Dear friend,
Being a long-time network engineer, I’ve seen (and done) it all: talking about about IPv6, designing and implementing IPv6 in production service providers and data center networks, holly wars IPv6 vs IPv4, industries saying they aren’t going to use IPv6 ever, and many others. For some network engineers, it could be even quite an “innovation” project (I clearly remember some senior person told me back in 2018 that introduction of IPv6 is an innovation; quite a statement in the 20-years anniversary of IPv6). But today I want to talk about it from a different angle.
In many cases every day we rely on the software, which works over Internet: whatever you need to buy or sell some goods, order a table in your favorite cafe, book ticket to train to visit your friends. Connected world is around us and, if for whatever reason it breaks, our life immediately becomes much more difficult. That’s because the applications rely on the Internet and their capability to provide you the service depends on their capabilities to connect from your smartphone or laptop to the application servers. And this capability is significantly affected by Continue reading
Dear friend,
This year I had a pleasure and privilege to attend KubeCon Europe 2023 and this was the first time I’ve heard about MicroK8s. That sounded interesting and I decided I shall experiment with it and write a blogpost; but it didn’t catch my attention to a degree that I put it on top of my list; instead, I’ve put it to back burner. The last week I was talking to a colleagues of mine, who told me that he needs to test something in his production Kubernetes at home. I was quite interested, what does the one mean by “production Kubernetes cluster at home” and it appeared to be MikroK8s. At this stage I though, I don’t have any more excuses, so I just should sit and write it.
It is, indeed. The last week when we posted a blog about starting programming in C we got an interesting discussion in LinkedIn about Go vs Python with one right-honorable gentleman, who rightfully suggested that one of the main weaknesses of Python is that it requires to install dependencies on the host before you can use application. However, to be brutally honest, many Continue reading
Hello my friend,
It has been a long, very long break in posting. In fact, it was almost for half a year, which are not proud of in any capacity. However, this was needed to allow my to accomplish a few things in my own study and get back even more loaded, so that I can share more useful information and insights about networking, computing, software development and IT in general.
We have absolutely not. In fact, developing software for distributes systems, which requires network connectivity between their components, I see how critical is to have the entire IT infrastructure (including networking) to have done right. By “done right” I mean the IT/network infrastructure, which is stable, predictable and deterministic. And in the fast pace environment, where you scale your infrastructure quick up and down (we are not talking about Kubernetes here), the network automation is the only way to achieve this level of precision and sustainability. So, my dudes, network automation is THE ONLY way how the network can be operated in now and in future. Your software development/business teams will be happy if you do things in your network automated way, I Continue reading
Dear friend,
Source of Truth plays crucial role in network automation as this is the basis we are automating our IT and network infrastructure against. It doesn’t mean to be monitoring system in any capacity. At the same time, it may be useful to quickly do some checks against your network infrastructure and to update some metadata in the Source of Truth.
Yes, we are. NetBox is a leading tool in the source of truth framework. Being open-source, it by far outpaces all other open-source and commercial tools existing worldwide in this area. On top of its wide built-in capabilities, it is highly extensible via plugins and scripts.
The good news is that we covered NetBox in our Zero-to-Hero Network Automation Training, and you can benefit from learning it from the context of network automation with integrations to Python and Ansible tools, which you create during our training.
We offer the following training programs for you:
During these trainings you will learn the following topics:
Dear friend,
It wouldn’t be an overestimation to say that in the modern world the availability of service online plays one of the key role for success of any business: we buy, sell and use goods and services via Internet from various private and public companies as well as governmental bodies. As such, if services are not unavailable online, we, as consumers, cannot get what we need and suppliers cannot provide use the service (and, therefore, cannot make some money). That’s why the information security in general, and protection of service online becomes the hot topic these days.
Absolutely it can be. Ensuring that configuration of network devices and online services are in-line with the security hardening blueprints is one of the most straightforward automation use cases, which provides significant value by ensuring that the amount of attack vectors is reduced and is limited to the set of services, which are really needed. Besides that, we have the whole range of vulnerability scanning, software upgrade, etc.
And for all these, and other network security automation activities, we are using the same set of tools as for “ordinary network automation”. Therefore, come and learn with us:
Dear friend,
Today’s topic will be an unusual one. We will talk about some (of course) Python-related technology, which despite its existence for quite a while already, we have been always somewhat avoiding. It always seemed for me that Jupyter is not a right thing for network automation, especially when we talk proper software development, not simple scripts. I still stand this ground; however, I see now where Jupyter can be quite useful.
