Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For May 26th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• 42%: increase US wireless traffic since 2015; 44: age of Ethernet; I $18.5m: low cost of Target data breach; 25 million: record set from Library of Congress; 98%: WannaCry infections on Windows 7; 100 terabytes: daily Pinterest logging; 2020: when Microsoft will have DNA storage in the cloud; 220 μm: size of microbots; 2 billion: lines of code in Google repository; 40%+: esports industry growth; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @Werner: There is no compression algorithm for experience.
  • @colinmckerrache: We just crossed over 2m EVs on the road. So yeah, second million took just under 18 months. Next million in about 10 months.
  • @swardley: When discussing China, stop thinking cheap labour, communism & copying ... to understand changes, start thinking World's largest VC.
  • @JOTB17: "Cars generate more than 4Tb of data a day, humans are becoming irrelevant in data collection" ? @saleiva #JOTB17
  • Wojciech Kudla: that's why blacklisting workqueues from critical Continue reading

Whose Zoomin who? Polycom is

Shortly after talking the helm as Polycom, CEO Mary McDowell discussed her strategy for the company moving forward. One of the focus areas for it is to broaden its technology partner ecosystem. The company has a great partnership with Microsoft and is the only vendor that has products that interoperate natively with Skype for Business/Office 365. As lucrative as this partnership has been to Polycom, McDowell recognizes that not everyone will be using Microsoft for their collaboration needs. + Also on Network World: Polycom brings a wide variety of video solutions to Microsoft Unified Communications + Also, Polycom will be directing more resources into endpoint innovation. The infrastructure business at Polycom has been in decline for years because customers are choosing to leverage the power and ubiquity of the cloud. Polycom has been a technology leader since its inception, but the transition of video from being on premises to the cloud has shrunk the companies addressable market. Hence the change in strategy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Whose Zoomin who? Polycom is

Shortly after talking the helm as Polycom, CEO Mary McDowell discussed her strategy for the company moving forward. One of the focus areas for it is to broaden its technology partner ecosystem. The company has a great partnership with Microsoft and is the only vendor that has products that interoperate natively with Skype for Business/Office 365. As lucrative as this partnership has been to Polycom, McDowell recognizes that not everyone will be using Microsoft for their collaboration needs. + Also on Network World: Polycom brings a wide variety of video solutions to Microsoft Unified Communications + Also, Polycom will be directing more resources into endpoint innovation. The infrastructure business at Polycom has been in decline for years because customers are choosing to leverage the power and ubiquity of the cloud. Polycom has been a technology leader since its inception, but the transition of video from being on premises to the cloud has shrunk the companies addressable market. Hence the change in strategy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: There is no free market for electricity

Electricity is an input in virtually everything we do as a modern society. Few Americans remember what it was like to live without it and its attendant benefits on quality of life, labor productivity, and human health. Electricity is today largely taken for granted, yet for middle-class and older Americans utility bills often constitute a significant share of household expenses. In the manufacture of everything from aluminum to silicon to chemicals, electricity is usually the largest operating expense; for many other manufactured goods, it is second only to labor. —American Affairs

The post Worth Reading: There is no free market for electricity appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Dell EMC and The Amazing Internet Of Things

While at Dell EMC World 2017 I had a very interesting chat with Jason Shepherd, Dell EMC’s Director of IoT Strategy & Partnerships. To be clear, I’m not an expert on the Internet of Things (IOT), and our discussion was a useful reminder how much difference perspective makes when evaluating a technology.

Internet Of Things: Use Cases

When I think about IOT the first thing that comes to mind — naturally enough — are the items most applicable to me, like a smart thermostat, smart door locks, smart light bulbs, and so forth. I work in an enterprise, so I also think about building management in the enterprise, to include things like smart lighting, HVAC, presence sensors, temperature monitoring and more. Both of these environments are ripe for IOT functionality, and are the ones that most of us are likely to encounter on a daily basis.

However, it’s probably obvious that there are many more use cases for IOT devices, including for example:

• industrial (monitoring critical equipment like motors, valves, temperatures, flow meters)
• metropolitan (city-wide automotive/pedestrian traffic monitoring, traffic flows)
• agricultural (monitoring water levels, animal health, production volumes, environmental)
• automotive (monitoring the car’s engine, location, mechanical and electronic Continue reading

Juniper Data Center Cohesion Wrap Up

Continue reading "Juniper Data Center Cohesion Wrap Up"

Securing Your Enterprise’s Expansion into the Cloud

Security needs to be elastic enough to scale with the cloud infrastructure itself.

Cisco working to regain control of the network edge in containers

Gets into the future of container networking via CNCF.

The post Cisco working to regain control of the network edge in containers appeared first on EtherealMind.

