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Guide to the Virtual Cloud Network at VMworld 2020

The countdown to VMworld 2020 is nearly at an end and we are eager to share our latest advancements in network and security virtualization that are powering the Virtual Cloud Network with you. With this year’s FREE virtual event having such a jam-packed agenda on all things virtualization, we’ve put together this comprehensive guide to navigating the Virtual Cloud Network.

Our engineers, technologists and customers will be dropping knowledge in over 100+ live and on-demand technical sessions, hands-on labs, and interactive roundtable sessions throughout the event, covering all technical levels from beginner to advanced. Read on to get a curated list of can’t-miss activities going on between September 29 and October 1.

If you haven’t already registered, make sure to do so here and then jump into the content catalog and schedule your sessions today. See you online!

(For Security-specific programming, check out this post on the top security sessions you must attend at VMworld)

Virtual Cloud Networking Education Track at VMworld

(Note: Scheduled Sessions are offered during several timeslots to

accommodate regional time zones. Click the session links to attend the most convenient one for you. And for the full-list of scheduled and on-demand sessions, click here. Continue reading

7 Benefits of Deploying a Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

HCI is more straightforward to manage than legacy alternatives. That means your tech staff can spend less time on mundane chores and focus their attention on more pressing matters.

NTC – Cisco Devnet With Stuart Clark

From barber to Technical Leader and Developer Advocate, learn how Stuart Clark on the Cisco DevNet team transformed his career over the past 15 years. In this episode, we talk with Stuart about his career journey, his role as a Developer Advocate focused on network automation, and the role Cisco DevNet can play along the way for those looking to enhance their automation skills. We close by asking the question, “Will there be a DevNet Expert exam?” Listen and find out!

Links:

DevNet: https://developer.cisco.com/
Automation Exchange: https://developer.cisco.com/network-automation/
Code Exchange: https://developer.cisco.com/codeexchange/
DevNet Certifications: https://developer.cisco.com/certification/

Stuart Clark

Guest

Jason Edelman

Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post NTC – Cisco Devnet With Stuart Clark appeared first on Network Collective.

Trust No One. And Be Quick About It.

The migration of apps to clouds and users to home requires rethinking security in a major way.

Add Watermarks to your Cloudflare Stream Video Uploads

Since the launch of Cloudflare Stream, our customers have been asking for a programmatic way to add watermarks to their videos. We built the Watermarks API to support a wide range of use cases: from customers who simply want to tell Stream “can you put this watermark image to the top right of my video?” to customers with more detailed asks such as “can you put this watermark image in a way it doesn’t take up more than 10% of the original video and with 20% opacity?” All that and more is now available at no additional cost through the Watermarks API.

What is Cloudflare Stream?

Cloudflare Stream provides out-of-the-box video infrastructure so developers can bring their app ideas to market faster. While building a video streaming app, developers must ask themselves questions like

“Where do we store the videos affordably?”
“How do we encode the videos to support users with varying Internet speeds?”
“How do we maintain our video pipeline in the long term?”

Cloudflare Stream is a single product that handles video encoding, storage, delivery and presentation (with the Stream Player.) Stream lets developers launch their ideas Continue reading

Musing: Hidden Complexity of Dual SIM Phones

It hadn’t occurred to me that having Dual SIMs in a smartphone has hidden aspects of complexity. In this slide, having multiple SIMs means thinking about activity – are both SIMs active at all times ? If so, are you willing to incur the battery and product penalty to have dual radios operating simultaneously. Or […]

Lenovo introduces four new HCI solutions

Lenovo Data Center Group on Thursday introduced four new hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) products aimed at a variety of workloads, including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), SAP HANA, Microsoft Azure, and Kubernetes.HCI products have grown in popularity because they are easily deployed and can get a variety of workloads up and running quickly. HCI is available either in hardware/appliance form or as software. HCI hardware vendors are the usual suspects – HP Enterprise, Dell, Lenovo – while the software vendors include Nutanix and VMware.Lenovo is focused on ready-to-deploy HCI solutions from both software firms. It boasts that its hardware is easy to deploy and manage with simple updates, automatic scalability and a consumption-based use model.To read this article in full, please click here

Lenovo introduces four new HCI solutions

Video: ASICs 101

Earlier this year, Pete Lumbis returned as an ipSpace.net webinar guest speaker with a great presentation describing data center switching ASICs from the perspective of networking engineers. After a brief intro, he started with ASIC Basics… a topic which generated a 25-minute Q&A session.