Well. The truth is that there is no limit. In vast majority of cases, tools used in Network Automation are either ones coming from DevOps or from Software Development. Both of these areas are massive and are ever growing, what ultimately means that amount of tools for network automation is growing as well. Some of these tools are more suitable for network automation, some are less: it is possible to assess if the particular one is suitable for network automation only if you test , which is time consuming.
The good news is that we already created a selection of great network automation tools and technologies for you. We have carefully tested and put them together, so that you Continue reading
Dear friend,
Awareness of what is happening in your IT infrastructure (in our case, in network) is a key success or failure factor of any modern business, as huge majority of businesses are now running online. The awareness is built on top of visibility of network events and activities happening in the network, which in their turn reflects in data points, which can be collected. In this blogpost we’ll cover how these data points can be collected in multi vendor network running Cisco IOS XR, Nokia SR OS and Arista EOS switches using Prometheus, which is one of the most popular monitoring platforms these days.
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The ultimate state of any system, including the IT/network is self-managed (self-healed, self-controlled, etc). It is simply impossible to build any self-controlled system without monitoring and collection of the data, as this data collection in the self-controlled system is the only (as we remove people Continue reading
Dear friend,
We all like spreadsheets, as this is an easy and intuitive way of representing data for us, humans. The possibility to analyze data with spreadsheets are endless, starting from simple aggregation till complicated pivots are endless. Even the people who say that they don’t like spreadsheets, use them so often. Network automation, for sure, is not an exclusion here.
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They absolutely are. We haven’t seen so far any non-IT person, or even IT high-profile engineer or manager, which won’t like spreadsheets. To put it simple, spreadsheets can be an easy way to represent data collected from network devices; likewise, it can be a good way to provide some input, either as inventory or as configuration details for your network automation intent. So the questions becomes, provided you can read data from your spreadsheet in a programmatic way, what would you do with it?
The good news is that Continue reading
Dear friend,
We hope you are doing great and had a nice time over the festive period to recharge your batteries towards the new year. We wish it to be successful, productive and prosperous. With this, let’s dive into the topic of today’s blog, which is network automation for OCP SONiC with GNMI and Python over pyGNMI.
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SONiC, which stands for Software for Open Networking in the Cloud, is a Network Operating System (NOS). SONiC’s main purpose is to run on the data center switches and provide simple and reliable connectivity between endpoints (Baremetal servers, virtual machines, containers, etc). As it is a piece of the network software, which runs on network hardware, it is for sure requires automation.
The good news is that it supports RESTCONF and GNMI with OpenConfig YANG modules, which we extensively cover in our Network Automation Trainings:
We offer the Continue reading
Hello my friend,
In one of the past blogposts we have highlighted the journey for automation for engineers, who is willing to develop further outside of their core remit, such as networking, compute, or storage. In today’s blogpost we’ll provide some of examples how the different moving pieces are coming along together.
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Yes, you do. Start today with our Network Automation Training programs:
We offer the following training programs for you:
During these trainings you will learn the following topics:
Dear friend,
Our team wishes you all the best for the upcoming year. Let it be healthy, wealthy, interesting, joyful, and successful in all capacities. Thanks a lot for reading us and staying in touch with us, reading our blogs, attending our trainings and using our open source software.
We sincerely wish you Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! You are the best, dear friend!
Warm regards,
Team Karneliuk
Hello my friend,
quite often we are getting questions from various folks on LinkedIn or via private consultations about how start with network automation and, more importantly, whether to start with network automation at all. With this blogpost we’ll try to answer the most popular question.
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The answer is simple: don’t wait. The amount of things you need to learn in order to succeed is huge and growing daily with new tools and platforms released. However, the good news is that we we provide you everything you need to start successfully in the role:
We offer the following training programs for you:
During these trainings you will learn the following topics:
Dear friend,
Today we’ll look into a question, which is raising quite often on various meetups related to network automation or various threads that is the addition of any automation components (say, NetBox) to the existing networking managing suit, where you already have some inventory (say, LibreNMS). We’ll take a look into multiple approaches and, as usual, will share some code snippets how you can do that.
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Integrating different automation tools is typically the most labor-intensive work, as it requires understanding of the tools you are integrating, their internal hierarchy and APIs capabilities. That is not even saying that you shall be proficient with a variety of technologies, such as REST API or GRPC API, JSON/Protobuf/XML, Postman and many other tools. That’s a lot, and may be not easy to start with.
