Making The Case For Containers

Linux container technology is IT’s shiny new thing. Containers promise to ease application development and deployment, a necessity in a business environment where getting ahead of application demand can mean the difference between staying in business or not. Containers offer many benefits, but they are not a panacea, and it’s important to understand why, where and when to use them.

Most IT pros recognize that application containers can provide a technological edge, one that translates into a clear business advantage. Containers unify and streamline application components – including the libraries and binaries upon which individual applications depend. Combining isolation with …

Making The Case For Containers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Salesforce will buy Krux to expand behavioral tracking capabilities

Salesforce.com has agreed to buy user data management platform Krux Digital, potentially allowing businesses to process even more data in their CRM systems.Krux describes its business as "capturing, unifying, and activating data signatures across every device and every channel, in real time."Essentially, it performs the tracking underlying behavioral advertising, handling 200 billion "data collection events" on three billion browsers and devices (desktop, mobile, tablet and set-top) each month.With that staggering volume of data, "Krux will extend the Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s audience segmentation and targeting capabilities to power consumer marketing with even more precision, at scale," Krux CEO and co-founder Tom Chavez wrote on the company blog.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: SoftLayer founder’s new company, StackPath, releases app security product

It’s always interesting to see what happens when a high-profile CEO sells his company and then finishes up his earn-out period. There are a few different models: some individuals go buy an island, start making films or go on permanent vacation. Others take some time to work out what they’re going to do and maybe take an entrepreneur-in-residence position for a time, while others jump straight back into the shark tank.+ Also on Network World: Application-layer DDoS attacks will increase, Kaspersky Labs predicts +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Salesforce kicks off its conference with mobile, IoT updates and more

Salesforce's annual Dreamforce mega-conference kicks off in San Francisco on Tuesday morning, and the company will announce a slew of updates to its apps and services. The company is enhancing its mobile apps, launching deeper integrations between Salesforce and Quip and improving its services for processing IoT data. All of these new features are aimed at leveling up Salesforce's feature set at a time when the company faces fierce competition from tech titans like Microsoft and Oracle, along with a fleet of startups. The Salesforce1 app for iOS will be updated to let managers see how their employees are matching up against their quotas and how sales are stacking up against projections and quotas. In addition, companies will be able to pay extra for a My Salesforce1 functionality that lets them deploy their own version of the app with their own branding.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google Touts Its Cloud Network

Review: ADATA’s waterproof SSD is small, rugged — and pricey

ADATA recently launched two new solid-state drives (SSDs): one it claims is the fastest and smallest external SSD, and the other is a new 2.5-in laptop SSD based on 3D NAND.Here, I review ADATA's diminutive external SSD as 2.5-in.At just 2.8-in x 1.7-in x 0.4-in, the ADATA SE730 SSD is not just shirt-pocket friendly, it can practically disappear in your pants pocket among your smartphone and keys. It also comes in a stylish, gold- or red-colored metal case. ADATA ADATA's SE730 external SSD in its packaging.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT Resume Makeover: Don’t downplay your success

In this Resume Makeover, Donald Burns, helps a senior marketing executive, Alice Gaines (name changed for this article), simplify her resume to tell a story about how she earned four major promotions over her 16-year marketing career with one company. The challenge for Burns was to not only list the titles in a way that made sense to hiring managers, but also to demonstrate how each promotion came with new responsibilities and skills.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

7 ways DevOps benefits security programs

DevOps can be beneficialImage by ThinkstockOrganizational culture and its processes and technology are evolving at a pace we have never experienced before. As a result, we can’t just sit back and wait for the “DevOps fad” to fade away because it isn’t going to. It’s not a fad – it’s an evolved way of software development. Furthermore, security cannot be the elephant in the room that everyone avoids because it gets too complicated. Security must evolve, as well, segueing into SecDevOps.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to get a job in IT services

One of the potential frustrations of working in a corporate IT department is the constant reminder that "IT is not our business; IT is here to serve the business." There's an alternative, of course: You can get a job in IT services, where information technology is the business.Work in IT services is closely related to IT consulting (a field we covered previously), with a few key differences. Although some companies offer both IT consulting and IT services, and both types of businesses are looking to hire highly skilled IT professionals, there's a distinct difference between the two, sources say. That difference is essentially the difference between strategy and tactics: An IT consulting firm plans new systems, while an IT services provider maintains systems after they're deployed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security for your collaborative software

