News in Networking: AWS Downtime, Skills for DevOps Engineers, and Tabs vs. Spaces Debate

This week’s top story picks from the Kentik team.

This week the NSA officially blamed North Korea for the WannaCry ransomware attacks. A Virginia school got creative to keep its students on fast broadband. Ericsson predicts a 5G user spike. The tabs versus spaces programmer debate continues. And the Kentik team advises on avoiding AWS downtime and offers skills for DevOps engineers to know.

Here are those stories and more:

• NSA Blames North Korea For WannaCry Ransomware (The Verge) The U.S. National Security Agency said it has “moderate confidence” that WannaCry, the name of the ransomware that took down thousands of computers, came from North Korean hackers.
• Know Your AWS Downtime Limits (TechTarget) “For many AWS customers, the reality is that most will tolerate some downtime almost fatalistically,” Kentik Co-founder and CEO Avi Freedman told TechTarget in this article on boosting uptime. “Zero downtime is achievable, but only with investment in architecture and layered or multi-vendor solutions.”
• Tapping Secret Spectrum to Give Kids Fast Broadband (Wired) “About five million households with school-aged children are mired in the so-called homework gap, because they can’t afford broadband or they live in underserved rural areas,” the article cites from Pew Research Center. Monticello High School in Albemarle County, Virginia doesn’t want that stat to slow its students education, so it got creative.
• Ericsson Eyes Half a Billion 5G Users by 2022 (Light Reading) Ericsson predicts there will be more than half a billion 5G customers by the end of 2022. According to Light Reading, Ericsson attributes this spike to the momentum behind the technology and the industry’s decision to “fast track its standardization.”
• ISP Startup Targets Disruption in US Suburbs (Light Reading) “In an ISP industry that is dominated by a handful of players, the chances for Common Networks to succeed are slim,” reports Light Reading. However, the startup is targeting suburban markets and believes “it can exploit a customer niche in areas that won’t attract the same fiber investments as larger, denser cities.”
• Tabs or Spaces? Developer Survey Reveals Where Programmers Make More Money (Ars Technica) The tabs or spaces debate continues for developers. But Stack Overflow’s annual survey says developers using spaces make more money. Ars Technica jokes that the latest survey includes “lots of bad news.”
• 10 Skills Every DevOps Engineer Needs for Success (TechRepublic) Network awareness is one of the key skills DevOps engineers need to be success, according to Kentik’s VP of Strategic Alliances Jim Frey in this TechRepublic article. Why? Jim advises, “The end objective of any DevOps project is to successfully deliver an application to the end user who will consume it. That involves the network,” Frey said. “My advice for DevOps engineers is to ignore the network at your peril. A good DevOps engineer will recognize that you have to account for the network in your design, your planning and your testing.”

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