Introducing Ansible Tower 3.1

We're excited to announce the release of Ansible Tower 3.1. Our engineering team has been hard at work on enhancing Ansible Tower to allow teams to harness the power of automation across servers, applications, environments, and networks, and with Ansible Tower 3.1, we've brought together a variety of enhancements that allow your teams to automate more processes, more frequently, and more easily analyze the results of your automation across the enterprise

Model complex processes with multi-Playbook workflows

Ansible brought simple, agentless automation to IT. But some IT processes don't lend themselves to being automated in a single Playbook - if you're provisioning environments, you may want to handle basic provisioning, default configuration, and application deployment differently. And once you've automated those tasks, you want to reuse those tasks in different ways, or in different environments. Plus, what if a deployment goes wrong? You may need to back your environment out to the last known good state.

To solve these issues, we developed Tower workflows. With Tower workflows, you can chain together any number of Playbooks together into a workflow, with each workflow step potentially using a different Playbook, inventory, set of credentials, and more. Easily launch one or more Continue reading

Five sides and 1,500 access points: Wi-Fi at the Pentagon

The central offices of the U.S. Department of Defense – better known as the Pentagon – pose a unique IT challenge in a lot of ways, but bringing the 6.5 million square-foot space up to the wireless standards of the modern office environment was a particularly big undertaking, according to a government contractor charged with the task. The idea of a technology that broadcasts information in all directions, invisibly, through the air, is an understandably unpleasant one to a certain cast of military mind. So selling the people who run the Pentagon on installing Wi-Fi wasn’t an easy pitch, according to Defense Engineering, Inc. program manager Brendan DeBow.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: AI as advisor, not magician

In 2009, Google introduced Gmail Autopilot. “As more and more everyday communications take place over email, lots of people have complained about how hard it is to read and respond to every message. This is because they actually read and respond to all their messages.” Autopilot replied to email as if it were actually you. It included an authenticity control panel to adjust for "tone, typo propensity, and preferred punctuation."Autopilot was launched as an April Fools' prank. It was one of several programs tied to Google CADIE (cognitive autoheuristic distributed intelligence entity). Google provided several examples that demonstrated how helpful autopilot could be, including this one:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Quantifying the Impact of “Cloudbleed”

Last Thursday we released details on a bug in Cloudflare's parser impacting our customers. It was an extremely serious bug that caused data flowing through Cloudflare's network to be leaked onto the Internet. We fully patched the bug within hours of being notified. However, given the scale of Cloudflare, the impact was potentially massive.

The bug has been dubbed “Cloudbleed.” Because of its potential impact, the bug has been written about extensively and generated a lot of uncertainty. The burden of that uncertainty has been felt by our partners, customers, our customers’ customers. The question we’ve been asked the most often is: what risk does Cloudbleed pose to me?

We've spent the last twelve days using log data on the actual requests we’ve seen across our network to get a better grip on what the impact was and, in turn, provide an estimate of the risk to our customers. This post outlines our initial findings.

The summary is that, while the bug was very bad and had the potential to be much worse, based on our analysis so far: 1) we have found no evidence based on our logs that the bug was maliciously exploited before it was patched; Continue reading

5G Will Be ‘Useless’ Without NFV, VMware Says

VMware and Atos team up on 5G, NFV, and security.

How Nokia’s Deepfield Maps the ‘Supply Chain of the Internet’

The startup has figured out where the Internet’s major services live.

Making Remote NVM-Express Flash Look Local And Fast

Large enterprises are embracing NVM-Express flash as the storage technology of choice for their data intensive and often highly unpredictable workloads. NVM-Express devices bring with them high performance – up to 1 million I/O operations per second – and low latency – less than 100 microseconds. And flash storage now has high capacity, too, making it a natural fit for such datacenter applications.

As we have discussed here before, all-flash arrays are quickly becoming mainstream, particularly within larger enterprises, as an alternative to disk drives in environments where tens or hundreds of petabytes of data – rather than the …

Making Remote NVM-Express Flash Look Local And Fast was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Blue Planet Lifecycle Service Orchestration: Moving from Promises to Production

As a service provider you need to respond to market demand, become more agile, and create and deploy services more rapidly. See what MDSO can do. Start today by leveraging the strengths of technology, building success on top of success.

Google hopes cord-cutters will sign up for YouTube TV: 44 channels for $35

Google has jumped into the cord-cutter game with YouTube TV, offering live TV without signing a contract.For $35 per month, you can watch 44 different channels via YouTube TV. Some of those channels are ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, CW, ESPN, Disney, Disney Jr., National Geographic, USA, FX, FXX, Syfy, Bravo, Oxygen, Sprout, E! and FreeForm. Google’s announcement included the full run-down, as well as intentions to partner with local TV stations to get local news and sports.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New FCC chairman: Net neutrality rules were a ‘mistake’

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules, passed two years, ago were a "mistake" that caused uncertainty for the broadband industry, the agency's new chairman said.The net neutrality rules, along with the FCC's decision to reclassify broadband as a regulated common carrier, "deviated" from the U.S. government's longstanding light-touch regulatory approach toward the internet, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.RELATED: The hidden cause of slow Internet and how to fix it Two years after the agency passed its net neutrality rules "it has become evident that the FCC made a mistake," said Pai, a Republican. "Our new approach injected tremendous uncertainty into the broadband market. And uncertainty is the enemy of growth."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New FCC chairman: Net neutrality rules were a ‘mistake’

