Category Archives: Cloud Servers
Microsoft Announces the General Availability of Windows Server Containers, and More for AKS – InfoQ.com
Almost a year ago, Microsoft launched a preview of Windows Server Containers in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Now the company announced the general availability of Windows Server containers in AKS, including the support of private clusters and managed identities.
With the GA of Windows Server containers, enterprises can now lift-and-shift their Windows applications to run on managed kubernetes services in Azure. Moreover, developers in these enterprises can create, upgrade, and scale Windows node pools in AKS through the standard tools such as the Azure Portal or Command Line Interface (CLI) - Azure will help manage the health of the cluster automatically.
Furthermore, Windows and Linux applications can run in parallel on a single AKS cluster which makes it easier for enterprises to bundle their applications for business processes. Microsoft corporate vice president, Azure Compute Brendan Burns wrote in his blog post on the GA release:
Running both Windows and Linux applications side by side in a single AKS cluster, you can modernize your operations processes for a broader set of applications while increasing the density (and thus lowering the costs) of your application environment.
And Elton Stoneman, Microsoft Azure MVP and Docker Captain, told InfoQ:
It's fantastic to see Windows nodes reach General Availability in AKS - it's a real milestone in the journey towards moving all your apps into containers and onto the cloud. Kubernetes uses the same application manifest language for Windows and Linux apps, so you get a layer of consistency across all your applications. Older .NET Framework apps and new apps written in .NET Core or Go or Node.js all have the same artifacts to build and run them: Dockerfiles and Kubernetes manifests. You can develop and deploy all your apps using GitHub actions, publishing your images to the Azure Container Registry and deploying to AKS with the same simple workflows.
Microsoft is not the only public cloud vendor with Kubernetes services and support for Windows Containers. For instance, Amazon announced the general availability of Windows Container on Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)in October last year; however, it has some limitations. Also, Google brought the support of Windows Containers to its Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)in preview at the beginning of this year and recently became ga.
Stoneman also told InfoQ:
I have been working with clients using Windows nodes in AKS under the preview release for several months now, and it has been very solid and easy to use. Lots of organizations have a roadmap for their Windows apps which starts by moving them to containers as-is with no code changes and then gradually breaking them up into distributed applications. Now with Windows nodes GA in AKS, that is a fully supported path in Azure. You can start by shifting .NET Framework monoliths into Windows pods, and incrementally split features out into .NET Core apps running in Linux pods, all on the same AKS cluster.
Besides the support for Windows Containers in AKS, Microsoft also announced support for private clusters and managed identities which are intended to provide developers with greater security capabilities and to easier meet compliance requirements. Private clusters allow the use of managed Kubernetes within a closed network - without connection to the internet. And, with private clusters, the security measures of highly regulated industries such as finance or healthcare can be met.
Next to the support for private clusters, AKS supports managed identities, which enables secure interaction with other Azure services such as Azure Monitor for Containers or Azure Policy. Furthermore, developers do not have to manage their service principals or rotate credentials often.
Lastly, Burns wrote in his blog post about the continuous development of more integrations between AKS and Azure Advisor and bringing industry best practices right into the AKS experience. Moreover, Microsoft is committed to bringing customer learning into the VS Code extension for Kubernetes to provide developers with advice and integrate security advice into the Azure Security Center. Developers, operator, and architects can, according to Burns, be successful with Kubernetes on Azure through the available learning, frameworks, and tools.
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Microsoft Announces the General Availability of Windows Server Containers, and More for AKS - InfoQ.com
Protecting the Cloud: Securing access to public cloud accounts – Naked Security
With hackers busy exploiting topical events to steal access credentials, properly maintaining the access roles and privileges for your AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) accounts is an essential step in safeguarding the data and workloads you store with these cloud providers.
In this article Ill walk through how Sophos Cloud Optix, our cloud security posture management tool, helps you secure access to your public cloud accounts.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) adds an extra layer of protection on top of a username and password, protecting against password compromise. All user accounts should have MFA enabled. Cloud Optix ensures MFA is enabled for AWS accounts, and the Cloud Optix service itself.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the AWS tool that controls access to services within your Amazon cloud account. You should ensure MFA is enabled for all IAM users that have AWS console access.
The Cloud Optix inventory view allows you to identify any IAM users without MFA enabled. This information is provided by an AWS Credentials report, which is updated by AWS every four hours.
To view this information in the Cloud Optix console, select Inventory in the left-hand navigation > Select IAM > Select MFA Disabled. Access to you AWS account is required to enable MFA for the users identified.
You can also use MFA to improve the security of your Cloud Optix console. This means you must use another form of authentication, as well as username and password, when you sign into Cloud Optix. Learn how to enable MFA for Cloud Optix.
The services within your Amazon cloud account will include server instances, databases, storage literally anything you run in Amazon. As best practice you should give users, groups and services only those privileges which are essential to perform their role. This minimizes risk and exposure.
However, keeping track of the actual use of the privileges assigned in IAM for all accounts, groups and roles can be a nearly impossible task without a lot of manual labor.
Cloud Optix IAM Visualization helps by visualizing these relationships, equipping your teams with a practical view to manage IAM and over-privileged access to cloud accounts and resources.
Accidental or malicious changes to the cloud resource configurations in AWS, Azure or GCP, such as S3 buckets, RDS, and EBS leave your organization exposed to automated hacker searches looking to exploit sensitive data.
Cloud Optix quickly identifies any publicly accessible data or website files, and provides guided or automated remediation pathways to make them private (and secure). Cloud Optix can also add an additional level of security to these critical services with Guardrails, ensuring no configuration changes are made without permission.
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Protecting the Cloud: Securing access to public cloud accounts - Naked Security
Cloud Act is not a sovereign aggressive overreach by the US – News24
A few months ago, I was on yet another panel with yet another foreign academic who described the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (Cloud Act) as an aggressive overreach by the US what he called expansive sovereignty.
I hadnt heard that particular term before. But I have heard the same basic epithet from numerous foreign governmental officials, many of whom worry that US will use the Cloud Act to scoop up foreigners data.
The world, understandably, has questions about the Cloud Act. The problem is, the rhetoric does not match the reality.
In contrast to the oft-heard assertions, the Cloud Act is a narrowly tailored act of limited application. It specifies that the US law enforcement officials can, in connection with a criminal investigation and according to detailed and specific standards and procedures, request emails and other data held by those companies subject to US jurisdiction.
The obligation to produce the sought-after data applies regardless of where the underlying 0s and 1s are stored.
Importantly, the Cloud Act is not an intelligence gathering tool. It is not an economic espionage tool. Law enforcement officials can only demand access to the data if it supports a criminal investigation over which the US has jurisdiction to prosecute.
READ:Should we be worried that the state will use mobile phones to trace us during the Covid-19 pandemic?
In order to get access to the data, law enforcement must meet specified standards and follow specified procedures. These standards and procedures apply across the board, whether the US is seeking the data of an American citizen, resident or foreigner.
For content, law enforcement needs a warrant issued by an independent judge based on a finding of probable cause. This is a relatively high bar for law enforcement to meet. In fact it is a more robust and more privacy protective standard than applies in just about any other country in the world.
Moreover, the reach is limited. US law enforcement cannot issue demands for emails and other communications content, from foreign companies that operate wholly outside the US.
That would be an extraterritorial assertion of authority and US law does not provide any mechanism for issuing warrants extraterritorially.
Contrast that with the draft EU E-evidence Directive, which requires any company that offers any services to the EU residents to install an EU-based representative, thereby ensuring EU jurisdiction over otherwise extraterritorially-located companies.
There is no equivalent requirement in US law.
Contrary to the rhetoric, the Cloud Act also adopts new provisions specifically designed to take into account foreign sovereign interests. It explicitly provides for a new statutory motion to quash a conflict with foreign law and if certain conditions are met.
