Introduction to ansible-test

As automation becomes crucial for more and more business cases, there is an increased need to test the automation code itself. This is where ansible-test comes in: developers who want to test their Ansible Content Collections for sanity, unit and integration tests can use  ansible-test  to achieve testing workflows that integrate with source code repositories.

Both ansible-core and ansible-base come packaged with a cli tool called ansible-test, which can be used by collection developers to test their Collection and its content. The ansible-test knows how to perform a wide variety of testing-related tasks, from linting module documentation and code to running unit and integration tests.

We will cover different features of ansible-test in brief below.

How to run ansible-test?

With the general availability of Ansible Content Collections with Ansible-2.9, a user can run ansible-test inside a collection to test the collection itself. ansible-test needs to be run from the collection root or below in order for ansible-test to run tests on the Collection.

If you try to run ansible-test from outside the above directory norms, it will throw an error like below:

root@root ~/.ansible/collections ansible-test sanity
ERROR: The current working directory must be at or below:
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            
 Continue reading

Tetrate’s GetIstio Promises to Simplify Management of a Istio Service Mesh

While the open source GetIstio, a commercial service mesh based on Istio and Varun Talwar. “The thing is, these are not static projects, right? Neither Kubernetes, nor Istio, nor Envoy,” said Talwar. “Every three months, you typically have new releases from these projects, Continue reading

IoT, edge computing and AI projects pay off for asset-based enterprises

Bill Holmes, facilities manager at the Corona, Calif., plant that produces the iconic Fender Stratocaster and Telecaster guitars, remembers all too well walking the factory floor with a crude handheld vibration analyzer and then plugging the device into a computer to get readings on the condition of his equipment.While all of the woodworking was done by hand when Leo Fender founded Fender Musical Instruments Corp. 75 years ago, today the guitar necks and bodies are produced with computer-controller woodworking routers, then handed off to the craftsmen who build the final product. Holmes says he is always looking for the latest technological advances to solve problems (he uses robotics to help paint the guitars), and there's no problem more vexing than equipment breakdowns.To read this article in full, please click here

Pure Storage expands its flash-storage systems and software lines

Pure Storage, the all-flash storage-array vendor, has expanded its Purity software base and is also expanding its line of storage products.Pure has three storage lines, the FlashArray//X, the FlashBlade, and the FlashArray//C lines, all managed by its Purity software line. The updated Purity software adds Windows-application acceleration for the FlashBlade and FlashArray lines and delivers ransomware protection across file, block and native cloud-based apps, among other features. Read about backup and recovery: Backup vs. archive: Why it’s important to know the difference How to pick an off-site data-backup method Tape vs. disk storage: Why isn’t tape dead yet? The correct levels of backup save time, bandwidth, space The new version of Purity also adds granular monitoring so administrators get real-time visibility into the most active users on a network and see who is stressing the storage system.To read this article in full, please click here

IT Salary Survey 2021: Compensation holds steady despite pandemic

Our survey of 1,172 IT pros finds that despite the pandemic, most people have seen compensation rise or remain steady but some old inequalities remain

IoT, edge computing and AI projects pay off for asset-based enterprises

Bill Holmes, facilities manager at the Corona, Calif., plant that produces the iconic Fender Stratocaster and Telecaster guitars, remembers all too well walking the factory floor with a crude handheld vibration analyzer and then plugging the device into a computer to get readings on the condition of his equipment.While all of the woodworking was done by hand when Leo Fender founded Fender Musical Instruments Corp. 75 years ago, today the guitar necks and bodies are produced with computer-controller woodworking routers, then handed off to the craftsmen who build the final product. Holmes says he is always looking for the latest technological advances to solve problems (he uses robotics to help paint the guitars), and there's no problem more vexing than equipment breakdowns.To read this article in full, please click here

Pure Storage expands its flash-storage systems and software lines

Pure Storage, the all-flash storage-array vendor, has expanded its Purity software base and is also expanding its line of storage products.Pure has three storage lines, the FlashArray//X, the FlashBlade, and the FlashArray//C lines, all managed by its Purity software line. The updated Purity software adds Windows-application acceleration for the FlashBlade and FlashArray lines and delivers ransomware protection across file, block and native cloud-based apps, among other features. Read about backup and recovery: Backup vs. archive: Why it’s important to know the difference How to pick an off-site data-backup method Tape vs. disk storage: Why isn’t tape dead yet? The correct levels of backup save time, bandwidth, space The new version of Purity also adds granular monitoring so administrators get real-time visibility into the most active users on a network and see who is stressing the storage system.To read this article in full, please click here

MUST READ: Designing a Simple Disaster Recovery Solution

A few weeks ago Adrian Giacometti described a no-stretched-VLANs disaster recovery design he used for one of his customers.

The blog post and related LinkedIn posts generated tons of comments (and objections from the usual suspects), prompting Adrian to write a sequel describing the design requirements he was facing, tradeoffs he made, and interactions between server and networking team needed to make it happen.

MUST READ: Designing a Simple Disaster Recovery Solution

A few weeks ago Adrian Giacometti described a no-stretched-VLANs disaster recovery design he used for one of his customers.

The blog post and related LinkedIn posts generated tons of comments (and objections from the usual suspects), prompting Adrian to write a sequel describing the design requirements he was facing, tradeoffs he made, and interactions between server and networking team needed to make it happen.

Do These 5 Things Before Moving Your Business to the Cloud

Tools 5. Searching for live hosts with fping. IPv4 and IPv6 version.

