Bringing IoT data into public clouds is getting easier

The formidable processing power and analytical tools available in public clouds could make industrial IoT more effective and less expensive. But bringing IoT data into the cloud takes more than a network connection.On Tuesday, two companies moved to help enterprises adapt their IoT data for popular cloud services. OSIsoft introduced its PI Integrator for Microsoft Azure, and Particle announced a custom integration with Google Cloud Platform.While some large enterprises with sensitive IoT data do all their analytics in-house, public clouds offer greater scale and better security than many organizations can achieve on their own, MachNation analyst Dima Tokar said. And more advanced analytics, including better error correction, in some cases can give enterprises the same insights with fewer sensors, he said. Trading hardware for software -- especially the cloud-based kind -- typically means savings.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Six years old and time for an update: CloudFlare becomes Cloudflare

Six years old and time for an update: CloudFlare becomes Cloudflare

Today, Cloudflare turns six years old, and if you’re reading this on our blog, you may have noticed that we look a bit different today than the cloudflare.com that you’ve visited in the past. More on that a bit later in this post.

Six years old and time for an update: CloudFlare becomes Cloudflare

What we’re most excited about today is that over the past six years, we’ve made the Internet safer, faster and a more reliable place for any domain whether it’s used for a website, web application or API.

We currently count more than 4,000,000 customers as members of the Cloudflare community, and we’ve been working very hard to bring the best of the modern Internet to you.

Levelling the Internet playing field is Cloudflare’s mission and it’s what gets us out of bed every morning and into one of our offices. Last week, we took away what we think are the last excuses for any domain to not be encrypted with our three launches during Encryption Week.

Yesterday, we announced the 100th city added to the Cloudflare global network of data centers. In the coming days, we have more exciting products that we’re opening up to the public for early access that will expand our offering to Continue reading

Down the rabbit hole, part 1: Making my life private and secure

Over the years I’ve done a number of—let’s just call them “experiments in computering”—where I attempt to use my computers in such a way that is outside of my comfort zone. Living entirely in a terminal. Getting rid of all Google software and services. Using nothing but a version of FreeDOS. That sort of thing. I typically give myself the simple goal of “do it for 30 days, and see how it goes.” In the process, I always learn something—about what I like, about what is possible. And even if I don’t learn a cotton-pickin’ thing of value, it’s still kinda fun—kinda. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Down the rabbit hole, part 1: Making my life private and secure

Over the years I’ve done a number of—let’s just call them “experiments in computering”—where I attempt to use my computers in such a way that is outside of my comfort zone. Living entirely in a terminal. Getting rid of all Google software and services. Using nothing but a version of FreeDOS. That sort of thing. I typically give myself the simple goal of “do it for 30 days, and see how it goes.” In the process, I always learn something—about what I like, about what is possible. And even if I don’t learn a cotton-pickin’ thing of value, it’s still kinda fun—kinda. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Six senators demand more details about the Yahoo data breach

Six U.S. senators have called Yahoo's massive data breach "unacceptable," and they're demanding that the company provide more details about the incident.In a letter addressed to Yahoo's CEO, the lawmakers said they were particularly "disturbed" that the breach occurred in 2014, but that Yahoo only publicized it last week."That means millions of Americans' data may have been compromised for two years," the letter said. "This is unacceptable."The hacking incident, which Yahoo said it only learned recently, affects at least 500 million users, making it perhaps the largest known data breach in history. Account information, including email addresses, telephone numbers, and hashed passwords, may have been stolen.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Six senators demand more details about the Yahoo data breach

Six U.S. senators have called Yahoo's massive data breach "unacceptable," and they're demanding that the company provide more details about the incident.In a letter addressed to Yahoo's CEO, the lawmakers said they were particularly "disturbed" that the breach occurred in 2014, but that Yahoo only publicized it last week."That means millions of Americans' data may have been compromised for two years," the letter said. "This is unacceptable."The hacking incident, which Yahoo said it only learned recently, affects at least 500 million user accounts, making it perhaps the largest known data breach in history. Account information, including email addresses, telephone numbers, and hashed passwords, may have been stolen.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Video: What’s it like to be a cloud startup

In a market dominated by vendors like Amazon, Microsoft and Google is there room for startups? Thinkstock Many entrepreneurs and investors believe so. I’ve been interested in what it takes to start up a business in the uber-competitive cloud computing market. To help explore the issue, Cloud Chronicles visited ClearSky Data in downtown Boston to chat with co-founder Ellen Rubin – a cloud industry veteran and three-time entrepreneur – to talk about what Clear Sky is and how it competes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker 1.12 swarm mode elastic load balancing


Docker Built-In Orchestration Ready For Production: Docker 1.12 Goes GA describes the native swarm mode feature that integrates cluster management, virtual networking, and policy based deployment of services.

This article will demonstrate how real-time streaming telemetry can be used to construct an elastic load balancing solution that dynamically adjusts service capacity to match changing demand.