It also expressly preserves the right of service providers to raise court challenges based on conflicting foreign law, even in situations where the statutory motion to quash is not available. This helps ensure that foreign government interests are taken into account.
We have not seen any such challenges litigated to date, in part because the conflicts have, at least until now, been more theoretical than real.
Consider the run-of-the mill US investigation of an American citizen with respect to a local murder or fraud investigation. Imagine that the US law enforcement officials served a warrant on Google or Facebook for relevant data, but, for whatever reason, the data is stored outside the US. Few, if any, foreign governments would claim a sovereignty invasion if the companies turned over that data.
Notably, despite the claims of some, Ireland never asserted a sovereignty violation in the long-standing litigation over whether US law enforcement officials could compel Microsoft to disclose emails held on a server in Dublin.
In court filings, Ireland emphasised that it would, in response to a diplomatic request, work with US government officials to access the data. But it never claimed that the US was required to make such a request. Or that the alternative approach taken violated its sovereignty.
That said, there are times when a conflict would arise if, say, the US is compelling the production of foreigners data protected by foreign law. Here, there is a legitimate foreign government interest at stake, that of protecting ones own citizens and residents.
If and when such a conflict arises, providers can and should bring a motion to quash, as the Cloud Act clearly allows. (US officials also should take steps to avoid such conflicts.)
This kind of approach makes sense. What matters is the protection of ones citizens and residents, not the location of bits and bytes that happen to flow through ones borders.
Meanwhile, the second part of the Cloud Act was, as many seem to forget, enacted at the behest of foreign governments, particularly the UK. Specifically, it was adopted in response to foreign governments frustrations about the difficulties in accessing their own nationals and residents communication content from US-based providers.
It puts in place a mechanism by which foreign governments can, subject to numerous safeguards and pre-conditions, request certain communications content from US-based service providers. This enables foreign governments to access certain data more expeditiously, without having to go through the laborious mutual legal assistance process to do so.
Of particular concern, the Cloud Act scapegoat is being pointed to by countries around the world to set limits on the transfer of data outside ones borders. The ironic result the US, through the Cloud Act, has taken steps to reduce restrictions on data transfers at the same time that other countries are pointing to the same act in support of their own data localisation mandates.
The Cloud Act is not perfect, but it is not the evil or expansive assertion of US snooping power that some claim it to be. To the contrary, it is a modest criminal law provision that largely codifies the status quo and adopts new provisions explicitly designed to accommodate foreign interest in US-held data.
Jennifer Daskal is a professor at the American University Washington College of Law
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Cloud Act is not a sovereign aggressive overreach by the US - News24
What public clouds are coronavirus-themed threats hiding in? – ARNnet
Over 1,700 malicious coronavirus-themed domains are created every day, new research has found,and while the vast minority are being hosted in public clouds, theyre more likely to slip by some of the less-complex firewalls.
This is according to research conducted by PaloAlto Networks' threat intelligence team Unit 42, which analysed 1.2 million newly registered domain (NRD) names with keywords relating to the coronavirus pandemic, from 9 March to 26 April.
Of these, over 86,600 domains were categorised as risky or malicious according to Palo Alto Networks URL filtering efforts and augmented by its AutoFocus product, the WHOIS domain database and IP geolocation.
Most of the malicious domains were hosted in the US with 29,007 domains, followed by Italy with 2,877, Germany with 2,564 and Russia with 2,456, according to a blog post by Jay Chen, senior cloud vulnerability and exploit researcher at Unit 42. In comparison, Australia held only 534 malicious domains.
The vast majority of the malicious domains contained malware, at 79.8 per cent. Phishing attempts were next at 20 per cent, and then command and control (C2) malware made up the last 0.2 per cent.
The vast minority of the malicious domains were also found to be hosted in public clouds, at 2,829. Of these, most were hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) at 79.2 per cent. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) had 14.6 per cent, Microsoft Azure had 5.9 per cent and Alibaba had just 0.3 per cent.
Chen hypothesised that higher prices and stringent screening and monitoring processes were likely the reasons so few malicious domains were being hosted in public clouds.
However, the threat from domains in public clouds shouldn't be underestimated.
"Threats originating from the cloud can be more difficult to defend because malicious actors leverage the cloud resources to evade detection and amplify the attack, Chen said.
The analysis conducted by Unit 42 found in some cases that multiple domains could resolve to a single IP address and a single domain could be associated with multiple IP addresses.
As both scenarios involve multiple connections, malicious actors can skirt IP blacklisting from layer-3 firewalls and could render safe domains unreachable in the process, while stronger layer-7 firewalls may be able to separate the bad domains from the good ones, Chen said.
He explained that the first scenario typically occurs when domains are hosted in a content delivery network (CDN), like Amazon Cloudfront or Cloudflare.
In a CDN, hundreds or thousands of domains in the nearby geographical location may resolve to the same IP of an edge server, Chen said.
CDNs reduce network latency and improve service availability by caching the static web content on edge servers.
However, because a malicious domain shares the same IPs as other benign domains in the same CDN, it also acts as a cover for malicious domains.
In our analysis, a Cloudflare IP 23.227.38[.]64 is associated with more than 150 risky or malicious domains. E.g., covid-safe[.]shop, cubrebocascovid[.]com, http://www.covidkaukes[.]lt, protection-contre-le- coronavirus[.]com. In the same dataset, more than 2,000 other benign domains also resolve to the same IP.
Meanwhile, the second scenario may be the domain having a set of redundant hosts which all serve the same content, or it may also be in a CDN, Chen said.
If a domain has multiple redundant hosts, a DNS will hold multiple A records for this domain, he said.
If a domain is hosted in a CDN, the domain can resolve to different IP addresses based on the client's location. The IP of the closest edge server is always returned when a client queries DNS servers for this domain.
In our analysis, the domain covid19-fr.johanrin[.]com resolves to 28 different IPs where each IP belongs to an Amazon CloudFront edge server. E.g., 52.85.151[.]68, 99.84.191[.]82, 13.249.44[.]82, 54.192.30[.]118.
This research is the latest in a series of coronavirus-themed cybersecurity alerts.
Previous cybersecurity warnings preying on the fears of COVID-19 include scammers hijacking the Microsoft Office 365 and Adobe brands, text message scams, impersonation scams of local companies and international organisations, and fake antivirus software claiming to protect users from the biological virus.
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What public clouds are coronavirus-themed threats hiding in? - ARNnet
How to Set Up pCloud Drive in 2020 – Cloudwards
pCloud is a Swiss-based online file storage provider that was founded in 2013 and now has more than 10 million users. Its popularity has only continued to grow, and pCloud has consistently performed well in our rankings of the best cloud storage providers.
To learn more about why were such big fans, head over to our pCloud review. In this piece, well be talking about one specific aspect of the service: setting up pCloud Drive. This tutorial will show you how to download and set it up on a Windows computer, but the process is similar if youre setting it up on Mac or Linux.
pCloud Drive is a cross-platform desktop application used to sync files between a device and its secure servers. It also allows you to work with files that are stored on the pCloud servers without taking up space on your computer.
You can register with pCloud using just an email address and a password to get 2GB of free storage. Alternatively, you can log in through your Apple, Facebook or Google account.
Once youve got your pCloud account login details, you need to download pCloud Drive.
After you download pCloud Drive, you need to install it. By default, it will be installed on your C:/, but you can change the installation location by selecting options. Select install to proceed.
The installation will be completed a few moments later. Select launch to start configuring it.
It will ask you for your account login details. Enter the email and password you used earlier to create a pCloud account.
If you open File Explorer, youll now see the pCloud virtual drive in the left-hand pane. A menu icon will also be added to the taskbar (in the bottom right of the screen), which allows you to easily access and manage pClouds settings.
This program will automatically start when you log in to your computer. You can change that by opening up the application and selecting the settings tab. There are other settings you can change here, but we would recommend you leave them alone.
