Must Read: Automate Nexus-OS Fabric Deployment

Some networking engineers breeze through our Network Automation online course, others disappear after a while… and a few of those come back years later with a spectacular production-grade solution.

Stephen Harding is one of those. He attended the automation course in spring 2019 and I haven’t heard from him in almost two years… until he submitted one of the most mature data center fabric automation solutions I’ve seen.

Not only that, he documented the solution in a long series of must-read blog posts. Hope you’ll find them useful; I liked them so much I immediately saved them to Internet Archive (just in case).

Must Read: Automate Nexus-OS Fabric Deployment

Some networking engineers breeze through our Network Automation online course, others disappear after a while… and a few of those come back years later with a spectacular production-grade solution.

Stephen Harding is one of those. He attended the automation course in spring 2019 and I haven’t heard from him in almost two years… until he submitted one of the most mature data center fabric automation solutions I’ve seen.

Not only that, he documented the solution in a long series of must-read blog posts. Hope you’ll find them useful; I liked them so much I immediately saved them to Internet Archive (just in case).

Nvidia announces a 2023 launch for an HPC CPU named Grace

Nvidia kicked off its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2021 with a bang: A new CPU for high performance computing (HPC) clients--its first-ever data-center CPU--called Grace.Based on the Arm Neoverse architecture, NVIDIA claims Grace will serve up to 10-times better performance than the fastest servers currently on the market for complex artificial intelligence and HPC workloads.But that’s comparing then and now. Grace won’t ship until 2023, and in those two years competitors will undoubtedly up their game, too. But no one has ever accused CEO Jen-Hsun Huang of being subdued.Nvidia made a point that Grace is not intended to compete head-to-head against Intel's Xeon and AMD's EPYC processors. Instead, Grace is more of a niche product, in that it is designed specifically to be tightly coupled with NVIDIA's GPUs to remove bottlenecks for complex AI and HPC applications.To read this article in full, please click here

Nvidia announces a 2023 launch for an HPC CPU named Grace

Nvidia kicked off its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2021 with a bang: A new CPU for high performance computing (HPC) clients--its first-ever data-center CPU--called Grace.Based on the Arm Neoverse architecture, NVIDIA claims Grace will serve up to 10-times better performance than the fastest servers currently on the market for complex artificial intelligence and HPC workloads.But that’s comparing then and now. Grace won’t ship until 2023, and in those two years competitors will undoubtedly up their game, too. But no one has ever accused CEO Jen-Hsun Huang of being subdued.Nvidia made a point that Grace is not intended to compete head-to-head against Intel's Xeon and AMD's EPYC processors. Instead, Grace is more of a niche product, in that it is designed specifically to be tightly coupled with NVIDIA's GPUs to remove bottlenecks for complex AI and HPC applications.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco DevNet certifications: 10k awarded in first year

In the year since Cisco revamped its DevNet certification portfolio to focus more on network programing, automation and application development, the need for those software-based skillsets has never been more important. IT Salary Survey on Insider Pro IT Salary Survey 2021: The results are in IT Salary Survey 2021: Compensation holds steady despite pandemic IT Salary Survey 2021: Hiring rate expected to increase but priorities will shift IT Salary Survey 2021: Over half of IT pros are satisfied at work – but nearly half are job hunting IT Salary Survey 2021: Security and cloud computing certifications on the up The requirement for software skills in the networking environment is being driven by a number of factors including the tremendous increase in the use of automation, the need to have an intelligent pipeline to remote users, and the growing necessity to efficiently network and secure multicloud resources. Many of these changes were already underway of course, but tons more are being driven by the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on many enterprise data-center, campus and wide area network operations.To read this article in full, please click here

First look: new O’Reilly eBook on Kubernetes security and observability *early release chapters*

We are excited to announce the early release of a new O’Reilly eBook on Kubernetes security and observability!

This practical book introduces new cloud-native approaches for Kubernetes practitioners who care about the security and observability of mission-critical microservices. Through practical guidance and best practice recommendations, this book helps you understand why cloud-native applications require a modern approach to security and observability practices and how to implement them.

You should read this book if you want to:

  • learn why you need a security and observability strategy for cloud-native applications, and determine your scope of coverage;
  • understand key concepts behind Kubernetes’s security and observability approach;
  • discover how to split security responsibilities across multiple teams or roles; and/or
  • learn how to architect Kubernetes security and observability for multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

Whether you want to know how to secure and troubleshoot your cloud-native applications, or are exploring Kubernetes for your organization and would like to solve security and observability challenges before making a decision, you will find that this book provides valuable insight.

Get your early release copy here!

The post First look: new O’Reilly eBook on Kubernetes security and observability *early release chapters* appeared first on Tigera.

Tech Bytes: New Prisma SD-WAN Features Improve Operations, Analytics (Sponsored)

Today’s Tech Bytes podcast explores new features in Prisma SD-WAN 5.5 from Palo Alto Networks, our sponsor for this episode. New features include event correlation and analysis, improved stats and analytics dashboards, and the ability to export telemetry to third-party devices and services. Our guest is Bill Pruitt, Sr. Product Manager, SD-WAN.

