Using Docker Machine with AWS

As part of a broader effort (see the post on my 2016 projects) to leverage public cloud resources more than I have in the past, some Docker Engine-related testing I’ve been conducting recently has been done using AWS EC2 instances instead of VMs in my home lab. Along the way, I’ve found Docker Machine to be quite a handy tool, and in this post I’ll share how to use Docker Machine with AWS.

By and large, using Docker Machine with AWS is pretty straightforward. You can get an idea of what information Docker Machine needs by running docker-machine create -d amazonec2 --help. (You can also view the documentation for the AWS driver specifically.) The key pieces of information you need are:

  • --amazonec2-access-key: This is your AWS access key. Docker Machine can read it from the $AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID environment variable, or—if you have the AWS CLI installed—Docker Machine can read it from there.
  • --amazonec2-secret-key: This is your AWS secret key. As with the AWS access key, Docker Machine can read this from an environment variable ($AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY) or from the AWS CLI credentials file (by default, found in ~/.aws/credentials).
  • --amazonec2-region: The AWS driver defaults to Continue reading

Hyper-connected cars can drive you to paranoia

This sounds like an ugly thing for a ham radio operator and director of a community radio station to say but: Clip your car’s antenna. Or stuff a wad of chewing gum into your car’s USB port, and perhaps its ODB2 port. Enough is enough.As Andy Greenberg of WIRED wrote of a US DOT Public Service Announcement, “it is important that consumers and manufacturers maintain awareness of potential cyber security threats” to their now hyper-connected cars.There are likely two antennas, one for radio and one that connects your car to a third-party monitoring system. On-Star, if you have it, is tracking your every move. Do they give information to the NSA? Consider that the NSA probably already gets such cell-phone transmitted information anyway. GM cards have it, and many other cars have their own in-vehicle two-way monitoring systems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Utilization at ‘net interconnects

I am pleased to release analysis taken from direct measurement of Internet interconnection points, which represents advancement in this important field of research. To this end, I am releasing a working paper that includes data from seven Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who collectively serve approximately half of all US broadband subscribers. -via Circle ID

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Apple vs. FBI: How iOS 8 changed everything

Apple and the FBI meet in court on Tuesday for the first hearing in the showdown over iPhone encryption, but this fight has been brewing since Apple introduced iOS 8 in June 2014.A new Bloomberg report reveals that the FBI and Apple both expected the White House to take their side before the fight went public.It all started with iOS 8 According to Bloomberg’s sources, Apple’s top lawyer, Bruce Sewell, met with officials in President Barack Obama’s administration shortly after the Worldwide Developers Conference in 2014 to discuss iOS 8’s security and privacy changes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wi-Fi Range Extender from TP-LINK Currently 43% Off – Deal Alert

Many of us probably need a wi-fi extender, but have yet to pull the trigger. The deal currently on the table from TP-LINK may give you the nudge you needed. Their wi-fi range extender lists for $169.99, but at the moment you can purchase this for 43% below list price ($96.96 - See item on Amazon).  TP-LINK's device promises to expand your coverage up to 10,000 square feet and has the capacity to handle, simultaneously, gaming and 4K HD streaming with dual band and AC1750 performance. They've designed it to plug directly into any outlet, and it's "smart signal indicator" will help you discover the best placement for maximum coverage. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 things to remember during Tuesday’s hearing pitting Apple against the FBI

Apple and the U.S. Department of Justice will argue in court Tuesday about whether a judge should require the tech giant help the FBI unlock an iPhone used by the San Bernardino, California, mass shooter.The hearing, before Magistrate Judge Sher Pym of U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, is the end result of weeks of court filings, media coverage, and often contentious debate. The case has pitted advocates of encryption and other security measures on electronic devices against law enforcement agencies trying to fight crime and terrorism.Here are five things to remember about the hearing, scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. PDT in California.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tim Cook: Apple won’t shrink in fight for data privacy

Apple won't shrink from its responsibility to safeguard the privacy of its users, CEO Tim Cook said Monday, a day before Apple lawyers are due to face off with the Department of Justice in a California courtroom.Cook's comments confirm the company's continued defiance against a request from the FBI to develop software that will allow it to make multiple guesses of an iPhone passcode without triggering the phone's self-destruct feature."I've been humbled and deeply grateful for the outpouring of support that we've received from Americans across the country from all walks of life," said Cook at an event in Cupertino held to announce new products. "We believe strongly that we have a responsibility to help you protect your data and your privacy."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others publish new email security standard

Engineers from some of the world's largest email service providers have banded together to improve the security of email traffic traversing the Internet.Devised by engineers from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Comcast, LinkedIn and 1&1 Mail & Media Development & Technology, the SMTP Strict Transport Security is a new mechanism that allows email providers to define policies and rules for establishing encrypted email communications.The new mechanism is defined in a draft that was published late last week for consideration as an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Leaked Clinton email shows Google wanted to help overthrow Syrian President

Last week WikiLeaks launched the Hillary Clinton email archive; it’s described as “a searchable archive for 30,322 emails & email attachments sent to and from Hillary Clinton's private email server while she was Secretary of State. The 50,547 pages of documents span from 30 June 2010 to 12 August 2014. 7,570 of the documents were sent by Hillary Clinton.”The Washington Examiner honed in on an email from 2012 that was forwarded to Clinton after her deputy chief of staff noted that it was a “pretty good idea.” It is supposedly proof that Google wanted to help insurgents overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad. It seems like the State Department, Google and Al Jazeera were all in cahoots.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Design Mindset (2)

In a comment from last week’s post on the design mindset, which focuses on asking what through observation, Alan asked why I don’t focus on business drivers, or intent, first. This is a great question. Let me give you three answers before we actually move on to asking why?