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules, passed two years, ago were a "mistake" that caused uncertainty for the broadband industry, the agency's new chairman said.The net neutrality rules, along with the FCC's decision to reclassify broadband as a regulated common carrier, "deviated" from the U.S. government's longstanding light-touch regulatory approach toward the internet, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.RELATED: The hidden cause of slow Internet and how to fix it Two years after the agency passed its net neutrality rules "it has become evident that the FCC made a mistake," said Pai, a Republican. "Our new approach injected tremendous uncertainty into the broadband market. And uncertainty is the enemy of growth."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Global cybercrime prosecution a patchwork of alliances

We don't hear much about John Dillinger-style bank robberies these days, with exciting police chases to the state lines. In 2015, there were 4,091 traditional bank robberies in the US, according to the FBI, with an average loss of less than $4,000 per incident. No customers or bank employees were killed in any of these robberies, though eight would-be robbers were killed.The clearance rate for traditional bank robberies is around 60 percent, while the proportion of criminals that escape could be even lower, if they commit more than one robbery -- the FBI currently has fewer than 500 people on its list of wanted and unidentified bank robbers. In most cases, the FBI has a picture of them, and a description, posted on its website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Global cybercrime prosecution a patchwork of alliances

We don't hear much about John Dillinger-style bank robberies these days, with exciting police chases to the state lines. In 2015, there were 4,091 traditional bank robberies in the US, according to the FBI, with an average loss of less than $4,000 per incident. No customers or bank employees were killed in any of these robberies, though eight would-be robbers were killed.The clearance rate for traditional bank robberies is around 60 percent, while the proportion of criminals that escape could be even lower, if they commit more than one robbery -- the FBI currently has fewer than 500 people on its list of wanted and unidentified bank robbers. In most cases, the FBI has a picture of them, and a description, posted on its website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: Visual Studio 2017 is the best ever

InfoWorldI mentioned earlier that Visual Studio startup time has improved over the years. For large solutions with many projects, such as a 2-million-line-of-code C++/C# project with a dozen DLLs and other separate modules on which I used to work, the new lightweight solution load mechanism can help a lot, because the individual projects are loaded on demand instead of all at once. That can make the difference between an annoying five-minute wait at startup time and a barely noticeable five-second pause as you open a different project within the solution. Individual file loads have sped up as well and now usually open in less than a second—almost at Sublime Text speeds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Operators Pushing Envelope on 5G Timeline

5G will likely be commercial in late 2018 or early 2019.

How to identify and resolve double-NAT problems

The digital world is all about IP (internet protocol) addresses. Every device needs an IP in order to communicate on the internet or within a private network. Given there’s not enough public IP addresses out there for every internet-connected device (at least with IPv4), this little thing called NAT becomes extremely important. It stands for network address translation (NAT) and is a function provided by routers to enable multiple devices to access the internet via a single public IP address.Behind each public IP, there can be hundreds of devices with their own private IP addresses, thanks to NAT. And almost all equipment that provides the NAT function includes a firewall to protect the private IPs and devices from public IPs and devices on the internet. Other network services are also typically offered, like DHCP (dynamic host control protocol) to give out the private IP addresses to devices that connect to the local network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to identify and resolve double-NAT problems

The digital world is all about IP (internet protocol) addresses. Every device needs an IP in order to communicate on the internet or within a private network. Given there’s not enough public IP addresses out there for every internet-connected device (at least with IPv4), this little thing called NAT becomes extremely important. It stands for network address translation (NAT) and is a function provided by routers to enable multiple devices to access the internet via a single public IP address.Behind each public IP, there can be hundreds of devices with their own private IP addresses, thanks to NAT. And almost all equipment that provides the NAT function includes a firewall to protect the private IPs and devices from public IPs and devices on the internet. Other network services are also typically offered, like DHCP (dynamic host control protocol) to give out the private IP addresses to devices that connect to the local network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trump says offshoring displaces ‘our best’ American workers

President Donald Trump promised Tuesday to crack down on offshore outsourcing, which he blamed for displacing some of the best American workers. He didn't say how he might do it, and didn't raise the H-1B visa issue, which he has previously blamed for enabling offshoring.But Trump aimed a fiery broadside at offshore outsourcing at an Oval Office ceremony concerning two bills, both aimed at encouraging more women to study and seek careers in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). His comments went well beyond the scope of the two bills.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel showed how 5G networking will power VR and self-driving cars

Think about how annoyed you get when you lose your cell signal, and you can see why Intel is pushing for advances in the next generation of networking, also known as 5G. Sure, the company stands to profit from making chips and networking equipment to support faster broadband. Consumers, too, stand to benefit from a future where more things in their lives are connected. To get there, though, we’re all going to need more bandwidth.At Mobile World Congress, Intel demonstrated several initiatives for developing 5G capabilities. Watching virtual reality’s often stuttery video can make people queasy, but Intel demonstrated how 5G could let you stream 8K VR content. The company also showed how self-driving cars will need a speedy 5G network to communicate with other cars and infrastructure so they can move safely.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel showed how 5G networking will power VR and self-driving cars

Think about how annoyed you get when you lose your cell signal, and you can see why Intel is pushing for advances in the next generation of networking, also known as 5G. Sure, the company stands to profit from making chips and networking equipment to support faster broadband. Consumers, too, stand to benefit from a future where more things in their lives are connected. To get there, though, we’re all going to need more bandwidth.At Mobile World Congress, Intel demonstrated several initiatives for developing 5G capabilities. Watching virtual reality’s often stuttery video can make people queasy, but Intel demonstrated how 5G could let you stream 8K VR content. The company also showed how self-driving cars will need a speedy 5G network to communicate with other cars and infrastructure so they can move safely.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here