The good news is that all these things you can learn at out Network Automation Training programs:
Dear friend,
After a bit of break caused by preparation to Kubernetes exams (we will continue blogs about Kubernetes as well) we are getting back to network and network automation topics. One of the interesting things, which is gradually emerging these days, is the possibility to manage multiple aspects of network devices (not only configuration or collection of operational data), such us issuing ping/traceroute checks, copying file, etc in a model-drive way (i.e., NETCONF, RESTCONF, GNMI with YANG). Today we are going to look into such a topic.
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It is exactly that. NETCONF/YANG all the things, my friend! Usage of model-driven network automation significantly improves the stability and manageability of the network due to much simpler way to perform all the operations remotely. You don’t need to scrape and parse CLI anymore; instead, you interact with network devices via programmable API, what makes it possible to integrate them Continue reading
Hello my friend,
It took a bit since our previous blogpost about the setup of the highly-available Kubernetes cluster with multiple control plane and worker nodes. We aimed to write the blogpost about the upgrade, but we will park it for now for two reasons:
Therefore, we decided to walk you through the main components used to build and publish your application in a cloud native way on Kubernetes. Let’s dive into that.
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These days there are interesting projects emerging with Kubernetes acting as a management plane for network devices. Kubernetes in such projects has a role of the entity, which distributes configuration to the worker nodes, which are either proxies for Continue reading
Hello my friend,
As mentioned in the previous blogpost, we continue looking into Kubernetes. In the previous blogpost we have built a simple cluster consisting of one control plane node, which is the one ruling the cluster, and two worker nodes, which are the ones hosting the customers’ workloads. Today we will add a few more nodes, both workers and control plane, to the cluster to convert it into a high available one.
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We absolutely are. One of the important things we have figured out is that automation is for sure the cross-platform technology. Therefore, whatever area you are coming from or heading two (networking, system administration, or cloud engineering), knowledge of automation frameworks and components, such as Ansible, Bash, Python, YAML, JSON, REST API, GRPC/GNMI is very beneficial and, in fact, is almost mandatory these days.
And in our Network Automation Trainings we have put it together in Continue reading
Hello my friend,
The last Black Friday (in 2021) I’ve purchased some Kubernetes trainings from Linux Foundation with quite a huge discount. I’ve purchased and then has been doing nothing in their regard for quite a bit until I’ve received a notification in the beginning of the September that I have only 3 months to use the training and pass exam or it will expire. Moreover, I have 2 exams to pass, so… All my blogs for a bit will be dedicated to Kubernetes only, as I don’t have time to look into anything else for the time being. I will be using these blogs as a brain dump for me during preparation for CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) and CKAD (Certified Kubernetes Application Developer). Whether I will manage it in 2,5 months, the time will show. Let’s get started.
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Kubernetes is one of the most popular platforms to build Continue reading
Hello my friend,
Once we are sorted with the theoretical part of how we are to deploy OpenStack, we are moving to a practical bit. Today we are going to explain the steps we are going to take in order to deploy OpenStack, the supporting storage and how they are to be integrated.
Video to the Topic
If you need a trusted and experienced partner to automate your network and IT infrastructure, get in touch with us.
If you have further questions or you need help with your networks, we are happy to assist you, just send us a message. Also don’t forget to share the article on your social media, if you like it.
BR,
Anton Karneliuk
Hello my friend,
In the previous blogpost we have started discussion about the Open Source Load Balancing solution, which leverages HAProxy and FRR, which is connected to the data centre fabric running EVPN/VXLAN on Arista EOS switches and serving content from NGINX-based origin servers. In that blogpost we covered the architectural guidelines and design principles. Today we will cover the configuration and the validation of the solution.
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The truth is that both disciplines are equally important. Knowledge and skills in network technologies will allow you to build great connectivity solutions to empower businesses across the globe and spread its capabilities as nowadays, perhaps, 99% of all business operations leverage IT and network technologies either entirely or at least partially. In its turn, network automation allows to make operational activities (e.g., configuration, troubleshooting, analysis, etc) much more precise and predictable, decreasing the probability of outages or Continue reading
Hello my friend,
Recently we’ve been working on an interesting (at least for me) project, which is an MVP of the highly available infrastructure for web services. There are multiple approaches existing to create such a solution including “simply” putting everything in Kubernetes. However, in our case we are building a solution for a telco cloud, which is traditionally not the best candidate for a cloud native world. Moreover, putting it to Kubernetes will require to build a Kubernetes cluster first, which is completely separate magnitude of the problem. Originally we were planning to write this blogpost the last weekend, but it took us a little bit longer to put everything together properly. Let’s see, what we are to share with you.
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Yes, today’s blogpost is dedicated to the network technologies (to a huge mix of different network and infrastructure technologies, to be honest). That’s why there Continue reading