All of the above-mentioned videos are available with Free ipSpace.net Subscription.

Getting Started with Docker Using Node – Part II

In part I of this series, we learned about creating Docker images using a Dockerfile, tagging our images and managing images. Next we took a look at running containers, publishing ports, and running containers in detached mode. We then learned about managing containers by starting, stopping and restarting them. We also looked at naming our containers so they are more easily identifiable.

In this post, we’ll focus on setting up our local development environment. First, we’ll take a look at running a database in a container and how we use volumes and networking to persist our data and allow our application to talk with the database. Then we’ll pull everything together into a compose file which will allow us to setup and run a local development environment with one command. Finally, we’ll take a look at connecting a debugger to our application running inside a container.

Local Database and Containers

Instead of downloading MongoDB, installing, configuring and then running the Mongo database as a service. We can use the Docker Official Image for MongoDB and run it in a container.

Before we run MongoDB in a container, we want to create a couple of volumes that Docker can manage to Continue reading

Server Hunger Is Stronger Than Economic Uncertainty

The appetite for compute capacity, and presumably also for storage and networking capacity, in the datacenter of the world might be waning in some sectors of the economy, but thanks to the voracious hunger of the hyperscalers and cloud builders and more than a few large enterprises that need to do more, not less, computing in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, server sales are now consistently at the levels we saw way back in the Dot-Com Boom more than twenty years ago. …

Server Hunger Is Stronger Than Economic Uncertainty was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Cisco extends Meraki SD-WAN to Microsoft Azure

Cisco Meraki added to its SD-WAN portfolio with support for workloads running in Microsoft Azure cloud environments.Specifically, Cisco said it has integrated its SD-WAN Powered by Cisco Meraki offering with Microsoft’s Azure Virtual WAN service, which will let customers automate secure connectivity between Meraki MX appliances at branch locations directly with the Azure service, regardless of geographical location.More about SD-WAN: How to buy SD-WAN technology: Key questions to consider when selecting a supplier • How to pick an off-site data-backup method • SD-Branch: What it is and why you’ll need it • What are the options for security SD-WAN? The Meraki SD-WAN package is tyically aimed at what Cisco calls “lean IT environments” and includes a variety of integrated branch connectivity, security, management, orchestration and automation support.To read this article in full, please click here

Taking the ‘hands-on’ out of data center administration

Discussions about networking in a work-from-home world often focus on employees and endpoints, but how can network administrators do more than just keep the lights on if they can’t go to the data center? Maintaining what exists isn’t enough, especially as the entire world is redefining the future of work. Organizations need to be able to adapt to change, so how is that possible when administrators can’t go hands on?

There are any number of remote administration options available today, and any number of ways to compare them. Deciding between them is all about finding the right balance between cost, capability, and the labor intensity of implementation. In other words, they’re subject to all of the same considerations as any other technology implementation.

To dispense with the network administration 101 portion of the discussion*, yes, networking is mostly a matter of remote administration anyway. If you can remote into something that has access to the management network, you can use SSH, HTTPS, or what-have-you to administer networks just as you would if you were in the office. That’s maintenance, not change.

Accomplishing change remotely and at scale requires automation and orchestration. In practice, this is heavily dependent upon virtualization and/or Continue reading

Achieving CI Velocity at Tigera using Semaphore

Tigera serves the networking and policy enforcement needs of more than 150,000 Kubernetes clusters across the globe and supports two product lines: open source Calico, and Calico Enterprise. Our development team is constantly running smoke, system, unit, and functional verification tests, as well as all our E2Es for these products. Our CI pipelines form an extremely important aspect of the overall IT infrastructure and enable us to test our products and catch bugs before release.

We eventually reached a point where we needed to adopt a complete continuous integration and delivery architecture to maintain our development velocity, from code push to Kubernetes. We decided to adopt the hosted CI solution from Semaphore as an integral part of our workflow. Our test rigs on Semaphore ensure that the product is tested on three Kubernetes versions on seven different platforms, including Kubeadm, GKE, EKS, AKS, OpenShift, Rancher, and Kops. As a result, a typical pipeline can have up to 100 jobs distributed over various stages. We also have different pipelines to test our code and build Docker images for it.

