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Stage Manager is Incomplete

I’ve been using macOS Stage Manager off and on for a little while now. In Stage Manager, I can see the beginnings of what might be a very useful paradigm for desktop computing. Unfortunately, in its current incarnation, I believe Stage Manager is incomplete.

Note that I haven’t yet tried Stage Manager on my iPad; my comments here apply only to the macOS implementation.

For those of you who haven’t yet tried Stage Manager yet, here’s a screenshot of my desktop, taken while I was writing this blog post:

I’ll draw your attention to the list of “recently used applications” on the left side of the screen. That’s the “Cast” (a term used by Howard Oakley in his great introductory article on Stage Manager). As you can see in this screenshot, the Cast supports application groups—like having Slack and Mail grouped together—as well as single applications. This allows you to easily switch between groups of applications simply by clicking on the preview in the Cast (which, using Howard’s terminology, moves the application or applications to the Stage).

This is the glimmer of a useful paradigm that I see in Stage Manager: being able to assemble groups of applications that Continue reading

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Bringing faster updates to Ansible Automation Platform

In today’s fast moving world, schedule driven, incremental releases may not be what customers are looking for. After gathering input from both external and internal customers, there is a definite appetite for more content driven releases.

Rather than waiting weeks to get official builds with a bug fix (schedule driven), most would like to have those builds made available within days after the code has been tested and merged (content driven). Beginning with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.3, this new release mechanism will be the norm. This blog will explain what it means for you and your processes.

 

What is Ansible Automation Platform?

From a business perspective, Ansible Automation Platform is the solution Red Hat offers its customers to reach and unleash the full potential of strategic automation.

From a technical perspective, Ansible Automation Platform is an umbrella of many components that provide automation capabilities. Some of these well known components include automation controller, Ansible automation hub, ansible-runner and ansible-core, which also have underlying dependencies.

A parallel can be easily drawn with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is the sum of all its components’ capabilities to run a battle tested operating system, just like Ansible Continue reading

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Tanzu Service Mesh Security Enhancements using Confidential Computing

Performance and Security Optimizations on Intel Xeon Scalable Processors with Intel SGX – Part 3

Contributors

Andrew Babakian — VMware

Saidulu Aldas, Ramesh Masavarapu, Sakari Poussa, Tarun Viswanathan —  Intel

Introduction

Intel and VMware have been working together to optimize and accelerate the microservices middleware and infrastructure with software and hardware to ensure developers have the best-in-class performance and low latency experience for building distributed workloads. The focus is on improving the performance of crypto accelerations and making workloads more secure.

The Service Mesh architecture pattern solves many problems, which are well-known and extensively documented, and will not be central to this discussion. However, the focal point of this blog series will include the architectural challenges of Service Mesh in the following top focus areas:

1. Performance
2. Security

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at how Tanzu Service Mesh uses eBPF to achieve network acceleration. In Part 2, we showcased how Intel and VMware collaborated to accelerate Tanzu Service Mesh crypto use cases and improve the performance of asymmetric crypto operations.

In this Part 3 blog series, we will discuss one security challenge (concerning the service mesh private key protection mechanism) and our solution.

In the current Continue reading

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Real-Life Not-Exactly-Networking AI Use Case

I get several emails every week¹ from people I never heard of telling me what a wonderful job they could do writing guest blog posts on a range of topics of interest to my audience.

I’m positive you must be pretty intelligent to be a successful scammer, so I’m sure the good ones are using ChatGPT to generate the “unique” content they’re promising. I felt it was high time to return the favor.

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Real-Life Not-Exactly-Networking AI Use Case

I get several emails every week¹ from people I never heard of telling me what a wonderful job they could do writing guest blog posts on a range of topics of interest to my audience.

I’m positive you must be pretty intelligent to be a successful scammer, so I’m sure the good ones are using ChatGPT to generate the “unique” content they’re promising. I felt it was high time to return the favor.

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Installing the Prerelease Pulumi Provider for Talos

Normally, installing a Pulumi provider is pretty easy; you run pulumi up and the provider gets installed automatically. Worst case scenario, you can install the provider using pulumi plugin install. However, when dealing with prerelease providers, sometimes things have to be done manually. Such is the case with the prerelease Pulumi provider for Talos Linux. In this post, I’ll show you what the manual process looks like for installing a prerelease provider.

