The Everything Feed - All Packet Pushers Pods

Today on the Priority Queue we have a roundtable show. We’ve gathered a few engineers around the microphone to talk about their experiences and what’s on their minds.

We often hear this format is an audience favorite, so we plan to record more of these in the Priority Queue and Weekly channels, so keep an eye out.

Today we welcome Alex Clipper, Eric Gullickson, Matt Elliott, and Stafford Rau to the podcast. We discuss encryption, code styles to ensure that code written by networkers is up to snuff, and what it’s like to work in technology after a certain age.

Sponsor: Paessler AG

Paessler AG is the maker of PRTG Network Monitor. PRTG monitors your entire IT infrastructure 24/7 and alerts you to problems before users notice. Find out more about the monitoring software that helps system administrators work smarter, faster, better by visiting paessler.com today.

Show Links:

Understanding Media Access Control Security (MACsec) – Technical Documentation – Support – Juniper Networks

Layer 2-Encryptors For Metro And Carrier Ethernet WANs And MANs – Inside-IT (PDF)

Thales L2 Encryption – Thales

Senetas – Senetas.com

What Is Optical Encryption? – Ciena

Certes Networks

Google Style Guides – GitHub

Python PEP 8 Style Guide – Python.org

PEP 8 — The Style Guide for Python Code – PEP8.org

Online PEP 8 Compliance Checker – PEP8 Online.com

Sublime Text Editor – Sublimetext.com

Atom.io Text Editor – Atom.io

VSCode – VisualStudio.com

Cutting ‘Old Heads’ at IBM – Pro Publica

Go Past The Resume,

Today, the Datanauts revisit the world of Kubernetes and container scheduling, but we also loop in Serverless or “Functions as a Service” (FaaS) along with building an incredibly famous project that has literally no code.

Our guest is Kelsey Hightower, a Google employee as well as a Kubernetes advocate and expert. We talk with Kelsey about the latest evolution of Kubernetes, whether the notion of Kubernetes lock-in is a concern, and how it’s being used in production.

We also delve into serverless computing or Functions as a Service (FaaS) and discuss the technology’s development and adoption. We also explore Kelsey’s latest project, No Code.

Last but not least, we look at how containers and orchestration affects the interaction between Devs and Ops, and how to embrace the new world of application design.

Show Links:

Kelsey Hightower on GitHub

Kelsey Hightower on Twitter

Kubernetes Up And Running – Amazon

Kubernetes The Hard Way – GitHub

Datanauts 058: Kubernetes – A Deep-Dive Introduction

Datanauts 042: Understanding Serverless Architecture

Datanauts 047: A Serverless Architecture Follow-Up

Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces Kubernetes as First Graduated Project – CNCF

Serverless Ops: What do we do when the server goes away? – Serverless Ops

Security Center Playbooks and Azure Functions Integration with Firewalls – Microsoft Azure

Today on the Datanauts we crack open our cabinet of curiosities to explore a variety of subjects, ideas, and blogs gleaned from the Internet.

Topics include Site Reliability Engineering, AWS vs. Azure for your cloud career, the pros and cons of abstraction, and the ups and downs of industry certifications.

Check out the show links for more details on everything we discuss.

Show Links:

You need SRE skills to thrive in a serverless world — Kelsey Hightower – A Cloud Guru

AWS Vs. Azure: Which One’s Right for Your Cloud Career? – SimpliLearn

OpenFaaS.com

The CNCF takes steps toward serverless computing – Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Serverless Working Group – GitHub

PowerShell Summit

How Self-Sufficient Do You Want to Be? – IP Space

The Law of Leaky Abstractions – Joel on Software

The Network Collective

Rehashing Certifications – Rule 11 Reader

Computer Networking Problems And Solutions – Rush White and Ethan Banks

Building Next-Generation Data Center – IP Space

RedHat to acquire CoreOS – RedHat

On-call doesn’t have to suck – Medium

Open source project trends for 2018 – GitHub Blog

The State of the Octoverse 2017 – GitHub

Have a listen in the player above to this short audio summary of a briefing I took from Neal Roche, CEO at Apposite Technologies. We talked about WAN emulation–what it is and what it’s not. We also cover enterprise use cases for WAN emulation. We touch on Apposite’s latest appliance, the Netropy 100G.

Today the Datanauts have beamed aboard a smart and insightful guide to help us navigate the swirling maelstroms of cloud, containers, and storage.

That guide is Stephen Foskett, founder of Tech Field Day and Gestalt IT, and long-time consultant and writer covering storage, networking, mobility and pretty much everything else in tech.

We explore the current state of storage and what’s new and interesting in the industry, including NVME; Stephen’s love of ZFS; and why we’ll always have spinning disk.

We also look at Rook, an open-source storage project that’s been adopted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation; Kubernetes and storage; and how far down you can go with abstractions.

The Datanauts and Stephen also discuss careers, professional development, and how the tech industry is evolving and changing.

