Brain Gracely, chair of Interop's Cloud Connect track, discusses how enterprises can make the most of public and private cloud, while containing costs, supporting business growth, and ensuring application quality.
Learn more about the Cloud Connect program and register for Interop, May 2-6 in Las Vegas.
Since Parse's big announcement it looks like the release of migration guides from various alternative services has died down.
The biggest surprise is the rise of Parse's own open source Parse Server. Check out its commit velocity on GitHub. It seems to be on its way to becoming a vibrant and viable platform.
The immediate release of Parse Server with the announcement of the closing of Parse was surprising. How could it be out so soon? That's a lot of work. Some options came to mind. Maybe it's a version of an on-premise system they already had in the works? Maybe it's a version of the simulation software they use for internal testing? Or maybe they had enough advanced notice they could make an open source version of Parse?
The winner is...
Charity Majors, formerly of Parse/Facebook, says in How to Survive an Acquisition, tells all:
Massive props to Kevin Lacker and those who saw the writing on the wall and did an amazing job preparing to open up the ecosystem.
That's impressive. It seems clear the folks at Parse weren't on board with Facebook's decision, but they certainly did everything possible to make the best Continue reading
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Cash register by the National Cash Register Co., Dayton, Ohio, United States, 1915.
Imagine a world where every aspect of a project gets charged correctly. Where the massive amount of compute time for a given project gets labeled into the proper department and billed correctly. Where resources can be allocated and associated to the projects that need them. It’s an exciting prospect, isn’t it? I’m sure that at least one person out there said “chargeback” when I started mentioning all these lofty ideas. I would have agreed with you before, but I don’t think that chargeback actually exists in today’s IT environment.
The idea of chargeback is very alluring. It’s been on slide decks for the last few years as a huge benefit to the analytics capabilities in modern converged stacks. By collecting information about the usage of an application or project, you can charge the department using that resource. It’s a bold plan to change IT departments from cost centers to revenue generators.
IT is the red headed stepchild of the organization. IT is necessary for business continuity and function. Nothing today can run without computers, networking, or phones. However, we aren’t a visible part Continue reading
The cloud is definitely having an impact on business cycles, but how much? There are at least two sides to this story; let’s take a look at both. First there is the continued growth of Amazon Web Services (AWS). According to the Next Platform, this chart represents the various options for the growth of AWS over the next decade or so:
It looks like, based on this projection, that AWS can keep growing at a fairly strong pace for a while yet longer. Of course, there are many factors that might impact this growth. For instance, one thing the original post points out is that recessions slow down spending in fixed IT and drive up spending in flexible IT. A recession, then, might improve the bottom line for AWS. The opposite of this, however, is that when companies can afford to build infrastructure, they tend to. There are, believe it or not, still justifications for building your own data center, especially if you can afford it.
There are other points to consider, however, as well, in the relationship between the network and business cycles. For instance, if open source and white box start bleeding out of the largest networks into Continue reading
The need for substantive network security in schools has never been greater. According to ID 
Analytics, more than 140,000 minors are victims of identity fraud per year—and when their data is exposed, it is misused more frequently. One reason for this is that minors’ clean credit reports can make them extra attractive to identity thieves.
“The educational space is extremely concerned about ensuring [that] Personally Identifiable Information (PII) about students, and their respective data, is kept safe, secure, and only used for the learning environment,” says Jason Radford, head of operations for IlliniCloud. Continue reading
The Internet of Things will dramatically reshape data center architecture. Are you ready?
Enterprises can run into problems like latency when using cloud storage for more than backup.
Make sure your IT partners ask these questions so they craft the right solution for your business.
Location-based security has a hard time with cloud applications.
While the large data centers increasingly use BGP as the routing protocol within their fabrics, the enterprise engineers tend to shy away from that idea because they think BGP is too complex/scary/hard-to-configure/obsolete/unknown/whatever.
It’s time to fix that.
Read more ...I’m currently working on a design and needed to verify some failover behavior of the Cisco ASA firewall.
The ASA can run in active/active or active/standby mode where most deployments I see run in active/standby mode. When in a failover pair the firewalls will share an IP address and MAC address, very similar to HSRP or VRRP but it also synchronizes the state of TCP sessions, IPSec SA’s, routes and so on. The secondary firewall gets its config from the primary firewall so everything is configured exactly the same on both firewalls.
To verify if the other firewalls is reachable and to synchronize state, a failover link is used between the firewalls. The firewalls use a keepalive to verify if the other firewall is still there. This works just like any routing protocol running over a link where you expect to see a hello from your neighbor and if you miss 3 hello’s, the other firewall is gone. This timer can be configured and in my tests I used a hello of 333 ms and a holdtime of 999 ms which means that convergence should happen within one second.
The first scenario I was testing was to manually trigger a Continue reading