Cisco Buying Hybrid Cloud Firm CliQr for $260M
CliQr's 100 or so employees will join Cisco's Insieme group.
Cisco ‘DNA’ Targets Hyperconvergence, Openness & APIs
Cisco goes hyperconverge wild.
VMware President Gets Plucked by a Venture Capital Firm
This is the second VMware exec in a week to leave for a VC.
Security ‘net: Internet of Things and iPhones edition
One of my college professors has suggested that the question of whether or not Apple should help the FBI break the encryption on the iPhone used by a terrorist is an ideal diagnostic question for your view of all things privacy. There are, of course, gray area answers, like “Apple should help the FBI break the encryption in this case, but not others.” The problem is, of course, that this isn’t the simple answer it might seem. First, there are motives behind the apparent motives. Many people see Apple as just “doing what’s right to save the world.” I don’t see it that way at all. Given I’m a bit cynical (who would have guessed), I see two motives from Apple’s point of view.
First, Apple is trying to protect a marketing stance. They’ve as much as admitted this in court documents and the implied threat of suing the U.S. Government for loss of revenue if they’re forced to build a version of their O/S that will allow the FBI to break the encryption. Just Security notes—
There are other interests at stake here too. Apple has a liberty interest in not being dragooned into writing forensic Continue reading
Mirantis Shores Up OpenStack Stability
Mirantis polishes OpenStack.
Cisco Dives Into Hyperconvergence
HyperFlex integrates software from Springpath into the Cisco UCS platform.
Sponsored Post: zanox Group, Varnish, LaunchDarkly, Swrve, Netflix, Aerospike, TrueSight Pulse, Redis Labs, InMemory.Net, VividCortex, MemSQL, Scalyr, AiScaler, AppDynamics, ManageEngine, Site24x7
Who's Hiring?
- The zanox Group are looking for a Senior Architect. We're looking for someone smart and pragmatic to help our engineering teams build fast, scalable and reliable solutions for our industry leading affiliate marketing platform. The role will involve a healthy mixture of strategic thinking and hands-on work - there are no ivory towers here! Our stack is diverse and interesting. You can apply for the role in either London or Berlin.
- Swrve -- In November we closed a $30m funding round, and we’re now expanding our engineering team based in Dublin (Ireland). Our mobile marketing platform is powered by 8bn+ events a day, processed in real time. We’re hiring intermediate and senior backend software developers to join the existing team of thirty engineers. Sound like fun? Come join us.
- Senior Service Reliability Engineer (SRE): Drive improvements to help reduce both time-to-detect and time-to-resolve while concurrently improving availability through service team engagement. Ability to analyze and triage production issues on a web-scale system a plus. Find details on the position here: https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/434
- Manager - Performance Engineering: Lead the world-class performance team in charge of both optimizing the Netflix cloud stack and developing the performance observability capabilities Continue reading
Slacking Off
A Candlestick Phone (image courtesy of WIkipedia)
There’s a great piece today on how Slack is causing disruption in people’s work habits. Slack is a program that has dedicated itself to getting rid of email, yet we now find ourselves mired in Slack team after Slack team. I believe the real issue isn’t with Slack but instead with the way that our brains are wired to handle communication.
Interrupt Driven
People get interrupted all the time. It’s a fact of life if you work in business, not just IT. Even if you have your head down typing away at a keyboard and you’ve closed out all other forms of distraction, a pop up from an email or a ringing or vibrating phone will jar your concentration out of the groove and force your brain to deal with this new intruder into your solitude.
That’s evolution working against you. When we were hunters and gatherers our brain had to learn how to deal with external threats when we were focused on a task like stalking a mammoth or looking for sprouts on the forest floor. Our eyes are even developed to take advantage of this. Your peripheral vision will pick up Continue reading
Worth Watching: The Basics of ASIC Design
The post Worth Watching: The Basics of ASIC Design appeared first on 'net work.
Docker Networking Design Philosophy
From the experimental networking in Docker 1.7 to the initial release in Docker 1.9, the reception from the community has been fantastic! First of all we want to thank you for all the discussions, evaluations, PRs and filed issues. As … ContinuedDon’t let DROWN get you down
If you’re maintaining services on the internet, you know about the importance of keeping up to date with security patches as they come available. Today is no exception with the release of CVE-2016-0800, describing the ‘DROWN’ vulnerability in OpenSSL.
The key points of DROWN are that it can allow for passive decryption of encrypted traffic, via vulnerabilities in the obsolete SSLv2 protocol. Merely using SSLv2 for one service could cause the compromise the traffic of other services, even if they aren’t using SSLv2. More information can be found at http://www.drownattack.com/.
The Red Hat specific announcement can be found in the Red Hat Knowledgebase.
Obviously, this is a big deal, but patching your systems for DROWN doesn’t have to be a big deal, thanks to Ansible.
Here’s a sample playbook for Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS and Debian/Ubuntu systems (link to source):
- hosts: all gather_facts: true sudo: true tasks: - name: update openssl from apt if available apt: name=openssl state=latest update_cache=yes when: ansible_os_family == 'Debian' notify: restart_system - name: update openssl from yum if available yum: name=openssl state=latest update_cache=yes when: ansible_os_family == 'RedHat' notify: restart_system Continue reading