Another week of being a Human in IT Infrastructure Are you still alive to talkabout it

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IN THIS WEEKS ISSUE Beware Emotional Attachments To Old Tech What AChanging Cisco Means To You A Disingenuous AI Partnership Please remember toenable the images the magazine looks a lot better that way

Table of Contents (aka The Project Plan)

1 Beware EmotionalAttachments To Old Tech2 What A Changing CiscoMeans For You3 New AI Consortium SoundsComically DisingenuousInternets Of Interest Product NewsPacketPushersnet - The LastFiveWatch ThisQuick Survey 2017 Predictions

Issue Number 46

12082016

The Changes issue

Thought For The WeekTurn and face the strange - David

Bowie

1 Beware EmotionalAttachments To Old Techby Keith Townsend Coming out of AWS Reinvent and HPE Discover I have a familiarfeeling in my stomach Big changes are coming and I have to beprepared to let go of technologies and skill sets Irsquove grown attached to I had the same feeling in 2000 and 2001 I started my IT career as aNovell NetWare administrator and as I gained competency I alsogained a sense of pride for the technology and my work The job liftedmy family into the middle class I felt loyal to NetWare However the market signs were clear Windows 2000 Server andActive Directory were going to sweep aside the technology I spent thepast few years mastering And even though I knew logically that it wastime to move on I was taken aback at how emotionally attached Irsquodgrown to a product

Here We Go AgainThe current shift in technology is similar Greg Ferro likes to tell us that enterprise technology especially datanetworking hasnrsquot changed in 15 years Enterprises take the samephysical approach to networking We wait on our favorite vendor toprovide a roadmap to the products that meet our businessrequirements But todayrsquos shift isnrsquot being driven by one enterprise vendorovercoming another Itrsquos that business users are getting smarter about

technology The height of the bookkeeper profession was the 1970rsquos The processof tabulating financial models was extremely manual If a smallbusiness wanted to perform a whatshyif calculation it might take days orweeks for a bookkeeper to create a manual spreadsheet showing theanswer to the business question Then PCs and bookkeeping software supplanted the bookkeeperBookkeepers had to move up the stack and grow the trade ofaccounting or be out of a job Today businesses are bypassing their IT departments and moving topublic cloud providers Giants like Amazon and Facebook are drivinginnovations that will create new infrastructure options for everyoneelse Automation is pushing up hard against handshycurated operations Like my situation in 2001 itrsquos time to realize the shift is occurringEnterprise IT is changing and we canrsquot write it off or ignore it becauseof emotional attachments to the products processes and skill thathave made us successful for the past 15 years IT people are smart and capable and should be able to see whatrsquoscoming But donrsquot discount the power of the emotional attachment toobscure your clarity

Maybe if I just stay under here it will all go away

2 What A Changing CiscoMeans For Youby Greg Ferro Ciscos switch and router businesses are shrinking What might thismean for you

Big Dancing ElephantLets get this out of the way early

Cisco Systems as a company isin fine health with $70B in thebank steady profits and slowgrowth The share price hasbeen fairly flat for a decade butit pays a nice dividend to itsshareholders and huge bonusesto its executives Overall themoney market analysts arepretty happy with the company Cisco along with othertechnology companies also hasa monster pile of cash stored offshore Cisco has a number ofopportunities to grow itsbusiness including IOT SecurityServers and Hybrid Cloud Butmostly Cisco is defending itsexisting customers and workingto refresh the installed base andprotect its business Cisco is abig happy dancing elephant thatcan crush competitors

Legacy Networking If youre a customer the story is somewhat different Cisco built itscurrent business on switching and routing which has been shrinkinggradually for a couple of years now In both service provider andenterprise markets revenues are slowly decreasing as the impact of amaturing market takes hold

Mainframeshystyle network hardware with nutsshytoshyguts integrationdoesnt fit the new market Disagreggation allows competitors to enterthe market and stop an incumbents growth If you are a dominantsupplier then competitors start eating into your revenue and profitsHere is Ciscos results for the last quarter showing the decrease

The future of private cloud will be determined by rapid change inapplications The last 30 years of widespread use of OSPF STP andSNMP applications is over The first generation of new applications isled by Ansible NETCONF gRPC and many others The secondgeneration sometimes called NFV uses virtual appliances running onx86 servers It is well advanced and further undermines the singleshyvendor strategy These are some of the reasons that revenue in core routing ampswitching is shrinking and wny Cisco is working hard to defend itsinstalled base against startups and new competitors such as Huaweiand ZTE