Heres where it can get a bit confusing. By default, this virtual folder is not synced to your local computer. This means that if you drag and drop files into it, they wont be available to use if youre not connected to the internet. Theyll be delivered straight to the cloud.
If you want to change this, then you need to open up the application, select the sync tab and then add new sync.
Choose a specific folder in your pCloud that you want to keep synced with somewhere on your computer.
You then need to choose where you want these synced files to be stored on your device. Select choose local folder and pick the folder that should be synced.
All thats left to do is confirm this by selecting add sync.
Now that these two folders are synced, any changes made within one of these folders will be mirrored in the other. This means that if you delete files in a local folder that is synced with pCloud, then it will also be deleted from the cloud.
Starts from $ 399 per month for 500 GBFree plan available Save 20 % All Plans
pCloud Drive is an excellent desktop client. It automatically sets up a virtual drive on your computer accessible like an old-fashioned mapped drive and allows you to sync areas of this virtual drive to your computer, too.
Signing up for a pCloud free plan gives you 2GB of free space and requires only an email address and a password. You can easily extend this to 10GB by verifying that your email address is real and sending out email invitations to your friends.
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If you need more space than this, pClouds paid plans are affordable. A lifetime plan is available, too, which isnt something youll find from alternatives like Amazon Drive or Google Drive (check out our pCloud vs Google Drive piece). This pCloud Lifetime plan represents excellent value for money.
It is disappointing that client-side encryption isnt included in pClouds paid plans, though. pCloud alternatives like Sync.com are cheaper and also have zero-knowledge encryption included. If thats something youre after, then check out our Sync.com review to learn more.
If you have any questions or problems about setting up pCloud Drive, you can get support in pClouds help center. Alternatively, let us know in the comment section below. Thanks for reading.
Starts from $ 500 per month for 1000 GBFree plan available All Plans
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How to Set Up pCloud Drive in 2020 - Cloudwards
In the cloud, who can hear your developers scream? – The Register
Webcast Like children flying the family nest, applications and services are leaving the on-premises corporate environment and theyre not even coming back so you can do their washing.
One of the core features of the ever-topical digital transformation trend is business infrastructure thats less about centralized servers and data centres, and more about endpoints typically managed remotely via a cloud provider.
It can be tricky to secure all these distributed systems and services. If your developers are working within a growing number of complex coding, testing, and operations environments, for instance, theres a lot of moving parts to track and protect.
Its, therefore, a valid course of action to focus on your people, and give them the freedom to do their work while making sure they have the tools and support to stay secure and safeguard your business.
On May 6, 2020, a Register-hosted webcast will turn its lens on exactly this issue.
Our Tim Phillips will be joined by Guy Podjarny of secure development experts Snyk to dig down into how and why traditional security methods dont tend to wash with modern cloud-based developer environments, and how dev-first security approaches can prove a surprisingly painless alternative.
From describing how to equip and educate programmers to manage and reduce risk, yet remain on the ball with day-to-day work, to the behavioural and process shift required of your average working human to maintain a more security-savvy way of working, it will be a valuable conversation for anyone whos worried coders may fall behind the curve as an organisation leaps into the cloud.
Sign up for the webcast, brought to you by Snyk, right here.
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In the cloud, who can hear your developers scream? - The Register
Unlock The Full Value Of SAP Hana In The Cloud With IBM Power – E3zine.com
With the addition of IBM Power Systems in SAP Hana Enterprise Cloud, customers now have more choices and greater flexibility to run their workloads where they want to across the hybrid cloud.
In February this year, IBM announced that IBM Power Systems has been certified for the Hana Enterprise Cloud (HEC) as a critical infrastructure platform provider for large Hana systems. The service will run on IBM Power 9 based IBM Power Systems E980 servers, which have one of the industrys largest virtualized server scalability of 24TB for the Hana database.
IBM and SAP have always had a long-standing, client-centric relationship since forming the digital transformation partnership more than three years ago. This certification marks yet another significant step forward in simplifying the IT infrastructure for the managed, private cloud environment, and strengthens the IBM Power and SAP Hana relationship in their mission to accelerate transformation for the enterprise.
