Racing On the Edge of Burnout

Exhibit A:

It’s been a year and more and I think a lot of us are on the ragged edge of burning out completely. Those that think they are superhuman and can just keep grinding away at things without acknowledging what’s going on are kidding themselves. I know I’m feeling it too even though I have a pretty decent handle on what’s going on. Let’s explore some of the ways it’s impacting us and what should be done, if anything can even be done.

Creativity Black Hole

I don’t feel like doing anything remotely creative right now. The cooking will get finished. The dishes will be done. The things in my floor will be picked up and put away. But beyond that? Good. Luck. I’m not feeling any kind of drive to do anything beyond that.

Remember when everyone was picking up quarantine skills? Baking, cooking, knitting, crocheting, home improvement, or even an instrument? Those were fun days filled with massive uncertainty and a need to distract ourselves from what might be coming next. However, those skill pickups are things that need Continue reading

Data-center outages: Causes are changing, report says

A new survey by the Uptime Institute found that power issues are becoming less of a problem for data center operators, but networking and software issues are emerging as an increasingly bigger problem.The Uptime Institute's third Annual Outage Analysis notes that while improvements have been made with technology and availability, outages remain a major industry, customer, and regulatory concern. The report also shows that the overall impact and direct and indirect cost of outages continue to grow. When asked about their most recent significant outage, more than half of respondents reported an outage in the past three years and estimated its cost at more than $100,000; among those respondents, almost one-third reported costs of $1 million or above.To read this article in full, please click here

Backup lessons from a cloud-storage disaster

The largest cloud provider based in Europe, OVHcloud, suffered a catastrophic fire last month that destroyed one of its data centers and smoke-damaged a neighboring one. OVHcloud customers with data in the burned-out data cener who had their own disaster recovery measures in place or who purchased the off-site backup and disaster-recovery services offered by OVHcloud have been able to resume operations. Those who did not lost data that will never come back.Some losses were complete, such as those described on Twitter by rounq.com who is still waiting for backups and redundancy that he thought were already in place, according to his tweets. Companies that had some type of off-site backup seemed to be up and running again, such as Centre PompidouTo read this article in full, please click here

Data-center outages: Causes are changing, report says

A new survey by the Uptime Institute found that power issues are becoming less of a problem for data center operators, but networking and software issues are emerging as an increasingly bigger problem.The Uptime Institute's third Annual Outage Analysis notes that while improvements have been made with technology and availability, outages remain a major industry, customer, and regulatory concern. The report also shows that the overall impact and direct and indirect cost of outages continue to grow. When asked about their most recent significant outage, more than half of respondents reported an outage in the past three years and estimated its cost at more than $100,000; among those respondents, almost one-third reported costs of $1 million or above.To read this article in full, please click here

Backup lessons from a cloud-storage disaster

The largest cloud provider based in Europe, OVHcloud, suffered a catastrophic fire last month that destroyed one of its data centers and smoke-damaged a neighboring one. OVHcloud customers with data in the burned-out data cener who had their own disaster recovery measures in place or who purchased the off-site backup and disaster-recovery services offered by OVHcloud have been able to resume operations. Those who did not lost data that will never come back.Some losses were complete, such as those described on Twitter by rounq.com who is still waiting for backups and redundancy that he thought were already in place, according to his tweets. Companies that had some type of off-site backup seemed to be up and running again, such as Centre PompidouTo read this article in full, please click here

Interview: What New Technologies Should You Aim to Master?

In the last part of my chat with David Bombal we discussed interesting technologies networking engineers could focus on if they want to grow beyond pure packet switching (and voice calls, if you happen to believe VoIP is not just an application). We mentioned public clouds, automation, Linux networking, tools like Git, and for whatever reason concluded with some of my biggest blunders.

Watch the interview

Interview: What New Technologies Should You Aim to Master?

In the last part of my chat with David Bombal we discussed interesting technologies networking engineers could focus on if they want to grow beyond pure packet switching (and voice calls, if you happen to believe VoIP is not just an application). We mentioned public clouds, automation, Linux networking, tools like Git, and for whatever reason concluded with some of my biggest blunders.

Watch the interview

IPv6 Fragmentation Loss

In this report I would like to revisit this measurement of packet drop for IPv6 Fragmented packets and see if the picture has changed over the intervening four years since we last measured this behaviour.

Installing AWX 19 on MicroK8s in AWS

AWX is now deployed on Kubernetes (since AWX release 18), which is great – the only thing is, what do you do if this is the only application you need Kubernetes for? It is a bit of a hassle setting up the K8s master and worker nodes just for a single application.

The documentation suggests you use Minikube for this, but that seems to be designed for local / testing use only. There’s no middle ground between these two options, so I decided to work it out on MicroK8s.

MicroK8s is Canonical’s minimal production Kubernetes environment. It installs on one host, but can be set up for high availability and even run on a Raspberry Pi!

Here are the instructions if you want to do the same.

Install an Ubuntu 20 host on a t2.medium or higher instance in AWS.

Give it 20Gb of general purpose SSD disk.

Create a security group that permits TCP/443 through from your location – only TCP/22 is permitted by default.

Install Microk8s on a new Ubuntu host in AWS:

ubuntu@ip-172-31-0-208:~$ sudo snap install microk8s --classic
microk8s (1.20/stable) v1.20.5 from Canonical✓ installed
ubuntu@ip-172-31-0-208:~$

Add the ‘ubuntu’ user you are logged in Continue reading

5 top open-source infrastructure projects

Open source software has been a key underpinning of enterprise IT for years, so it’s no surprise that it’s helping to drive the infrastructure part of the equation forward just as much as application development.Some projects are much more influential than others, and here are five that are doing the most to help enterprise infrastructure keep pace with the demands of an ever-more sophisticated operating environment.OpenStack OpenStack is notable in part for being an open-source competitor to the most important proprietary virtualization software on the market—VMware’s VSphere. For the basic task of virtualizing servers into a flexible pool of computing resources, the difference appears to be ease of use—it’s simpler to use VMware when there isn’t a lot of in-house virtualization or private-cloud expertise.To read this article in full, please click here

5 top open-source infrastructure projects

Open source software has been a key underpinning of enterprise IT for years, so it’s no surprise that it’s helping to drive the infrastructure part of the equation forward just as much as application development.Some projects are much more influential than others, and here are five that are doing the most to help enterprise infrastructure keep pace with the demands of an ever-more sophisticated operating environment.OpenStack OpenStack is notable in part for being an open-source competitor to the most important proprietary virtualization software on the market—VMware’s VSphere. For the basic task of virtualizing servers into a flexible pool of computing resources, the difference appears to be ease of use—it’s simpler to use VMware when there isn’t a lot of in-house virtualization or private-cloud expertise.To read this article in full, please click here

Greening the Internet: Five Questions with Dr. Chomora Mikeka

Today is Earth Day, an international event celebrated around the world to pledge support for environmental protection. From small actions to large, we all have a role to play in protecting our planet. As we celebrate today, we’re shining a light on people like Chomora Mikeka, a scientist in Malawi and a recent awardee of […]

The post Greening the Internet: Five Questions with Dr. Chomora Mikeka appeared first on Internet Society.

What’s the Controversy Over Bitcoin?

Bitcoin – something we have all heard of but never fully understand what the hype is all about. Apart from the hype, there are always news headlines regarding the scandals related to bitcoin. All of this talk in town only leads us to one question: what’s the controversy over Bitcoin?

For starters, you need to know what Bitcoin is. According to the company, they are the pioneers of a peer-to-peer payment network that involves no intermediary. Here , the first controversy begins: governments are highly against cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin simply due to the lack of a middleman during the buying and selling of money or commodities.

Governments and Money: What’s the Relationship?

Governments are the ones who issue currencies to their people. While currencies are merely numbers printed on pieces of paper or metal, the government claims that they have value, and the general population believes them. These notes and coins are then used to make transactions of all kind, and the money flows around through the entire economy.

However, conventional currencies do not have any actual value since they cannot be given back to the government in exchange for commodities. If you want to purchase even something as simple Continue reading

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