Human Infrastructure 361: Becoming a Tech Leader

AuthorAuthor

Ethan Banks & Drew Conry-Murray
July 11, 2024

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Kyverno is a policy engine for Kubernetes clusters. Basically it’s a tool to set “acceptable configuration standards for Kubernetes objects and resources. When these standards are deviated from, the engine can block the deployment, send alerts, or even mutate the configurations to comply with the policies,” writes Karim. Kyverno falls under the category of Admissions Controllers in Kubernetes, and Karim’s post explains how Kyverno differs from Admissions Controllers that come built in to Kubernetes. And if you’re wondering why this might have anything to do with you, Karim is experimenting with Kyverno to enforce networking policies within a Kubernetes deployment. - Drew

Experienced technologists may find themselves at a fork in the career: give up tech to move into a management role, or give up advancement because you’ve reached the top of your technical ladder and there aren’t any more rungs. Eyvonne Sharp posits a third option: the technical leader. 

What is a technical leader? Eyvonne says it’s a person with “the ability to influence people to move in a particular direction. A technologist who profoundly understands the tech and can marshal people becomes a powerful organizational asset and will unlock career opportunities previously unimaginable.” She cites Kelsey Hightower as an example (which, to be honest, is a very high bar). But she also offers some concrete ways you can develop into a technical leader. - Drew

I’m trying to piece together an understanding of AI and ML, so this blog post from Medium caught my eye. It describes in clear language what a neuron is in a neural network and how that neuron works. Neurons underpin neural networks, so for it was a useful data point. The piece briefly goes on to describe how neurons get incorporated into a neural network, but a full overview of neural nets is beyond its scope. One cool thing is the author provides a link to a GitHub repo and some training data so you can, with some Python work, create and train a single-neuron neural net on your own.  - Drew

Steve calls out the problem most of us who’ve worked for a large organization have experienced—bureaucracy breaking the wills of people who just want to get things done. Steve puts it, “Ultimately the innovators get tired of banging their heads against the wall and leave government service or large companies. Their organizations hemorrhage the very people they need to help them compete against aggressive adversaries or competitors who have them in their sights.”

Having worked in both government service and for large companies, I lived through exactly what Steve describes. In one case, a smaller company that thrived on getting things done quickly and cleverly for our customers was gobbled up by a large global firm. In the space of a year, we went from getting work done and keeping our customers happy to being mired down in processes established by people we didn’t work with and who didn’t understand how we served our high profile customers. I lasted another year before finding a home at another (smaller) company. - Ethan

Jerome Tissieres reports that NVIDIA Air simulates a data center topology. You can build a network of your choosing, or fire up a pre-built topology. Network operating system support includes SONiC and Cumulus Linux. You can also add Ubuntu hosts. You can access the lab via a jump box, and have API access to the lab as well.

NVIDIA Air is free to use, with limits. Jerome says, “For an account using a valid business email, at the time I’m writing this post, a user is granted the following limits:

  • 60 vCPUs

  • 90GB memory

  • 650GB storage

  • 4 running simulations”

Sounds like a great tool for lab enthusiasts! - Ethan

Daniel Dib explains why there are native VLANs. Or to put the question another way, “Why allow untagged frames on a trunk link?” The answer is surprisingly nuanced, as Daniel digs through the 802.1Q VLAN standards to explain. I hadn’t given this topic much thought in many years, and learned a few things. Great stuff from Daniel, as always. - Ethan

For the second straight year, Palo Alto Networks was named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® “Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge.

TECH NEWS 📣

Belgian organization Testaankoop has discovered that Linksys Velop Pro 6E & Velop Pro 7 mesh routers are sending wireless connection information to AWS servers in plaintext. The data points include the SSID name and password, identification tokens for the network, and the user session’s access token. That’s enough for a MitM attack or worse. Linksys has been notified of the vulnerability, but has not responded. - Ethan

Programmers are complaining that GitHub Copilot is copying their code, an alleged copyright violation. The class action lawsuit “started with 22 claims in all, and over time this has been whittled down as the defending corporations [GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI] motioned to have the accusations thrown out of court, requests that Judge Jon Tigar has mostly sustained.” The judge doesn’t think the code is “identical enough” to qualify as DMCA section 1202(b) violations.

