Ops by Pull Request: An Ansible GitOps Story

In a previous blog post I introduced Automation Webhooks and their uses with Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) workflows and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. In this blog post, I’ll cover how those features can be applied to creating GitOps pipelines, a particular workflow gaining popularity in the cloud-native space, using Ansible and the unique benefits utilizing Ansible provides. 

 

What is GitOps?

Like so many terms that evolve and emerge from the insights and practices of what came before it, finding a definitive meaning to the term “GitOps” is a bit elusive. 

GitOps is a workflow whose conceptual roots started with Martin Fowler’s comprehensive Continuous Integration overview in 2006 and descends from Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps culture and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) patterns. What makes it unique is that GitOps is a prescriptive style of Infrastructure as Code based on the experience and wisdom of what works in deploying and managing large, sophisticated, distributed and cloud-native systems. So you can implement git-centric workflows where you treat infrastructure like it is code, but it doesn’t mean it’s GitOps.

The term GitOps was coined by Alexis Richardson, CEO and Founder of Weaveworks, so a lot of how I’m going to define Continue reading

What Has COVID-19 Taught Us About Information Networks?

Niraj Tolia Niraj Tolia is the CEO and co-founder at Kasten and is interested in all things Kubernetes. He has played multiple roles in the past, including the Senior Director of Engineering for Dell EMC's CloudBoost family of products and the VP of Engineering and Chief Architect at Maginatics (acquired by EMC). Niraj received his Ph.D., MS, and BS in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. COVID-19 has been the most disruptive event in modern history, right up there with 9/11. But unlike a terrorist’s attack, this one has no geographic, ideological, or political boundaries. It’s been an equal opportunity pestilence, and there’s no way to downplay its impact. However, it may be comforting to know that if it had occurred as recently as 30 or 40 years ago, a coronavirus outbreak would have been a far greater disaster. That’s because, during the intervening decades, a robust global communication network infrastructure has emerged. Today, a significant portion of the world’s commerce, administrative, and productive work is routinely conducted through that network’s digital conduits, clouds, server farms, data centers, and privately owned user devices. As a result, even with a massive workforce quarantine in place, a lot of work Continue reading

In New York City, Building a Network While Social Distancing

NYC Mesh connects people to “critical Internet lifeline” during COVID-19 pandemic

As COVID-19 spreads across the globe, cities are slowing to a halt and millions of people are self-isolating to help slow the spread of the virus.

The Internet has never been more important. It is a critical for up-to-date health information, a necessity for students to continue their education while at home and for their parent to continue working, enables access to government programs and supports like unemployment insurance, and can help alleviate the effects of social isolation.

Yet, in New York City alone, 1.5 million people don’t have access from their homes or mobile devices, largely due to high costs of connectivity.

A group of volunteers is working around the clock to change that, one antenna at a time.

NYC Mesh, a community network supported by the Internet Society, kicked into high gear earlier this month in advance of the pandemic, getting as many people connected as possible while it was still safe to do so, prioritizing those with no other Internet access. The ramp up –going from a couple of installs a week to one or more a day – was “a mad rush of Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: U.S. Senator Fears Attacks on Connectivity

Networked virus: U.S. Senator Mark Warner has raised concerns about cyberattacks targeting Internet connectivity while many people are working from home due to the COVID-19 outbreak, The Hill reports. Warner, vice chairman on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote letters to network device vendors asking that they pump up the security of their products.

Sharing the WiFi: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will allow schools and libraries to share their WiFi connections with the surrounding communities during the coronavirus pandemic, a change in the normal FCC policy about their WiFi networks, KRCRTV.com reports. Schools and libraries can set their own WiFi-sharing policies, the FCC said. Meanwhile, some libraries want to extend their WiFi networks using bookmobiles, Vice.com says. It’s unclear if FCC rules allow this expansion of service, however.

Tracking you and the virus: Some countries are tracking the coronavirus outbreak by tracking residents’ mobile phones, Science Magazine says. However, tracking phones also raises privacy concerns. “We don’t live in a culture of public trust when it comes to data,” says David Leslie, an ethicist at the Alan Turing Institute. “We live in this age that has been called the age of surveillance capitalism, where … our Continue reading

Post: InterviewCamp.io, Scrapinghub, Fauna, Sisu, Educative, PA File Sight, Etleap, Triplebyte, Stream

Who's Hiring? 