Reduce Costs in a Shrinking Market

What do companies do to stay profitable in a shrinking market

1 Reduce sales costs by reducing field staff or forming salespartnerships (resellers vendor integrations product cooperation)

2 Reduce the cost of making products (merchant silicon opensource software)

3 Reduce or rationalize diversity of products4 Increase price increase marketing efforts to grow market share(no market share to gain pricing already premium)

These options are standard business practice Its not rocket scienceThe only item that I feel Cisco hasnt yet tried is Rationalization

So What If you follow my logic then Cisco may start to reduce the number ofproducts it sells This will

1 Cut RampD support stock service and maintenance costs2 Reduce head count3 Focus sales team on successful remaining products 4 Reduce burden on executive team to focus on new markets

If you are considering a purchase of Cisco Enterprise products andexpecting to own them for more than three years take time to considerthe products longevity Some questions

1 Is the product old and based on legacy technology 2 Is the product successful in the market 3 Is the product hard to support

Not easy questions to answer but thats what you are there for

3 New AI Consortium SoundsComically Disingenuousby Drew Conry-Murray A few months ago a handful of corporations with a vested interest ingathering and analyzing as much personal information as possiblefounded an industry consortium with the laughably insincere nameldquoPartnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Societyrdquo Consumers and citizens should start to pay attention when an industryconsortium feels compelled to tell them that something is harmlessand good The founding members of the partnership are Facebook GoogleMicrosoft Amazon and IBM These companies are keenly aware ofthe profits to be made from advances in machine learning and AI andhave voracious appetites for humanshygenerated data across a variety offields including commerce social interaction and health care The aims of the partnership as noted in the press release are topartner with academics researchers and ethicists to ldquorecommend bestpractices and publish research under an open license in areas suchas ethics fairness and inclusivity transparency privacy andinteroperabilityrdquo Those are laudable goals But does anyone believe that arecommendation or best practice that emerges from this body willhave any impact on the behavior of these corporations when realmoney is at stake I read this partnership as a sop to public concerns over serious issueslike privacy and transparency and an effort to get out in front ofgovernment regulations

technology The height of the bookkeeper profession was the 1970rsquos The processof tabulating financial models was extremely manual If a smallbusiness wanted to perform a whatshyif calculation it might take days orweeks for a bookkeeper to create a manual spreadsheet showing theanswer to the business question Then PCs and bookkeeping software supplanted the bookkeeperBookkeepers had to move up the stack and grow the trade ofaccounting or be out of a job Today businesses are bypassing their IT departments and moving topublic cloud providers Giants like Amazon and Facebook are drivinginnovations that will create new infrastructure options for everyoneelse Automation is pushing up hard against handshycurated operations Like my situation in 2001 itrsquos time to realize the shift is occurringEnterprise IT is changing and we canrsquot write it off or ignore it becauseof emotional attachments to the products processes and skill thathave made us successful for the past 15 years IT people are smart and capable and should be able to see whatrsquoscoming But donrsquot discount the power of the emotional attachment toobscure your clarity

Maybe if I just stay under here it will all go away

2 What A Changing CiscoMeans For Youby Greg Ferro Ciscos switch and router businesses are shrinking What might thismean for you

Big Dancing ElephantLets get this out of the way early

Cisco Systems as a company isin fine health with $70B in thebank steady profits and slowgrowth The share price hasbeen fairly flat for a decade butit pays a nice dividend to itsshareholders and huge bonusesto its executives Overall themoney market analysts arepretty happy with the company Cisco along with othertechnology companies also hasa monster pile of cash stored offshore Cisco has a number ofopportunities to grow itsbusiness including IOT SecurityServers and Hybrid Cloud Butmostly Cisco is defending itsexisting customers and workingto refresh the installed base andprotect its business Cisco is abig happy dancing elephant thatcan crush competitors

Legacy Networking If youre a customer the story is somewhat different Cisco built itscurrent business on switching and routing which has been shrinkinggradually for a couple of years now In both service provider andenterprise markets revenues are slowly decreasing as the impact of amaturing market takes hold

Mainframeshystyle network hardware with nutsshytoshyguts integrationdoesnt fit the new market Disagreggation allows competitors to enterthe market and stop an incumbents growth If you are a dominantsupplier then competitors start eating into your revenue and profitsHere is Ciscos results for the last quarter showing the decrease

