Stephen Foskett and Eric Wright discuss service mesh, a networking tool for secure communication between services and applications in cloud environments. It is commonly used in cloud-native setups like Kubernetes and addresses the challenge of limited IPv4 addresses through dynamic networks and load balancers. Service mesh enhances application performance, ensures secure communication, and enables automation, though implementation requires organizational alignment.

Between the so-called last mile and first mile lies the middle mile, the realm of colocation and network service providers. This episode of Utilizing Tech features Roy Chua and Allyson Klein, discussing the middle mile with Stephen Foskett. This middle area includes content delivery services like Varnish and Akamai, as well as companies like Cloudflare that are delivering content and compute there. The middle network includes providers like Equinix, Digital Realty, and Megaport, which provide connectivity to the cloud and service providers, the hyperscalers themselves, and some interesting networking startups like Packet Fabric and Graphiant. We must also consider observability, with companies like cPacket and Kentik as well as companies like Cisco and Juniper Networks.

During Cloud Field Day in June, Stephen Foskett sat down with Michael Levan to discuss his contributions to the Kubernetes community as part of the release team. Michael’s role primarily involves documenting features and providing technical insights to the community, a path others can follow to get more involved. The discussion also dives into the effectiveness of concise content on LinkedIn and the significance of audience engagement.

We’re at Pure Storage’s Pure Accelerate conference this week, and the buzz is focused on the company’s continuing quest to push hard disk drives out of the datacenter. The new FlashArray R4 products are faster, while the new “E family” of FlashBlade and FlashArray target capacity-focused applications like data protection and logging. Another announcement focuses on ransomware recovery, with Pure offering a temporary replacement array on demand. Let’s talk about these stories in more detail. This and more on this on-site Rundown at Pure Accelerate.

Although artificial intelligence, specifically machine learning and large language models, is in the news, it isn’t very useful in enterprise IT. In this episode of the On-Premise IT podcast, Karen Lopez, W. Curtis Preston, Michael Levan, and Stephen Foskett discuss the use case for AI in security. The panel acknowledges that machine learning can be beneficial in identifying anomalies and patterns that humans may overlook. It can assist in generating policies, templates, and rule sets, as well as providing best practices based on aggregated data. However, they also express concerns about the responsible use of AI and the need for training models on specific environments to ensure effectiveness. They highlight the importance of having the right data sets and the challenges of dealing with the black box nature of machine learning. Despite potential exploits and limitations, they agree that AI is currently the best tool available for detecting and addressing security threats, such as data exfiltration and unauthorized access.

When it comes to edge computing, money is not limitless. Joining us for this episode of Utilizing Edge is Carlo Daffara of NodeWeaver, who discusses the unique economic challenges of edge with Alastair Cooke and Stephen Foskett. Cost is always a factor for technology decisions, but every decision is multiplied when designing edge infrastructure with hundreds or thousands of nodes. Total Cost of Ownership is a critical consideration, especially operations and deployment on-site at remote locations, and the duration of deployment must also be taken into consideration. Part of the solution is designing a very compact and flexible system, but the system must also work with nearly any configuration, from virtual machines to Kubernetes. Another issue is the fact that technology will change over time and the system must be adaptable to different hardware platforms. It is critical to consider not just the cost of hardware but also the cost of maintenance and long-term operation.

At Cisco Live 2023, Cisco unveiled a range of solutions for SSE, network management, observability, and a new cloud-native application security solution called Panoptica. The event, which includes a performance by comedian Jim Gaffigan, highlighted Cisco’s focus on simplifying user experiences and addressing the evolving needs of organizations. The security service edge (SSE) solution aims to streamline access and enhance hybrid work experiences, while the integration of generative AI into the Security Cloud improves security operations and efficiency. Cisco Networking Cloud offers a unified platform for network management, addressing challenges of complexity and fragmentation. The Full-Stack Observability (FSO) Platform brings together data from multiple domains, enabling comprehensive insights, while Panoptica provides end-to-end lifecycle protection for cloud native applications. We’re getting more details on all of these products as part of Tech Field Day at Cisco Live, which included presentations from Cisco Security, ThousandEyes, and Enterprise Networking yesterday and cloud and compute, secure policy, and IoT today.

Although everyone wants high availability from IT systems, the cost to achieve it must be weighed against the benefits. This episode of Utilizing Edge focuses on HA solutions at the edge with Bruce Kornfeld of StorMagic, Alastair Cooke, and Stephen Foskett. Although it might be tempting to build the same infrastructure at the edge as in the data center, but this can get very expensive. Thinking about multi-node server clusters and RAID storage, the risk of a so-called split brain means not just two nodes but three must be deployed in most cases. StorMagic addresses this issue in a novel way, with a remote node providing a quorum witness and reducing the need for on-site hardware. Edge infrastructure also relies on so-called hyperconverged systems, which use software to create advanced services on simple and inexpensive hardware.

Enterprise IT is constantly oscillating between centralized and distributed, and we’re currently in a period of repatriation of workloads from the cloud. This episode of the On-Premise IT podcast features three delegates from Cloud Field Day 17, Joey D’Andoni, Eric Wright, and Jason Benecicic, discussing the reality of repatriation of cloud applications with Stephen Foskett of Gestalt IT. Pundits constantly tout the money they save by repatriating from public cloud, but this might not be the best choice especially for smaller organizations. The only way to ensure functionality between on-prem, hybrid, and public cloud is to use them and use each where it is the best solution. Repatriation is especially challenging for today’s SaaS-oriented businesses, since most of these solutions can’t be run on-prem. But even workloads that can be run outside the cloud will likely require re-architecting to run locally. Yet many companies are developing software to ease the transition to and from the cloud, and these make it much easier to repatriate.

The edge isn’t the same thing to everyone: Some talk about equipment for use outside the datacenter, while others talk about equipment that lives in someone else’s location. The difference between this far edge and near edge is the topic of Utilizing Edge, with Andrew Green and Alastair Cooke, Research Analysts at Gigaom, and Stephen Foskett. Andrew is drawing a line at 20 ms roundtrip, the point at which a user feels that a resource is remote rather than local. From the perspective of an application or service, this limit requires a different approach to delivery. One approach is to distribute points of presence around the world closer to users, including compute and storage, not just caching. This would entail deploying hundreds of points of presence around the world, and perhaps even more. Technologies like Kubernetes, serverless, and function-as-a-service are being used today, and these are being deployed even beyond service provider locations.