Why can yuor barin raed tihs? Because your mind has a natural ability to recognize patterns and “unscramble” them. In reality, what you’re doing is seeing something that looks similar to what you’ve seen before, inferring that’s what is meant now, and putting the two together in a way you can understand. It’s pattern recognition at it’s finest—you’re already a master at this, even if you think you’re not. This is an important skill for assessing the world and reacting in (near) real time; if we didn’t have this skill, we wouldn’t be able to tolerate the information inflow we actually receive on a daily basis.network-design-mindset-01

The danger is, of course, that you’re going to see a pattern you think you recognize and skip to the next thing to look at without realizing that you’ve mismatched the pattern. These pattern mismatches can be dangerous in the real world—like the time I Continue reading

OED tools: tmux

The need If you work with Linux machines and you don’t use a terminal multiplexer you’re doing it wrong. What is a terminal multiplexer? It lets you switch easily between several programs in one terminal, detach them (they keep running in the background) and reattach them to a different terminal. The Solution I use tmux, […]

Picking Up the Baton

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I’m incredibly excited and honored to take on the role of CEO of Cumulus Networks. In many ways, I’ve trained for this role my whole life. I grew up in Silicon Valley. I have had a front row seat to the growth of the tech economy and been fortunate to watch many passionate leaders grow companies from simple concepts to multi-million dollar firms. I couldn’t be more committed than I am today to bringing a lifetime of experience and learning to bear in leading Cumulus Networks to its next phase.

First and foremost, thank you, JR, for entrusting me with this enormous responsibility. JR and Nolan have both invested their hearts, souls and many years of their lives in Cumulus Networks. They have hired incredible people, built great products, signed impactful partnerships and — in a brief few years — have already had a profound impact on this industry. They have fundamentally changed how networking products are bought, sold, developed and deployed, and in the process spawned a legion of imitators. I’m honored to be entrusted with the job of moving this organization forward. JR and I bring incredibly complementary skills to the table; he is a technical visionary and Continue reading

Finding Level

Josh-Leslie-JR-Rivers

Nolan and I started Cumulus Networks with a specific vision: to help people build better, faster, easier networks.  To change the way that people think about building and deploying applications, regardless of scale. A lot of people have contributed into turning this vision into reality, and we’re excited by everything that we’ve achieved.

As we closed our series A, it was time to name a CEO, and we didn’t want to trust the company to a “professional CEO”. To that end, I took on the responsibility. In the early days I was able to stay involved with the technology and products; however, as the company has progressed, I’ve had less time to spend in the areas that motivated me to start the company.

Then along came Josh.  He participated in our extensive (some would say exhaustive) VP of Sales selection process and stood out.  His ability to grasp the business details as well as manage the team dynamics showed us that he has chops.  He joined us in June of 2015 and continued to impress.  He did his day job effectively by restructuring our sales team, refining the sales process, getting operations tight, and closing deals.  He also became a Continue reading

Johns Hopkins team cracks iMessage photo, video encryption

A Johns Hopkins team has decrypted iMessage photos by guessing character-by-character the key used to encrypt it, and Apple plans to release a new iOS version today that will fix the flaw.Upgrading to iOS 9.3 should fix the problem for users of the operating system and iMessage, says Matthew Green, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins who led a team of grad students that broke the encryption, according to a story in the Washington Post.The story says he discovered a flaw in the encryption last fall and told Apple about it, but when months went by and nothing was done to patch it, he turned his team loose. Here’s how the Post describes the attack:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

To Compress or Not to Compress, that was Uber’s Question

Uber faced a challenge. They store a lot of trip data. A trip is represented as a 20K blob of JSON. It doesn't sound like much, but at Uber's growth rate saving several KB per trip across hundreds of millions of trips per year would save a lot of space. Even Uber cares about being efficient with disk space, as long as performance doesn't suffer. 

This highlights a key difference between linear and hypergrowth. Growing linearly means the storage needs would remain manageable.  At hypergrowth Uber calculated when storing raw JSON, 32 TB of storage would last than than 3 years for 1 million trips, less than 1 year for 3 million trips, and less 4 months for 10 million trips.

Uber went about solving their problem in a very measured and methodical fashion: they tested the hell out of it. The goal of all their benchmarking was to find a solution that both yielded a small size and a short time to encode and decode.

The whole experience is described in loving detail in the article: How Uber Engineering Evaluated JSON Encoding and Compression Algorithms to Put the Squeeze on Trip Data. They came up with a matrix of Continue reading

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