Packet Pushers - Datanauts

Today on the Datanauts, we move up the stack to think about Web application delivery.

How are Web pages actually delivered to a client? What’s the role of the client vs. the role of the server these days? What do new protocols like HTTP/2 and SPDY bring to the party?

From an infrastructure perspective, how do we make sure we’re optimizing the performance and user experience? If the last thing you got excited about with HTTP was pipelining, stay tuned to catch up with the latest on application acceleration.

Our guest is Lori MacVittie, Principal Technical Evangelist at F5 Networks. She and the Datanauts discuss the changes in application architecture as we’ve migrated from the early days of e-commerce to Web 2.0 to the current era of mobile devices and APIs.

They also drill into acceleration options such as CDNs, image optimization, and compression, and then explore HTTP/2 and SPYDY.

Show Links:

How Apps and APIs are Changing the App Acceleration Game – F5 DevCentral

Azure Stack is a recent offering from Microsoft that aims to recreate IaaS and PaaS capabilities in the public cloud (pools of compute, storage, and networking that can be easily consumed by developers and applications) in your own data center.

One goal of Azure Stack is to enable the fabled hybrid cloud, in which developers can use the same tools and processes to write applications and run workloads either on premises or in the Azure public cloud. As today’s guest puts it, Azure Stack is meant to be an extension of Azure.

Today on the Datanauts, we unpack Azure Stack to get a closer look at its primary components, explore the rationale for adopting Azure Stack, look at integrated systems that support it (and are required to run Azure Stack), and point listeners to resources to let them play around with the technology.

Our guest is Ned Bellavance, Director, Cloud Solutions at Anexinet, a VAR and systems integrator. You can follow him on Twitter or check out his blog at nedinthecloud.com. Ned also podcasts at Anexinet Insights.

Show Links:

Azure Stack Tools – GitHub

Azure Stack Development kit – Microsoft Azure

Key features and concepts in Azure Stack – Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure Stack is ready to order now – Microsoft

IoT is everywhere, from home automation to smart buildings to industrial controls. On this Datanaut’s episode Ethan Banks and Chris Wahl examine the major categories of IoT and where the technology sits on the spectrum between reality and hype.

They also dig into security issues with IoT, including easily exploitable software and the rise of IoT botnets, and suggest common-sense options for locking down IoT devices, including firewall and endpoint segmentation and isolation.

They also look at how IoT devices and sensors are networked, examine the radio and power issues, and outline general device classes. Last but not least, they look at the various mechanisms that have emerged to process, analyze, and store data collected by these devices.

The Datanauts are joined by Jennelle Crothers, IT Pro Evangelist at Microsoft, to discuss infrastructure-as-a-service in the Microsoft public cloud, Azure.

In this episode we explore what Azure is, how it compares to other IaaS offerings, and when to use it vs. a SaaS offering like Office 365. We also get nerdy, talking about the orchestration and automation options in Azure. Our discussion concludes making sense of the different service options within Azure. For example, does it make sense to keep running our own domain controllers, or should we be using Azure’s Active Directory Domain Services instead?

Links

Microsoft Azure Resources

Azure Roadmap

Azure QuickStart Templates

Azure Products by Region

Azure Architecture Center

Follow Jennelle Crothers

* Jennelle’s blog

* Jennelle on Twitter @jkc137

You’ve got a lot of choices when it comes to building out a new pod in the data center. Of course you have the tried-and-true Lego assembly of compute, storage, and networking blocks.

But what about  options such as converged, hyperconverged, composable, and superhyper compose-verged? (OK, not the last one, but you get the idea.)

Today on the Datanauts we’ll talk about the pros and cons of these alternative infrastructure options and why you might want to consider them for your next data center project.

Our guest is Fred Chagnon, an industry analyst at Info-Tech Research Group. He’s been researching converged, hyperconverged, and composable infrastructure approaches. He’ll share what he’s learned and explore benefits and limitations.

And as Fred notes in the show, you need to ask what your infrastructure platform needs to do not just today, but tomorrow.

Sponsor: Future:net

VMware’s Future:net is a networking-focused, invitation-only event being held during VMworld this August. You’ll hear from industry leaders and expert practitioners about new and emerging technologies that will transform the network. Request your invitation at vmware.com/futurenet.