Getting started with swarm mode describes the steps to configure a swarm cluster. For example, following command issued on any of the Manager nodes deploys a web service on the cluster:
docker service create --replicas 2 -p 80:80 --name apache httpd:2.4
And the following command raises the number of containers in the service pool from 2 to 4: 
docker service scale apache=4
Asynchronous Docker metrics describes how sFlow telemetry provides the real-time visibility required for elastic load balancing. The diagram shows how streaming telemetry allows the sFlow-RT controller to determine the load on the service pool so that it can use the Docker service API to automatically increase or decrease the size of the pool as demand changes. Elastic load balancing of the service pools ensures consistent service levels by adding additional resources if demand increases. In addition, efficiency is improved by releasing resources Continue reading

Being an Effective Interviewer

One challenging aspect of being an engineer is interviewing other engineers. The interview process is rife with various problems, including the discomfort of interviewing someone who you perceive as being a better engineer than you are, or figuring out how to draw out actual engineering skill versus simply finding out how much someone has memorized. Does that CCIE or degree on their resume really mean anything? What does an effective network engineering interview look like?

There are, of course, several different theories “out there.” For instance, some companies focus on giving candidates “real world” problems to solve, and checking with them several days later to see how they’ve done. This is potentially useful, but quite often I find my best work is done with a team, rather than by myself. Such systems seem to tend towards pitting the candidate against well known or well established problem sets, which can easily revert back to memorization skills, or towards difficult/obtuse problems. Either way, this doesn’t test the candidate’s ability to work in a team, or interact with others in solving difficult problems.

What about tossing other sorts of puzzles towards the candidate to see how they do? This also seems problematic Continue reading

Unwrapping Tangled Device Configurations – A10 Networks Edition

If you’ve ever tried to interpret an A10 Networks load balancer configuration, or some Cisco Modular QoS CLI commands, you’ll know that doing so involves following references to other parts of the configuration, inevitably ones that appear earlier in the configuration than where you are now, using a display pager which doesn’t support a back command to scroll up a page at a time. In short, it’s a huge pain. The same applies to Cisco ACE and CSM load balancer configurations. The modularity is beautiful and logical, but it’s a massive irritation to reverse engineer.

Spaghetti

Spaghetti Configurations

I work regularly with A10 Networks load balancers. ACOS (the A10 OS) has a CLI and configuration format that’s very similar to Cisco IOS. Looking at a particular vPort (A10 terminology for a particular Virtual IP (VIP) and Port combination) and trying to figure out which real servers are related to it is irritating to say the least. Here’s an example of the configuration in the order it appears when you view it:

ip nat pool pool1 10.100.1.1 10.100.1.126 netmask /25
!
health monitor checkstatus
   method http url /status expect code 200
!
slb server server1 1.2.3.4
   port  Continue reading

IEEE sets new Ethernet standard that brings 5X the speed without disruptive cable changes

As expected the IEEE has ratified a new Ethernet specification -- IEEE P802.3bz – that defines 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T, boosting the current top speed of traditional Ethernet five-times without requiring the tearing out of current cabling.The Ethernet Alliance wrote that the IEEE 802.3bz Standard for Ethernet Amendment sets Media Access Control Parameters, Physical Layers and Management Parameters for 2.5G and 5Gbps Operation lets access layer bandwidth evolve incrementally beyond 1Gbps, it will help address emerging needs in a variety of settings and applications, including enterprise, wireless networks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IEEE sets new Ethernet standard that brings 5X the speed without disruptive cable changes

As expected the IEEE has ratified a new Ethernet specification -- IEEE P802.3bz – that defines 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T, boosting the current top speed of traditional Ethernet five-times without requiring the tearing out of current cabling.The Ethernet Alliance wrote that the IEEE 802.3bz Standard for Ethernet Amendment sets Media Access Control Parameters, Physical Layers and Management Parameters for 2.5G and 5Gbps Operation lets access layer bandwidth evolve incrementally beyond 1Gbps, it will help address emerging needs in a variety of settings and applications, including enterprise, wireless networks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: MarkLogic: Can NoSQL databases support today’s enterprise?

Although I had a few problems with the original PR messages that invited me to meet with MarkLogic, the conversation with Gary Bloom, the company's CEO and president, was well worth the time.Summary of our conversation The following bullets are a quick summary to a complex and engaging conversation: The industry is experiencing several fundimental shifts in both the sources of data and how it is being used. The data is now coming from many types of end user focused devices, applications that combine the efforts of many systems that are housed all over the planet, neither enterprises nor end users will tolerate slow response times or failures, and older approaches that are based upon monolithic application and database design simply can't keep up. While it is true that things have changed in fundimental ways, older applications, systems and designs are not going away. They continue to support enterprise critical applications, but need help dealing with the tsunomi of data coming from everywhere. The state of the art in database architecture has shifted from a "shared nothing" design center to a "shared everything" center that can take advantage of local, virtual and cloud processing and data. Database design Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: MarkLogic: Can NoSQL databases support today’s enterprise?

Although I had a few problems with the original PR messages that invited me to meet with MarkLogic, the conversation with Gary Bloom, the company's CEO and president, was well worth the time.Summary of our conversation The following bullets are a quick summary to a complex and engaging conversation: The industry is experiencing several fundimental shifts in both the sources of data and how it is being used. The data is now coming from many types of end user focused devices, applications that combine the efforts of many systems that are housed all over the planet, neither enterprises nor end users will tolerate slow response times or failures, and older approaches that are based upon monolithic application and database design simply can't keep up. While it is true that things have changed in fundimental ways, older applications, systems and designs are not going away. They continue to support enterprise critical applications, but need help dealing with the tsunomi of data coming from everywhere. The state of the art in database architecture has shifted from a "shared nothing" design center to a "shared everything" center that can take advantage of local, virtual and cloud processing and data. Database design Continue reading

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