To me, this fine, if admittedly appropriate, parsing of the laws currently on the books is ignoring the larger issue that AI models are being trained on other people’s work without their willing consent. Most of us that consider this issue feel instinctively that an injustice has been done. Big corporations are making money on the backs of other people’s work. Those people are not being compensated or even acknowledged. The solution? The only way forward I see is legislation governing how AI models are trained. - Ethan

IndieGoGo startup Gamgee is packaging wireless tech that uses WiFi signal as radar to map objects. Gamgee’s pitch is to make body prints of the people and pets in your home. Then, after a two week training period, deviations from normal body prints and movements can be used to detect someone who’s fallen or an intruder. If you’re like me and your privacy concern detector is flashing red, Gamgee says all the data is stored & processed on-router, and not in the cloud. There are other privacy concerns here to be sure, but that’s something.

I’ll be interested to see if Gamgee’s tech is any better than what can be done with plain old surveillance cameras. I have six of them, and they work just fine. In the system I purchased, there’s no knowledge of “normal” people or pets in my home, but with AI recognition being what it is, there’s no technical reason the vendor couldn’t add functionality that if they wanted. Maybe lots of practical reasons not to, but the tech exists. - Ethan

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Dmytro buries the lead in this blog. He’s created what he calls a “user-friendly” controller for segment routing called Traffic Dictator. If you like segment routing but you’re frustrated with controller complexity, you can download Traffic Dictator as a container to try it yourself, or play with it in a pre-configured ContainerLab setup. The bulk of the blog post talks about how segment routing improves on traditional MPLS, but also makes a plausible argument that vendors have over-complicated segment routing for typical vendor reasons: to get you to buy only their gear. He’s developed Traffic Dictator as an alternative. - Drew

Kirk Byers has announced the 4.4.0 release of Netmiko, the “multi-vendor library to simplify CLI connections to network devices” for Python. 4.4.0 adds support for Python 3.13, a new driver for the HPE Aruba AOS-CX NOS, and various other improvements. - Ethan

Impala - TUI For Managing WiFi On Linux
https://github.com/pythops/impala

This rapidly iterating project released v0.1 on 9-June-2024, and is up to v0.2.1 as of 27-June-2024. I don’t have a Linux box with a wifi interface handy for my own testing, so here’s a screenshot from the README.md.

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

NetBrain, which makes network automation software, has announced it’s hosting its first-ever user conference September 30th through October 2nd in Boston, MA. The company also announced the creation of a Network Automation certification and credential program. If you’re deep in the NetBrain ecosystem and love to rack up certs, this may be of interest. According to a statement from NetBrain, “the Professional-level certification will be 100% in-product where the engineers will design and build automation.” The company says the first exam for the cert will take place on October 3rd, the day after the live event. - Drew

Zero Networks, which plays in the zero trust space, has added enhancements to its RPC firewall capabilities. From the release: “As the underlying protocol used by Microsoft services for both local and remote communication, such as Active Directory, RPC exposes functionality related to authentication, user management, service management, and more.” Zero Networks says its enhancements can examine the full context of RPC operations and make granular decisions about what to allow and what to block. I met with Zero Networks at the RSA 2024 conference and found it to have an interesting approach to zero trust. If you want more details, I wrote about Zero Networks in a blog post a few months ago. - Drew

Aviatrix and Megaport are teaming up. From the press release: “The new integrated service offering allows customers to deploy Aviatrix services on Megaport's Network Function Virtualization platform, Megaport Virtual Edge (MVE), which gives access to Megaport's global private network spanning 25+ countries and over 850 data centers worldwide. The platform integrates seamlessly with Aviatrix's cloud networking software which offers a simplified, cloud-like experience to build resilient, encrypted, and performant hybrid networks.” - Drew

LAST LAUGH 😆