The Cloud Is Now A Thing

In the networking world, we’re starting to see the term “cloud” more and more. When I teach classes, if I so much as mention the word cloud, I start to see some eyes roll. That’s completely understandable, as the term cloud was such an overused buzzword, only having been recently supplanted only by “software defined”.

Here’s real-life supervillain (dude owns an MiG 29 and an island with a volcano on it… seriously) Larry Ellison freaking out about the term cloud.

“It’s not water vapor! All it is, is a computer attached to a network!”

But here’s the thing, it’s actually a thing now. Rather than a catch-all buzzword, it’s being used more and more to define a particular type of operational model. And it’s defined by NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, part of the US Department of Commerce. With the term cloud, we now get a higher degree of specificity.

The NIST definition of cloud is as follows:

• On-demand self service
• Broad network access
• Resource pooling (multi-tenant)
• Rapid Elasticity
• Measured service

That first item on the list, the on-demand self service, is a huge change in how we will be doing networking. Right now network Continue reading

Liveblog: Scaling New Services

This is a liveblog for the DockerCon 2015 session titled “Scaling New Services: From Container Creation to Automated Deployments”. This session is being led by the Disney Systems Engineering team and will feature a discussion/demo involving Docker, Mesos, Chef, Consul, and HAProxy.

The session starts with an introduction by Alex Williams, founder of The New Stack, who quickly turns it over to the Disney staff—Brian Scott and Patrick O’Connor. Brian starts with an overview of all the various companies within Disney, and the challenges that breadth creates. He then discusses the role of Disney’s Systems Engineering team, and the responsibilities of the team. That includes managing infrastructure, both on-premises as well as cloud-based infrastructure.

So, why Docker? To improve the guest experience, Disney needs to be able to move fast. They want to get away from managing VMs and cattle to managing containers and micro-bots. Brian talks about issues with onboarding developers, battling configuration drifts, and similar challenges. Disney started on their Docker journey 6-10 months ago, and lots of teams are still exploring the use cases for Docker. Some teams are already using it in the CI pipeline, and other teams are evaluating production use cases. CI is a Continue reading

Designing A Multi-Region, Multi-Hub Phase 3 DMVPN With BGP

This network design uses global/regional MPLS backbone as primary WAN connectivity method, with Cisco DMVPN backup. DMVPN spokes should have a regional primary hub with secondary hubs also based on location.

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Matt Love

Matt is a network engineer in Greenville, SC, USA, working in the enterprise space. He enjoys solving complex routing, data center, and security (ish) problems, and writes about those when he can. When not at work, Matt can be found traipsing around Greenville on a road bike, or at home with his wife and two study-preventing kids.

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The post Designing A Multi-Region, Multi-Hub Phase 3 DMVPN With BGP appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Matt Love.

How More Services Providers Are Thinking ‘Outside In’

Snowflake Computing opens data warehouse to the masses

Snowflake Computing announced Tuesday that its cloud-based data warehouse service is available to all users.Called the Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse, the service allows companies to pool all their data and workloads in a single warehouse that can be accessed by all their users. The warehouse is designed to handle administrative tasks for many of its users, like automatically scaling to match a company’s demands and handling hardware provisioning by itself so that administrators don’t need to spend as much time managing it.In addition, Snowflake’s service is capable of taking in both structured and semi-structured data, without requiring users to ensure that it’s all in one format before uploading to the warehouse. The data warehouse will also automatically optimize itself based on data usage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How More Services Providers Are Thinking ‘Outside In’

June usually signals two things in my household: the end of the school year, and the beginning of the trips to the multiplex for the latest family-friendly animated movie. This year is no different, and from everything we’ve heard, Disney / Pixar’s latest entrant, Inside Out, is a winner.

While animated and emotion-based avatars are cute and funny, it’s the reverse concept that’s driving a lot of service provider thinking. And that is, thinking from the ‘Outside In’.

What do I mean by this? It all depends on the point of view. For a service provider that’s managing a network, be it global, regional, or metro, there’s a natural tendency to think about starting from the core and extending it out to edge. For this network, it’s important to have a reliable, super fast core – big fast iron that can process packets and bandwidth at really fast rates.

