The Fat Pipe - All Packet Pushers Pods

Today's Heavy Networking continues a conversation about the broadcast industry's transition to IP. We consider the challenges IP networks face when implemented in a broadcasting environment, and why IP is moving ahead anyway. Our guests are Ricki Cook and Cyrus Hira.

Today’s Heavy Networking continues a conversation we started back in Weekly Show 410, where we discussed the transition the broadcast industry is making to IP.

In that episode, we covered the technical legacy of the broadcasting industry, how IP is starting to be used, and the impact to network engineering as a whole.

Today, we consider the challenges IP networks face when implemented in a broadcasting environment, but why IP is moving ahead anyway.

Our guests are Ricki Cook, a solutions architect who specializes in broadcasting (and also edits Packet Pushers audio); and Cyrus Hira, Customer Success Manager at Densify who also has experience with broadcast networks (and also edits Packet Pushers audio).

We examine the particular challenges of transitioning broadcast networks to IP from their legacy transport mechanisms, key technical standards for broadcast media such as SMPTE ST2110, interoperability challenges, and more.

We also discuss real-world projects that Ricki and Cyrus have worked on.

Sponsor: ExtraHop

Today’s episode is brought to you in part by ExtraHop. Think analytics, folks. ExtraHop is the enterprise cyber analytics company delivering performance and security from the inside out. Visit extrahop.com/packetpushers for an interactive demo to find out more.

Show Links:

Weekly Show 410 – Broadcast Media Using IP Networks – Packet Pushers

Joint Task Force on Networked Media – Advanced Media Workflow Association (PDF)

IP Solutions: Innovation Around the World – The Andrews Hubs

RickiCook.com

Today’s Datanauts show tackles three different topics with three guests. We explore

* AWS Outposts with Ned Bellavance

* Choosing the right NVMe fabric with Howard Marks

* Being Cautious with Parallel Network File System (NFS) with Chris Wahl

This show is a departure from our usual format where we divide one subject into three segments. Let us know what you think of this experiment.

Even More Podcasts!

If you like Datanauts, check out other podcasts in the Packet Pushers network, including IPv6 Buzz, Full Stack Journey, Heavy Networking, and Network Break. Get nerdy tech analysis and compelling conversations about infrastructure, cloud, professional development, and more.  Find them all at packetpushers.net.

Show Links:

AWS Outposts and Azure Stack – Ned In The Clouds (Ned Bellavance’s blog)

DeepStorage.net – All things Howard Marks

Wahl Network – Chris Wahl’s blog

RFC 5661 “Network File System (NFS) Version 4 Minor Version 1 Protocol” – IETF

RFC5664 “Object-Based Parallel NFS (pNFS) Operations” – IETF

Today’s Datanauts show tackles three different topics with three guests. We explore

* AWS Outposts with Ned Bellavance

* Choosing the right NVMe fabric with Howard Marks

* Being Cautious with Parallel Network File System (NFS) with Chris Wahl

This show is a departure from our usual format where we divide one subject into three segments. Let us know what you think of this experiment.

Even More Podcasts!

If you like Datanauts, check out other podcasts in the Packet Pushers network, including IPv6 Buzz, Full Stack Journey, Heavy Networking, and Network Break. Get nerdy tech analysis and compelling conversations about infrastructure, cloud, professional development, and more.  Find them all at packetpushers.net.

Show Links:

AWS Outposts and Azure Stack – Ned In The Clouds (Ned Bellavance’s blog)

DeepStorage.net – All things Howard Marks

Wahl Network – Chris Wahl’s blog

RFC 5661 “Network File System (NFS) Version 4 Minor Version 1 Protocol” – IETF

RFC5664 “Object-Based Parallel NFS (pNFS) Operations” – IETF

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 January 14, 2019, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with Aporeto in December 2018.

Aporeto is a security startup. “Oooh, another security startup?!?” you might say, rolling your eyes dismissively. I wouldn’t roll my eyes, as I believe there’s something very interesting here. The Aporeto solution has an eye to modern infrastructure security’s future, and not the past.

A Microsegmented Context

Before I explain Aporeto, I need to explain microsegmentation. In a nutshell, microsegmentation is centralized management of whitelists applied on a workload by workload basis. Filtering at the workload gives you the “micro” and the whitelisting gives you the “segmentation.” Writing individualized workload whitelists and maintaining them would be too hard for a human to do, especially at scale, and therefore solutions like Cisco Tetration, Illumio, and VMware NSX handle this for you.

Each of the solutions I just mentioned all do what they do differently under the hood, but the end result is roughly the same. A small whitelist pushed to or very close to a workload, segments that workload from every other workload, the big idea being to keep malware out, or at least prevent malware from spreading, as well as help prevent data leaks. It’s a divide and contain strategy using central management and a policy engine to deploy at scale.

There is more we can talk about here, because it’s possible to bolt on higher level scanning and so forth depending on the microsegmentation solution, but none of that changes my point that microsegmentation is merely an evolution of the same old firewall filtering we’ve all been doing for decades in one form or another.

Is Network-Based Microsegmentation The Proper Security Approach?

Microsegmentation assumes that the network is where security should be applied. And that’s fair enough. Assuming a defense-in-depth strategy, the network is one part of the security paradigm at least. Should sticking filter lists into highly distributed firewalls be the primary security for a modern, cloud-based application with diverse workloads, though?

Aporeto argues, “No.” Aporeto sees workload security not as a network problem. If you view the network as an increasingly complex transport, which it is especially when considering hybrid and multi-cloud architectures and orchestration platforms, then securing workloads is a security problem of its own, not one to dump onto the network infrastructure in the Aporeto view.

