?

This is my second week of PhD seminars this fall—the only time in this program I intend to take two seminars back to back. One of the two was, in fact, very deep philosophy, so I was pretty taxed trying to pull the material together.

At the same time, the book has passed through technical review, and is now in author review. I hope it soon be in proofs. The combination of these two things, the book and the PhD work, along with multiple other things, is what caused me to call a pause in blogging for these two weeks. The date to watch is the 29th of December. It might be released earlier, but it is hard to tell right now. I will do a post a little later this week describing the book for those who are interested.

Tonight (Monday) I will be recording a new Network Collective show on the Intermediate System to Intermediate System (IS-IS) protocol, and we have a long list of History of Networking guests to bring on. The history material has turned out to be absolutely fascinating; I am thankful we have the connections available, and the recording venue, and someone Continue reading

What will programming look like in the future?

 

Maybe programming will look something like the above video. Humans and AIs working together to produce software better than either can separately.

The computer as a creative agent, working in tandem with a human partner, to produce software, in a beautiful act of co-creation.

The alternative vision—The Coming Software Apocalypse—is a dead end. Better requirements and better tools have already been tried and found wanting. Requirements are a trap. They don't work. Requirements are no less complex and undiscoverable than code. Tools are another trap. Tools are just code that encode an inflexible solution to a problem that's already been solved.

Admittedly, I'm cheating. I have no idea how any of this will work, but here are the seeds of how it has already started:

Here's what we do know: neither tools or requirements are a silver bullet, they are a method of incrementally improving software quality. Software production quantity is not increased at all.

What we need is a manufacturing process that puts software production on an exponential curve. The only conceivable tool we have at Continue reading

Worth Reading: Open Source Licenses

Today, the GPL license that Stallman pioneered is in its third version (GNU GPLv3) and is only one of several dozen types of open source licenses. The Open Source Initiative, an organization founded in 1998 to promote open source software and normalize the use of the term, has approved more than 80 open source licenses. These 80 licenses generally fall into one of two categories: permissive licenses and copyleft licenses. —Heather Meeker @OpenSource

The post Worth Reading: Open Source Licenses appeared first on rule 11 reader.

First Practical Workshop on IoT to Increase Awareness and Interest in Ethiopian Universities

The Department of Computer Science College of Natural Sciences of the Addis Ababa University (AAU), in collaboration with the Internet Society and International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) successfully concluded the 1st practical workshop in Ethiopia on Internet of Things (IoT). The workshop, which took place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from 23-29 September 2017 aimed at increasing the awareness and interest of IoT amongst Universities in Ethiopia and in the long run enhance the understanding and involvement of Africans in IoT standardization at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

The workshop came at an important crossroad as we are at the beginning of a new revolution, witnessing our pots and cups turned to be part of the computing world. The wrist watch no longer tells us the “time” only, but also a lot more information – from the status of the weather to our health. Our “things” can be enabled to compute and even communicate to one another; and this takes us to new mode of computation known as IoT.

Dawit Bekele, Director of the African regional bureau of Internet Society reflected on this issue saying that “the potential of IoT in all Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: 3 ways machine learning is revolutionizing IoT

Few things have propelled the IoT’s dizzying growth in recent years as much as machine learning and the innovators who are pushing it. Independent, intelligent machines that can comb through data to make their own decisions are, to some, the only reason such phenomenon as the IoT can exist in the first place. So what are the top three ways in which machine learning has and will shape the IoT?Whether it’s inspiring human creativity, surpassing human efficiency, or paving the way for even newer technologies to themselves break through and reshape the IoT, machine learning is the fuel that’s driving the IoT forward into the 21st century. Here’s how:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Not all information is created equal: Unlocking the huge potential of smart data

The amount of data being created today is expected to increase ten-fold in less than a decade, it’s also anticipated that enterprises will produce around 60% of global data by 2025[1]. However, while the amount of data may be growing exponentially, the intelligence gleaned from it is not. Instead, companies can be subject to a barrage of unstructured data delivered at high velocity from a variety of different sources with limited ability to convert it into actionable insight. As a result, enterprises risk useful information getting lost amidst the sheer volume of noise.This is set to be further compounded by the widespread adoption of IoT technologies in both consumer and enterprise markets. The proliferation of IoT sensors, mobile devices and digital services, combined with advent in big data technologies and broadband networks increase the volume, velocity and variety of data traversing the connected world. This means that businesses that collect relevant data that flows through their corporate networks and the connected world are sitting on an abundance of data, which will only increase. Mission contextual analysis of this data can provide invaluable insight to corporations in a variety of areas and improve business outcomes. For example, gleaning insight Continue reading

Not all information is created equal: Unlocking the huge potential of smart data

The amount of data being created today is expected to increase ten-fold in less than a decade, it’s also anticipated that enterprises will produce around 60% of global data by 2025[1]. However, while the amount of data may be growing exponentially, the intelligence gleaned from it is not. Instead, companies can be subject to a barrage of unstructured data delivered at high velocity from a variety of different sources with limited ability to convert it into actionable insight. As a result, enterprises risk useful information getting lost amidst the sheer volume of noise.This is set to be further compounded by the widespread adoption of IoT technologies in both consumer and enterprise markets. The proliferation of IoT sensors, mobile devices and digital services, combined with advent in big data technologies and broadband networks increase the volume, velocity and variety of data traversing the connected world. This means that businesses that collect relevant data that flows through their corporate networks and the connected world are sitting on an abundance of data, which will only increase. Mission contextual analysis of this data can provide invaluable insight to corporations in a variety of areas and improve business outcomes. For example, gleaning insight Continue reading

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