Hello my friend,

Quite often, when we do the troubleshooting of our networks and systems, we want to figure out, which hosts are alive in the certain range. The quickest and the easiest way (though, not 100% accurate) is to run the ping against a specific range of IPs. There is a brilliant tool for this purpose, which is called fping.

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retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any 

means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission of the author.

Can automation help to find issues in the network quickly?

All the time, when the outage is happening in the production environment, either with the network or server/application infrastructure, the race starts to restore the service as soon as possible. Automation is a key helper there.

In our trainings, the Live Network Automation Training (10 weeks) and Automation with Nornir (2 weeks), we explore a lot of real use cases, where the automation helps you to validate the state of you network and change it if necessary. You will learn the whole spectre of Continue reading

Networking and Infrastructure News Roundup: February 19 Edition

Weekend Reads 021921

In the current quantum computing landscape, there are hardware and software providers with the most prominent players doing both. While the shakeout on which of these companies will become the prominent won’t even begin for a few years yet, there are some companies that have some significant advantages across the quantum spectrum.

NLNOG RING allows engineers to access other networks securely so they can collect troubleshooting data without having to wait for the other side. Ten years after its launch, Martin Pels takes a look back on how the project came to be and how it evolved over the past decade.

SonicWall on Monday warned of active exploitation attempts against a zero-day vulnerability in its Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 100 series devices.

Even after 40 years of working to mitigate fileless attacks, the software industry is still struggling to eliminate them. By hijacking the control flow of a running application by exploiting a buffer-overflow vulnerability, fileless malware is responsible for numerous zero-day attacks.

More than a month into the discovery of Solorigate, investigations continue to unearth new details that prove it is one of the most sophisticated and protracted intrusion attacks of the decade.

A growing number of ransomware victims Continue reading

Worth Reading: How To Put Faith in $someTechnique

The next time you’re about to whimper how you can’t do anything to get rid of stretched VLANs (or some other stupidity) because whatever, take a few minutes and read How To Put Faith in UX Design by Scott Berkun, mentally replacing UX Design with Network Design. Here’s the part I loved most:

[… ]there are only three reasonable choices:

• Move into a role where you make the important decisions.
• Become better at influencing decision makers.
• Find a place to work that has higher standards (or start your own).

Unfortunately the most common choice might be #4: complain and/or do nothing.

Worth Reading: How To Put Faith in $someTechnique

The next time you’re about to whimper how you can’t do anything to get rid of stretched VLANs (or some other stupidity) because whatever, take a few minutes and read How To Put Faith in UX Design by Scott Berkun, mentally replacing UX Design with Network Design. Here’s the part I loved most:

[… ]there are only three reasonable choices:

• Move into a role where you make the important decisions.
• Become better at influencing decision makers.
• Find a place to work that has higher standards (or start your own).

Unfortunately the most common choice might be #4: complain and/or do nothing.

4 Reasons The Next CEO Of AWS Doesn’t Really Matter

Andy Jassy, the top executive at AWS, will step into the role of  CEO of Amazon some time in 2021. Who will take over at AWS? It doesn’t really matter. Here’s why: 1. The operating model and corporate culture are in place Amazon spent years developing an effective way to share infrastructure within the organization. […]

The post 4 Reasons The Next CEO Of AWS Doesn’t Really Matter appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Should App Code & IaC Be In Separate Repositories? – Video

In this Day Two Cloud podcast clip, we discuss whether the code we use to manage our infrastructure and the code we use for our applications should be stored in different repositories. To hear the entire episode, go to Day Two Cloud 085: Hosting Your Infrastructure Code In The Cloud. Hosts Ned Bellavance and Ethan […]

The post Should App Code & IaC Be In Separate Repositories? – Video appeared first on Packet Pushers.

2020: A Record Year for MANRS

Over the past year, COVID-19 underlined the importance of a secure and resilient Internet to ensure we stay connected online. For MANRS, this meant even more incentive to work with network operators, Internet exchange points (IXPs), and content delivery network (CDN) and cloud providers to ensure data went where it was supposed to go via secure paths.

It was, therefore, really encouraging to see a record number of participants joining MANRS last year: the number almost doubled from 317 participants at the beginning of the year to 588 participants as of 31 December 2020. MANRS participants now manage 651 autonomous systems from over 60 countries across all continents.

MANRS contributed to the decline in reported routing incidents from more than 5,000 in 2017 to below 4,000 in 2020, making the entire Internet more secure for everyone. While we cannot claim full credit, we can attribute the fewer routing incidents to the increasing number of network operators implementing best routing practices.

The year also saw us launching a new program for CDN and cloud providers in collaboration with eight founding participants: Akamai, Amazon Web Services, Azion, Cloudflare, Facebook, Google, Continue reading

Can Your Data Architecture Survive Modern Cybersecurity Threats?

Minor Administrative Updates to Internet Society Privacy Policy

Today we have made some minor updates to the Privacy Policy for this site and most of our other affiliated websites. The changes from the previous privacy policy were:

• Clarified in the introduction that this privacy policy applies to sites from both the Internet Society and also the Internet Society Foundation. Previously, it said only “Internet Society”.
• References to “Chief Administrative Officer” were changed to “Legal Department”.
• The contact email address was changed from “[email protected]” to “[email protected]”.
• Under “Can I Choose not to Receive Commercial Email Communications?”, the mention of “the OTA member preference center” was removed as that functionality was merged into the Internet Society membership portal.

The previous policy from April 2018 is available for review. We are publishing this notice as part of our commitment to transparency around any updates to our privacy policy. If you have any questions about this privacy policy, please contact [email protected].

The post Minor Administrative Updates to Internet Society Privacy Policy appeared first on Internet Society.