The Everything Feed - All Packet Pushers Pods

CloudPassage talked with the Packet Pushers about Container Secure, a product announcement they made at AWS re:Invent earlier this year. Ethan Banks shares his impressions. Click to hear the audio recording in the player above.

What CloudPassage Discussed

Container Image Security is about protecting the container image registry or repository. Container Host Security is about protecting the host that containers are running on. Container Runtime Security is about securing the container when it’s in operation servicing client requests.

All of these features were added functionality to Halo, CloudPassage’s security platform.

The View From The Hot Aisle

The announcement of the Container Secure feature addition to the Halo platform is timely as more and more companies refactor their monolithic applications and redeploy them in container form factors, and possibly as microservices. This style of architecture blows up traditional operational processes, demanding new tools.

CloudPassage has been around for awhile working with their customers as they transition to cloud, and now they are going deeper down the rabbit hole as their customers work to get cloud right leveraging containers.

For More Information

https://www.cloudpassage.com/company/press-releases/container-secure/

The Datanauts discuss securing print infrastructure with Michael Howard, Chief Security Advisor, and Jason O’Keeffe, Print Security Advisor, at HP. These guys are the real security deal in touch with how the hacking community leverages printers as jump off points to launch attacks.

HP has both best practice and product recommendations to secure a print infrastructure. If you don’t think much about your printers, you’ll think differently after this episode. Or put another way, replace the word “printer” with “IoT”. Does printer security seem like a big deal now? It should.

Enjoy this look at the lurking horror that is your printer network.

For More Information

* HP Secure Printing Services

* Shodan – searchable database of IoT devices

* Censys – sort of a “Shodan Plus”

* HP SureStart – BIOS protection

* HP JetAdvantage Security Manager

Ethan Banks had a briefing with LightStep via cofounder Ben Sigelman on December 12th, 2017. Click in the player above hear the audio report.

Who’s LightStep?

LightStep is a performance monitoring software as a service company for cloud-native application architectures, although they will be happy to monitor your monolithic apps as well.

The system works via a local collector that observes transaction data, scrubs it for security reasons if required, and ships it to LightStep’s SaaS engine for analysis.

You can think of them in the APM space, although they describe themselves as “xPM.” From their website, xPM means, “APM reinvented to diagnose anything across all components of today’s software applications.”

Briefing Highlights

Unique performance profiles per customer. Build unique profiles tailored to each of your customer’s specific SLA requirements, giving you a “per customer” view of a complex infrastructure.

Break down transaction components into unsampled microsecond timeframes. LightStep highlights the anomalous records, bubbling them up to the surface so that they stand out.

Figure out what IS or perhaps what WAS going wrong as the application delivery infrastructure changes dynamically.

LightStep integrates with Kubernetes. For example, LightStep can make calls out to Kubernetes to find out information about the local environment.

LightStep ingests metadata from software processes today. Hardware telemetry will become a first-class citizen in the future.

The View From The Hot Aisle

My take is that LightStep is performance monitoring for the long-term. They have skated to where the puck is going, creating a system that excels in cloud-native application deployments, while still supporting those architectures that are transitioning from legacy into the future.

For More Information

http://lightstep.com

Quick Takeaways 

12.8 Tbps Line Rate L3 Ethernet Switch ASIC

* tailored to the needs of hyperscalers

* Tomahawk 3 is the world’s first 12.8Tbps switch chip, now sampling to customers, that will accelerate the next

* wave of 100GbE/400GbE hyperscale cloud build-out

* high port radix requires low latency,

* buffer architecture,

* instrumentation,

* 40% less power,

* 75% cheaper cost per 100Gpbs through the use of 50G PAM4 signalling

* Up to 256 x 50G-PAM4/25G-NRZ Dual-Mode Serde

Shrinks an OCP Backpack switch (which is basically 6 x 32 100 front facing switches with an internal spine) into a single switch. So what used 10 ASICs before, is now a single ASIC unit.

Architecture Notes

* architected for hyperscale – performance oriented, latency, L3/label switched fabrics, load balancing.

* But no reqt for programmable data plane.

* driven by Deep Learning / ML / AI

* Hyperscale DC market opportunity -growing

* NVMe over fabrics – the use of SSD in distributed storage means that network performance must be low latency

* Storage advances – NVMe over Ethernet

Compare Trident 3

* Trident 3 – has a programmable pipeline and lower latency but matters less.

* Tomahawk 3 at same power and cost but twice the bandwidth (but no programmability)

* Note that high radix, multi-hop Ethernet is their operation. HPC is building Slim Fly/DragonFly

* 16nm die process, gives an 18 month advantage (?)

Interpreting what this means

* focussing on low latency so its not a flexible architecture for overlays etc needing programmability. You likely won’t see this in the Enterprise (although Cisco could waste money building it into a spine only unit and claim its got magic inside)

* building nearly dedicated ASICs for cloud providers is a reflection of how much they are spending on data centres and the need to build products that are suited to their exact requirements.

* Broadcom has three ASIC families : Tomahawk is for speed and port density. Trident is for programmable features at medium density – ie data centres. Jericho is an ASIC targeting carrier grade needs such as routers.

