VMworld 2021 is happening this week, virtually of course, and there are a ton of new product announcements. The biggest one is perhaps Project Capitola. And did you hear that Facebook went down Monday? You likely did because your parents called you and started asking weird questions about DNS and BGP. We discuss these stories and more on this week’s Rundown!
The Last JEDI for Oracle Fails Too
The Last Jedi is a divisive movie in the Star Wars franchise. Just like the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative that was named after the legendary space wizards. However, the last JEDI appeal sought by Oracle to keep them relevant in the cloud space has failed harder than the box office for the Lucasfilm movie. The US Supreme Court has declined to hear the appeal from Darth Larry Ellison’s outfit, which completely exhausts their legal avenues. This isn’t surprising considering the JEDI debacle was formally canceled earlier this year in favor of less-cool named Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability, or JWCC program. No news from Oracle if they’re considering additional actions or deciding to instead come back more powerful than we could possibly imagine after being struck down.
Let’s Encrypt Expiration Causes Internet Issues
Were you having any website issues late last week? It’s possible your misfortunes were caused by a problem with a certificate. A number of websites that rely on the Let’s Encrypt service for TLS certificates started appearing offline for users. Let’s Encrypt had warned consumers that their old root certificate would expire on September 30th and without an update to the chain of trust there would be outages because of the expiration of the old certificate. In grand Internet fashion, there were several companies that didn’t listen, including Palo Alto Networks, Catchpoint, Shopify, and many more. Once the companies realized that Let’s Encrypt wasn’t kidding they were able to restore services by updating the certificates.
FireEye and McAfee Merging to Form FireEye Supreme
You may recall in a previous episode of the Rundown we mentioned that FireEye and Mandiant were splitting apart, with FireEye going to a private equity firm. Late last week the firm, Symphony Technology Group, announced some changes in their portfolio. The biggest news is that with the closure of the FireEye sale that it would be merged with the assets of McAfee Enterprise, which was acquired back in July of this year.The enterprised-focused company that comes out of this merger will have 40,000 customers and almost $2 billion in revenue. No word yet on what they’re going to call the new organization.
Cloudflare Disrupting Storage?
First it was website availability. Then it was DNS. Now, Cloudflare is looking to move into the storage market. The reports are out that the cloud giant is creating a distributed object storage system they’re calling R2, which is one less than S3 and still the coolest droid ever. What’s even cooler than the name? The report that Cloudflare will not charge for data egress for customers of the service, as opposed to the reassuringly expensive rates you need to pay to ransom your data back from Amazon S3. Because of their distributed global network, Cloudflare believes they can offer the service with no egress fees because bandwidth is a fixed cost. No word yet on the release date for Cloudflare R2 but we’ve already preemptively moved Oracle down a spot on the Top Cloud Provider list.
Twitch Gets The Spotlight For Hack of the Week
It’s not the best day for your kids’ favorite video game streaming platform. Twitch.tv has had their entire website dumped to the Internet this morning. The website source code, payout information for streamers, and even the encrypted password files were all posted in a torrent file. Anonymous sources are reporting the leak is legitimate and includes data up to this week. The creator payout list was from 2019 and lists the monthly earnings for the most popular channels on the service.
Did you hear that Facebook went down on Monday? You likely did because your parents called you and started asking weird questions about DNS and BGP. The social media empire went offline Monday morning and stayed offline for hours. Reports were ranging far and wide from the believable automation issues causing problems to the hilarious lack of access to the physical equipment to the downright insane theories that the company took itself down to combat bad PR. The ultimate resolution and cause are still being investigated but the culprit appears to be a routing protocol and DNS combined.
VMworld Looms Large, Capitola Redefines Memory
It’s the most wonderful time of the year for virtualization. VMworld 2021 is happening this week, virtually of course, and there are a ton of new product announcements. The biggest one is perhaps Project Capitola. This technology preview is an implementation of software-defined memory. What exactly does that term mean? VMware is looking to combine tiers of memory architectures, such as DRAM, persistent Memory, NVMe, and other future technologies into one kind of resource pool to be allocated as needed. Instead of defining them discretely, Capitola calls them Logical memory and allows the vSphere architecture to allocate them as needed.
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