The post Tech Bytes: New Prisma SD-WAN Features Improve Operations, Analytics (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Automating a RHEL 8 Installation Using the VMware REST Ansible Collection

Managing virtual machines in an IT infrastructure is often a common task, specifically VMware virtualization technology has been around for over 20 years. VMware administrators spend a lot of their time in automating the creation, management, and removal of virtual instances that contain various operating systems. One operating system that often resides on VMware infrastructure is Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 

With the introduction of VMware REST APIs, we recently announced the initial release of the vmware.vmware_rest Collection, for production use. As opposed to the community.vmware Collection, the vmware.vmware_rest Collection is based on next generation VMware REST APIs.  This new Collection no longer requires any third party Python bindings to communicate with VMware infrastructure. A large part of the new Collection that has been introduced is support for automating virtual machine operations.

In this blog post I will show you how VMware users can automate the installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL 8) using the vmware.vmware_rest.vcenter_vm module and a valid Kickstart file.

 

Scenario requirements

For this scenario, we will assume following requirements:

  1. vCenter 7.0.1 or latest with at least one ESXi 
  2. RHEL 8 installation DVD
  3. Ansible
  4. vmware.vmware_rest Continue reading

Calico Cloud now available on AWS Marketplace

We are pleased to announce that Calico Cloud, our software as a service (SaaS) for Kubernetes security and observability, is now available on AWS Marketplace! AWS users can now use Kubernetes security and observability as services along with managed Kubernetes services, all with a single click. For more information, see our official press release.

Can’t wait to jump right in? Subscribe and deploy Calico Cloud on AWS Marketplace here.

The post Calico Cloud now available on AWS Marketplace appeared first on Tigera.

4 Data Center Security Issues That Will Make You Rethink Firewalling

Recall what was happening a decade ago? While 2011 doesn’t seem that long ago (you rememberthe Royal Wedding, Kim Kardashian’s divorce, and of course Charlie Sheen’s infamous meltdown), a lot has changed in 10 years. Back then, most data centers were just starting to experiment with virtualization. Remember when it was considered safe for only a handful of non-essential workloads to go virtual? Well, today about half of the servers globally have become virtualized, and we’ve moved well beyond just virtualization. Nearly every enterprise data center has become a hybrid environment, with a mix of physical and virtual storage and compute resources. Containerization and the technologies supporting it are starting to take hold. And of course, cloud computing has become pervasive in all aspects of enterprise computing. 

Now, the business benefits of today’s software-defined data center are many, especially in terms of resource efficiency and cost savings. But there’s no denying that complexity has also increased, because all the same resources are still needed—compute, storage, switching, routingbut now any number of these resources may be on-prem or in the Continue reading

Loose Lips

When I was in the military we were constantly drilled about the problem of Essential Elements of Friendly Information, or EEFIs. What are EEFis? If an adversary can cast a wide net of surveillance, they can often find multiple clues about what you are planning to do, or who is making which decisions. For instance, if several people married to military members all make plans to be without their spouses for a long period of time, the adversary can be certain a unit is about to be deployed. If the unit of each member can be determined, then the strength, positioning, and other facts about what action you are taking can be guessed.

Given enough broad information, an adversary can often guess at details that you really do not want them to know.

What brings all of this to mind is a recent article in Dark Reading about how attackers take advantage of publicly available information to form Spear Phishing attacks—

Most security leaders are acutely aware of the threat phishing scams pose to enterprise security. What garners less attention is the vast amount of publicly available information about organizations and their employees that enables these attacks.

Going back further Continue reading

Nvidia Enters The Arms Race With Homegrown “Grace” CPUs

There has been talk and cajoling and rumor for years that GPU juggernaut Nvidia would jump into the Arm server CPU chip arena once again and actually deliver a product that has unique differentiation and a compelling value proposition, particularly for hybrid CPU-GPU compute complexes.

Nvidia Enters The Arms Race With Homegrown “Grace” CPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Week in Internet News: Encryption Faces Serious Threats

Encryption in danger: Encryption is essential, but a number of countries are trying to weaken its protections, Wired.com says. Recent attempts to weaken encryption have happened in Germany, Brazil, India, and other countries. “Technical as encryption can be, it is really about something at the very core of how we live our lives today: Should […]

The post The Week in Internet News: Encryption Faces Serious Threats appeared first on Internet Society.

Network Break 328: Arista CloudVision Adds Config Workflow Automation; Innovium ASICs Embrace SONiC

On this week's Network Break we cover Arista's careful steps into automation, new support for SONiC from Innovium, a cash injection for whitebox NOS maker Pica8, a startup tackling cloud infrastructure and application experience, and why you can blame cosmic rays the next time there's a network problem.

The post Network Break 328: Arista CloudVision Adds Config Workflow Automation; Innovium ASICs Embrace SONiC appeared first on Packet Pushers.