The GitHub repository for the prerelease Pulumi provider for Talos can be found here. As of this writing, the latest release was v0.1.0-beta.0. Currently, the prerelease provider for Talos Linux can’t be installed automatically when running pulumi up, and pulumi plugin install doesn’t work either.

The manual process for installing this provider looks like this:

1. Download the latest release of the Talos provider from the GitHub Releases page. This will download a tarred and gzipped archive.
2. The plugin files need to go into a specific subdirectory under ~/.pulumi/plugins. Navigate to that directory, and create a subdirectory whose name corresponds to the version of the Talos provider. For example, if the version downloaded is v0.1.0-beta.0, then the name of the new Continue reading

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Learning to use Python classes

This tutorial demonstrates object-oriented programming and Python classes.

I think that most people learn best when working on a practical project, so I will show readers how to build a simple program that they can share with their friends and family. While building the program, I demonstrate the types of problems solved by using Python classes and I use Python classes to build and manage multiple game elements.

NOTE: I realize this is off-topic for my blog. I used the Pyxel game framework as an tool to introduce Python programming to my child. After using Pyxel to build a game, I thought that it provided a good example of using Python classes in an easy-to-understand way.

I assume the reader has already learned the basics of Python programming.

Python Classes

A Python class is a type of Python object used in object-oriented programming. Programmers create new objects by instantiating, or calling, classes. They may then use or modify those instances’ attributes in their programs.

Each instance of a class is a unique object that may contain variables, called data attributes, and functions, called methods.

Each class also contains an initialization function, called a constructor, that runs when a new Continue reading

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Fortinet Announces A New System on Chip (SoC) For Its Firewall Appliances

Fortinet has announced new chip hardware, the SP5, to power FortiGate firewall appliances for entry-level and medium-size customers that need firewalls at campus, branch, and edge locations. Fortinet is positioning this chip as a high-performance, energy-efficient option compared to security devices using off-the-shelf CPUs. Fortinet has long developed its own ASICs and has three hardware […]

The post Fortinet Announces A New System on Chip (SoC) For Its Firewall Appliances appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Day Two Cloud 181: Implementing Patterns And Practices For Infrastructure as Code

On today's Day Two Cloud podcast we talk about Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and software practices you might want to put in place for the parts of your team who know what they're doing with infrastructure but may not be familiar with developer practices that can help make code more reliable and operational processes more repeatable. Our guest is author Rosemary Wang.

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Day Two Cloud 181: Implementing Patterns And Practices For Infrastructure as Code

On today's Day Two Cloud podcast we talk about Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and software practices you might want to put in place for the parts of your team who know what they're doing with infrastructure but may not be familiar with developer practices that can help make code more reliable and operational processes more repeatable. Our guest is author Rosemary Wang.

The post Day Two Cloud 181: Implementing Patterns And Practices For Infrastructure as Code appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Welcome to Wildebeest: the Fediverse on Cloudflare

The Fediverse has been a hot topic of discussion lately, with thousands, if not millions, of new users creating accounts on platforms like Mastodon to either move entirely to "the other side" or experiment and learn about this new social network.

Today we're introducing Wildebeest, an open-source, easy-to-deploy ActivityPub and Mastodon-compatible server built entirely on top of Cloudflare's Supercloud. If you want to run your own spot in the Fediverse you can now do it entirely on Cloudflare.

The Fediverse, built on Cloudflare

Today you're left with two options if you want to join the Mastodon federated network: either you join one of the existing servers (servers are also called communities, and each one has its own infrastructure and rules), or you can run your self-hosted server.

There are a few reasons why you'd want to run your own server:

• You want to create a new community and attract other users over a common theme and usage rules.
• You don't want to have to trust third-party servers or abide by their policies and want your server, under your domain, for your personal account.
• You want complete control over your data, personal information, and content and visibility over what Continue reading

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Extreme adds network fabric support to its SD-WAN

Extreme Networks has added network fabric capabilities to its flagship SD-WAN platform to enable customers to link and manage distributed resources more securely.Additional enhancements to the ExtremeCloud SD-WAN platform include improved automated workflows and direct connectivity to cloud systems such as Microsoft Azure and AWS.“The overarching idea is to help customers more effectively connect distributed sites, especially the smaller branch office, without increasing optical or management overhead,” said Rob Hull, product marketing director at Extreme. “For the smaller sites, especially, with maybe no IT person or few, it gives them the big-site quality-of-service feel and big-site centralized management capability.”To read this article in full, please click here