There’s a gaping hole in your security infrastructure right now. The front door is open, the side window is ajar, and there’s an open safe with a neon sign saying “steal my data” in flashing lights. While you might have locked down the network used for this software, instituted strict usage policies, and insist on having users stick to complex passwords, the data is leaking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Turn data from risk liability into an asset

Big data has proven to be a big asset for corporations who are trying to collect information and make informed business decisions, but if the proper strategies for protecting that data are not in place, the risks to the enterprise can be costly.Earlier this year Cisco reported that worldwide mobile traffic is expected to grow eightfold from 2015 to 2020 reaching 30.6 exabytes, monthly. Planning for that data inflation raises a very important question: “How can organizations ensure their data is an asset and not a liability?” To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Storage-As-A-Service Option

DNSSEC and ECDSA

Introducing InfraKit, an open source toolkit for creating and managing declarative, self-healing infrastructure

Written by Bill Farner and David Chung

Docker’s mission is to build tools of mass innovation, starting with a programmable layer for the Internet that enables developers and IT operations teams to build and run distributed applications. As part of this mission, we have always endeavored to contribute software plumbing toolkits back to the community, following the UNIX philosophy of building small loosely coupled tools that are created to simply do one thing well. As Docker adoption has grown from 0 to 6 billion pulls, we have worked to address the needs of a growing and diverse set of distributed systems users. This work has led to the creation of many infrastructure plumbing components that have been contributed back to the community.

It started in 2014 with libcontainer and libnetwork. In 2015 we created runC and co-founded OCI with an industry-wide set of partners to provide a standard for container runtimes, a reference implementation based on libcontainer, and notary, which provides the basis for Docker Content Trust. From there we added containerd, a daemon to control runC, built for performance and density. Docker Engine was refactored so that Docker 1.11 is built on top of containerd and runC, providing benefits Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: The growing network divide: What it means for your company and your career

We’re leaving the Information Age and entering the Network Age, at least that’s what Joshua Cooper Ramo argues in his compelling and thought-provoking business book, The Seventh Sense.As we move to digitize everything from retail and services to cities and healthcare, networks are the secret sauce at the center of new business models. They separate the winners from the losers. They transform industries, social movements, governments and our everyday lives.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The growing network divide: What it means for your company and your career

We’re leaving the Information Age and entering the Network Age, at least that’s what Joshua Cooper Ramo argues in his compelling and thought-provoking business book, The Seventh Sense.As we move to digitize everything from retail and services to cities and healthcare, networks are the secret sauce at the center of new business models. They separate the winners from the losers. They transform industries, social movements, governments and our everyday lives.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ansible versus Puppet in Initial Device Provisioning

One of the attendees of my Building Next-Generation Data Center course asked this interesting question after listening to my description of differences between Chet/Puppet and Ansible:

For Zero-Touch Provisioning to work, an agent gets installed on the box as a boot up process that would contact the master indicating the box is up and install necessary configuration. How does this work with agent-less approach such as Ansible?

Here’s the first glitch: many network devices don’t ship with Puppet or Chef agent; you have to install it during the provisioning process.

udevadm, systemd and a barcode scanner

I chose the LS2208 because there were lots of them on eBay and because documentation was available. So far I'm happy with the LS2208, but wish it didn't require a physical PC to be nearby. A USB Anywhere box may be in my future (nope, Windows only). If I'd been able to find a WiFi scanner that would POST scans directly to a REST API over TLS, I'd have gone with that instead, but it seems that this guy and I are out of luck in that regard. I've got zero interest in fooling around with WinCE or similar mobile devices with built-in scanners.

• Set Factory Defaults
• Simple COM Port Emulation
• Low Volume
• Beep on <BEL> (still need to fool with this - seems like it could provide useful feedback to the operator)
• Do Not Beep After Good Decode

Someone Released the Code That Turns IoT Devices into Evil Bots

IoT devices could set the stage for 'epic DDoS wars.'

IoT botnet highlights the dangers of default passwords

A botnet responsible for a massive DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attack was created thanks to weak default usernames and passwords found in internet-connected cameras and DVRs.The Mirai botnet grabbed headlines last month for taking down the website of cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs with a huge DDOS attack. Unlike most botnets, which rely on infected PCs, this one used IoT devices to target its victims.It turns out the botnet was specifically designed to scan the internet for poorly secured products like cameras and then access them through easily guessable passwords like "admin" or "12345." Last Friday, the botnet's maker released its source code, and security experts have noticed it's built to try a list of more than 60 combinations of user names and passwords.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here