Christoph Herman, SVP and Head of Hana Enterprise Cloud Delivery, summarises the value of this announcement as follows, Hana Enterprise Cloud on IBM Power Systems will help clients unlock the full value of SAP Hana in the cloud, with the possibility of enhancing the scalability and availability of mission critical SAP applications while moving workloads to Hana and lowering TCO. Combining Hana Enterprise Cloud capabilities with IBM Power Systems can help establish a faster path to cloud readiness for our clients while addressing risk and providing closer alignment to the intelligent enterprise.
The Hana on Power solution runs the same Suse or Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions as x86 servers, with the flexibility, scalability, resiliency and performance advantages of Power servers allowing SAP to:
As you can see, with the addition of IBM Power Systems in Hana Enterprise Cloud, customers have more choices and greater flexibility to run their workloads where they want to across the hybrid cloud.
The Tech Data IBM team supports clients Hana on IBM Power Systems journey. If youre interested or need more information about Hana migration on IBM Power Systems, message Craig Cannon at [emailprotected]
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Unlock The Full Value Of SAP Hana In The Cloud With IBM Power - E3zine.com
Critical SaltStack vulnerability affects thousands of datacentres – ComputerWeekly.com
A series of critical vulnerabilities in SaltStacks open source Salt remote task and configuration framework will let hackers breeze past authentication and authorisation safeguards to take over thousands of cloud-based servers if left unpatched.
Salt is used in infrastructure, network and security automation solutions and is widely used to maintain datacentres and cloud environments. The framework comprises a master server acting as a central repository, with control over minion agents that carry out tasks and collect data.
The two vulnerabilities, which are assigned designations CVE-2020-11651 and CVE-2020-11652, were uncovered by F-Secure researchers in March 2020 while working on a client engagement.
They affect all versions of Salt up to 3000.1, and are considered so severe that they carry a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) rating of 10, the highest possible.
Successfully exploited, they enable attackers to execute code remotely with root privileges on Salt master repositories, meaning they could, for example install backdoors into systems, carry out ransomware attacks, or take over systems to mine cryptocurrencies. F-Secure said it had already found 6,000 such repositories openly vulnerable on the public internet.
F-Secure principal consultant Olle Segerdahl said this meant the vulnerabilities were particularly dangerous and urged Salt users to download two new patches versions 3000.2 and 2019.2.4 that were issued by SaltStack on 29 April 2020, prior to the co-ordinated disclosure.
Patch by Friday or compromised by Monday, said Segerdahl. Thats how Id describe the dilemma facing admins who have their Salt master hosts exposed to the internet.
Patch by Friday or compromised by Monday thats how Id describe the dilemma facing admins who have their Salt master hosts exposed to the internet Olle Segerdahl, F-Secure
Segerdahl said the 6,000 Salt masters he found during the course of his research, which are popular in environments such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), were of particular concern.
I was expecting the number to be a lot lower. There are not many reasons to expose infrastructure management systems, which is what a lot of companies use Salt for, to the internet, he explained.
When new vulnerabilities go public, attackers always race to exploit exposed, vulnerable hosts before admins patch or hide them. So if I were running one of these 6,000 masters, I wouldnt feel comfortable leaving work for the weekend knowing its a target.
Even though the publicly accessible Salt masters are highly at risk of exploitation, Segerdahl added that hosts hidden from the internet could still be exploited easily if attackers have already accessed their target organisations network in some other manner.
Organisations using Salt should take advantage of SaltStacks automated update capabilities to make sure their systems are patched as soon as possible. Those with exposed Salt hosts can use additional controls to restrict access to Salt master ports 4505 and 4506 on default configurations or at the very least block them from the public internet. SaltStacks website carries further guidance on how to do this.
Segerdahl said that looking on the bright side, he had found no evidence or reports of anyone exploiting the vulnerabilities in real-world attacks although it is very important to note that following disclosure this will likely change in short order.
