NetDevOpEd: an engineer’s response to traditional solutions

I was out at Gartner Catalyst in London in September, speaking to IT professionals about their data center deployments. It was an enjoyable time engaging actively with other like-minded technical individuals that were interested in leveraging the boundaries of their technologies to drive greater business efficiencies and competitiveness.

The common theme across all the attendees I spoke to was the urge for containerization, flexibility of design and rapid deployment. These IT professionals were being tasked with reacting faster, and building more rapidly scalable environment. For their server and application needs, they all had turned to open solutions in Linux, leveraging operating systems such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Centos, Ubuntu, and orchestration tools such as Mesos and Docker Swarm to control Docker containers. The common point I saw was that all the compute infrastructure relied on open solutions that allowed for greater simplicity without sacrificing flexibility.

I would then ask these same IT professionals: “what do you use in for network infrastructure in these data centers?”
Universally, the response would come back: “Cisco” or “Arista” or “Juniper.”
I would push them: “Why?”
“Because it’s what we’ve always done.”
“It’s all we know.”
“No one ever Continue reading

A networking expert on how to experiment with containers using Mesosphere and Cumulus Linux

With the rising popularity of containers, it seems that containers and networking interact more and more frequently. Amongst all the excitement, there is also terminology and technical complexity. And because of this, I’m super grateful for Cumulus in the Cloud. As a Sr. Consulting Engineer, part of my job is ensuring I am deeply familiar with the technologies and methodologies our customers are using. I’ve recently been playing with Cumulus in the Cloud to better learn how Mesos’s Marathon and Mesosphere interoperate with Cumulus Linux and NetQ.

Let me start off by saying that if you’re interested in container networking but want more information on how to do it right, we’re hosting a webinar with Mesosphere that you should most definitely check out. Our co-founder, JR Rivers, will also be hosting, and, I promise you, he’s always an engaging speaker. Of course if you’re already familiar with container networking, or you would like to learn about it in a more hands-on atmosphere, then please read on!

I’m a networking veteran, but working at Cumulus has pushed the boundaries of my networking knowledge as I’ve had to learn more about integrating networking solutions with application functionality. When I have to talk Continue reading

Data center network monitoring best practices part 2: Network alerting, a deeper dive

Network monitoring without alerting is like having a clock without any hands. In the previous post, Eric discussed setting up a monitoring strategy, and in it we scraped the surface of network alerting. In this post we dive into alerting more deeply.

Network alerting on relevant data

Alerting comes in many forms. In the previous post, we discussed how metrics can be set with thresholds to create alerts. This is the most basic level of alerting. CPU alerts are set at 90% of utilization. Disk usage alerts are set to 95% of utilization. There are at least two drawbacks with this level of alerting.

First, by alerting on metric thresholds, we limit ourselves to the granularity of the metrics. Consider a scenario where interface statistics are gathered every five minutes. That limits the ability to capture anomalous traffic patterns to a five minute interval, and at the fast pace of modern datacenters, that level of granularity isn’t acceptable. Limiting the alerting ability based on the thresholds.

Secondly, there are many times when alerts from certain metrics don’t create any actionable activities. For example, an alert on CPU utilization may not directly have an impact on traffic. Since switch CPUs should Continue reading

Making Networking Great Again: Leveraging ifupdown2 in the Data Center

I love election season, mainly for all the great slogans. Every candidate is trying to find a way to catch the attention of the electorate in order to get their ideas across. If people don’t know the benefits of a new solution, they’ll be hard pressed to understand how much better life can be.

The same can be said for Linux networking when ifupdown2 came along. This article describes the improvements made to ifupdown2, but it doesn’t describe the excruciating pain of having to run the classic ifupdown. I feel obliged to join this campaign cycle to wholeheartedly endorse ifupdown2 and tell you about how it’s making networking great again.

I was recently simulating a data center environment with Vagrant to test scalable architectures. I was trying to leverage ECMP via the new Routing on the Host feature on an Ubuntu 14.04LTS server over a Cumulus Linux spine/leaf Clos network. One requirement for this feature to work is peering BGP between the Ubuntu server and the first-hop leaf. Sounds simple, right? I had already peered BGP throughout my entire Cumulus Linux switch network, and since Ubuntu is also a Debian-based distribution, it should have been a trivial task.

Read Continue reading