Today on Datanauts, we look under the hood of distributed storage systems to explore erasure coding. Is erasure coding just a fancy name for RAID? What happens if we lose a storage node and have to recreate the missing pieces? Holy east-west traffic, Batman! It’s erasure coding today on the Datanauts podcast.

Our guest is J Metz, Research & Development Engineer for Advanced Storage at Cisco Systems. You can follow J on Twitter and read his blog, which includes technical content, political musings, and lots of pictures of Jeeps, at jmetz.com.

The Datanauts and Dr. J discuss the general concept of distributed storage, offer common examples, and explain the similarities and differences between distributed storage and RAID.

They drill into how erasure coding works and then explore issues around bottlenecks, performance, and repair.

Go full storage nerd with this show, and then check out the links with additional information. The links are posted just below our sponsor message.

Sponsor: FutureNet

VMware’s FutureNet is a networking-focused, invitation-only event being held during VMworld this August. You’ll hear from industry leaders and expert practitioners about new and emerging technologies that will transform the network. Request your invitation at vmware.com/futurenet.

Show Links:

Basics

Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask: Part Chartreuse – Webinar

Erasure Coding Wiki

Storage Performance Benchmarking: Introduction and Concepts – Webinar

Intermediate

Modern Erasure Codes for Distributed Storage Systems. Presentation at the 2016 Storage Developer Conference – PDF

Erasure Codes for Large-Scale Distributed Storage – YouTube (oldie but a goodie)

Advanced

Network Coding for Distributed Storage Systems – PDF

Today the Datanauts talk about how to automate an MCSA lab project using Chef. MCSA, or Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate, is a Microsoft certification program that offers credentials for a variety of Microsoft products and services, such as Windows Server, SQL, Azure, and so on.

Our guest is Brett Johnson, a senior consultant at VMware. We talk with Brett about the options for setting up labs, explore a few free options, and then drill into the ability to stand up a Windows domain in a cloud provider using Chef and Terraform.

This is a project Brett is working on. He started the project to save time standing up servers and make more efficient use of study time.

You can follow him on Twitter or read his writing on technical topics at Brett’s IT Blog.

Show Links:

Brett on GitHub

Brett’s Web site

Brett on Twitter

Datanauts 071: Everything As Code With Mitchell Hashimoto

The Datanauts’ “Found On The Internet” series continues with a discussion about Nutanix and the cloud focus of its Next 2017 conference. Chris Wahl attended the conference and he and Ethan Banks dig into the big announcements coming out of the show. They include:

* A hybrid cloud partnership with Google Cloud Platform

* A deal with Aviatrix and Cisco for connecting private data centers with public cloud infrastructure

* Announcements around Nutanix’s CALM and Xi initiatives

Tune in to get details on Nutanix’s hybrid cloud strategy and to hear a broader conversation about the challenges of moving workloads from your premises into the world of clouds.

Networking in the cloud isn’t just VLANs. On today’s Datanauts episode we explore the ins and outs of building networks in cloud services such as AWS.

Our guest is Anthony Miloslavsky, a network engineer in the finance industry. He’s been leading his company’s AWS networking efforts and wanted to share what he’s been learning.

The first point to understand? Instead of the layer 2 domains that engineers traditionally work with, public cloud networking is basically all layer 3. The provider presents you with its overlay and gives you tools and services to work with it.

Anthony and the Datanauts explore the basic constructs in AWS networking, including Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and security groups, and how these constructs will affect your architectural choices.

They also discuss how your AWS networks interact with the rest of the world, including load balancers and NAT gateways. They also drill into the automation capabilities that are on offer, and how those capabilities could influence your premises infrastructure.

Rob Hirschfeld joins the Datanauts to talk about the term Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) and what it means for IT operations.

Rob explores how the SRE designation is an effort to put operations teams on a more equal footing with developers within an organization. Rob and the Datanauts also discuss how SREs line up with other industry trends such as the cloud native and DevOps movements.

This episode was inspired by Rob’s talk at DevOps Days Austin.

Rob is CEO of RackN, which makes the Digital Rebar platform. He also joined the Datanauts in episode 72 to talk about OpenStack, Kubernetes and infrastructure automation.

Show Links:

Site Reliability Engineering – Google

Datanauts 65: Cloudy With A Chance Of Ops with Charity Majors – Packet Pushers

SRE vs Cloud Native vs DevOps”? Why do they conflict with one another? – Rob Hirschfeld

DevOps Days Austin

RackN

Digital Rebar