Google Spanner Inspires CockroachDB To Outrun It

There is an old joke that in the post-apocalyptic world that comes about because of plague or nuclear war, only two things will be left alive: cockroaches and Keith Richards, the guitarist for the Rolling Stones. As it hails from New York City, you can understand why Cockroach Labs, the upstart software company that is cloning Google’s Spanner distributed relational database, chose that particular bug to epitomize a system that will stay alive no matter what. But, they could have just as easily called it RichardsDB.

When discussing Google’s cloud implementation of Spanner, which launched in beta earlier this

Google Spanner Inspires CockroachDB To Outrun It was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Cisco touts next-gen firewall gear for midsize installations

Cisco is coming out with four next-generation firewall boxes aimed at giving smaller organizations protection that is better sized to their needs and engineered to minimize performance hits as additional security services are turned on.The devices make up a family called the Cisco Firepower 2100 series and are built around dual, multi-core processors. That architecture enables custom processing of traffic requiring threat inspection, and also supports tagging traffic that doesn’t need threat inspection so it flows through only the separate network processing unit.These features combine to provide ample processing power for services such as IPS and also lighten the total load on that processor by diverting traffic that doesn’t require those services, Cisco says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco touts next-gen firewall gear for midsize installations

Cisco is coming out with four next-generation firewall boxes aimed at giving smaller organizations protection that is better sized to their needs and engineered to minimize performance hits as additional security services are turned on.The devices make up a family called the Cisco Firepower 2100 series and are built around dual, multi-core processors. That architecture enables custom processing of traffic requiring threat inspection, and also supports tagging traffic that doesn’t need threat inspection so it flows through only the separate network processing unit.These features combine to provide ample processing power for services such as IPS and also lighten the total load on that processor by diverting traffic that doesn’t require those services, Cisco says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Using CNI with Docker

In our last post we introduced ourselves to CNI (if you haven’t read that yet, I suggest you start there) as we worked through a simple example of connecting a network namespace to a bridge.  CNI managed both the creation of the bridge as well as connecting the namespace to the bridge using a VETH pair.  In this post we’ll explore how to do this same thing but with a container created by Docker.  As you’ll see, the process is largely the same.  Let’s jump right in.

This post assumes that you followed the steps in the first post (Understanding CNI) and have a ‘cni’ directory (~/cni) that contains the CNI binaries.  If you don’t have that – head back to the first post and follow the steps to download the pre-compiled CNI binaries.  It also assumes that you have a default Docker installation.  In my case, Im using Docker version 1.12.  

The first thing we need to do is to create a Docker container.  To do that we’ll run this command…

user@ubuntu-2:~/cni$ sudo docker run --name cnitest --net=none -d jonlangemak/web_server_1
835583cdf382520283c709b5a5ee866b9dccf4861672b95eccbc7b7688109b56
user@ubuntu-2:~/cni$

Notice that when we ran the command we told Docker to use a network of ‘none’. Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: What is OWASP, and why it matters for AppSec

Modern software development is firmly focused on speed. The race to be first in the market is extremely competitive. To innovate, companies develop at breakneck pace, quickly establishing feedback loops that allow them to hone their software. Security, however, is often an afterthought for stressed developers and the business people pushing them to deliver faster.The importance of application security (AppSec) is widely understood, with 97 percent of respondents to the SANS Institute’s 2016 State of Application Security report revealing they have an AppSec program in place.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: What is OWASP, and why it matters for AppSec

Modern software development is firmly focused on speed. The race to be first in the market is extremely competitive. To innovate, companies develop at breakneck pace, quickly establishing feedback loops that allow them to hone their software. Security, however, is often an afterthought for stressed developers and the business people pushing them to deliver faster.The importance of application security (AppSec) is widely understood, with 97 percent of respondents to the SANS Institute’s 2016 State of Application Security report revealing they have an AppSec program in place.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Senator to file bill requiring border agents to get a warrant before searching phones

In moments of optimism, I’d like to believe there is still some common ground upon which liberals and conservatives – even supporters of President Trump – can stand with firm resolve. One such patch should be ensuring privacy protections for the digital devices and sensitive personal information of all U.S. citizens when they pass through border checkpoints.Toward that end, U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has signaled his intention to file legislation that would require customs and law enforcement agencies to acquire a warrant before compelling access to a U.S. traveler’s electronic device and also prohibit the growing practice of demanding social media identities and passwords. In a letter to John Kelly, director of homeland security, Wyden poses the following questions:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Senator to file bill requiring border agents to get a warrant before searching phones

In moments of optimism, I’d like to believe there is still some common ground upon which liberals and conservatives – even supporters of President Trump – can stand with firm resolve. One such patch should be ensuring privacy protections for the digital devices and sensitive personal information of all U.S. citizens when they pass through border checkpoints.Toward that end, U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has signaled his intention to file legislation that would require customs and law enforcement agencies to acquire a warrant before compelling access to a U.S. traveler’s electronic device and also prohibit the growing practice of demanding social media identities and passwords. In a letter to John Kelly, director of homeland security, Wyden poses the following questions:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 happiest cities for CIOs

CIOs appear to be a relatively happy bunch, despite the pressures of the job.Robert Half Technology surveyed 2,500 U.S. CIOs in 25 metropolitan areas. As a group, the tech leaders rated their overall job satisfaction at 8.5 in a 10-point scale. Respondents from 10 cities reported above-average happiness, with Miami hosting the most content IT chiefs.The top 10 cities for CIO job satisfaction, according to the tech staffing firm, are:1. Miami2. Boston3. Des Moines, Iowa4. Indianapolis5. Cincinnati6. Minneapolis7. Raleigh, NC8. Salt Lake City9. Dallas10. San FranciscoTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Ayyeka Sigfox IoT sensors monitor sewage deep underground San Francisco

San Francisco depends on a thousand miles of sewers to keep the city running smoothly.The city collects up to 500 million gallons of waste water in a day when it rains. This waste water is transported to one of three treatment plants where pollutants are removed before being discharged into San Francisco Bay.Processing sewage is challenging in San Francisco because the city has the Pacific Ocean on three sides of it. During storm conditions, groundwater and storm water can overload the sewage system. Physical, chemical and biological processes remove contaminants from the waste water. This produces environmentally safe water and sewage sludge as a byproduct.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Baidu Targets Deep Learning Scalability Challenges

When it comes to solving deep learning cluster and software stack problems at scale, few companies are riding the bleeding edge like Chinese search giant, Baidu. As we have detailed in the past, the company’s Silicon Valley AI Lab (SVAIL) has some unique hardware and framework implementations that put AI to the test at scale. As it turns out, scalability of the models they specialize in (beginning with speech recognition) is turning out to be one of the great challenges ahead on all fronts—hardware, compiler/runtime, and framework alike.

As we have described across multiple use cases, at Baidu and elsewhere

Baidu Targets Deep Learning Scalability Challenges was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

BrandPost: DevOps at Wells Fargo

Portions of this post were originally posted on the Puppet blog, and are republished here with Puppet's permission.As one of the world's largest banks, Wells Fargo competes by innovating its IT. At the heart of its innovation is the ability to continually launch, maintain and update software. You can get some sense of the scale when you hear that the Wells Fargo IT organization manages an infrastructure that supports 1 billion transactions per day.With more than 120,000 servers, 55,000 network devices, more than 2,300 applications in production, and more than 6,000 ways to deliver change to a server, Wells Fargo IT needs a consistent way to manage infrastructure, and a consistent way to plan each application's architecture.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here