  • InterviewCamp.io has hours of system design content. They also do live system design discussions every week. They break down interview prep into fundamental building blocks. Try out their platform.

  • Scrapinghub is hiring a Senior Software Engineer (Big Data/AI). You will be designing and implementing distributed systems: large-scale web crawling platform, integrating Deep Learning based web data extraction components, working on queue algorithms, large datasets, creating a development platform for other company departments, etc. - this is going to be a challenging journey for any backend engineer! Please apply here. 

  • Sisu Data is looking for machine learning engineers who are eager to deliver their features end-to-end, from Jupyter notebook to production, and provide actionable insights to businesses based on their first-party, streaming, and structured relational data. Apply here.

  • Triplebyte lets exceptional software engineers skip screening steps at hundreds of top tech companies like Apple, Dropbox, Mixpanel, and Instacart. Make your job search O(1), not O(n). Apply here.

  • Need excellent people? Advertise your job here! 

Cool Products and Services

  • Level up on in-demand technologies and prep for your interviews on Educative.io, featuring popular courses like the bestselling Grokking the Continue reading

Multi-Platform Docker Builds

This is a guest post from Docker Captain Adrian Mouat who is Chief Scientist at Container Solutions, a cloud-native consultancy and Kubernetes Certified Service Provider. Adrian is the author of “Using Docker,” published by O’Reilly Media. He is currently developing Trow, a container image registry designed to securely manage the flow of images in a Kubernetes cluster. Adrian is a regular conference speaker and trainer and he has spoken at several events including KubeCon EU, DockerCon, CraftConf, TuringFest and GOTO Amsterdam.

Docker images have become a standard tool for testing and deploying new and third-party software. I’m the main developer of the open source Trow registry and Docker images are the primary way people install the tool. If I didn’t provide images, others would end up rolling their own which would duplicate work and create maintenance issues.

By default, the Docker images we create run on the linux/amd64 platform. This works for the majority of development machines and cloud providers but leaves users of other platforms out in the cold. This is a substantial audience – think of home-labs built from Raspberry Pis, companies producing IoT devices, organisations running on IBM mainframes and clouds utilising low-power arm64 chips. Users of Continue reading

Comcast’s Jeffrey Lewis: ‘Job No. 1 Is Customer Experience’

Comcast's Jeffery Lewis sat down to share his thoughts on ActiveCore and how it is improving the...

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Network Break 277: Juniper’s Mist Systems Announces Premium Analytics; Cato Launches Clientless Remote Access

Today's Network Break podcast examines a new analytics service from Juniper's Mist Systems for engineers and lines of business, a new clientless remote access service from Cato Networks, the impact of increased traffic on Facebook and cloud services, how co-lo sites are restricting physical access, and more.

The post Network Break 277: Juniper’s Mist Systems Announces Premium Analytics; Cato Launches Clientless Remote Access appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Heavy Networking 508: Should Network Engineers Learn Advanced Programming Languages?

Today's Heavy Networking explores what it's like to get deeply into programming while still being attached to the world of networking. We discuss the transition from day-to-day networking tasks to spending more time with code, the role of programming in automation, and more. Our guests are Matt Stone, Brent Salisbury, Dave Tucker, and Daryn Johnson.

The post Heavy Networking 508: Should Network Engineers Learn Advanced Programming Languages? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Introducing Quicksilver: Configuration Distribution at Internet Scale

Introducing Quicksilver: Configuration Distribution at Internet Scale

Cloudflare’s network processes more than fourteen million HTTP requests per second at peak for Internet users around the world. We spend a lot of time thinking about the tools we use to make those requests faster and more secure, but a secret-sauce which makes all of this possible is how we distribute configuration globally. Every time a user makes a change to their DNS, adds a Worker, or makes any of hundreds of other changes to their configuration, we distribute that change to 200 cities in 90 countries where we operate hardware. And we do that within seconds. The system that does this needs to not only be fast, but also impeccably reliable: more than 26 million Internet properties are depending on it. It also has had to scale dramatically as Cloudflare has grown over the past decade.

Historically, we built this system on top of the Kyoto Tycoon (KT) datastore. In the early days, it served us incredibly well. We contributed support for encrypted replication and wrote a foreign data wrapper for PostgreSQL. However, what worked for the first 25 cities was starting to show its age as we passed 100. In the summer of 2015 we decided to Continue reading

5 metrics you need to know about your backup and recovery system

Finding out whether backup and recovery systems work well is more complicated than just knowing how long backups and restores take; agreeing to a core set of essential metrics is the key to properly judging your system to determine if it succeeds or needs a redesign.Here are five metrics every enterprise should gather in order to insure that their systems meet the needs of the business.Storage capacity and usage Let's start with a very basic metric: Does your backup system have enough storage capacity to meet your current and future backup and recovery needs? Whether you are talking a tape library or a storage array, your storage system has a finite amount of capacity, and you need to monitor what that capacity is and what percentage of it you're using over time.To read this article in full, please click here

Webinars in April 2020

With webinars being the only way to deliver training content these days, we’ll run one every week in April 2020:

  • Starting on April 2nd I’ll talk about one of my favorite topics: switching, bridging and routing, covering almost everything ever invented from virtual circuits and source route bridging to so-called routing at layer-2 and IP forwarding based on host routes;

  • I was planning to update the Introduction to Containers and Docker material for ages… but then had to move the December 2019 workshop to March 2020, only to cancel it a week before the coronavirus exploded for real in Switzerland. I hope I’ll manage to deliver the online version on April 9th ;)

  • Dinesh Dutt is back on April 16th with an update of Network Automation Tools webinar, in which he’ll cover (among other things) the new network automation tools launched since we did the original webinar in 2016.

  • On April 23rd Pete Lumbis plans to dive as deep into the intricacies of switching ASICs as he can without violating an NDA ;)

Parallel Wireless CEO: Don’t Forget About Radios

“Everyone wants to forget the radios, and the radios are what makes wireless wireless," Steve...

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CEX (Code EXpress) 09. For loop + if conditional = while loop. And the most popular math functions.

Hello my friend,

So far you have learned about the for loop and if conditional. Both of these tools are very useful and have a wide area of the applicability inside the network automation filed. But what if we need to do some activities in your Python code continuously until a certain condition becomes False? The answer you will find in this blogpost.

Network automation training – boost your career

Don’t wait to be kicked out of IT business. Join our network automation training to secure your job in future. Come to NetDevOps side.

How does the training differ from this blog post series? Here you get the basics and learn some programming concepts in general, whereas in the training you get comprehensive set of knowledge with the detailed examples how to use Python for the network and IT automation. You need both.

What are we going to do today?

While loop is a specific type of the loop in Python, which is being executed infinitely while the associated condition is True. All the knowledge you got about the if conditionals are applicable here as well.

Read the if conditional blogpost for more details.

Therefore, while instruction requires careful planing Continue reading

The 5G Economic Impact

Organizations are predicting a multi-trillion-dollar boost from 5G deployments, though...

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Migrating from VPN to Access

Migrating from VPN to Access
Migrating from VPN to Access

With so many people at Cloudflare now working remotely, it's worth stepping back and looking at the systems we use to get work done and how we protect them. Over the years we've migrated from a traditional "put it behind the VPN!" company to a modern zero-trust architecture. Cloudflare hasn’t completed its journey yet, but we're pretty darn close. Our general strategy: protect every internal app we can with Access (our zero-trust access proxy), and simultaneously beef up our VPN’s security with Spectrum (a product allowing the proxying of arbitrary TCP and UDP traffic, protecting it from DDoS).

Before Access, we had many services behind VPN (Cisco ASA running AnyConnect) to enforce strict authentication and authorization. But VPN always felt clunky: it's difficult to set up, maintain (securely), and scale on the server side. Each new employee we onboarded needed to learn how to configure their client. But migration takes time and involves many different teams. While we migrated services one by one, we focused on the high priority services first and worked our way down. Until the last service is moved to Access, we still maintain our VPN, keeping it protected with Spectrum.

Some of our services didn't Continue reading

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