The Fat Pipe - All Packet Pushers Pods

ThousandEyes presented at Network Field Day 17. The company started out monitoring the Internet “as a network” and has extended into monitoring the customer’s digital experience.

* ThousandEyes is moving from visibility into a more useful representation of the customer experience

* Internet visibility needs new tools for the networks that you don’t own when you use SD-WAN, hybrid cloud, SaaS, etc.

* User agents reporting to ThousandEyes improve troubleshooting

* The on-premises agent, which can be deployed on user machines or a server, gathers data from your private network and uploads it to ThousandEyes, which combines private and public network into a single view

* Product future: a) Routing anomalies such as BGP hijacks or leaks b) DDOS detection c) app outages

Today on this sponsored episode of Priority Queue: making the transition from Skype for Business to Teams, a chat and collaboration platform from Microsoft. Teams runs on Azure and integrates with Office 365.

Our sponsor is Ribbon Communications, which is the new name of the combined companies Sonus Networks and Genband.

Brad Chapin, Director of Strategic Alliances at Ribbon Communications, joins us to get nerdy about voice, collaboration, Skype, and Microsoft Teams.

We discuss the differences between Skype for Business and Teams, how Ribbon’s Session Border Controllers (SBCs) can help you integrate the two platforms even in a hybrid cloud environment, and how organizations can move from one platform to another while keeping existing phone numbers.

Show Links:

Ribbon Communications

Ribbon Communications on Twitter

Microsoft Teams – Group Chat software – Microsoft

PQ 124: Cloud SBC Security & Analytics With Sonus Networks (Sponsored) – Packet Pushers

PQ Show 102: Sonus Networks & Migrating To Microsoft Cloud PBX (Sponsored) – Packet Pushers

Fresh from a two-hour Network Field Day session at Juniper on its OpenContrail transition to the Linux Foundation, Greg and Drew do a hot take on what we saw and what it means.

We also quickly review Juniper’s ambitions for its commercial Contrail product.

* Moving OpenContrail to be fully open source is harder than it looks

* The move is customer driven (as we hinted previously)

* OpenContrail will diverge from Contrail

* Contrail wants to bridge your private and public clouds, with support for AWS, Google, etc.

* Juniper is building a network platform and moving past products

* Emphasizing security because you can control the network correctly

Using open source software on a variety of hardware platforms is old news on the compute side of the IT house. Now, whitebox hardware and open source software are challenging incumbent network vendors and demonstrating new operational models for network engineers.

Web-scale giants have blazed the trail for whitebox/open source networking, and the tools and technologies these giants use are finding their way into the enterprise.

What does all of this mean for enterprise infrastructure going forward? We ponder these questions on the Datanauts podcast.

Our guest is Peyton Maynard-Koran, currently working at a stealthy blockchain startup.

We talk with Peyton about the problems that exist with big networking vendors (feature bloat, tightly coupled software and hardware, and other issues), and how these problems create challenges for network operators.

We also explore how disaggregation, open source, and an emphasis on software offer a different vision for how to build, buy, and operate networks.

Show Links:

Peyton Maynard-Koran – Twitter

Peyton Maynard-Koran – Blog

future:net 2017 – The Impacts of Cloud Computing and Open Source on the Networking Industry – YouTube

Fixing the Internet for Real-Time Applications: Part III – Riot Games Engineering

I had a briefing with netYCE on January 8, 2018. In this briefing, netYCE gave me an overview of their platform and shared some of the latest capabilities they’ve baked in. Listen to the audio in the embedded player above to hear what stuck out to me.

Who’s netYCE?

NetYCE is a maker of vendor agnostic network automation software. They play in the same space as Anuta Networks, Glue Networks, Tail-F and other big, grown up packages that hide messy, manual configuration from operators while preventing them from shooting themselves in the foot during complex network changes.

For More Information

Visit netyce.com. Note that netYCE has been selling to European markets and Asia primarily, but is planning to come to North America in 2018 once they have their support infrastructure in place.

Today the Datanauts get sorted about the world of database administrators, a.k.a DBAs.

There’s a chasm between infrastructure ops and DBAs, especially when it comes to running data center workflows. This show aims to build some bridges.

We also focus on Microsoft SQL Server, one of the most widely deployed database applications in the enterprise.

Our guide to the DBA life is Mike Fal, a database solutions engineer at Rubrik. Mike blogs at Art Of The DBA. We’ll delve into the intricacies of relational databases and how applications interact with them.

Then Mike walks us through the day in the life of a DBA, and we conclude with a conversation on how infrastructure ops and DBAs can work better together.

Show Links:

Art Of The DBA – mikefal.net

PASS: A Non-profit organization for data professionals

Mike Fal on Twitter

On today’s episode, the Datanauts starship traverses time and space via VXLAN tunnels. VXLAN is an overlay networking technology for the data center that augments and extends traditional VLANs.

VXLAN helps data center operators support multitenancy, enables ECMP (Equal Cost Multi-Pathing) to make full use of available paths, and avoids the perils of Spanning Tree. VXLAN works by adding a header to an Ethernet frame that makes it routable across an IP network.

Our guest is Lukas Krattiger, Principal Engineer at Cisco Systems. Lukas and the Datanauts discuss how VXLAN works, explore use cases, and examine the tradeoffs of encapsuation and de-encapsulation in software vs. hardware.

We also delve into how hosts inside a VXLAN network communicate with end points outside that network.

Show Links:

Lukas Krattiger on Twitter

Show 256 – Design & Build 6 – VXLAN Use Cases – Packet Pushers

Show 66 – VXLAN and NVGRE with Ken Duda – Packet Pushers

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