Show Links:

Stephen Foskett on Twitter

GestaltIT

Tech Field Day

On Premise IT Podcast – Gestalt IT

Datanauts 118: The Whitebox & Enterprise Networks – Packet Pushers

ZFS Is the Best Filesystem (For Now…)  – Stephen Foskett

Add a Mirror to an Existing ZFS Drive – Stephen Foskett

Rook.io – Cloud Native Computing Foundation

And yet another: Rook voted in as a CNCF project – Diversity.net

7 Ways Kubernetes Avoids an OpenStack-Like Hype Cycle – The New Stack

You need SRE skills to thrive in a serverless world — Kelsey Hightower – A Cloud Guru

An Explanation of the Meltdown/Spectre Bugs for a Non-Technical Audience – CloudFlare

The Full Stack Journey explores how the cloud drives IT pros to cultivate both developer and infrastructure skills, and provides an introduction to Microsoft's Azure platform.

I spent a few weeks in Silicon Valley recently, and Martin Casado generously agreed to record a conversation with me. Martin is a general partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. He previously worked at VMware and was cofounder of Nicira, which VMware acquired in 2012 for $1.2 billion.

I wanted to dig deeper into the business concepts behind product/market fit and the differences in how big vendors and startups come to market. Not everyone thinks about how business drives what you buy.

Apology: There is some bad audio for the first 5 minutes or so. I was using someone else’s equipment and I forgot to double check. The audio clears up about 5 minutes in if you want to skip ahead.

Here are the topics we cover in this wide-ranging discussion, based in part on a post Martin wrote:

1. Getting stuck in the “innovation-friend zone”

2. Even when customers are “sold”, they still can’t buy

3. Your biggest competition isn’t another company… it’s the status quo (or is it?)

4. Is money leaving Enterprise IT because the market is shrinking?

5. Are we seeing the death of Enterprise IT brands?

6. Is the intent-based networking movement legit? How does it work out?

Also, a wasp briefly interrupts the conversation before meeting a swift end.

Link: “Need More Time” or Lack of Product-Market Fit? Guideposts for Tech Founders Going to Market When No Market Exists – Andreessen Horowitz

Cyber security is no game. The data from millions of companies and institutions as well as billions of dollars are at stake. Yet some proponents want to gamify security education and training.

Is gamification an effective tool to educate and train security practitioners, or just a gimmick to dumb down a complex subject (and maybe sell some courses or training)?

Today on the Datanauts we discuss the tension between gaming and learning and examine whether this tool can be effective.

We also explore security training more broadly, including the role of certifications, exams, and hands-on testing, and how gamification might enhance or improve traditional training or provide a new pathway into security careers.

Last but not least, we dive into the operational impact of security gamification.

Our guest is Evan Dornbush, co-founder and CEO of Point3 Security.

Show Links:

Learning Cyber Operations Through Gaming: An overview of current and up and coming gamified learning environments – CSIAC Journal (PDF)

Gamification is Bullshit – Ian Bogost

New Collar Jobs – IBM

ESCALATE is coming. Here’s why it matters. – Point3 Security

Ruru is open source software for monitoring TCP latency in real time. As it says on the project’s GitHub page, the software “utilizes Intel DPDK for high speed packet processing (up to 40Gbit/s) and a Node.JS web frontend to present results.”

On today’s Priority Queue we talk with Ruru developer Richard Cziva. We dive into how Ruru works, what insights we can glean from the data Ruru generates, and how the application scales.

We also discuss roadmap items and how developers and non-developers alike can contribute to the project.

Last but not least, we answer the burning question “What the heck is a Ruru?” (It’s an owl native to New Zealand and Tasmania, and also known as a Morepork.)

Show Links:

REANNZ Ruru – GitHub

Ruru RIPE Presentation – PDF

NetLab: Ruru: live, end-to-end TCP latency monitoring – University of Glasgow

Richard’s Blog

Follow Richard on Twitter

Today on a sponsored episode of Datanauts, we dive into VMware Cloud on AWS. This service lets you run a VMware environment (including ESXi, vSAN, and NSX) in Amazon’s AWS on bare metal servers. It’s sold and supported by VMware.

Our guest to help us sort through the nuts and bolts of this service is Matt Dreyer, Director of Product Management, VMware Cloud on AWS.

We explore common use cases, including cloud migration, on-demand capacity, and disaster recovery. We examine how this service might impact your operations, tooling, and skillsets (hint: it’s exactly the same as VMware on premises, but if you want to dig into AWS Networking and other specialties you can).

We also look at how VMware Cloud ties into AWS services, discuss available topologies, and review a slate of new announcements about the service.

Check out the links below for details on pricing, capabilities, and more.

Show Links:

VMware Cloud Provider Program – VMware

VMware Cloud on AWS/Pricing – VMware

VMware Cloud on AWS – Amazon

AWS re:Invent 2017: VMware Cloud on AWS: A World of Unique Integrations – YouTube

AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty – Amazon