The future of private cloud will be determined by rapid change inapplications The last 30 years of widespread use of OSPF STP andSNMP applications is over The first generation of new applications isled by Ansible NETCONF gRPC and many others The secondgeneration sometimes called NFV uses virtual appliances running onx86 servers It is well advanced and further undermines the singleshyvendor strategy These are some of the reasons that revenue in core routing ampswitching is shrinking and wny Cisco is working hard to defend itsinstalled base against startups and new competitors such as Huaweiand ZTE

Reduce Costs in a Shrinking Market

What do companies do to stay profitable in a shrinking market

1 Reduce sales costs by reducing field staff or forming salespartnerships (resellers vendor integrations product cooperation)

2 Reduce the cost of making products (merchant silicon opensource software)

3 Reduce or rationalize diversity of products4 Increase price increase marketing efforts to grow market share(no market share to gain pricing already premium)

These options are standard business practice Its not rocket scienceThe only item that I feel Cisco hasnt yet tried is Rationalization

So What If you follow my logic then Cisco may start to reduce the number ofproducts it sells This will

1 Cut RampD support stock service and maintenance costs2 Reduce head count3 Focus sales team on successful remaining products 4 Reduce burden on executive team to focus on new markets

If you are considering a purchase of Cisco Enterprise products andexpecting to own them for more than three years take time to considerthe products longevity Some questions

1 Is the product old and based on legacy technology 2 Is the product successful in the market 3 Is the product hard to support

Not easy questions to answer but thats what you are there for

3 New AI Consortium SoundsComically Disingenuousby Drew Conry-Murray A few months ago a handful of corporations with a vested interest ingathering and analyzing as much personal information as possiblefounded an industry consortium with the laughably insincere nameldquoPartnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Societyrdquo Consumers and citizens should start to pay attention when an industryconsortium feels compelled to tell them that something is harmlessand good The founding members of the partnership are Facebook GoogleMicrosoft Amazon and IBM These companies are keenly aware ofthe profits to be made from advances in machine learning and AI andhave voracious appetites for humanshygenerated data across a variety offields including commerce social interaction and health care The aims of the partnership as noted in the press release are topartner with academics researchers and ethicists to ldquorecommend bestpractices and publish research under an open license in areas suchas ethics fairness and inclusivity transparency privacy andinteroperabilityrdquo Those are laudable goals But does anyone believe that arecommendation or best practice that emerges from this body willhave any impact on the behavior of these corporations when realmoney is at stake I read this partnership as a sop to public concerns over serious issueslike privacy and transparency and an effort to get out in front ofgovernment regulations

Maybe if I just stay under here it will all go away

2 What A Changing CiscoMeans For Youby Greg Ferro Ciscos switch and router businesses are shrinking What might thismean for you

Big Dancing ElephantLets get this out of the way early

Cisco Systems as a company isin fine health with $70B in thebank steady profits and slowgrowth The share price hasbeen fairly flat for a decade butit pays a nice dividend to itsshareholders and huge bonusesto its executives Overall themoney market analysts arepretty happy with the company Cisco along with othertechnology companies also hasa monster pile of cash stored offshore Cisco has a number ofopportunities to grow itsbusiness including IOT SecurityServers and Hybrid Cloud Butmostly Cisco is defending itsexisting customers and workingto refresh the installed base andprotect its business Cisco is abig happy dancing elephant thatcan crush competitors

Legacy Networking If youre a customer the story is somewhat different Cisco built itscurrent business on switching and routing which has been shrinkinggradually for a couple of years now In both service provider andenterprise markets revenues are slowly decreasing as the impact of amaturing market takes hold

Mainframeshystyle network hardware with nutsshytoshyguts integrationdoesnt fit the new market Disagreggation allows competitors to enterthe market and stop an incumbents growth If you are a dominantsupplier then competitors start eating into your revenue and profitsHere is Ciscos results for the last quarter showing the decrease

The future of private cloud will be determined by rapid change inapplications The last 30 years of widespread use of OSPF STP andSNMP applications is over The first generation of new applications isled by Ansible NETCONF gRPC and many others The secondgeneration sometimes called NFV uses virtual appliances running onx86 servers It is well advanced and further undermines the singleshyvendor strategy These are some of the reasons that revenue in core routing ampswitching is shrinking and wny Cisco is working hard to defend itsinstalled base against startups and new competitors such as Huaweiand ZTE