F-Secure pointed out that any reasonably competent hacker should be able to create a 100% reliable exploit for the vulnerabilities within the next 24 hours due to this, the firm has not provided any proof-of-concept exploit code, as this risks harming Salt users who are slow to patch.
It is also possible for Salt users to detect attacks exploiting the vulnerabilities, said Segerdahl. Concerned organisations can and maybe should search the master host systems for any signs of intrusion the Salt master repository records scheduled jobs which defenders can examine.
Further details on the vulnerabilities can be found in F-Secure Labs advisory notice.
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Critical SaltStack vulnerability affects thousands of datacentres - ComputerWeekly.com
Hot On The Heels Of Mellanox, Nvidia Snaps Up Cumulus Networks – The Next Platform
Last week, when we talked to Nvidia co-founder and chief executive officer, Jensen Huang, about how the datacenter was becoming the unit of compute and in such a world networking was critical, it was obvious that acquiring Mellanox Technologies for $6.9 billion was just the beginning of the strategy that will no doubt unfold in the coming months and years.
Huang didnt wait long to make another move, with Nvidia acquiring open network software provider Cumulus Networks for an undisclosed sum and marrying it with Mellanox in its newly formed networking business unit.
Sometimes, to understand what a company is doing you have to take a really hard look at the things that key people at that company have seen and done in their careers. This is one of those cases.
Cumulus Networks was founded in 2010 by JR Rivers and Nolan Leake, and dropped out of stealth in the summer of 2016.
Rivers was the companys chief executive officer and its face until recent years. Rivers got his start as an engineer at 3Com back in 1989m and then had gigs at Gran Junction Networks and Cisco Systems, rising in the engineering ranks in networking. After a decade at Cisco, Rivers move to a short four-month stint at Google, and then went back to Cisco a few years before the Great Recession and stayed until it was mostly over, which is when Cumulus Networks was founded.
Leakes first big job was as a member of the technical staff at VMware for three years in 2002 through 2005, and then he took a job as technical director of software engineering at server startup 3Leaf Networks, which created NUMA big iron from InfiniBand switching and a homegrown distributed virtual machine of the likes of ScaleMP, RNA Networks, and TidalScale. Leake was then a member of the office of the CTO at Nuova Systems, the Cisco spinoff that created its NX-OS network operating system and their Nexus line of switches, which was spun back in as Cisco launched the Nexus 5000 series in 2008 ahead of (and more or less concurrent with and connected to its California Unified Computing System blade servers, which converged servers and switching). Leake was the founder of Tile Networks, which created a virtualized storage fabric for compute clouds, and then joined up with Rivers to co-found Cumulus Networks in early 2010 as its chief technology officer.
Leake left Cumulus Networks in June 2016 and Rivers took over as CTO until he left in July last year. Rivers went to Amazon Web Services to become a senior principal engineer on its network, and Josh Leslie, who headed up sales at both VMware and Cumulus Networks, took over as chief executive officer at the network operating system startup as Rivers switched roles to CTO back in 2016.
Over the past decade, Cumulus Networks has been working on a number of fronts to try to break open the datacenter switch, prying its operating system from the underlying hardware as Facebook talked to us at length about when we first started The Next Platform five years ago. Some history and laying out of the terrain is in order to understand what Nvidia is doing and why it is doing it.
The hyperscalers and big public cloud providers all have their own network operating systems and various kinds of controllers that comprise their networks; in some cases, as with the customers of Arista Networks, companies can use that companys Extensible Operating System, a variant of Linux that is hardened for networking and that has features to allow them to put other features on the box given the CPU, FPGA, of switch ASIC functions in a box. In the case of Microsoft, it created the Switch Abstraction Interface, or SAI, and its own variant of a network operating system called SoNIC, which itself runs on Open Network Linux, a Linux kernel tuned for networking created by Big Switch Networks, which was eaten by Arista Networks in February and which has a stack of software-defined networking software that makes it a valuable asset.