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Extreme adds network fabric support to its SD-WAN

Extreme Networks has added network fabric capabilities to its flagship SD-WAN platform to enable customers to link and manage distributed resources more securely.Additional enhancements to the ExtremeCloud SD-WAN platform include improved automated workflows and direct connectivity to cloud systems such as Microsoft Azure and AWS.“The overarching idea is to help customers more effectively connect distributed sites, especially the smaller branch office, without increasing optical or management overhead,” said Rob Hull, product marketing director at Extreme. “For the smaller sites, especially, with maybe no IT person or few, it gives them the big-site quality-of-service feel and big-site centralized management capability.”To read this article in full, please click here

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Lessons Learned From the Top Cloud Outages of 2022

IT pros need to choose their cloud providers carefully but also ensure network resiliency and visibility are in place to recover from the problem as quickly as possible.

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Response: Nothing Works (in Enterprise IT)

Dmitry Perets left a thoughtful comment on my Nothing Works blog post describing why enterprise IT might be even worse than consumer world.

I think another reason for the “Nothing Works” world is that the only true Management Plane separation that exists in our industry is that of the real “human” management. In the medium/large enterprises they (and their interests, KPIs and so on) are very much separated from the technical workforce. And increasingly so, because today the technical workforce might not even be the employees of the same enterprise. They are likely to come from some IT consultancy outsource – degree of separation which makes a true SDN evangelist envious.

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Response: Nothing Works (in Enterprise IT)

Dmitry Perets left a thoughtful comment on my Nothing Works blog post describing why enterprise IT might be even worse than consumer world.

I think another reason for the “Nothing Works” world is that the only true Management Plane separation that exists in our industry is that of the real “human” management. In the medium/large enterprises they (and their interests, KPIs and so on) are very much separated from the technical workforce. And increasingly so, because today the technical workforce might not even be the employees of the same enterprise. They are likely to come from some IT consultancy outsource – degree of separation which makes a true SDN evangelist envious.

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Cisco adds services, hardware to better support industrial IoT

Cisco has added new visibility and security software to its cloud-based dashboard for managing configuration and applications for IoT devices in industrial settings.The company has upgraded its IoT Operations Dashboard with Cisco Cyber Vision, software that automatically builds a detailed inventory of all operational technology (OT) devices and identifies vulnerabilities.Cyber Vision can share its inventories with SecureX, Cisco’s enterprise Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platform to provide a combined inventory of both IT and OT assets, and that can make threat investigations easier and build remediation workflows, according to Vikas Butaney, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of cloud connectivity and industrial IOT networking.To read this article in full, please click here

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Cisco security upgrades strengthen access control, risk analysis

Cisco has strengthened some of its key security software packages with an eye toward better protecting distributed enterprise resources.Specifically, Cisco added more intelligence to its Duo access-protection software and introduced a new application called Business Risk Observability that can help enterprises measure the impact of security risks on their core applications. The company also enhanced its SASE offering by expanding its SD-WAN integration options.To read this article in full, please click here

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Cisco security upgrades strengthen access control, risk analysis

Cisco has strengthened some of its key security software packages with an eye toward better protecting distributed enterprise resources.Specifically, Cisco added more intelligence to its Duo access-protection software and introduced a new application called Business Risk Observability that can help enterprises measure the impact of security risks on their core applications. The company also enhanced its SASE offering by expanding its SD-WAN integration options.To read this article in full, please click here

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How Cloudflare erroneously throttled a customer’s web traffic

Over the years when Cloudflare has had an outage that affected our customers we have very quickly blogged about what happened, why, and what we are doing to address the causes of the outage. Today’s post is a little different. It’s about a single customer’s website not working correctly because of incorrect action taken by Cloudflare.

Although the customer was not in any way banned from Cloudflare, or lost access to their account, their website didn’t work. And it didn’t work because Cloudflare applied a bandwidth throttle between us and their origin server. The effect was that the website was unusable.

Because of this unusual throttle there was some internal confusion for our customer support team about what had happened. They, incorrectly, believed that the customer had been limited because of a breach of section 2.8 of our Self-Serve Subscription Agreement which prohibits use of our self-service CDN to serve excessive non-HTML content, such as images and video, without a paid plan that includes those services (this is, for example, designed to prevent someone building an image-hosting service on Cloudflare and consuming a huge amount of bandwidth; for that sort of use case we have paid image and video Continue reading