Reduce Costs in a Shrinking Market

What do companies do to stay profitable in a shrinking market

1 Reduce sales costs by reducing field staff or forming salespartnerships (resellers vendor integrations product cooperation)

2 Reduce the cost of making products (merchant silicon opensource software)

3 Reduce or rationalize diversity of products4 Increase price increase marketing efforts to grow market share(no market share to gain pricing already premium)

These options are standard business practice Its not rocket scienceThe only item that I feel Cisco hasnt yet tried is Rationalization

So What If you follow my logic then Cisco may start to reduce the number ofproducts it sells This will

1 Cut RampD support stock service and maintenance costs2 Reduce head count3 Focus sales team on successful remaining products 4 Reduce burden on executive team to focus on new markets

If you are considering a purchase of Cisco Enterprise products andexpecting to own them for more than three years take time to considerthe products longevity Some questions

1 Is the product old and based on legacy technology 2 Is the product successful in the market 3 Is the product hard to support

Not easy questions to answer but thats what you are there for

3 New AI Consortium SoundsComically Disingenuousby Drew Conry-Murray A few months ago a handful of corporations with a vested interest ingathering and analyzing as much personal information as possiblefounded an industry consortium with the laughably insincere nameldquoPartnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Societyrdquo Consumers and citizens should start to pay attention when an industryconsortium feels compelled to tell them that something is harmlessand good The founding members of the partnership are Facebook GoogleMicrosoft Amazon and IBM These companies are keenly aware ofthe profits to be made from advances in machine learning and AI andhave voracious appetites for humanshygenerated data across a variety offields including commerce social interaction and health care The aims of the partnership as noted in the press release are topartner with academics researchers and ethicists to ldquorecommend bestpractices and publish research under an open license in areas suchas ethics fairness and inclusivity transparency privacy andinteroperabilityrdquo Those are laudable goals But does anyone believe that arecommendation or best practice that emerges from this body willhave any impact on the behavior of these corporations when realmoney is at stake I read this partnership as a sop to public concerns over serious issueslike privacy and transparency and an effort to get out in front ofgovernment regulations

Cisco Systems as a company isin fine health with $70B in thebank steady profits and slowgrowth The share price hasbeen fairly flat for a decade butit pays a nice dividend to itsshareholders and huge bonusesto its executives Overall themoney market analysts arepretty happy with the company Cisco along with othertechnology companies also hasa monster pile of cash stored offshore Cisco has a number ofopportunities to grow itsbusiness including IOT SecurityServers and Hybrid Cloud Butmostly Cisco is defending itsexisting customers and workingto refresh the installed base andprotect its business Cisco is abig happy dancing elephant thatcan crush competitors

Legacy Networking If youre a customer the story is somewhat different Cisco built itscurrent business on switching and routing which has been shrinkinggradually for a couple of years now In both service provider andenterprise markets revenues are slowly decreasing as the impact of amaturing market takes hold

Mainframeshystyle network hardware with nutsshytoshyguts integrationdoesnt fit the new market Disagreggation allows competitors to enterthe market and stop an incumbents growth If you are a dominantsupplier then competitors start eating into your revenue and profitsHere is Ciscos results for the last quarter showing the decrease

The future of private cloud will be determined by rapid change inapplications The last 30 years of widespread use of OSPF STP andSNMP applications is over The first generation of new applications isled by Ansible NETCONF gRPC and many others The secondgeneration sometimes called NFV uses virtual appliances running onx86 servers It is well advanced and further undermines the singleshyvendor strategy These are some of the reasons that revenue in core routing ampswitching is shrinking and wny Cisco is working hard to defend itsinstalled base against startups and new competitors such as Huaweiand ZTE

Reduce Costs in a Shrinking Market

What do companies do to stay profitable in a shrinking market

1 Reduce sales costs by reducing field staff or forming salespartnerships (resellers vendor integrations product cooperation)

2 Reduce the cost of making products (merchant silicon opensource software)

3 Reduce or rationalize diversity of products4 Increase price increase marketing efforts to grow market share(no market share to gain pricing already premium)

These options are standard business practice Its not rocket scienceThe only item that I feel Cisco hasnt yet tried is Rationalization

So What If you follow my logic then Cisco may start to reduce the number ofproducts it sells This will

1 Cut RampD support stock service and maintenance costs2 Reduce head count3 Focus sales team on successful remaining products 4 Reduce burden on executive team to focus on new markets