Introducing Aporeto

Aporeto is an identity-based security solution. I don’t only mean user identity. I also mean workload identity. That is, when using Aporeto, workloads can only talk to each other when their identity is authenticated by fingerprint and authorized by policy.

Aporeto decouples the network infrastructure from security on the assumptions that the network is distributed and probably not wholly managed by a given organization, that workloads are ephemeral, that all actions should be authorized, and that security lifecycle should be decoupled from the application lifecycle.

I just said many words there, so let me give you a more concise focal point. Aporeto is an identity and access management security solution that expects essentially nothing of developers and little of operators to provide deep, context-aware security for workloads no matter if they are hosted locally or in the public cloud, and it does it in a form-factor agnostic way.

Hosts, containers, processes, functions, and users all get a unique cryptographic identifier …

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 January 14, 2019, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with Aporeto in December 2018.

Aporeto is a security startup. “Oooh, another security startup?!?” you might say, rolling your eyes dismissively. I wouldn’t roll my eyes, as I believe there’s something very interesting here. The Aporeto solution has an eye to modern infrastructure security’s future, and not the past.

A Microsegmented Context

Before I explain Aporeto, I need to explain microsegmentation. In a nutshell, microsegmentation is centralized management of whitelists applied on a workload by workload basis. Filtering at the workload gives you the “micro” and the whitelisting gives you the “segmentation.” Writing individualized workload whitelists and maintaining them would be too hard for a human to do, especially at scale, and therefore solutions like Cisco Tetration, Illumio, and VMware NSX handle this for you.

Each of the solutions I just mentioned all do what they do differently under the hood, but the end result is roughly the same. A small whitelist pushed to or very close to a workload, segments that workload from every other workload, the big idea being to keep malware out, or at least prevent malware from spreading, as well as help prevent data leaks. It’s a divide and contain strategy using central management and a policy engine to deploy at scale.

There is more we can talk about here, because it’s possible to bolt on higher level scanning and so forth depending on the microsegmentation solution, but none of that changes my point that microsegmentation is merely an evolution of the same old firewall filtering we’ve all been doing for decades in one form or another.

Is Network-Based Microsegmentation The Proper Security Approach?

Microsegmentation assumes that the network is where security should be applied. And that’s fair enough. Assuming a defense-in-depth strategy, the network is one part of the security paradigm at least. Should sticking filter lists into highly distributed firewalls be the primary security for a modern, cloud-based application with diverse workloads, though?

Aporeto argues, “No.” Aporeto sees workload security not as a network problem. If you view the network as an increasingly complex transport, which it is especially when considering hybrid and multi-cloud architectures and orchestration platforms, then securing workloads is a security problem of its own, not one to dump onto the network infrastructure in the Aporeto view.

Introducing Aporeto

Aporeto is an identity-based security solution. I don’t only mean user identity. I also mean workload identity. That is, when using Aporeto, workloads can only talk to each other when their identity is authenticated by fingerprint and authorized by policy.

Aporeto decouples the network infrastructure from security on the assumptions that the network is distributed and probably not wholly managed by a given organization, that workloads are ephemeral, that all actions should be authorized, and that security lifecycle should be decoupled from the application lifecycle.

I just said many words there, so let me give you a more concise focal point. Aporeto is an identity and access management security solution that expects essentially nothing of developers and little of operators to provide deep, context-aware security for workloads no matter if they are hosted locally or in the public cloud, and it does it in a form-factor agnostic way.

Hosts, containers, processes, functions, and users all get a unique cryptographic identifier …

Today's Network Break podcast forecasts 2019 IT trends, analyzes new industry reports on IT spending, reviews the continuing fallout from Ericsson's outage, detects a bit of consumer backlash against gadget surveillance and more tech news analysis.

Today's Network Break podcast forecasts 2019 IT trends, analyzes new industry reports on IT spending, reviews the continuing fallout from Ericsson's outage, detects a bit of consumer backlash against gadget surveillance and more tech news analysis.

Today's episode introduces Heavy Networking, a rebrand of the Packet Pushers' Weekly Show. We've renamed this podcast to better reflect its deep dive into networking technology and skills, and better differentiate it from other infrastructure shows in our podcast network. We also dive into key trends that will impact your career.

Welcome to the Packet Pushers Heavy Networking show. No, this isn’t a new show in our line-up. It’s the Weekly Show you’ve known since 2010, now with a new name.

Why the name change?

One reason is to reflect our growth. When Packet Pushers first launched, this was the only show we did. The podcast was published once a week, so voila–the Weekly Show.

Over the years, we’ve grown into a network of technical podcasts across multiple channels, so we thought it was time to freshen up the name on the podcast that started it all.

Second, it’s a reflection of how the industry has changed. Ten years ago, you could nestle into your technical silo and not worry too much about what was happening in other areas.

That’s not the case any more. IT engineers need to have knowledge in many disciplines. Our podcast network reflects that: shows like IPv6 Buzz, Datanauts, and Full Stack Journey delve into all kinds of IT infrastructure, and aim to help your professional development.

Of course, you still need deep expertise, so when you want to focus on networking technology, Heavy Networking is our main channel.

We’ve changed the name, but if you’re subscribed to the Weekly Show you don’t need to do anything. You’ll still get this show in your favorite podcatcher.

Not Just Navel-Gazing

Don’t worry, the whole show isn’t just about us. We also analyze some trends and issues we think will have an impact in 2019. They include:

* How SD-WAN will disrupt traditional telco business

* Whether a managed SD-WAN service makes sense

* What skills and expertise will be of value in 2019 and beyond

* How much should you be learning about the cloud

* Why deep networking knowledge still matters