23% off iRobot Roomba 650 Robotic Vacuum Cleaner – Deal Alert

If you want a thorough, everyday clean, maybe you should consider using robots. The Roomba 650 Vacuuming Robot provides a thorough clean at the push of a button. The patented, 3-Stage Cleaning System easily picks up dust, pet hair and large debris like cereal and works on all floor types, adjusting itself and re-charging itself as needed to make sure the job is done correctly every time you need it -- preset Roomba to clean when it’s convenient for you. Roomba is just 3.6 inch tall, and is specifically designed to fit under most furniture, beds and kickboards. The 650 model is a #1 best seller on Amazon, where its typical list price of $374 is reduced right now to $286.99. See this deal on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Getting Started: Tower Projects and Inventories

Welcome to another post in our Getting Started series. In our previous post, we discussed how you can equip your Ansible Tower instance with users and credentials.

In this post, we will discuss how to set up projects and inventories in your Ansible Tower instance.

What Is A Tower Project?

Tower projects are a logical collection of Ansible Playbooks that are set up with each other based on what they might be doing or which hosts they might interact with.

Playbooks can be managed within Tower projects by either adding them manually to the project base path on your Tower server, (/var/lib/awx/projects) or by importing them from a source control management system (SCM) that is supported by Tower. Examples of SCMs supported by Tower are Git, Subversion and Mercurial. Managing your projects with an SCM is recommended to ensure that only users with assigned access to the repository can change the Playbook before execution, and for the extra layer of accountability and change control it provides. If your Playbooks are managed by an SCM, update options can be selected to “update on launch”, “delete on update” and “clean”.

If you select “update on launch", Tower will sync each Continue reading

LPWAN: The Linchpin for IIoT

Start Using OpenConfig with NAPALM on Software Gone Wild

OpenConfig sounds like a great idea, but unfortunately only a few vendors support it, and it doesn’t run on all their platforms, and you need the latest-and-greatest software release. Not exactly a set of conditions that would encourage widespread adoption.

Things might change with the OpenConfig data models supported in NAPALM. Imagine you could parse router configurations or show printouts into OpenConfig data structures, or use OpenConfig to configure Cisco IOS routers running a decade old software.

Progressive Dutch Municipality Protects Citizen Data and Meets Compliance with VMware NSX

Summary: Municipality of Zoetermeer implements Zero-Trust model with VMware NSX-enabled micro-segmentation for advanced security inside data centers. Zoetermeer follows the Dutch BIG (Baseline Information Security Dutch Municipalities) regulations Zoetermeer is a modern, fast-growing municipality in the province of South Holland. It provides local services such as water supply, sewage and garbage disposal to around 125,000... Read more →

Progressive Dutch Municipality Protects Citizen Data and Meets Compliance with VMware NSX

Summary: Municipality of Zoetermeer implements Zero-Trust model with VMware NSX-enabled micro-segmentation for advanced security inside data centers. Zoetermeer follows the Dutch BIG (Baseline Information Security Dutch Municipalities) regulations

Zoetermeer is a modern, fast-growing municipality in the province of South Holland. It provides local services such as water supply, sewage and garbage disposal to around 125,000 residents. As a forward-thinking organization, the municipality of Zoetermeer recognizes that the increasing volume of cyber attacks against organizations today has shown that traditional, perimeter-centric security models are no longer effective.

The municipality responded by working with VMware partner ON2IT IT Services on a solution that wouldn’t treat everything inside the network as trusted. Zoetermeer deployed VMware NSX® network virtualization to facilitate a Zero Trust security model. This Zero Trust model is enabled by the unique micro-segmentation capabilities of VMware NSX.  Zoetermeer is now compartmentalizing different segments of its network and applying automated, fine-grained security policies to individual applications.

“The municipality of Zoetermeer is committed to delivering digital services to our citizens, and also digital tools to enable the best experience for our employees,” said Mr. Van Gaalen, IT Manager, Municipality of Zoetermeer. “But security must remain paramount. Thanks to VMware, we can Continue reading

Technology Short Take #83

Welcome to Technology Short Take #83! This is a slightly shorter TST than usual, which might be a nice break from the typical information overload. In any case, enjoy!

Networking

• I enjoyed Dave McCrory’s series on the future of the network (see part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4—part 5 hadn’t gone live yet when I published this). In my humble opinion, he’s spot on in his viewpoint that network equipment is increasingly becoming more like servers, so why not embed services and functions in the network equipment? However, this isn’t enough; you also need a strong control plane to help manage and coordinate these services. Perhaps Istio will help provide that control plane, though I suspect something more will be needed.
• Michael Kashin has a handy little tool that functions like ssh-copy-id on servers, but for network devices (leveraging Netmiko). Check out the GitHub repository.
• Anthony Shaw has a good comparison of Ansible, StackStorm, and Salt (with a particular view at applicability in a networking context). This one is definitely worth a read, in my opinion.
• Miguel Gómez of Telefónica Engineering discusses maximizing performance in VXLAN overlay networks.
• Nicolas Michel has a good Continue reading

Bastion Hosts and Custom SSH Configurations

The idea of an SSH bastion host is something I discussed here about 18 months ago. For the most part, it’s a pretty simple concept (yes, things can get quite complex in some situations, but I think these are largely corner cases). For the last few months, though, I’ve been trying to use an SSH bastion host and failing, and I could not figure out why it wouldn’t work. The answer, it turns out, lies in custom SSH configurations.

In my introduction on using SSH bastion hosts (linked above)—or in just about any tutorial out there on using SSH bastion hosts—brief mention is made of adding configuration information to SSH to use the bastion host. Borrowing from my original post, if you had an instance named “private1” that you wanted to access via a bastion named “bastion”, the SSH configuration information might look like this:

Host private1
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/rsa_private_key
  ProxyCommand ssh user@bastion -W %h:%p

Host bastion
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/rsa_private_key

Normally, that information would go into ~/.ssh/config, which is the default SSH configuration file.

In my case, I only allow public key authentication to “trusted” systems (I vaguely recall an article I read a while ago about a Continue reading

Bastion Hosts and Custom SSH Configurations

The idea of an SSH bastion host is something I discussed here about 18 months ago. For the most part, it’s a pretty simple concept (yes, things can get quite complex in some situations, but I think these are largely corner cases). For the last few months, though, I’ve been trying to use an SSH bastion host and failing, and I could not figure out why it wouldn’t work. The answer, it turns out, lies in custom SSH configurations.

In my introduction on using SSH bastion hosts (linked above)—or in just about any tutorial out there on using SSH bastion hosts—brief mention is made of adding configuration information to SSH to use the bastion host. Borrowing from my original post, if you had an instance named “private1” that you wanted to access via a bastion named “bastion”, the SSH configuration information might look like this:

Host private1
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/rsa_private_key
  ProxyCommand ssh user@bastion -W %h:%p

Host bastion
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/rsa_private_key

Normally, that information would go into ~/.ssh/config, which is the default SSH configuration file.

In my case, I only allow public key authentication to “trusted” systems (I vaguely recall an article I read a while ago about a Continue reading

Technology Short Take #83

Welcome to Technology Short Take #83! This is a slightly shorter TST than usual, which might be a nice break from the typical information overload. In any case, enjoy!

Networking

• I enjoyed Dave McCrory’s series on the future of the network (see part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4—part 5 hadn’t gone live yet when I published this). In my humble opinion, he’s spot on in his viewpoint that network equipment is increasingly becoming more like servers, so why not embed services and functions in the network equipment? However, this isn’t enough; you also need a strong control plane to help manage and coordinate these services. Perhaps Istio will help provide that control plane, though I suspect something more will be needed.
• Michael Kashin has a handy little tool that functions like ssh-copy-id on servers, but for network devices (leveraging Netmiko). Check out the GitHub repository.
• Anthony Shaw has a good comparison of Ansible, StackStorm, and Salt (with a particular view at applicability in a networking context). This one is definitely worth a read, in my opinion.
• Miguel Gómez of Telefónica Engineering discusses maximizing performance in VXLAN overlay networks.
• Nicolas Michel has a good Continue reading

Bastion Hosts and Custom SSH Configurations

The idea of an SSH bastion host is something I discussed here about 18 months ago. For the most part, it’s a pretty simple concept (yes, things can get quite complex in some situations, but I think these are largely corner cases). For the last few months, though, I’ve been trying to use an SSH bastion host and failing, and I could not figure out why it wouldn’t work. The answer, it turns out, lies in custom SSH configurations.

In my introduction on using SSH bastion hosts (linked above)—or in just about any tutorial out there on using SSH bastion hosts—brief mention is made of adding configuration information to SSH to use the bastion host. Borrowing from my original post, if you had an instance named “private1” that you wanted to access via a bastion named “bastion”, the SSH configuration information might look like this:

Host private1
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/rsa_private_key
  ProxyCommand ssh user@bastion -W %h:%p

Host bastion
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/rsa_private_key

Normally, that information would go into ~/.ssh/config, which is the default SSH configuration file.

In my case, I only allow public key authentication to “trusted” systems (I vaguely recall an article I read a while ago about a Continue reading

Technology Short Take #83

Welcome to Technology Short Take #83! This is a slightly shorter TST than usual, which might be a nice break from the typical information overload. In any case, enjoy!

Networking

• I enjoyed Dave McCrory’s series on the future of the network (see part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4—part 5 hadn’t gone live yet when I published this). In my humble opinion, he’s spot on in his viewpoint that network equipment is increasingly becoming more like servers, so why not embed services and functions in the network equipment? However, this isn’t enough; you also need a strong control plane to help manage and coordinate these services. Perhaps Istio will help provide that control plane, though I suspect something more will be needed.
• Michael Kashin has a handy little tool that functions like ssh-copy-id on servers, but for network devices (leveraging Netmiko). Check out the GitHub repository.
• Anthony Shaw has a good comparison of Ansible, StackStorm, and Salt (with a particular view at applicability in a networking context). This one is definitely worth a read, in my opinion.
• Miguel Gómez of Telefónica Engineering discusses maximizing performance in VXLAN overlay networks.
• Nicolas Michel has a good Continue reading