If you are considering a purchase of Cisco Enterprise products andexpecting to own them for more than three years take time to considerthe products longevity Some questions

1 Is the product old and based on legacy technology 2 Is the product successful in the market 3 Is the product hard to support

Not easy questions to answer but thats what you are there for

3 New AI Consortium SoundsComically Disingenuousby Drew Conry-Murray A few months ago a handful of corporations with a vested interest ingathering and analyzing as much personal information as possiblefounded an industry consortium with the laughably insincere nameldquoPartnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Societyrdquo Consumers and citizens should start to pay attention when an industryconsortium feels compelled to tell them that something is harmlessand good The founding members of the partnership are Facebook GoogleMicrosoft Amazon and IBM These companies are keenly aware ofthe profits to be made from advances in machine learning and AI andhave voracious appetites for humanshygenerated data across a variety offields including commerce social interaction and health care The aims of the partnership as noted in the press release are topartner with academics researchers and ethicists to ldquorecommend bestpractices and publish research under an open license in areas suchas ethics fairness and inclusivity transparency privacy andinteroperabilityrdquo Those are laudable goals But does anyone believe that arecommendation or best practice that emerges from this body willhave any impact on the behavior of these corporations when realmoney is at stake I read this partnership as a sop to public concerns over serious issueslike privacy and transparency and an effort to get out in front ofgovernment regulations

Mainframeshystyle network hardware with nutsshytoshyguts integrationdoesnt fit the new market Disagreggation allows competitors to enterthe market and stop an incumbents growth If you are a dominantsupplier then competitors start eating into your revenue and profitsHere is Ciscos results for the last quarter showing the decrease

The future of private cloud will be determined by rapid change inapplications The last 30 years of widespread use of OSPF STP andSNMP applications is over The first generation of new applications isled by Ansible NETCONF gRPC and many others The secondgeneration sometimes called NFV uses virtual appliances running onx86 servers It is well advanced and further undermines the singleshyvendor strategy These are some of the reasons that revenue in core routing ampswitching is shrinking and wny Cisco is working hard to defend itsinstalled base against startups and new competitors such as Huaweiand ZTE

Reduce Costs in a Shrinking Market

What do companies do to stay profitable in a shrinking market

1 Reduce sales costs by reducing field staff or forming salespartnerships (resellers vendor integrations product cooperation)

2 Reduce the cost of making products (merchant silicon opensource software)

3 Reduce or rationalize diversity of products4 Increase price increase marketing efforts to grow market share(no market share to gain pricing already premium)

These options are standard business practice Its not rocket scienceThe only item that I feel Cisco hasnt yet tried is Rationalization

So What If you follow my logic then Cisco may start to reduce the number ofproducts it sells This will

1 Cut RampD support stock service and maintenance costs2 Reduce head count3 Focus sales team on successful remaining products 4 Reduce burden on executive team to focus on new markets

If you are considering a purchase of Cisco Enterprise products andexpecting to own them for more than three years take time to considerthe products longevity Some questions

1 Is the product old and based on legacy technology 2 Is the product successful in the market 3 Is the product hard to support

Not easy questions to answer but thats what you are there for

3 New AI Consortium SoundsComically Disingenuousby Drew Conry-Murray A few months ago a handful of corporations with a vested interest ingathering and analyzing as much personal information as possiblefounded an industry consortium with the laughably insincere nameldquoPartnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Societyrdquo Consumers and citizens should start to pay attention when an industryconsortium feels compelled to tell them that something is harmlessand good The founding members of the partnership are Facebook GoogleMicrosoft Amazon and IBM These companies are keenly aware ofthe profits to be made from advances in machine learning and AI andhave voracious appetites for humanshygenerated data across a variety offields including commerce social interaction and health care The aims of the partnership as noted in the press release are topartner with academics researchers and ethicists to ldquorecommend bestpractices and publish research under an open license in areas suchas ethics fairness and inclusivity transparency privacy andinteroperabilityrdquo Those are laudable goals But does anyone believe that arecommendation or best practice that emerges from this body willhave any impact on the behavior of these corporations when realmoney is at stake I read this partnership as a sop to public concerns over serious issueslike privacy and transparency and an effort to get out in front ofgovernment regulations

What do companies do to stay profitable in a shrinking market

1 Reduce sales costs by reducing field staff or forming salespartnerships (resellers vendor integrations product cooperation)

