The Fat Pipe - All Packet Pushers Pods

The following is a transcript of the audio file you can listen to in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s March 26, 2019, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with HammerSpace earlier this month. HammerSpace describes themselves as, “a storage and protocol agnostic cloud data control plane, abstracting data from the infrastructure for self-service hybrid cloud data management, driven by machine learning and metadata management to deliver Data-as-a-Service.”

That mouthful does a pretty good job at getting to the heart of HammerSpace, which is to layer policy on top of your existing storage, moving data around to wherever you need it to be automatically. And if that happens to include hybrid cloud, that’s just fine with HammerSpace.

Data-As-A-Microservice

In this briefing, HammerSpace announced the ability to provide a global namespace for persistent storage in Kubernetes environments. As containers were originally conceived to be stateless and ephemeral, that is you should be able to stand them up and tear them down at will with essentially zero application impact, the idea of persistent storage seemed a bit wrong. Why do we need persistent storage for stateless containers?

As container use cases have expanded, stateful containers have become normal, and the need for persistent storage has grown right along side. But presenting that storage to a container in an automated way hasn’t been all that easy.

HammerSpace has tackled this issue with what they are calling data-as-a-microservice. This is not a new type of K8s specific storage, which HammerSpace thinks is about the last thing the Kubernetes world needs. Therefore don’t think of this as being just about getting data to a container. More importantly, HammerSpace is trying to answer the question, “How do we get storage to evolving workloads?”

Data Is Declarative

The answer to this question is to make data declarative. That is, describe what is needed from storage, and it just happens. At least, from a devops perspective, it looks like “it just happens.” In other words, policy drives the automation without admins having to pay too much attention.

Once the policies are in place, snapshots are put where they are needed for access or resilience. You might be accessing storage that’s on prem. You might be accessing storage that was burst to public cloud if policy dictated. You can also turn off HammerSpace in the public cloud when you need to save some dollars in your cloud provider’s bill, although global de-dupe to reduce the amount of data transiting cloud is part of the package.

Of course, nothing here is actual magic. What’s really going on is that K8s is talking to HammerSpace DSX Data Services Nodes as well as the Container Storage Interface as presented by HammerSpace. Kubernetes workloads are getting local file type performance via NVMe-level IOPS even though they are talking to HammerSpace and not storage directly.

Use Cases

HammerSpace cited a couple of key use cases for this technology that will be familiar to folks who have run into stateful containers.

The first use case is databases. For example, noSQL, MySQL, Elastic, Redis, Cassandra, mongoDB, and MS SQL Server. HammerSpace described this scenario as helpful to folks who need low latency access for their builds to go fast.

The second was for transparent dev/test to production. For example, you could take a snapshot of data living on your on-premises NetApp, present it into the cloud read-write, a benefit of a Kubernetes global namespace according to HammerSpace.

For More Information

This is a complex product and announcement, and lots more to the…

On today’s Tech Bytes episode we talk with sponsor Nubeva about getting packet visibility in public clouds. Nubeva’s Prisms agent is a cloud-based packet broker that can collect and distribute packets to processing tools in the cloud or on premises.

With Nubeva Prisms you can get packet-level visibility for analysis, performance monitoring, and security.

Our guests from Nubeva are Steve Perkins, CRO and Head of Product; and Erik Freeland, Director, Customer Success.

We talk about the latest capabilities in Prisms, including packet aggregation, filtering, slicing, and distribution/replication.

Nubeva is also integrating with open-source processing tools such as ntop, Moloch, and Zeek so that companies can deploy these tools in their cloud environments.

The company also talks about how it can work with native cloud-based taps such as Azure VTAPs.

Show Links:

Nubeva Blog

Nubeva on Twitter

Nubeva on LinkedIn

Tech Bytes: Packet Visibility In Public Clouds With Nubeva Prisms (Sponsored) – Packet Pushers

On today’s Tech Bytes episode we talk with sponsor Nubeva about getting packet visibility in public clouds. Nubeva’s Prisms agent is a cloud-based packet broker that can collect and distribute packets to processing tools in the cloud or on premises.

With Nubeva Prisms you can get packet-level visibility for analysis, performance monitoring, and security.

Our guests from Nubeva are Steve Perkins, CRO and Head of Product; and Erik Freeland, Director, Customer Success.

We talk about the latest capabilities in Prisms, including packet aggregation, filtering, slicing, and distribution/replication.

Nubeva is also integrating with open-source processing tools such as ntop, Moloch, and Zeek so that companies can deploy these tools in their cloud environments.

The company also talks about how it can work with native cloud-based taps such as Azure VTAPs.

Show Links:

Nubeva Blog

Nubeva on Twitter

Nubeva on LinkedIn

Tech Bytes: Packet Visibility In Public Clouds With Nubeva Prisms (Sponsored) – Packet Pushers

Today's Network Break looks at Facebook's plaintext password blunder, Nokia's new investment in the IETF, the potential impact of Google's gaming service on broadband, new products from VMware and Dell EMC, and more tech news.

