Video: Simplify Network Configurations with Cumulus Linux

Many vendors talk about network automation these days, and almost all of them gloss over an important detail: automation works best when you manage to simplify things to the bare minimum needed to get the job done.

One of the vendors that focus on simplifying the network device configuration is Cumulus Linux.

Was CLNP Really Broken?

One of my readers sent me this question after listening to the podcast with Douglas Comer:

Professor Comer mentioned that IP choose a network attachment address model over an endpoint model because of scalability. He said if you did endpoint addressing it wouldn’t scale. I remember reading a bunch of your blog posts about CNLP (I hope I’m remembering the right acronym) and I believe you liked endpoint addressing better than network attachment point addressing.

As always, the answer is “it depends” (aka “we’re both right” ;).

Ever Heard of Role-Based Access Control?

During my recent SDN workshops I encountered several networking engineers who use Nexus 1000V in their data center environment, and some of them claimed their organization decided to do so to ensure the separation of responsibilities between networking and virtualization teams.

There are many good reasons one would use Nexus 1000V, but the one above is definitely not one of them.

Why Would You Want to Attend a Classroom Workshop?

One of my regular subscribers wondered whether it makes sense to attend a live workshop (like the one we’re running in Miami in a few weeks) instead of listening to my webinars:

I am following your blog posts quite regularly, I’ve been a yearly subscriber for more than 3 years now and I’m even trying to attend as many webinars as I can in real time. Is there a real benefit to participate in this classroom event if we are almost aware of all your slide decks and videos?

Absolutely. Here’s what one of the attendees of a recent SDN workshop wrote when asking me whether I would be willing to do an on-site event for his company:

We Need Product Documentation, not just Glitzy Demos

Whenever a vendor approaches me touting the benefits of their new gizmo, they want to give me a product demo, or offer me access to online labs… and I always tell them I’m not interested until I see their design and configuration guides.

Here’s why I think you should take the same approach:

More Features, Improved Lock-In

Found an interesting article on High Scalability blog (another must-read web site) on how PostgreSQL improves locking behavior in high-volume transaction environment.

Needless to say, the feature is totally proprietaryrather unique and not available in most other database products. Improved locking behavior ⇒ improved lock-in.

Moral of the story: Stop yammering. Networking is no different from any other field of IT.

Update: Yep, I goofed up on the proprietary bit (it was one of those “I don’t think this word means what you think it means” gotchas). However, if you think open source product can't have proprietary features or you can’t get locked into an open-source product, I congratulate you on your rosy perspective. Reality smudged mine years ago.

SDN Internet Router Is in Production on Software Gone Wild

You might remember the great idea David Barroso had last autumn – turn an Arista switch into an Internet edge router (SDN Internet Router – SIR). In the meantime, he implemented that solution in production environment serving high-speed links at multiple Internet exchange points. It was obviously time for another podcast on the same topic.

The Lack of Historic Knowledge Is so Frustrating

Every time I’m explaining the intricacies of new technologies to networking engineers, I try to use analogies with older well-known technologies, trying to make it simpler to grasp the architectural constraints of the shiny new stuff.

Unfortunately, most engineers younger than ~35 years have no idea what I’m talking about – all they know are Ethernet, IP and MPLS.

Just to give you an example – here’s a slide from my SDN workshop.

Get Digital Content with the SDN Workshop

Last week I ran two SDN workshops, and in both of them the participants were busy taking notes as I explained the intricacies of concepts like SDN, NFV and network automation, and tools like OpenFlow or BGP.

However, how often did you revisit notes taken at a presentation and kept wondering “what exactly was he trying to say?” … or felt like the training you attended was like drinking from a fire hose and you missed most of the good stuff?

You won’t have that problem during the Miami SDN/NFV/SDDC retreat.

Sometimes You Have to Decide How Badly You Want to Fail

Another week, another ExpertExpress session, as is often the case focusing on two data centers with stretched VLANs spanning both of them. However, this one was particularly irksome, as the customer ran a firewall cluster stretched across two locations.

I gave the customer engineers my usual recommendations:

DMVPN Split Default Routing

SD-WAN is all the rage these days (at least according to software-defined pundits), but networking engineers still build DMVPN networks, even though they are supposedly impossibly-hard-to-configure Rube Goldberg machinery.

To be honest, DMVPN is not the easiest technology Cisco ever developed, and there are plenty of gotchas, including the problem of default routing in Phase 2/3 DMVPN networks.

Winston Churchill on IPv6

While researching for another blog post, I stumbled upon this speech by Winston Churchill:

When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the Sibylline Books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong -these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

Obviously mr. Churchill wasn't talking about IPv6 but about way more serious matters… but it's also obvious he was right abut the unteachability of mankind.

Enterprise Content-over-IPv6 Deployment Scenarios

After ARIN ran out of IPv4 address space (in a totally uncontrolled “let’s party till it’s over” way) US enterprise IT shops (RFC 6919) OUGHT TO learn how to spell IPv6 (US service providers are already ahead of the pack).

You may also decide to ignore IPv6 indefinitely, but do keep in mind that consultants love panicking clients.

Douglas Comer on the Future of Networking

Jim Small asked me what I thought about the Future of Networking Packet Pushers podcast with Douglas Comer. I decided to listen to it while driving toward one of my recent hikes, and it was a great decision– it was the best Packet Pushers podcast I listened to in a long while.

Get ipSpace.net Subscription while Attending the Rome SDN/NFV Event

Reiss Romoli, the fantastic organizers of my SDN/NFV event in Rome, Italy in late October are offering you a free personal ipSpace.net subscription – a saving of $299 or approximately EUR 270.

All you have to do to qualify is (A) download and fill in the registration form, (B) send it to Reiss Romoli and (C) pay before attending the webinar.

Yeah, I know the PDF form says “fax it back” – everyone has to use the tools that work best in their environment.

Hope we'll meet in warm and sunny Rome in a few weeks!

Building Carrier-Grade Cloud Infrastructure

During my recent SDN workshop one of the attendees asked me “How do you build carrier-grade (5 nines) cloud infrastructure with VMware NSX?”

Short answer: You don’t… and it’s a wrong question anyway.

Software-Defined IXP with Laurent Vanbever on Software Gone Wild

A while ago I started discussing the intricate technical details of fibbing (an ingenious way of implementing traffic engineering with traditional OSPF) with Laurent Vanbever and other members of his group, and we decided to record a podcast on this topic.

Things never go as planned in a live chat, and we finished talking about another one of his projects – software defined Internet exchange point (SDX), the topic of Episode 41 of Software Gone Wild.

Designing Active-Active and Disaster Recovery Data Centers

A year ago I was a firm believer in the unlimited powers of Software-Defined Data Centers and their ability to simplify workload migrations. After all, if you can use an API to create any data center object, what’s stopping you from moving the workload running in a data center to another location.

As always, there’s a huge difference between theory and reality.

What Happens When a Data Center Fabric Switch Fails?

I got into an interesting discussion with a fellow networking engineer trying to understand the impact of a switch failure in a L2/L3 data center fabric (anything from Avaya’s fabric or Brocade’s VCS Fabric to Cisco’s FabricPath, ACI or Juniper’s QFabric) on MAC and ARP tables.

Here’s my take on the problem – have I missed anything?

Prepare for Job Interview with ipSpace.net Subscription

Did you know that many networking engineers use ipSpace.net webinars (and subscription) to prepare for the job interviews?

Here’s one of their success stories (name changed for obvious reasons):