2 Reduce the cost of making products (merchant silicon opensource software)

3 Reduce or rationalize diversity of products4 Increase price increase marketing efforts to grow market share(no market share to gain pricing already premium)

These options are standard business practice Its not rocket scienceThe only item that I feel Cisco hasnt yet tried is Rationalization

So What If you follow my logic then Cisco may start to reduce the number ofproducts it sells This will

1 Cut RampD support stock service and maintenance costs2 Reduce head count3 Focus sales team on successful remaining products 4 Reduce burden on executive team to focus on new markets

If you are considering a purchase of Cisco Enterprise products andexpecting to own them for more than three years take time to considerthe products longevity Some questions

1 Is the product old and based on legacy technology 2 Is the product successful in the market 3 Is the product hard to support

Not easy questions to answer but thats what you are there for

3 New AI Consortium SoundsComically Disingenuousby Drew Conry-Murray A few months ago a handful of corporations with a vested interest ingathering and analyzing as much personal information as possiblefounded an industry consortium with the laughably insincere nameldquoPartnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Societyrdquo Consumers and citizens should start to pay attention when an industryconsortium feels compelled to tell them that something is harmlessand good The founding members of the partnership are Facebook GoogleMicrosoft Amazon and IBM These companies are keenly aware ofthe profits to be made from advances in machine learning and AI andhave voracious appetites for humanshygenerated data across a variety offields including commerce social interaction and health care The aims of the partnership as noted in the press release are topartner with academics researchers and ethicists to ldquorecommend bestpractices and publish research under an open license in areas suchas ethics fairness and inclusivity transparency privacy andinteroperabilityrdquo Those are laudable goals But does anyone believe that arecommendation or best practice that emerges from this body willhave any impact on the behavior of these corporations when realmoney is at stake I read this partnership as a sop to public concerns over serious issueslike privacy and transparency and an effort to get out in front ofgovernment regulations

3 New AI Consortium SoundsComically Disingenuousby Drew Conry-Murray A few months ago a handful of corporations with a vested interest ingathering and analyzing as much personal information as possiblefounded an industry consortium with the laughably insincere nameldquoPartnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Societyrdquo Consumers and citizens should start to pay attention when an industryconsortium feels compelled to tell them that something is harmlessand good The founding members of the partnership are Facebook GoogleMicrosoft Amazon and IBM These companies are keenly aware ofthe profits to be made from advances in machine learning and AI andhave voracious appetites for humanshygenerated data across a variety offields including commerce social interaction and health care The aims of the partnership as noted in the press release are topartner with academics researchers and ethicists to ldquorecommend bestpractices and publish research under an open license in areas suchas ethics fairness and inclusivity transparency privacy andinteroperabilityrdquo Those are laudable goals But does anyone believe that arecommendation or best practice that emerges from this body willhave any impact on the behavior of these corporations when realmoney is at stake I read this partnership as a sop to public concerns over serious issueslike privacy and transparency and an effort to get out in front ofgovernment regulations

Itrsquos the kind of thing corporations can point to and say ldquoWe as anindustry take your concerns seriously and wersquove set up a toothlessnonshybinding organization into which we can chuck those concernsrdquo In the spirit of more accurate labeling herersquos a few other names thepartnership might want to consider

1 Smart Computers Are Totally Nice And Not At All Something ToFear Or Question

2 Please Donrsquot Ask To Look Inside The Blackbox Algorithms thatWill Make Major Decisions About Your Life

3 An Industry Consortium That Can Be Safely Ignored WhenProfits Market Dominance And Citizensrsquo Privacy Are At Stake

Join the Datanauts on their missionto bust silos and explore the latestdevelopments in cloudconvergence data centers andmore Sign up free here

Network Break is a weeklypodcast that delivers news ampanalysis on the networking industryin a fun fastshypaced style Subscribehere

Internets Of Interest A collection of pre-loved links that might interest you Pre-lovedbecause I liked them enough to put into this newsletter Its not true love By Greg Ferro and Drew Conry-Murray

No More On-Call Martyrs Alice Goldfuss critiques the cult of masochism that has grown uparound ops teams who are on call to troubleshoot problems afterhours

Onshycall is glorified when itrsquos all yoursquore allowed to have Andhistorically ops folk are allowed to have very littleDevelopers are empowered to create and build while opsengineers are only allowed to maintain and patch

But besides critiquing this culture she offers sensible fixes includinghaving rules in place around worker fatigue and shifting someresponsibility to developers

