Technology Short Take #83

Welcome to Technology Short Take #83! This is a slightly shorter TST than usual, which might be a nice break from the typical information overload. In any case, enjoy!

Networking

• I enjoyed Dave McCrory’s series on the future of the network (see part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4—part 5 hadn’t gone live yet when I published this). In my humble opinion, he’s spot on in his viewpoint that network equipment is increasingly becoming more like servers, so why not embed services and functions in the network equipment? However, this isn’t enough; you also need a strong control plane to help manage and coordinate these services. Perhaps Istio will help provide that control plane, though I suspect something more will be needed.
• Michael Kashin has a handy little tool that functions like ssh-copy-id on servers, but for network devices (leveraging Netmiko). Check out the GitHub repository.
• Anthony Shaw has a good comparison of Ansible, StackStorm, and Salt (with a particular view at applicability in a networking context). This one is definitely worth a read, in my opinion.
• Miguel Gómez of Telefónica Engineering discusses maximizing performance in VXLAN overlay networks.
• Nicolas Michel has a good Continue reading

Container Deployment Demos from Interop ITX

At Interop ITX 2017 in Las Vegas, I had the privilege to lead a half-day workshop on options for deploying containers to cloud providers. As part of that workshop, I gave four live demos of using different deployment options. Those demos—along with the slides I used for my presentation along the way—are now available to anyone who might like to try them on their own.

The slides and all the resources for the demos are available in this GitHub repository. The four demos are:

1. Docker Swarm on EC2: This demo leverages Terraform and Ansible to stand up and configure a Docker Swarm cluster on AWS.

2. Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS): This demo uses AWS CloudFormation to create an EC2 Container Service cluster with 3 instances and an Amazon RDS instance for backend database storage.

3. Kubernetes on AWS using kops: Using the kops CLI tool, this demo turns up a Kubernetes cluster on AWS to show how to deploy containerized applications on Kubernetes.

4. Google Container Engine: The final demo shows using Google Container Engine—which is Kubernetes—to deploy an application.

In the coming weeks, I plan to recreate the demos, record them, and publish them via YouTube, so that Continue reading