Coming Soon: Networking Features in Ansible 2.4

Ansible 2.4

Wow, how time flies! Here we go with another Ansible Project release packed full of updates for automating network infrastructure. After spending the last year heavily focused on building much of the foundation for Ansible network integration, this release represents the beginning of the journey towards building more application-aware, declarative-based Ansible modules. This is an exciting time and on behalf of the entire Ansible community, including the Ansible network engineering team. I’m very pleased to share with you the enhancements and updates to network integration included with the forthcoming Ansible 2.4 open source release.

The initial introduction of network support was originally conceived to help operators focus on being able to execute configuration changes on network devices with a set of imperative-based configuration modules.

Today, the Ansible network modules are focused on pushing configuration statements to network devices. It was a small step, but an important one in the journey towards full configuration management of physical network devices.

Since then, we have turned our attention towards how to better help organizations become more agile in actively managing network configurations. Over the course of the Ansible 2.4 release, we have been phasing in a more intelligent approach to building Continue reading

Future Interconnects: Gen-Z Stitches A Memory Fabric

It is difficult not to be impatient for the technologies of the future, which is one reason that this publication is called The Next Platform. But those who are waiting for the Gen-Z consortium to deliver a memory fabric that will break the hegemony of the CPU in controlling access to memory and to deepen the memory hierarchy while at the same time flattening memory addressability are going to have to wait a little longer.

About a year longer, in fact, which is a bit further away than the founders of the Gen-Z consortium were hoping when they launched …

Future Interconnects: Gen-Z Stitches A Memory Fabric was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Breaking the Internet: Swapping Backhoes for BGP

The term “break[ing] the Internet” has taken hold over the last few years – it sounds significant, and given the role that the Internet has come to play in our daily lives, even a little scary. A Google search for “break the Internet” returns 14.6 million results, while “broke the Internet” returns just under a half million results.

Interestingly, Google Trends shows a spike in searches for the term in November 2014 (arguably representing its entry into mainstream usage), coincident with Kim Kardashian’s appearance in Paper Magazine, and on the magazine’s Web site. (Warning: NSFW) To that end, Time Magazine says “But in the context of viral media content, ‘breaking the Internet’ means engineering one story to dominate Facebook and Twitter at the expense of more newsworthy things.” Presumably in celebration of those efforts, there’s even now a “Break the Internet” Webby Award.

“Breaking the Internet” in this context represents, at best, the failure of a website to do sufficient capacity planning, such as using a content delivery network (CDN) to help improve the scalability and performance of the Web site in the face of increased traffic from a flash crowd from the viral Continue reading

Fly be free: introducing Cumulus in the Cloud

I get really excited watching people use the technology that we develop at Cumulus Networks, and we’re always looking to make it easier for people get their heads and hands wrapped around our products and tools. Our first product, Cumulus Linux, is pretty easy; a curious techie can download our free Cumulus VX virtual machine and use it standalone or in concert with other virtual machines. If they want to see the rubber meet the road with a physical experience, they can buy a switch/license and experiment in a live network.

Cumulus VX

The introduction of Cumulus NetQ and Cumulus Host Pack upped the ante in demonstrability. These products work together to allow for high scale, operationally sane infrastructure. We wanted the curious to be able to explore all of our products in a comfortable setting. Thus was born a project we call Cumulus in the Cloud.

Cumulus in the Cloud

The awesome team here at Cumulus leveraged modern technology to set up a personal mini data center infrastructure complete with four servers and a multi-rack leaf/spine network. Then we put that technology to work in infrastructure related architectures that are meaningful to customers.

Leaf/spine

Our first personalization is a container deployment leveraging Mesos and Docker. An Continue reading

Worth Reading: Is your mobile carrier your weakest link?

More online services than ever now offer two-step authentication — requiring customers to complete a login using their phone or other mobile device after supplying a username and password. But with so many services relying on your mobile for that second factor, there has never been more riding on the security of your mobile account. Below are some tips to ensure your mobile device (or, more specifically, your mobile carrier) isn’t the weakest link in your security chain. —Krebs on Security

The post Worth Reading: Is your mobile carrier your weakest link? appeared first on rule 11 reader.

IDG Contributor Network: Tech enabled disaster response to Hurricane Harvey

Hurricane Harvey has dumped over 50 inches of water across Texas. Thousands of people displaced. Roads flooded. Communication channels disrupted.How are relief efforts coordinated? How are emergency personnel given the information they need? How can data be collected with broken communication channels and little cellular coverage? How can information from multiple sources be aggregated and presented in an actionable form?Here’s how Esri Disaster Response Program is helping first responders and the Texas Division of Emergency Management. Information on local conditions such as water levels, flood gauges, road closures and traffic conditions are essential to coordinate relief efforts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ensuring Good with VMware AppDefense

co-author Geoff Wilmington

Traditional data center endpoint security products focus on detecting and responding to known bad behavior. There are hundreds of millions of disparate malware attacks, with over a million getting added every day.  In addition, there is the threat of zero-day attacks exploiting previously unknown vulnerabilities. It becomes a never-ending race to “chase bad” without ever staying ahead of the threat landscape.  What if we took an opposite approach to security?  What if, instead of  “chasing bad” we started by “ensuring good”?

VMware AppDefense is a new security product focused on helping customers build a compute least privilege security model for data center endpoints and provide automated threat detection, response, and remediation to security events. AppDefense is focused on “ensuring good” versus “chasing bad” on data center endpoints.  When we focus our attention on what a workload is supposed to be doing, our lens for seeing malicious activity is much more focused and as a result, we narrow the exploitable attack surface of the workload down to what we know about.

 

Changing The Way We Secure Compute

AppDefense applies the concept of “ensuring good” by using three main techniques:

Capture

AppDefense starts by capturing Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: How business is preparing for the arrival of 5G

As today’s market continues to churn out new technologies which revolutionize entire industries overnight, many business leaders are scrambling to prepare themselves for the next disruptive innovation. Increasingly, astute corporations and bold startups alike are coming to realize that 5G is the next big thing which will reshape how they operate, and they’re taking steps to prepare for it.So how exactly are today’s leading brands and companies preparing themselves for 5G’s arrival? What common pitfalls have these preppers encountered, and how can a savvy businessman avoid making them himself? Is 5G really worth all of the sound and fury?A new type of telecom industry While a market where 5G is ubiquitous will see a plethora of changes, few stand to be revolutionized more than the telecom industry. In the past few years alone, consumers all around the globe have flocked to digital devices like smartphones, tablets, and personal computers en masse, forcing businesses to up their wireless systems and the standards they follow. When 5G inevitably arrives, these same businesses will have an even greater hurdle set before them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How business is preparing for the arrival of 5G

As today’s market continues to churn out new technologies which revolutionize entire industries overnight, many business leaders are scrambling to prepare themselves for the next disruptive innovation. Increasingly, astute corporations and bold startups alike are coming to realize that 5G is the next big thing which will reshape how they operate, and they’re taking steps to prepare for it.So how exactly are today’s leading brands and companies preparing themselves for 5G’s arrival? What common pitfalls have these preppers encountered, and how can a savvy businessman avoid making them himself? Is 5G really worth all of the sound and fury?A new type of telecom industry While a market where 5G is ubiquitous will see a plethora of changes, few stand to be revolutionized more than the telecom industry. In the past few years alone, consumers all around the globe have flocked to digital devices like smartphones, tablets, and personal computers en masse, forcing businesses to up their wireless systems and the standards they follow. When 5G inevitably arrives, these same businesses will have an even greater hurdle set before them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: When networks hit the wall

Whether you are streaming the latest boxing match or watching the most recent Game of Thrones episode, during its first run, the network is going to play a major role in determining your quality of experience like never before. There is unprecedented demand for content, and with the proliferation of smart devices capable of displaying video, every pair of eyeballs on the internet is a potential consumer.The widespread availability of video combined with streaming technology means our viewing expectations are now much more demanding on the infrastructure. We expect content to be there, wherever and whenever we want it. We want to watch it, pause it, play it in slow motion, watch it again, analyze it, save it for later, share it with friends.  We want to watch it at home, on the train or at work – because there’s always the underlying risk of spoilers, or missing out on the next-day office discussion should we be unable to view it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: When networks hit the wall

Whether you are streaming the latest boxing match or watching the most recent Game of Thrones episode, during its first run, the network is going to play a major role in determining your quality of experience like never before. There is unprecedented demand for content, and with the proliferation of smart devices capable of displaying video, every pair of eyeballs on the internet is a potential consumer.The widespread availability of video combined with streaming technology means our viewing expectations are now much more demanding on the infrastructure. We expect content to be there, wherever and whenever we want it. We want to watch it, pause it, play it in slow motion, watch it again, analyze it, save it for later, share it with friends.  We want to watch it at home, on the train or at work – because there’s always the underlying risk of spoilers, or missing out on the next-day office discussion should we be unable to view it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Maneuvering around run levels on Linux

On Linux systems, run levels are operational levels that describe the state of the system with respect to what services are available. One run level is restrictive and only used for maintenance; network connections will not be operational, but admins can log in through a console connection. Others allow anyone to log in and work, but maybe with some differences in the available services. This post examines how run levels are configured and how you can change the run level interactively or modify what services are available.The default run state on Linux systems -- the one that will be used when the system starts up (unless instructed otherwise) -- is usually configured in the /etc/inittab file which generally looks something like this:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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