There was a flurry of activity back in the 2015 and 2016 timeframe, when Hewlett Packard Enterprise open sourced OpenSwitch, a new network operating system, based of course on the Linux kernel, that was inspired by (but distinct from) the Comware and ProVision NOSes that were deployed on its respective 3Com and HPE switches. Dell, which had acquired Force10 Networks in July 2011 to add datacenter-class networking to its portfolio, open sourced the FTOS NOS created by that switch company in early 2016, calling it OS10 and running underneath SAI as well. Mellanox Technologies, just acquired by Nvidia last week, had its own open source NOS interface tools, called SwitchDev, which worked in conjunction with Cumulus Linux as well as the homegrown Onyx operating system from Mellanox (formerly known as ML-NX) and the Microsoft Azure networking stack (which is not completely open source) and which come from the same time in early 2016.
There are a lot of open source Linux NOSes out there, or pieces that can be assembled into one. The NOS created by Cumulus Networks is arguably the most popular of the open source ones. Leslie tells The Next Platform it has thousands of customers and hundreds of thousands of ports under management and importantly, has a staff of network experts who know how to make it work that will be valuable to Nvidia as it makes its tries to realize its datacenter aspirations. But as we have pointed out in the past, networking doesnt require a Linux kernel Arrcus has created its own ArcOS from scratch starting from a routing base and coded by Cisco routing luminaries, and it is most certainly not open source, just like neither IOS or NX-OS from Cisco or EOS from Arista or the homegrown OSes from the hyperscalers and cloud builders most certainly are not.
In addition to creating the ONIE NOS installer, which the entire industry uses on whitebox switches powered by ASICs from Broadcom, Mellanox, and others, Cumulus Networks also created a fork of the open source Quagga routing stack, called Free Range Routing, or FRR, which runs atop the Linux kernel as well as a bunch of Unix kernels and which addresses many of the shortcomings of Quagga. The Cumulus Linux 4.0 stack and its NetIQ 2.4 telemetry software were last updated in November last year, adding support for the deep buffer Qumran ASICs from Broadcom and the Spectrum-2 ASICs from Mellanox. To date, by the way, Cumulus itself supports 14 different ASICs from Broadcom and Mellanox (on 134 distinct switch platforms), and while it has been evaluating other ASICs, like those from Innovium and Barefoot Networks (now part of Intel), the latter are not yet supported.
All of this work is distinct from Dent, which is an edge Linux NOS aimed at retail and other types of locations that Amazon (the online retailer, not its Amazon Web Service cloud unit) has been building with Cumulus Networks, Mellanox, Marvell, and others over at The Linux Foundation.
There is really synergy here, Kevin Deierling, senior vice president in the networking business unit at Nvidia after the Mellanox acquisition. If you look at these technologies narrowly, you might say they are all competitive open platforms. But if you look at them broadly, there really is a huge amount of complementary as well as common technologies. We will see where each of these open networking platforms prevail, but more importantly, what this means is that Nvidia has embraced the open networking stack and it is going to accelerate the networking business within Nvidia.
We suspect we will learn more about exactly how this will all map out during Jensen Huangs GTC 2020 keynote, which is happening on May 14.
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Hot On The Heels Of Mellanox, Nvidia Snaps Up Cumulus Networks - The Next Platform
AWS Cloud Formation Market Countries Analysis Report 2020 by Industry Size, Share, Growth Rate and Revenue Aminet Market Reports – amitnetserver
Global AWS Cloud Formation Market Forecast 2019-2026
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Table Of Content
1 Report Overview
2 Global Growth Trends
3 Market Share by Key Players
4 Breakdown Data by Type and Application
5 North America
6 Europe
7 China
8 Japan
9 Southeast Asia
10 India
11 Central & South America
12 International Players Profiles
13 Market Forecast 2019-2026
14 Analysts Viewpoints/Conclusions
15 Appendix
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AWS Cloud Formation Market Countries Analysis Report 2020 by Industry Size, Share, Growth Rate and Revenue Aminet Market Reports - amitnetserver