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Keep the learning pace! A Holiday recap about network automation sessions

AnsibleFest in October was an amazing experience; the best part was meeting and chatting about multiple network automation use cases with our customers and partners.

In case you want to review the most relevant sessions, here is a summary on the abridged network automation related sessions that you can check on-demand for the next 5 months:

 

Why unified network automation and why now? 

Bob Laliberte, Principal Analyst, ESG covers the complexity of modern networks which span across multi-domain teams including campus, branches, data centers, WAN networks and now edge across distributed locations. 

Network automation, when implemented as an end to end solution, can unify teams and make it faster and more efficient to deliver network services.

IT decision makers and managers will be able to have a better insight on network automation challenges and KPIs.

 

Noor Shadid, Wells Fargo | theCUBE at Red Hat AnsibleFest 2022

In this interview, Wells Fargo Senior Vice President, Noor Shadid, describes their cultural change with automation and how Wells Fargo positioned itself as a technology company.

 

Journey to Automated NetOps in Financial Services 

John Teixido from Truist and Tony Dubiel from Red Hat cover this amazing session. You Continue reading

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Automating multi-vendor network prefix-lists

To keep the networks healthy, cause connectivity matters

I love being a network engineer, even though I struggled to explain to non-networking people about the utmost relevance of network administration. However, during the last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world could see the relevance of having connectivity. Networks are the highways of information. Data, applications, entertainment, and factories need the network connectivity roads to make the world run. It’s interesting that even network models to estimate traffic behavior use algorithms that are similar to the ones to estimate transportation.

To enable this communication, networks have to interconnect through routing protocols. There are many ways to configure routing; you can permit or restrict traffic to certain networks to leave some sectors isolated, and propagate routes to allow connectivity only to specific segments of your network.

When you configure routing settings to allow this interconnection, you not only want to reach the ultimate purpose of configuring connectivity, but you want to do this in an efficient manner. 

The use of prefix-lists is one mechanism to permit a better use of resources in your routers. In this blog we are going to briefly cover why prefix-lists configuration is relevant, and Continue reading

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Automating Applications and Servers at the Edge with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

In my previous blog, Why 2022 will be the year for edge automation, we discussed the objective of edge solutions to bring resources closer to the end user or data source.

As edge expands its IT footprint and becomes an extension of the data center, bare-metal, virtual environments, private cloud and public cloud start to coexist as part of the infrastructure. 

While our customers move forward with their own automation journey, they are adding edge computing to the puzzle, with common automation challenges such as:

How to automate disparate architectures at scale? 

How do we reduce the operational burden, if the IT teams do not grow exponentially? 

What is needed to foster a collaborative automation practice?

As part of this blog we will go through a hybrid edge computing automation scenario. But let's start with the fundamental question: Why is hybrid cloud critical for edge computing?

 

Hybrid cloud to solve edge computing challenges

At the edge, geography matters. 

The fundamental need is to allocate resources closer to where the data is generated to pre-process the information before forwarding it to the data centers. The reason for this architectural change is to increase Continue reading

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What’s new: network automation using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.1

A financial customer explained his first automation priority in the most visual and understandable way: “I want to paint all of my network devices with the color of the company.” What I like about that analogy is that it clearly describes the first rule for automation: customers must define their golden configurations (the color to paint) to be able to automate configurations and later assess compliance, and remediate any issues accordingly. 

A “golden configuration” usually refers to a Day 1 configuration, and covers the minimal settings needed for a network device to be configured after a fresh network operating system installation. This usually includes common services such as NTP, DNS, AAA, Syslog, SNMP, and ACLs for management connectivity. 

As part of this blog, I will provide an overview for new automation capabilities available to achieve some of these Day 1 configuration activities. In addition to the enhancements for network configuration management, I will cover new Ansible Automation Platform capabilities that are frequently required by our network customers, such as:

• Detailing common operational benefits of Ansible Automation Platform.
  
  
• Measuring the value of automation use cases.
  
  
• Leveraging execution environments and automation mesh.

Certified Collections available in Ansible automation hub

Continue reading

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Why 2022 will be the year for edge automation

Seamlessly, every single day, we wake up and check our health statistics in smart watches, scan QR codes to validate information, pay using credit cards in different locations, use surveillance cameras to record our neighborhoods, and connect our smartphones to distributed WiFi access points in our restaurants or coffee shops. According to the Statista, in the Forecast number of mobile users worldwide 2020-2025^[1] report, the number of mobile users worldwide reached 7.1 billion in 2021, and this number is projected to grow. This initiates a new set of use cases for edge devices due to the explosive growth of network-connected entry points.

Edge computing and networking is not specific to any industry; all of these scenarios span many different types of organizations. However, all edge scenarios have one common factor: creating and consuming data resources that are geographically distributed. As a final objective we want to analyze, consume or react to data to fulfill our customer and business needs.

Edge challenges here, and now 

12 years ago, I was the network administrator for a bank. We had a branch office connected through a satellite link, which was easily impacted by the constant heavy rains. In the Continue reading