* See Broadcom is the incumbent, it doesn’t have to be better than the competition. It needs to be good enough so that people don’t switch away (see MS Windows). With Marvell buying Cavium we are seeing consolidation in the ASIC market.

* The ASIC market is a scale up business, the larger volume you can manufacture the better your competitive advantage and that why Broadcom bought Brocade to scale up its Fibrechannel ASIC business and reduce costs.

* I don’t believe that Cisco can compete with Broadcom and the custom cloudscape chips on Nexus (which might be a slightly customised version of Marvell silicon)  doesn’t seem practical anymore when most people are focussed not he software defined parts and not on the hardware. In Enterprise, most people haven’t even gotten to 10G so a 32 port 400G silicon isn’t relevant.

* If you are in the Enterprise, this likely doesn’t matter since most of you don’t need more than 2 switches anyway. Having 2 switches with 32 x 400G ports with limited features but going very very makes no sense because you haven’t scaled out.

Today the Datanauts embark on a weight loss program for the compute stack by getting into unikernels.

Rather than standing up a full operating system, how about packaging your application to run as a binary that can be created in an immutable fashion and updated in a snap? That’s idea behind unikernels.

In particular, we’re looking at one effort called IncludeOS. Our guest is Per Buer, the CEO of IncludeOS. We’ll talk about how unikernels differ from a traditional OS, their benefits and tradeoffs, use cases for the technology, and more. Per also gives an overview of the IncludeOS software.

Show Links:

IncludeOS.org

Unikernel.org

Unikernel Devel.org

Datanauts 063: Unikernels Vs. Containers – Packet Pushers

The Full Stack Journey podcast tackles service meshes and Linkerd. Joining to help explain is George Miranda from Buoyant.io.

If you Google for a definition of high performance computing, you’ll find several entries on several sites that can be condensed down to this: high performance computing describes the use of supercomputers or parallel processing algorithms to solve computationally intensive problems.

Today on the Datanauts podcast, we’re going to pick the brains of a person who has worked in high performance computing environments. We’re especially interested in the distributed computing aspects of HPC and the challenges it presents to the infrastructure engineering community.

Our guest is Nick Buraglio, a network architect and engineer at the Energy Sciences Network, the service provider network for the Department of Energy that connects national labs. Nick blogs at The Forwarding Plane.net.

Sponsor: ITProTV

ITProTV brings you the most current IT training with over 2,000 hours of content and more than 125 hours added weekly. ITProTV is the resource to keep you and your IT team’s skills up to date. Visit itpro.tv/datanauts​ ​and use code DATANAUTS30​ ​to get a FREE 7-day trial and 30% off a monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription.

Show Links:

High Performance Computing (HPC) – AWS

Best practices for Securing the Science DMZ by Nick Buraglio – YouTube

The Forwarding Plane.net – Nick Buraglio

Let’s get physical, Datanauts. Today we talk about the key elements of building a physical data center: data cabling, racks, HVAC, power, and then managing all of that stuff.

The death of the physical data center is greatly exaggerated, and today we build the perfect data center beast. Our guest architect is John Kerns, Principal Network Engineer for an IT professional services company. John blogs at PackeTsar and co-hosts the InfoTrek podcast. He’s also an active developer on GitHub.

Show Links:

Explain: Tier 1 / Tier 2 / Tier 3 / Tier 4 Data Center – NixCraft

Data Center Power and Cooling White Paper – Cisco

Back to Basics: Power – John Kerns (via Packet Pushers)

Back to Basics: Cooling – Part 1 – John Kerns (via Packet Pushers)

Back to Basics: Cooling  –Part 2 – John Kerns (via Packet Pushers)

Datacenter Vanity – John Kerns (via Packet Pushers)

Today on the Datanauts, we look at non-volatile memory express, or NVMe.

NVMe SSDs are fast. As these drives go mainstream and make their way into enterprises and clouds at scale, what’s that mean for distributed storage networking?

We play “move the bottleneck” on today’s Datanauts. Our guest is J Metz, a.k.a @drjmetz on Twitter. He’s Research & Development Engineer for Advanced Storage at Cisco Systems.

He’s also been on previous episodes, including Datanauts 093: Erasure Coding And Distributed Storage.

We discuss the basics of NVMe and how it works, look at its performance specs, and explore how this technology will impact the network and the design of distributed storage systems.

Today on the Datanauts podcast, we rocket ahead in time. Put on your favorite time-travel helmet, and join us as we explore commodity hardware, NVMe, distributed architectures, and of course, cloud.

Our destination? The future of storage.

Our Guild Navigator for this glimpse into the future is Tom Lyon. He’s the founder and chief scientist at DriveScale and can be found on Twitter.

In part one of the show, Ethan and Chris relay audience questions to Tom, including the long-term prospects of Fibre Channel, what’s keeping Fibre Channel alive, and the implications of distributed storage.

In parts two and three, the Datanauts delve into commodity storage, NVMe, and storage’s cloudy future.

Sponsor: ITProTV

ITProTV brings you the most current IT training with over 2,000 hours of content and more than 125 hours added weekly. ITProTV is the resource to keep you and your IT team’s skills up to date. Visit itpro.tv/datanauts​ ​and use code DATANAUTS30​ ​to get a FREE 7-day trial and 30% off a monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription.