Tag Archive for: Cloud

Career at Dogsbody
Claire Christmas

apt-get a Career at Dogsbody

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A career can mean very different things to different people, some want to climb the corporate ladder, others want to pursue more adventures, of their own, outside of work – most do a combination of everything 🙂

Your career goals may look very different to your friends, families and colleagues but along the way you will keep on learning and developing.

Dogsbody is a small, bespoke, Linux and Cloud consultancy based in Farnborough, Hampshire, UK.

Our mission is to remove the pain of building, securing and maintaining infrastructure, wherever it is located.

“IT” is always changing, new software, new deployment processes, new technologies and your career needs to include the upskilling to keep up in the IT world, as well as, giving you the skills and confidence to give yourself the career YOU want.

Here’s how Dogsbody can help you find and reach your career goals.

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.” – Michelangelo.

Find your passion

Dogsbody is a small team. This give us a great opportunity to help you find your passion within IT and beyond…

You’ll get involved in elements of business you may miss out on at larger companies; Training, quoting, project management, blog post writing and more!  We give you the opportunity to find new strengths, learn new skills and diversify your skills into other areas.

Our quarterly 121’s (or chats if you prefer) help us set small goals for the next 3 months as well as discussing your larger goals both inside and outside of work. It gives you the opportunity to think about what you enjoy doing and where you want to go and share these with your manager who can help you reach them. Because they are so frequent when things change we are small and nimble enough to change with you and help you on your new path.

Dogsbody responsibility doesn’t end at 17.30 – we work hard to make sure all our employee have an opportunity to reach their goal inside and outside of work providing support and advise as well as helping manage responsibility outside of work life with flexible working.

“A goal is not always meant to be reached; it often serves simply as something to aim at.” – Bruce Lee

Everyone has a different style of learning – we offer support for further studies, focused learning time and learning budgets to pursue what you want to learn (within reason – we may not fund your butchery course although we do like (Halal) steak 🙂 ). We take opportunities to set up peer learning sessions, online and in classroom courses and aim to provide the tools you need to improve the way you work.

Support for all

“Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.” – Margaret Mead.

Everyone is different, unique and sometimes people need a little more support to make sure they have the same opportunities as everyone else.

We support Diversity, we strongly encourage applications from people with varied backgrounds and perspectives. All applicants are considered for employment without attention to ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, family or parental status.

We have navigated the DWP’s access to work systems helping neurodiverse and long-term illness employees through support and understanding. We are proud to be a Disability Confident Employer.

What’s the next step in your career?

We want to be a place that helps people find their passion, always trying to improve and diversify.

We aim to support all our employees at all stages of their life and career.

Our employee turnover is consistently below industry average, and our customers and employees rate us highly.

Maybe that’s why our employees and customers seem to stick around.

Sign up to our mailing list to be the first to know about new roles as they become available.

You Miss 100% Of The Shots You Don’t Take

Gary Rixon

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation

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The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is:

an open source software foundation dedicated to making cloud native computing universal and sustainable

They do this by hosting and “incubating” projects they see as valuable, helping them to develop and reach maturity, where they can be used widely in cloud environments.

CNCF has over 350 members including the world’s largest public cloud and enterprise software companies as well as dozens of innovative startups

The CNCF is also backed by the Linux Foundation, who are fast becoming one of the most recognised organisations in the industry. They support the open source community as a whole, aiming to protect and accelerate development of the Linux kernel, along with many other things.

Why should I care?

The CNCF is exciting as, for me at least, it provides a bit of a portal into the way that the industry is moving at the moment.  It showcases both the current behemoths of cloud computing software stacks, along with projects that are likely to replace or supplement them in the future. The CNCF split their projects into 3 main categories:

  • Graduated
  • Incubating
  • Sandbox

Graduated projects are ones that have reached maturity and see wide adoption. The current list of these projects at the time of writing are Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, CoreDNS and containerd. If you’ve been even dabbling in the cloud/linux community, then you’ve probably heard of at least a few of these projects.

Incubating projects are ones that haven’t quite hit the prime time yet, but are well on their way. These currently include projects such as rkt, a container engine that’s a potential competitor for Docker, CNI (Container Network Interface), which focuses on configuring networking within containers, and etcd, a key-value store designed for storing critical system data.

I find the CNCF useful for guiding me on what pieces of software I should be learning to enhance my skill set as they’re likely to be desirable in the short to medium term. It’s also one of the first places I’m likely to check for a piece of software that fits a particular need, as I know that CNCF projects are going to be active, well supported, and have lots of related stack overflow questions / Github issues for when I’m getting started.

Training and Certification

The CNCF also offer some training and certification options. This is useful to prove that you’re familiar and capable with some of the technologies they support. At the time of writing, the training courses and certifications they offer are all kubernetes based (which is by no means a bad thing), but I’m sure they will offer more in the future.

In summary, the CNCF acts a sort of central hub for a lot of the hottest and biggest projects right now, and even if you’re don’t have a particular need for them at this time, it’s good to know what’s out there right now, as well as coming over the hill, and it’s therefore useful for this reason alone.

 

Featured image by chuttersnap on Unsplash

Dan Benton

Security and The Cloud

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Don’t worry this isn’t going to be another post on how security is holding up cloud adoption or how the cloud is destroying security.  There is already too much negativity regarding the reporting of security news (some would say all news).  I do however want to discuss how security is changing due to the cloud and cloud technologies.  In my opinion cloud computing is actually good for security.

What’s in a word

I probably use the word “cloud” too much, I realise it’s an industry buzzword for something that has been around for ages but it works.  Call it Outsourcing, Virtulisation, SaaS or Utility Computing, they are all variations of Internet computing by machines that you do not directly own and have just licensed for the time that you need.

The ring of steel

For years security experts have been saying that companies should stop using the idea of a ring of steel around their internal network. The concept that you are either connected to the internal (trusted) network or the external (untrusted) network is very outdated and just doesn’t work with today’s computing use but companies still insist on using it.

While people have tried to adopt this topology to greater granularity with “Chinese firewalls” (lets separate accounts from development) people will continue to have to move data around between areas of the business to do their work and it quickly becomes an IT vs Business battle.

With more companies needing to get company data outside the building either to access it from a smartphone or share the data with another company the whole procedure falls down altogether.

Smaller rings

One solution is to adapt the model to it’s ultimate conclusion.  A ring of steel for each machine/job/task.  Until now this has been an impossible task, from a practice standpoint but now that companies are moving to cloud and virtual environments resources can be configured in any way needed.  No longer are you required to physically move cables in the patch room to change a networks topology.  Instead of one server with one operating system running web, email and any number of other tasks you can have that same server with many operating systems all locked down to do their one job well.  Most servers in the cloud and virtual environments come with their own firewall and authentication mechanism that can be easily managed on mass.  How many hardware server rooms can say that?

Outside is inside

Given this new model there is no need to have a “corporate firewall” on the edge of your network at all.  Why not let the internet in?  This is in fact what we do at Dogsbody Technology. Every machine on the network is public and even internal switching is treated as public.  If we want to move a private file from one machine to another it needs to be done in a secure/encrypted way.  While that sounds like a lot of work it really isn’t.  You save on a lot of infrastructure from not having to worry about a locked down network and while it does take a while to setup safe transfer methods, once you are set up there is no difference between transferring a private file to the computer next to you or a computer the other side of the world.

Not the end of the story

Of course, like all security, this is not the end of the story and will not fix all your issues.  Monitoring and company policy are still required to stop, find and block exceptions but we’ll discuss that in a separate blog post.

If you have any questions or comments reading this post them please do leave a comment below or contact Dogsbody Technology for more information.

Dan Benton

Buzzword Bingo

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As happens when you are a company registered on social media sites we occasionally get sent invites to advertise on their networks. We’ve always been proud to receive most of our business via referrals and word of mouth but when LinkedIn offers you $100 of free advertising it seems silly to say no. The results turned out to be an interesting window into the words and phrases that are popular at the moment.

When creating adverts online it’s always a good idea to run more than one advert at once, you can then run them for a bit and keep modifying the one that’s doing the worse. After a while you end up with some adverts that are pretty well tuned for the people you want to attract. We didn’t bother modifying any ads this time as it was a short ad run but we did create a number of different ads with slightly different wording.

(Quick side note: When running ads it’s always a good idea to link them to your websites analytics. Not just to separate out the traffic to your site but to link that traffic to actual contacts/sales etc. Surely it’s better to get 100 clicks to your site where 10 become customers than get 10000 clicks and 1 customer. Especially when you are paying by the click!)

To keep things easy we set a maximum spend of $10 per day and ran all of the ads below for 10 days…

Advert Clicks Impressions CTR
Cloud ComputingLet us show you how to get the most from powerful Amazon AWS services. 51 162168 0.031%
Electronics & AutomationIntegrate your website with the real world. The ideas are endless. 1 10451 0.010%
VMwareWe can help you adopt a Virtualisation solution that is right for you. 1 10552 0.009%
Amazon AWSLet us show you how to get the most from powerful Cloud Computing services. 3 40700 0.007%
SysAdminLet us worry about the system administration of your server. 0 12724 0.000%
VirtualisationWe can help you adopt a VMware solution that is right for you. 0 10403 0.000%

As you can see, the Cloud Computing and Amazon AWS ads are identical with the words swapped. The same is true for the VMware and Virtualisation adverts.

What does all this mean?

The Impression Count is the number of times that LinkedIn users have been show each advert. LinkedIn decide when to show your advert and while you can pay more money to “bid” to a higher position it is linked to the text in the page that LinkedIn is showing to the user. It is therefore safe to say that LinkedIn treat the title of your ad as more important that the text (Ads with the same overall text had very different impression counts).

CTR stands for Click Through Rate, how many and what percentage of the people that saw the ad actually clicked on it. As you can see the numbers are low but at $2 per click the money goes down fast.

Results

Based on all the above we can make the following statements about the popularity of certain buzzwords:

  • A lot more people are talking about Cloud Computing than Virtualisation. This was quite surprising to us. While Cloud Computing is the buzzword du jour Virtualisation is the pin that runs it and for the swing to be so unbalanced is slightly unnerving.
  • “Cloud Computing” is bigger than “Amazon AWS”. this makes sense, it’s a subset. AWS is just one vendor of cloud computing services.
  • “VMware” is more popular than “Virtualisation”. no, wait, what!? A very interesting find. I don’t think anyone would argue that VMware is one of the biggest players in the Virtualisation market but for it to be bigger is interesting.
  • Advertising on LinkedIn is expensive! $100 for 56 clicks to our website. Lets just say we are glad it was a free trial and we don’t need to heavily advertise 🙂

I realise the sample numbers on this were low. We would love to hear if you have any other statistics to back this up or blow us out the water. Feel free to comment below.