If you treat your engineers like interchangeable human resources you’ll get the results you deserve ;)… but if you wonder how to make them keep them happy and production, there’s no better place to start than the Key Factors in Attracting and Retaining Talent by Daniel Dib.
A while ago we discussed a software-focused view of Network Interface Cards (NICs) with Luke Gorrie, and a hardware-focused view of them with Or Gerlitz (Mellanox), Andy Gospodarek (Broadcom) and Jiri Pirko (Mellanox).
Why would anyone want to implement features in hardware and not in software, and what would be the best hardware implementation? We discussed these dilemmas with Silvano Gai in Episode 110 of Software Gone Wild podcast.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I rarely get emails along the lines of “I deployed SD-WAN and it was the best thing we did in the last decade” (trust me, I would publish those if they’d come from a semi-trusted source).
What I usually get are sad experiences from people being exposed to vendor brainwashing or deployments that failed to meet expectations (but according to Systems Engineering Director working for an aggressive SD-WAN vendor that’s just because they didn’t do their research, and thus did everything wrong).
Here’s another story coming from Adrian Giacometti.
Whenever I was comparing VMware NSX and Cisco ACI a few years ago (in late 2010s in case you’re reading this in a far-away future), someone would inevitably ask “and how would you connect a bare metal server to a VMware NSX environment?”
While NSX-T has that capability since release 2.5 (more about that in a later blog post), let’s start with the big question: why would you need to?
In early April 2020 I ran another live session in my How Networks Really Work webinar. It was supposed to be an easy one, explaining the concepts of packet forwarding and routing protocols… but of course I decided to cover most solutions we’ve encountered in the last 50 years, ranging from Virtual Circuits and Source Route Bridging to Segment Routing (which, when you think about it, is just slightly better SRB over IPv6), so I never got to routing protocols.
That webinar was supposed to be an introductory one, but of course I got pulled down all sorts of rabbit trails, and even as I was explaining interesting stuff I realized a beginner would have a really hard time following along… but then I silently gave up. Obviously I’m not meant to create introduction-to-something material.
Imagine a life where you would be able to…
… and be able to do all that in a multi-vendor environment without writing tons of Ansible playbooks or Python code.
A tweet by Corey Quinn pointed me to his hilarious riff on the you are not Google and don’t have the same problems theme. Enjoy!
Mat Jovanovic decided to follow my lead and migrate his blog from Blogger to Hugo, using Docsy theme, AWS Amplify as the CI/CD pipeline, and AWS S3 as the hosting platform.
Nice job… but he did way more than that - he documented the whole process, including tool selection, setup, and Blogger migration.
Thank you Mat! Every time I see someone publishing blog posts about open-source tools on Medium I’ll send them a link to your blog (with a comment “this is how you should blog about open-source solutions").
It’s amazing how many people assume that The Internet is a thing, whereas in reality it’s a mishmash of interconnected independent operators running mostly on goodwill, misplaced trust in other people’s competence, and (sometimes) pure dumb luck.
I described a few consequences of this sad reality in the Internet Has More than One Administrator video (part of How Networks Really Work webinar), and Nick Buraglio and Elisa Jasinska provided even more details in their Surviving the Internet Default-Free Zone webinar.
The third hands-on exercise in our Networking in Public Cloud Deployments online course asks the students to deploy a web server in a public cloud of their choice using infrastructure-as-code principles.
Not surprisingly, Erik Auerswald created another fantastic writeup when solving that exercise, including exploring the problem space, detailed description of his Terraform-based solution, and testing procedures. Enjoy!
There was an obvious invisible elephant in the virtual Cloud Field Day 7 (CFD7v) event I attended in late April 2020. Most everyone was talking about AWS, how their stuff runs on AWS, how it integrates with AWS, or how it will help others leapfrog AWS (yeah, sure…).
Although you REALLY SHOULD watch my AWS Networking webinar (or something equivalent) to understand what problems vendors like VMWare or Pensando are facing or solving, I’m pretty sure a lot of people think they can get away with CliffsNotes version of it, so here they are ;)
Andrea Dainese is continuing his journey through open-source NetDevOps land. This time he decided to focus on log management systems, chose Elastic Stack, and wrote an article describing what it is, why a networking engineer should look at it, and what’s the easiest way to start.
Got mentioned in this tweet a while ago:
Watching @ApstraInc youtube stream regarding BGP in the DC with @doyleassoc and @jtantsura.Maybe BGP is getting bigger and bigger traction from big enterprise data centers but I still see an IGP being used frequently. I am eager to have @ioshints opinion on that hot subject.
Maybe I’ve missed some breaking news, but assuming I haven’t my opinion on that subject hasn’t changed.
After setting the stage clarifying the current Cisco SD-WAN deployment scenarios, David Penaloza focused on definitions and fundamentals that must be considered before dealing with solutions that hide and abstract complexity like overlays, routing, and network virtualization from the network administrator.
One of the attendees of our Building Next-Generation Data Center online course submitted a picture-perfect solution to scalable layer-2 fabric design challenge:
The only seemingly weird decision he made: he decided to run the EVPN EBGP session between loopback interfaces of core switches (used as BGP route reflectors) and WAN edge routers.
Being stuck at home like most everyone else we’re continuing the increased pace of content production in May 2020:
Imagine that you just stumbled upon the hammer Thor carelessly dropped, and you’re so proud of your new tool that everything looks like a nail even though it might be a lightbulb or an orange.
That happens to some people when they get the network automation epiphany: all of a sudden CLI and manual configuration should be banned, and everything can be solved by proper incantation of Git and Ansible commands or whatever other workflow you might have set up… even though the particular problem might have nothing to do with what you have just automated.
Kode Vicious (aka George V. Neville-Neil ) wrote another brilliant article on reducing risk in systems that can do serious harm. Here are just two of the gems:
The risks involved in these systems come from three major areas: marketing, accounting, and management.
There is a wealth of literature on safety-critical systems, much of which points in the same direction: toward simplicity. With increasing complexity comes increasing risk …
For whatever reason most networking- and virtualization vendors joined a lemming-like run in the opposite direction years ago.
Ben Friedman and his team (the video crew producing all the Tech Field Day events) published a number of interviews about the impact of COVID-19 on IT.
Among other things we discussed how busy networking engineers are trying to cope with unexpected demand, and how public cloud isn’t exactly infinitely elastic.
This podcast introduction was written by Nick Buraglio, the host of today’s podcast.
As private overlays are becoming more and more prevalent and as SD-WAN systems and technologies advance, it remains critical that we continue to investigate how we think about internetworking. Even with platforms such as Slack Nebula, Zerotier, or the wireguard based TailScale becoming a mainstream staple of many businesses, the question of “what is next” is being asked by an ambitious group of researchers.