The Automation Experience: AnsibleFest 2022

It is almost time for our favorite event of the year! AnsibleFest is back as an in-person event, and it’s the only place to feel the full power of automation. Join us October 18 and 19 in Chicago, and immerse yourself in the movement that’s made Ansible an industry-leading automation technology.

The AnsibleFest 2022 session catalog and agenda builder are now available. That means you can see all this year’s session content and build your own custom experience. Let’s take a closer look at all that AnsibleFest 2022 has to offer.

Breakout Sessions

This year we will be featuring six content tracks. These tracks include: Getting Started with Automation, the Ansible Community, Automation Applied, Ansible Automation Platform, Advanced Ansible, and Automation Adoption. Sessions across these tracks will cover a range of focus areas, including network automation, security automation, automation at the edge, IT leaders, developers, and several more. We also have a wide range of customer, partner, and Ansible contributor talks to join. You can see a list of all the sessions being offered in our session catalog.

Workshops and Labs

Get hands-on experience at AnsibleFest in our workshops and labs. We will have a mixture of self-paced Continue reading

Global internet health check and network outage report

The reliability of services delivered by ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services (such as unified communications-as-a-service) is critical for enterprise organizations. ThousandEyes monitors how providers are handling any performance challenges and provides Network World with a weekly roundup of interesting events that impact service delivery. Read on to see the latest analysis, and stop back next week for another update. Additional details available here.Internet report for October 23-29 ThousandEyes reported 221 global network outage events across ISPs, cloud service provider networks, collaboration app networks and edge networks (including DNS, content delivery networks, and security as a service) during the week of October 23-29. That’s up from 163 the week prior, an increase of 36%. Specific to the U.S., there were 103 outages. That's up from 75 outages the week prior, an increase of 37%. Here’s a breakdown by category:To read this article in full, please click here

How Multi-Scaled HPC-Enabled Genomics Will Help Save Your Life

A combination of Lenovo HPC and system optimization could help genomics detect and defuse healthcare timebombs

Sponsored Feature The concept of precision medicine is revolutionizing healthcare by ‘personalizing’ treatment using genomics to provide insights into a patient’s genetic make-up gleaned from study of their own DNA. …

How Multi-Scaled HPC-Enabled Genomics Will Help Save Your Life was written by David Gordon at The Next Platform.

Service Mesh And Ingress In Kubernetes: Lesson 3 – Service Mesh Fundamentals – Video

This video provides a deeper dive into service mesh fundamentals, why a service mesh is important, how it works, and the pros and cons of service mesh in Kubernetes.

The post Service Mesh And Ingress In Kubernetes: Lesson 3 – Service Mesh Fundamentals – Video appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Day Two Cloud 162: The Mental Health Of The 10x Samurai Ninja Engineer

Day Two Cloud 162: The Mental Health Of The 10x Samurai Ninja Engineer

In this Day Two Cloud episode, Ned and Ethan discuss the tradeoffs of mental health and professional achievement. Maybe you spend a lot of extra hours at work for your employer. Perhaps you focus on certifications after work and on the weekends. Maybe you say “yes” to more than you should, because you’re scared you’ll lose it all if you don’t. The tradeoffs are in your personal relationships. Your mental health. You suffer from burnout, anxiety, and stress. Is it all worth it? Ned and Ethan don't have all the answers, but they share their experiences and perspectives.

The post Day Two Cloud 162: The Mental Health Of The 10x Samurai Ninja Engineer appeared first on Packet Pushers.

What’s Driving Symmetrical Internet Access?

How Routers Became Bridges

Network terminology was easy in the 1980s: bridges forwarded frames between Ethernet segments based on MAC addresses, and routers forwarded network layer packets between network segments. That nirvana couldn’t last long; eventually, a big-enough customer told Cisco: “I don’t want to buy another box if I already have your too-expensive router. I want your router to be a bridge.”

Turning a router into a bridge is easier than going the other way round¹: add MAC table and dynamic MAC learning, and spend an evening implementing STP.

How Routers Became Bridges

Network terminology was easy in the 1980s: bridges forwarded frames between Ethernet segments based on MAC addresses, and routers forwarded network layer packets between network segments. That nirvana couldn’t last long; eventually, a big-enough customer told Cisco: “I don’t want to buy another box if I already have your too-expensive router. I want your router to be a bridge.”

Turning a router into a bridge is easier than going the other way round¹: add MAC table and dynamic MAC learning, and spend an evening implementing STP.

APIs and Ransomware: The Path Attackers are Using to Infect Organizations

Tech Bytes: Develop Custom Network Apps With Nokia’s SR Linux NDK (Sponsored)

Tech Bytes: Develop Custom Network Apps With Nokia’s SR Linux NDK (Sponsored)

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we talk with sponsor Nokia about its SR Linux network OS. More specifically, because SR Linux is open, customers can write homegrown applications to solve specific problems with the network OS using Nokia's NetOps Development Kit (NDK).

The post Tech Bytes: Develop Custom Network Apps With Nokia’s SR Linux NDK (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Implementing zero-trust workload security on Amazon EKS with Calico

Whether you’re migrating to the cloud via lift-and-shift deployments, or re-architecting to a cloud-native architecture, the migration itself and adopting a microservices architecture is no easy feat. To accelerate their cloud-native journey, many organizations opt for a managed Kubernetes service, as the skill and resources required to run a container orchestration system at scale are demanding.