This is certainly important, but in order to differentiate and add value to their customers, service providers are investing more at the edge. They are thinking about how to wrap up and package network functionality, offer these up as monetized services, and distribute these all the way to the customer premises. Continue reading

Linux Network Interface Configuration With udev

I’m recently been running down (or is it through) the Linux, systemd, networkd, udevd rabbit hole at full pelt and thought perhaps now was a good time to come up for some air and to share what I’ve learned so far. I could (and have elsewhere) written long essays on why Linux makes an excellent network […]

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Steven Iveson

Steven Iveson, the last of four children of the seventies, was born in London and has never been too far from a shooting, bombing or riot. He's now grateful to live in a small town in East Yorkshire in the north east of England with his wife Sam and their four children.

He's worked in the IT industry for over 20 years in a variety of roles, predominantly in data centre environments. Working with switches and routers pretty much from the start he now also has a thirst for application delivery, automation, SDN, virtualisation and related products and technologies. He's published a number of F5 Networks related books, is a regular contributor at DevCentral and was an F5 DevCentral MVP for 2014.

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The post Linux Network Interface Configuration With udev appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and Continue reading

Legacy telcos make peace with Internet services in Africa

Companies providing audiovisual content and apps over the Internet are becoming increasingly influential in Africa, to the point where traditional telecom operators are essentially being forced to accommodate them.A growing number of telecom company executives themselves believe that so-called over-the-top (OTT) service providers, delivering apps and multimedia content over the Web, will only increase in influence, according to an Ovum survey.The Digital Africa survey, presented at Ovum’s recent Connecting West Africa conference in Dakar, found that 35 percent of telecom company executives polled believed that OTT service providers will be very important in five years, compared to only 18 percent who think that they are very influential today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

GNS3 Weekly Development Report: June 22th

Arista Networks Ships CloudVision, Strengthening SDN Story

EOS takes a step closer to SDN by integrating with Nuage and NSX controllers.

Some users will ‘kick and scream’ at paying with slower chip cards

Major U.S. banks have been rolling out new, secure smart chip debit and credit cards for months, but the real end-user impact hasn't yet been felt.Some experts say typical consumers will get confused and may even balk when first attempting to use these new "pin and chip" smart cards. As a result, customers may choose to rely on the less-secure magnetic stripe also on the new cards for in-store purchases.MORE: 10 mobile startups to watch Or, customers could even turn to mobile wallet alternatives, like Apple Pay or the coming Android Pay, and skip the credit and debit card experience altogether.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Solving the “jabber-config.xml” File Mystery

The jabber-config.xml file is an essential piece of configuration for the Jabber client. Sure, the client has the ability to operate just fine without this file. Video calling, deskphone control, instant messaging, etc. all work flawlessly. However, if you need to add any additional options, policies, or directory integrations, the jabber-config.xml file becomes necessary. Within the realm of the CCIE Collaboration certification, we are specifically concerned about two different configurations: UDS Directory Integration and SIP URI Dialing.

User Data Service (UDS) simply put, is the name for the End User database within Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM). It contains all relevant information about that user, as would any other directory. UDS, however, is not enabled by default on the Jabber client. In fact, Jabber is geared towards integration with an LDAP source “out of the box”. This means that we must instruct the Jabber client to use UDS if we would like to be able to search the CUCM database to communicate with other users. Since this will have to be done by using the jabber-config.xml file, we must first determine how to create it. Thankfully, the Cisco documentation does not disappoint in this regard. From the Continue reading

Juniper, Ruckus join hands with an eye on mobile growth

The alliance between Juniper Networks and Ruckus Wireless announced on Tuesday underscores the importance of Wi-Fi in enterprises, where employees increasingly work and access cloud applications on mobile devices.Juniper and Ruckus say they’re joining forces to build integrated wired and wireless infrastructures while keeping their technologies open and standards-based. The companies focused on enterprises in announcing the partnership, but they will also integrate technologies for service-provider networks, Ruckus Vice President of Corporate Marketing David Callisch said.As Wi-Fi gets faster and more workers use laptops and other portable devices, more enterprises see wireless as a real alternative to traditional ethernet LANs, said Gartner analyst Tim Zimmerman. Some networks based on IEEE 802.11ac theoretically can deliver more speed than Gigabit ethernet, and the second wave of that technology now emerging will offer more than 6Gbps on the top end.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple takes a greater role in Bluetooth development

Apple will be playing a larger role in the development of Bluetooth as the company pushes into wearable technology, home automation and more.The Bluetooth Special Interest Group, which oversees the development of the wireless communication standard, announced Tuesday that Apple has become a “promoter member” of the group, giving the company new power to guide Bluetooth’s development. Promoter members are given a continual seat on the group’s board of directors, and are also the only membership class that can vote on its corporate matters.Apple has been an associate board member of the group since 2011, and the company’s senior wireless architect, Joakim Linde. currently serves as the board’s secretary. In the past, Apple’s board membership was term limited. The current promoter members—Ericsson, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, Nokia, and Toshiba—voted unanimously to have Apple join their ranks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Instagram gets more Twitter-y with trending photos

Instagram, the popular app for sharing photos with friends, is broadening the reach of those photos.On Tuesday, the Facebook-owned app significantly expanded its service with new features around search and trending topics. The changes are aimed at letting users discover photos and videos related to popular events and places, and letting users more easily find photos taken in particular places.The changes are aimed at making Instagram not just an app to see friends’ photos, but an app for seeing other people’s photos related to local or global events. The changes put Instagram’s app more squarely in competition with Twitter, already known for its real-time feed of tweets around events, including photos and videos.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Liveblog: DockerCon 2015 Day 2 General Session

This is a liveblog from the day 2 general session at DockerCon 2015. I was running late from some early morning meetings (sorry folks), so I wasn’t able to catch the first part of the general session (about the first 15 minutes or so). Here’s what I was able to capture.

Chris Buckley, Director of DevOps at Business Insider, took the stage to provide an overview of how Business Insider (BI) started using Docker. Buckley provides some “lessons learned”:

1. Building for production first was grandiose was misguided.
2. Porting it back to development wasn’t the right approach.

This led BI to Fig (now Docker Compose), which led to a decrease in the time it took to get a development environment up and running. With the combination of Vagrant and Docker, BI was able to reduce that to just a couple of hours. When BI revisited production apps, they turned to use Upstart/SysV scripts for containers, but this wasn’t quite the right fit. BI turned back to Puppet, building a parameterized Puppet class to create containers, links, set environment options, and define dependencies on other containers/services starting first.

Before Docker, the workflow was developers to GitHub to Jenkins, which then pushed to Continue reading

Featured SDN+NFV Use Case: On-Premise vCPE

A new use case explains how on-premise vCPE virtualizes common network functions to a commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) platform.

Adobe patches zero-day Flash Player flaw used in targeted attacks

Adobe Systems released an emergency security update for Flash Player Tuesday to fix a critical vulnerability that has been exploited by a China-based cyberespionage group.Over the past several weeks, a hacker group identified as APT3 by security firm FireEye has used the vulnerability to attack organizations from the aerospace, defense, construction, engineering, technology, telecommunications and transportation industries.The hacking group targeted the companies with generic phishing emails that contained a link to a compromised server, researchers from FireEye said in a blog post Tuesday. The server used JavaScript code to profile potential victims and then served the Flash exploit to the ones meeting attackers’ criteria, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Silver Peak Launches EdgeConnect SD-WAN Product

Silver Peak gets into the SD-WAN market with Unity EdgeConnect, a new product that aims to make it easier to provision, manage, and monitor WAN connectivity for remote and branch offices.

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Drew Conry-Murray

I'm a tech journalist, editor, and content director with 17 years' experience covering the IT industry. I'm author of the book "The Symantec Guide To Home Internet Security" and co-author of the post-apocalyptic novel "Wasteland Blues," available at Amazon.

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The post Silver Peak Launches EdgeConnect SD-WAN Product appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Drew Conry-Murray.

Docker: Ready for Production