Automating Cisco Nexus Switches with Ansible Jason Edelman shares a couple of different options for automatingtasks on Cisco Nexus switches using Ansible He walks step by stepthrough an example of managing a VLAN and includes both codeexamples and commentary

Just over a year ago Ansible recognized the importance ofembracing the network community and since then hasmade significant additions to offer network automation out ofthe box

2016 Jealousy List Several years ago Bloomberg BusinessWeek started publishing a listof stories that it wished its reporters and writers had written Thetradition continues in 2016 in which the Web site assembles over 40excellent works from a variety of publications Theres several techshyrelated stories as well as pop culture politics investigative reportingsports and more This is one to bookmark and come back to particularly if you needreading over the upcoming holiday break And in keeping with the theme Im jealous of Bloomberg for thinkingup this great idea

New Microsoft Azure training and discountedcertifications Microsoft is announcing new training and certification options forAzure including access to several free Massively Open OnlineCourses (MOOCs) The MOOCs include videos demos and labs soif Azure is on your radar for the new year this may be a free andinteresting opportunity to get up to speed

The Weekly Show channel is ouroneshyhour deep dive on networkingtechnology Subscribe today

Priority Queue tackles niche andnerdy tech topics and cuttingshyedgeresearch projects Subscribe here

Product News We dont often get new products worth talking about so that makes itnice to have something to say

Big Switchs BigSecure Architecture Big Switch Networks is introducing a new use case for its technologycalled BigSecure Architecture The topshylevel takeaway is that bycombining Big Switchs Big Monitoring Fabric and service nodes (x86servers boosted by DPDK to accelerate networking capabilities andpacket processing) Big Switch lets operators monitor traffic forsecurity issues If an attack is directed traffic can be filtered to thirdshyparty remediation tools

Ethan Banks has a detailed writeshyup with diagrams that gets into thenitty gritty LINK

Brocade Announces New Switches ampAutomation Software Brocade has announced three new switches in its SLX line It alsoannounced three Automation Suites that target common networkingtasks The suites are part of Brocades Workflow Composer its crossshydomain automation platform Feeds and speeds and other details areavailable by clicking the link LINK

Recent ArticlesThe last five articles published on Packet Pushers

PacketPushersnet - The Last Five

PQ Show 102 Sonus Networks amp Migrating To Microsoft Cloud PBX(Sponsored) Datanauts 063 Unikernels Vs Containers Network Break 115 Avaya Considers Bankruptcy AWS Reinvents Show 317 Nuage Networksrsquo Virtualized Security Services (Sponsored) PQ Show 101 Kentik NPM For Cloud amp DDoS Detection (Sponsored)

Watch ThisWhere we collect some videos that make us reflect think about our inner livesor just entertain us

The Packet Pushers are experimenting with video as a way to share content Gregkicks off the experiment with commentary on a presentation by James Hamilton at

AWS reInvent Check it out and let us know what you think

Cant get enough newsletters Check out Link Propagation our newestpublication We send you a free weekly digest with tech news interesting blogsand industry announcements all curated by the Packet Pushers Its an easyway to keep up and stay informed Subscribe at packetpushersnetlink-propagation

Quick Survey 2017Predictions

In the spirit of looking ahead to the new year which of the followingpredictions seems possible in 2017

A Amazon becomes so huge that it collapses in on itself and createsa wormhole in the fabric of reality Luckily most workloads getmigrated to an AZ that still exists within our own coordinates on thespacetime continuum B IoT devices achieve sentience via a wireless neural network Butinstead of trying to overthrow humans they spend most of their timeblogging about HBOrsquos ldquoWestworldrdquo C Weaponized Facebook news feed algorithms create a Matrixshylikealternative reality minus the cool outfits and kung fu D George RR Martin still hasnrsquot finished the next installment ofGame Of Thrones

Did We Miss Something Got an link or an article to share Email it tohumaninfrastructurepacketpushersnet

The End Bit

Sponsorship and Advertising - Send an email to humaninfrastructurepacketpushersnet for more information Youcould reach 5013 people Human Infrastructure is bi-weekly newsletter with view perspectives and opinions It is edited andpublished by Greg Ferro and Drew Conry-Murray from PacketPushersnet If youd like to contribute emailDrew at drewconrymurraypacketpushersnet We dont give away your email address or personal details because that would suck Copyright copy 2016 Packet Pushers Interactive LLC All rights reserved unsubscribe from this list update subscription preferences