Fully integrated with core Amazon Web Services (AWS) technologies, easy-to-use, and most importantly, scalable, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is one of the most popular managed Kubernetes services for organizations running containerized applications in cloud.

The next immediate challenge after migrating to the cloud is security and compliance. As an AWS Competency Partner, Tigera’s suite of solutions, including Calico Cloud, Calico Enterprise, and Calico Open Source, are built to solve these challenges. These solutions are created with EKS security in mind, enabling users to implement zero-trust workload access controls along with microsegmentation to apply workload isolation during runtime.

In a new joint blog post with the AWS Partner Network, AWS Solutions Architect, Andrew Park, and Tigera’s Director of Solution and Partner Marketing, Dhiraj Sehgal, guides users through the journey of implementing zero-trust workload access controls and identity-aware microsegmentation for multi-tenant workloads in Continue reading

The Bellwethers Of Enterprise IT Spending Fare Reasonably Well

If you want to figure out what is going on with spending on the corporate datacenters of the world, a good place to start is to examine the financial results of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell Technologies, which are still the two largest original equipment makers for servers in the world. …

The Bellwethers Of Enterprise IT Spending Fare Reasonably Well was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Managing AWS Key Pairs with Pulumi and Go

As I was winding down things at Kong and getting ready to transition to Pulumi (more information on why I moved to Pulumi here), I casually made the comment on Twitter that I needed to start managing my AWS key pairs using Pulumi. When the opportunity arose last week, I started doing exactly that! In this post, I’ll show you a quick example of how to use Pulumi and Go to declaratively manage AWS key pairs.

This is a pretty simple example, so let’s just jump straight to the code:

_, err := ec2.NewKeyPair(ctx, "aws-rsa-keypair", &ec2.KeyPairArgs{
	KeyName:   pulumi.String("key-pair-name"),
	PublicKey: pulumi.String("<ssh-key-material-here>"),
	Tags: pulumi.StringMap{
		"Owner":   pulumi.String("User Name"),
		"Team":    pulumi.String("Team Name"),
		"Purpose": pulumi.String("Public key for authenticating to AWS EC2 instances"),
		},
	})
	if err != nil {
		return err
	}

This code is, by and large, pretty self-explanatory. For PublicKey, you just need to supply the contents of the public key file (use cat or similar to get the contents of the file) where Continue reading

Cloudflare named a Leader by Gartner

Gartner has recognised Cloudflare as a Leader in the 2022 "Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Web Application and API Protection (WAAP)" report that evaluated 11 vendors for their ‘ability to execute’ and ‘completeness of vision’.

You can register for a complimentary copy of the report here.

We believe this achievement highlights our continued commitment and investment in this space as we aim to provide better and more effective security solutions to our users and customers.

Keeping up with application security

With over 36 million HTTP requests per second being processed by the Cloudflare global network we get unprecedented visibility into network patterns and attack vectors. This scale allows us to effectively differentiate clean traffic from malicious, resulting in about 1 in every 10 HTTP requests proxied by Cloudflare being mitigated at the edge by our WAAP portfolio.

Visibility is not enough, and as new use cases and patterns emerge, we invest in research and new product development. For example, API traffic is increasing (55%+ of total traffic) and we don’t expect this trend to slow down. To help customers with these new workloads, our API Gateway builds upon our WAF to provide better visibility and mitigations for well-structured API traffic for Continue reading

Tier 1 Carriers Performance Report: August, 2022

The post Tier 1 Carriers Performance Report: August, 2022 appeared first on Noction.

Network Break 397: VMware Aria Sings Multicloud Management; NVIDIA Ordered To Stop Selling AI Chips To China

Network Break 397: VMware Aria Sings Multicloud Management; NVIDIA Ordered To Stop Selling AI Chips To China

This week's Network Break podcast tackles space weather, new products from VMware, a significant firewall vulnerability, an order barring NVIDIA from selling certain chips to China, and more tech news.

The post Network Break 397: VMware Aria Sings Multicloud Management; NVIDIA Ordered To Stop Selling AI Chips To China appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Natural Vitamins to Help You Stay Alert

When it comes to staying alert throughout the day, many people turn to caffeine or sugary snacks for a quick energy boost. However, these foods can cause spikes and drops in blood sugar that ultimately lead to feelings of fatigue and low energy. To help keep you feeling energized and focused throughout the day, consider incorporating natural vitamins into your diet.

Vitamins That Help Promote Alertness

There are many vitamins that keep you feeling awake and energized. Here are a few of the most effective supplements to try:

Vitamin B6

The B vitamins are key for supporting brain health, and vitamin B6 in particular is known for its ability to help boost energy levels. This nutrient helps increase the production of the neurotransmitter serotonin, which promotes feelings of calm and well-being. It can also help improve sleep quality, making it an excellent choice for those who struggle with fatigue and low energy levels.

Iron

Iron is another essential nutrient that helps support brain health and energy levels. It plays an important role in the production of red blood cells, which are responsible for carrying oxygen throughout the body and to the brain. When your blood is low in Continue reading