Take a Network Break! Facebook stored millions of user passwords in plaintext and made them accessible to thousands of employees, Nokia sinks significant money into IETF sponsorship, and the Ethernet Alliance moves forward on Single Pair Ethernet.

Google announces a new streaming gaming service, but bandwidth requirements may strain broadband connections, the open-source Putty project releases a new version of the software to address eight critical vulnerabilities, and Huawei becomes a certified hardware partner for Nutanix.

VMware and Dell EMC partner on hyperconverged infrastructure, Dell EMC tops the global server market while Huawei notches impressive growth, MySpace loses massive volumes of user files and it takes months for anyone to notice, and a network admin takes the password to a core switch to his grave.

Get links to all these stories below.

Sponsor: WAN Summit

Join over 300 WAN professionals at WAN Summit, April 8 and 9th in NYC. Meet your peers to find out how they’re meeting network challenges, and how they’re readying the WAN for cloud and data center migrations. It’s just $99 to attend and listeners can get -20% off with the code PACKETPUSHERS when they register for New York. Go to WANSummit.com for details and to register.

Tech Bytes: Nubeva

Stay tuned after the news for a sponsored conversation with Nubeva. We’ll discuss the newest features in Nubeva’s cloud packet broker, Prisms, and how you can get packet-level visibility into your public cloud deployments.

Show Links:

Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in Plain Text for Years – Krebs On Security

Facebook Mistakenly Stored ‘Hundreds of Millions’ of User Passwords as Plaintext – Motherboard

Keeping Passwords Secure – Facebook

Nokia Commits US$750K to Support the Work of the Internet Engineering Task Force – Nokia

Single Pair Ethernet (SPE) comes to town – Ethernet Alliance

Google Announces Stadia, a Video Game Streaming Service Designed to Change the Way Games Are Enjoyed – MacStories

Amazon Lumberyard: Features – AWS

PuTTY Releases Important Software Update to Patch 8 High-Severity Flaws – Hacker News

Download PuTTY: latest release (0.71) – PuTTY

Huawei and Nutanix Par...

On today's Heavy Networking we explore the intersection of policy, politics, and technology with the Internet Governance Project (IGP), which connects tech and policy experts to help bridge gaps in understanding between these two communities, with the goal of influencing outcomes on issues such as free expression, privacy, and security.

On today’s Heavy Networking we explore the intersection of policy, politics, and technology with the Internet Governance Project (IGP).

A non-profit hosted at Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy, the IGP examines how technology and government policies affect critical Internet issues such as free expression, individual rights, and cybersecurity.

The IGP produces research, writes commentary, and participates in global bodies such as ICANN and Regional Internet Address Registries (RIRs).

The IGP connects technology experts and policy experts to help bridge gaps in understanding between these two communities, with the goal of influencing outcomes in global governance and standards bodies.

Our guests are Milton Mueller, Ph.D., Director of the IGP and a professor at Georgia Tech; and Brenden Kuerbis, a post-doctoral researcher at IGP.

We discuss issues such as technology nationalism (think the US vs. Huawei) and its affects on trade and technology development, cyber-attribution of state-sponsored attacks, privacy and GDPR, and more.

Show Links:

Internet Governance Project

Cyber Nationalism and Digital Trade: IGP Workshop Report – IGP

Russia tries to double down on a “national” Internet – IGP

Research on public attribution of state-sponsored attacks – IGP

Whois-Privacy Reform Hits its First Milestone – IGP

Another Facebook privacy scandal you have never heard of! – IGP

There are a few critical security differences between IPv4 and IPv6, including host addressing and extension headers. In today's IPv6 Buzz episode, we examine these differences, and other v6 security issues, with guest Eric Vyncke, a Distinguished Engineer at Cisco and co-author of the book "IPv6 Security."

Today’s Day Two Cloud episode is all about the perceptions and realities of building a startup in the cloud era. My guest Adam Bertram shares his experiences launching an online learning company called TechSnips.

Entrepreneurs can choose a variety of ready-made Web and cloud tools to launch a site and provide backend functions.

But as Adam learned, you make tradeoffs when you adopt commodity services instead of doing it yourself, including integration problems and a lack of customization.

Adam shares his experiences using cloud services such as Trello, Zapier, and Lambda; discusses why good APIs matter; and talks about how to balance a startup’s immediate need to get things done against long-term technical debt.

Show Links:

TechSnips.io

TechSnips on Twitter

Adam The Automator – Adam Bertram’s Blog

Adam Bertram on Twitter

Today’s Day Two Cloud episode is all about the realities of building a startup in the cloud era. Guest Adam Bertram shares his experiences launching a startup using cloud services such as Trello, Zapier, and Lambda; discusses why good APIs matter; and talks about how to balance immediate needs against long-term technical debt.