Packet Pushers - Datanauts

Welcome to a cloud native architecture discussion on the Datanauts podcast. Today we blast off into the microservices galaxy and orbit the binary star system of Istio and Envoy.

That’s right. A proxy for every microservice instance. What’s that you say? Too hard to manage? Infinite points of failure? Will we orbit successfully, or crash into the fiery cores of these burning stars? Hang in there, and we’ll find out.

Our guide to this galaxy is Christian Posta, Chief Architect, Cloud Application Development at Red Hat.

We start with an overview of Envoy (an application-level proxy) and Istio (management software or the control plane for service meshes).

Envoy and Istio were developed to help solve the problem of how to get various service elements to talk to each other to provide a fully-functioning application.

We also look at how Envoy, Istio, and an orchestrator such Kubernetes work together in a microservices architecture.

In part two, we dive into the main use cases or capabilities of Istio, including traffic management, observability, policy enforcement, and service identity and security.

In part three, Christian walks us through day-two operations of running Envoy and Istio in production.

Sponsor: ITProTV

Join ITProTV to learn the skills to pass the most in-demand IT certs. It’s binge-worthy learning! ITProTV’s extensive course library includes CEH v9, CISA, CompTIA A+, Mac Certified Support Professional, and more!

Visit itpro.tv/data and use code DATANAUTS to try it FREE for 7 days, and receive 30% off your monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription.

Show Links:

Envoy Project Home

Istio Project Home

Microservices Patterns With Envoy Sidecar Proxy, Part I: Circuit Breaking – Christian Posta’s blog

Microservices Patterns With Envoy Proxy, Part II: Timeouts and Retries – Christian Posta’s blog

Microservices Patterns With Envoy Proxy, Part III: Distributed Tracing – Christian Posta’s blog

Deep Dive Envoy and Istio Workshop – Christian Posta’s blog

Istio Deep Dive with Dan Berg and Zack Butcher (video) – YouTube

Introducing Istio Service Mesh for Microservices (free e-book, regwall) – RedHat

Building Service Meshes With Avi Networks (Sponsored) – Packet Pushers

Full Stack Journey 018: Istio, Envoy & Service Meshes – Packet Pushers

Chri...

Welcome to a cloud native architecture discussion on the Datanauts podcast. Today we blast off into the microservices galaxy and orbit the binary star system of Istio and Envoy.

That’s right. A proxy for every microservice instance. What’s that you say? Too hard to manage? Infinite points of failure? Will we orbit successfully, or crash into the fiery cores of these burning stars? Hang in there, and we’ll find out.

Our guide to this galaxy is Christian Posta, Chief Architect, Cloud Application Development at Red Hat.

We start with an overview of Envoy (an application-level proxy) and Istio (management software or the control plane for service meshes).

Envoy and Istio were developed to help solve the problem of how to get various service elements to talk to each other to provide a fully-functioning application.

We also look at how Envoy, Istio, and an orchestrator such Kubernetes work together in a microservices architecture.

In part two, we dive into the main use cases or capabilities of Istio, including traffic management, observability, policy enforcement, and service identity and security.

In part three, Christian walks us through day-two operations of running Envoy and Istio in production.

Sponsor: ITProTV

Join ITProTV to learn the skills to pass the most in-demand IT certs. It’s binge-worthy learning! ITProTV’s extensive course library includes CEH v9, CISA, CompTIA A+, Mac Certified Support Professional, and more!

Visit itpro.tv/data and use code DATANAUTS to try it FREE for 7 days, and receive 30% off your monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription.

Show Links:

Envoy Project Home

Istio Project Home

Microservices Patterns With Envoy Sidecar Proxy, Part I: Circuit Breaking – Christian Posta’s blog

Microservices Patterns With Envoy Proxy, Part II: Timeouts and Retries – Christian Posta’s blog

Microservices Patterns With Envoy Proxy, Part III: Distributed Tracing – Christian Posta’s blog

Deep Dive Envoy and Istio Workshop – Christian Posta’s blog

Istio Deep Dive with Dan Berg and Zack Butcher (video) – YouTube

Introducing Istio Service Mesh for Microservices (free e-book, regwall) – RedHat

Building Service Meshes With Avi Networks (Sponsored) – Packet Pushers

Full Stack Journey 018: Istio, Envoy & Service Meshes – Packet Pushers

Chri...

Stress is a fairly constant feeling when it comes to piloting a galaxy class battle cruiser around the galaxy. From dealing with personnel requests to battling evil lizard droids in sector 8, the job can weigh you down. What might be done about it?

That’s the topic of today’s Datanauts episode. Our guest is Eric Shanks, a senior solutions architect at Ahead. He also blogs at The It Hollow.

Eric has blogged recently about his own efforts to understand why he’s stressed, and a few things he dug up in researching the subject.

These include a pernicious phenomenon called the Zeigarnik Effect, in which people remember uncompleted tasks better than finished ones.

They also discuss cognitive and memory biases and how they affect recall, and look at techniques to help you manage complex tasks, which can help reduce the Zeigarnik Effect, and, we hope, get your stress levels down.

Sponsor: ITProTV

Join ITProTV to learn the skills to pass the most in-demand IT certs. It’s binge-worthy learning! ITProTV’s extensive course library includes CEH v9, CISA, CompTIA A+, Mac Certified Support Professional, and more!

Visit itpro.tv/data and use code DATANAUTS to try it FREE for 7 days, and receive 30% off your monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription.

Show Links:

The Dark Side of Stress – The IT Hollow

Zeigarnik Effect – Wikipedia

Memory errors and biases – Wikipedia

My trudge through IT Burnout and the fight to keep it at bay – Eric Lee

Stress is a fairly constant feeling when it comes to piloting a galaxy class battle cruiser around the galaxy. From dealing with personnel requests to battling evil lizard droids in sector 8, the job can weigh you down. What might be done about it?

That’s the topic of today’s Datanauts episode. Our guest is Eric Shanks, a senior solutions architect at Ahead. He also blogs at The It Hollow.

Eric has blogged recently about his own efforts to understand why he’s stressed, and a few things he dug up in researching the subject.

These include a pernicious phenomenon called the Zeigarnik Effect, in which people remember uncompleted tasks better than finished ones.

They also discuss cognitive and memory biases and how they affect recall, and look at techniques to help you manage complex tasks, which can help reduce the Zeigarnik Effect, and, we hope, get your stress levels down.

Sponsor: ITProTV

Join ITProTV to learn the skills to pass the most in-demand IT certs. It’s binge-worthy learning! ITProTV’s extensive course library includes CEH v9, CISA, CompTIA A+, Mac Certified Support Professional, and more!

Visit itpro.tv/data and use code DATANAUTS to try it FREE for 7 days, and receive 30% off your monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription.

Show Links:

The Dark Side of Stress – The IT Hollow

Zeigarnik Effect – Wikipedia

Memory errors and biases – Wikipedia

My trudge through IT Burnout and the fight to keep it at bay – Eric Lee

How’d that lift and shift to the cloud go? Pretty good? Workloads spun up in AWS? Getting used to Azure? Management happy because IT is all cloud-i-fied?

Excellent. That was day 1. Now it’s day 2, and you’ve got some new problems to solve. Cost issues. Security issues. Operations issues. On today’s Datanauts episode, we dig into your Day 2 cloud.

Our guest is Maish Saidel-Keesing, Cloud & DevOps Architect at CyberArk. He also blogs at Technodrone.

We talk about understanding and managing cloud costs and how your application infrastructure affects those costs. We also drill into cloud security and how to audit your controls. Last but not least, we look at the operational impacts of cloud, including team organization, skills, and training.

Sponsor: ITProTV

Join ITProTV to learn the skills to pass the most in-demand IT certs. It’s binge-worthy learning! ITProTV’s extensive course library includes CEH v9, CISA, CompTIA A+, Mac Certified Support Professional, and more!

Visit itpro.tv/data and use code DATANAUTS to try it FREE for 7 days, and receive 30% off your monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription.

Show Links:

5 AWS Certifications in 237 Days – Technodrone

The Cloud Walkabout AWS – Maish’s book

About Maish Saidel-Keesing – Technodrone

Maish’s Technodrone Blog

Maishsk on Twitter

Maish on GitHub

How’d that lift and shift to the cloud go? Pretty good? Workloads spun up in AWS? Getting used to Azure? Management happy because IT is all cloud-i-fied?

Excellent. That was day 1. Now it’s day 2, and you’ve got some new problems to solve. Cost issues. Security issues. Operations issues. On today’s Datanauts episode, we dig into your Day 2 cloud.

Our guest is Maish Saidel-Keesing, Cloud & DevOps Architect at CyberArk. He also blogs at Technodrone.

We talk about understanding and managing cloud costs and how your application infrastructure affects those costs. We also drill into cloud security and how to audit your controls. Last but not least, we look at the operational impacts of cloud, including team organization, skills, and training.

Sponsor: ITProTV

Join ITProTV to learn the skills to pass the most in-demand IT certs. It’s binge-worthy learning! ITProTV’s extensive course library includes CEH v9, CISA, CompTIA A+, Mac Certified Support Professional, and more!

Visit itpro.tv/data and use code DATANAUTS to try it FREE for 7 days, and receive 30% off your monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription.

Show Links:

5 AWS Certifications in 237 Days – Technodrone

The Cloud Walkabout AWS – Maish’s book

About Maish Saidel-Keesing – Technodrone

Maish’s Technodrone Blog

Maishsk on Twitter

Maish on GitHub

You’ve got your traditional on-premises network. You know how it works. Lots of manual configuration and ticket-y stuff to get the job done when someone needs something.

And then you’ve got your cloud network. You don’t worry about that one as much. The devs provision what they need automatically, hitting APIs as they go, and you keep tabs on things from a watchful distance, helping out as needed.

What if you could operate your on-premises network like you do your public cloud network? What if your hybrid cloud was operationally consistent? Today on the Datanauts, sponsor Big Switch Networks makes some pretty big hybrid cloud networking announcements, and we quiz them on the why and how.

Our guest is Kyle Forster, founder of Big Switch.

We talk about Big Switch’s new products, including the ability to create an on-premises VPC within Big Switch’s data center fabric. The goal is to provide the same operational constructs within your own data center as you’d get in a public cloud like AWS, Azure, or Google.

Show Links:

Big Switch Networks

Big Switch Labs

Multi-Cloud Director Tech Demo

Big Cloud Fabric-Public Cloud Tech Demo

Big Switch Networks on Twitter

Big Switch Networks on LinkedIn

Kyle Forster on LinkedIn

Big Switch is hiring. Check out opportunities here.

“Cloud native applications are designed to be managed by software in all stages. This includes ongoing health checks as well as initial deployments. Human bottlenecks should be eliminated as much as possible in the technology, processes, and policies.”

That quote is from the O’Reilly book Cloud Native Infrastructure. On today’s Datanauts episode, we talk to Justin Garrison, one of the authors and a senior systems engineer.

We dive into the chapter about managing cloud native applications, including a general conversation about the definition of a cloud-native app–that is, an application managed by software rather than humans.

Then we discuss the challenges of managing a microservices architecture, explore the concept of sidecar proxies, and walk through the process of deploying a new cloud application into production.

We also look at troubleshooting tools and techniques, and examine the necessity of service discovery and resource scheduling.

Sponsor: Linux Academy

Linux Academy offers the most hands-on training content in AWS, Azure, OpenStack, Linux, DevOps, Containers, security, and Google Cloud. Beginners and advanced learners alike will find up-to-date courses in skills development and certification prep. Hands-on labs let you work in actual cloud environments. Find out about the newest courses available online–including free courses–here.

Show Links:

Cloud Native Infrastructure – O’Reilly

Justin Garrison on Twitter

There’s a lot to be said about consuming technology remotely. Heck, the cloud is just that – someone else stands up infrastructure and services, and you consume them.

But what about for the desktop environment, which for many is their main working environment and something of a tug-of-war when it comes to ownership, management, and administration?

In today’s episode of the Datanauts, join us as we de-mystify the exotic world of End User Compute, or EUC.

Our guest is Sean Massey, Senior Technical Architect at AHEAD. You can follow him on Twitter at seanpmassey and check out his blog at TheVirtualHorizon.com.

We discuss what EUC encompasses, including technologies such as VDI as well as mobile devices, laptops, and desktops. We also look at how SaaS and cloud apps affect end users and application delivery, and explore the impact of EUC/VDI on the data center.

Show Links:

Carl Stalhood – Filling gaps in EUC vendor documentation

The Virtual Horizon – Sean Massey’s blog

Sean Massey on Twitter

AWS security issues show up in tech news fairly often. Today, we talk with someone who wrote about AWS services other than S3 that were found exposed to the public. Could that be some of your services?

Could be. The numbers are pretty impressive. Stay tuned, and find out how to determine whether or not your EBS snapshots, RDS snapshots, AMIs, or ElasticSearch clusters are accidentally public.

Our guest is Scott Piper, an AWS security consultant for Summit Route. You can follow him on Twitter at @0xdabbad00.

We start by exploring the types of AWS resources that can be unintentionally exposed to the public Internet, how to find them, and how to lock them down.

Then we talk about general practices such as vulnerability scanning, how to minimize human error when configuring AWS services, and drill into options such as CloudMapper and Security Monkey, open-source tools to help administrators find and control AWS resources.

Show Links:

Scott Piper on Twitter

Scott Piper’s blog – Duo.com

Scott Piper on GitHub – GitHub

Beyond S3: Exposed Resources on AWS – Duo.com

flAWS Challenge

CloudMapper – GitHub

CloudTracker – GitHub

Netflix Security Monkey – GitHub

Datanauts 086: AWS Identity & Access Management Policies – Packet Pushers

Datanauts 106: Controlling AWS Costs – Packet Pushers