Here’s a run for one of the components of our open source offering: All the Continue reading

Operations Channel at AnsibleFest 2020

AnsibleFest 2020 is right around the corner and we could not be more excited. This year we have some great content in each of our channels. Here is a preview of what attendees can expect from the Operations channel at AnsibleFest.

Operations Channel

This channel will take Operators on an automation journey through the Technical Operations lifecycle and how The Ansible Automation Platform is the center of your automation goals. Learn how to get your automation moving with Certified Content Collections, then scale out with execution environments and tune the performance. Once you are running at scale we have tools to show you what teams are using automation and how much it is saving you with some real world examples and by using Analytics.

You should be leaving with some great examples and walkthroughs on infrastructure automation, from operating systems to public cloud and how you can leverage Ansible Automation Platform to foster cross-functional team collaboration and empower your whole organization with automation they need.

There will be something for everyone. You’ll get to hear from customers, Red Hatters and our partners. Also pick up some tips for your server deployments, performance and cluster management.

Operation Continue reading

The Growing Security Priority for DevOps and Cloud Migration

Survey asserts security may be increasingly top of mind, but many organizations are unsatisfied with their current footing on that front.

Let World Alzheimer’s Day Remind Us to Take Our Own Brain Health Seriously

In the list of diseases that can affect your brain, Alzheimer’s disease is a critical one. From it not only affects the biology of the brain, it also affects the personality of the person. That is why it is necessary to talk about Alzheimer’s, because talking about this disease helps create awareness about brain health. On World Alzheimer’s Day, Sept. 21, 2020, talking about it will help create a sense of seriousness and importance.

How to Keep Your Brain Healthy

There are some diseases that are inevitable. That means that they cannot be stopped from occurring, but what an individual can do is make sure that you keep your brain health better and active.

Sleep Better

By sleeping better, you are making sure that your brain is getting the right rest. This means that you make sure that you are being provided with a situation where you are resting and your brain is working actively to make sure that it keeps you and your body healthy. That is why a good night’s sleep can help not only elevate your mood but also help keep you healthy and strong.

Eat Well and Healthy

By eating healthy and well, you will Continue reading

Migrating cdnjs to serverless with Workers KV

Cloudflare powers cdnjs, an open-source project that accelerates websites by delivering popular JavaScript libraries and resources via Cloudflare’s network. Since our major update in December, we focused on remodelling cdnjs for scalability and resilience. Today, we are excited to announce how Cloudflare delivers cdnjs—a migration to a serverless infrastructure using Cloudflare Workers and its distributed key-value store Workers KV!

What is cdnjs?

For those unfamiliar, cdnjs is an acronym describing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for JavaScript (JS). A CDN simply refers to a geographically distributed network of servers that provide Internet content, whether it is memes, cat videos, or HTML pages. In our case, the CDN refers to Cloudflare’s ever expanding network of over 200 globally distributed data centers.

And here’s why this is relevant to you: it makes page load times lightning-fast. Virtually every website you visit needs to fetch JS libraries in order to load, including this one. Let’s say you visit a Sydney-based website that contains a local file from jQuery, a popular library found in 76.2% of websites. If you are located in New York, you may notice a delay, as it can easily exceed 300ms to fetch the file—not to mention Continue reading

Telehealth usage soars during COVID-19

Internet-based virtual healthcare, sometimes called telehealth or telemedicine, has seen a massive increase in usage during the pandemic, according to new research.A study by University of Michigan's National Poll on Healthy Aging (NPHA) found that a quarter of older adults aged between 50 and 80 had a virtual medical visit over a network in the first three months of the coronavirus pandemic. By comparison, in a similar poll from 2019, just 4% of people over 50 said they had ever had a virtual visit with a doctor. READ MORE: Pandemic reveals the need for better telemedicineTo read this article in full, please click here

Disaster Recovery: a Vendor Marketing Tale

Several engineers formerly working for a large virtualization vendor were pretty upset with me when I claimed that the virtualization consultants promote “disaster recovery using stretched VLANs” designs instead of alternatives that would implement proper separation of failure domains.

Guess what… it’s even worse than I thought.

Here’s a sequence of comments I received after reposting one of my “disaster recovery doesn’t need stretched VLANs” blog posts on LinkedIn sometime in late 2019: