Free-Form Discussion at CLEUR
I was fortunate enough to be invited out to Milan, Italy for Cisco Live Europe, and we had a few interesting discussions about a multitude of topics. One of them was more free-form than the others, and focused on defining SDN, what it’s value is, and where that value is most realized. Check out this video recording of the session; it was good to get a few perspectives from non-networkers, since I’m sure their perspective is different from the network administrator’s as it pertains to the ongoing shift in this industry:Free-Form Discussion at CLEUR
I was fortunate enough to be invited out to Milan, Italy for Cisco Live Europe, and we had a few interesting discussions about a multitude of topics. One of them was more free-form than the others, and focused on defining SDN, what it’s value is, and where that value is most realized. Check out this video recording of the session; it was good to get a few perspectives from non-networkers, since I’m sure their perspective is different from the network administrator’s as it pertains to the ongoing shift in this industry:Five Next-Gen Networker Skills
With all the flux that is going on in the networking space, it’s hard to figure out what to do next. You may want to add to your skillset, but you’re not sure where to throw your effort. I’d like to focus on five different areas you can focus on, without talking about a specific product – at the end of the day, that’s just implementation details. These areas are going to be increasingly more valuable and will help you be more marketable when added to your existing network knowledge and experience.
This isn’t meant to say that all of these skills are required to move your career forward; indeed, everyone’s situation is unique. These are just ideas – the way you implement these skillsets in your own life is up to you.
1. Software Skills
Here, I’m not necessarily talking about full-fledged code knowledge. This section isn’t about going and getting a 4 year CS degree. This is mostly about tools, methodologies, and workflows. For some, this will include some kind of interpreted language like Python, but will vary in degree greatly from person to person.
To help get more detailed with this point, I’d like to drill down on four very Continue reading
Five Next-Gen Networker Skills
With all the flux that is going on in the networking space, it’s hard to figure out what to do next. You may want to add to your skillset, but you’re not sure where to throw your effort. I’d like to focus on five different areas you can focus on, without talking about a specific product - at the end of the day, that’s just implementation details. These areas are going to be increasingly more valuable and will help you be more marketable when added to your existing network knowledge and experience.
This isn’t meant to say that all of these skills are required to move your career forward; indeed, everyone’s situation is unique. These are just ideas - the way you implement these skillsets in your own life is up to you.
1. Software Skills
Here, I’m not necessarily talking about full-fledged code knowledge. This section isn’t about going and getting a 4 year CS degree. This is mostly about tools, methodologies, and workflows. For some, this will include some kind of interpreted language like Python, but will vary in degree greatly from person to person.
To help get more detailed with this point, I’d like to drill down on four very Continue reading
Five Next-Gen Networker Skills
With all the flux that is going on in the networking space, it’s hard to figure out what to do next. You may want to add to your skillset, but you’re not sure where to throw your effort. I’d like to focus on five different areas you can focus on, without talking about a specific product - at the end of the day, that’s just implementation details. These areas are going to be increasingly more valuable and will help you be more marketable when added to your existing network knowledge and experience.Five Next-Gen Networker Skills
With all the flux that is going on in the networking space, it’s hard to figure out what to do next. You may want to add to your skillset, but you’re not sure where to throw your effort. I’d like to focus on five different areas you can focus on, without talking about a specific product - at the end of the day, that’s just implementation details. These areas are going to be increasingly more valuable and will help you be more marketable when added to your existing network knowledge and experience.Network Automation @Interop Vegas 2015
In case you are planning on attending Interop in Las Vegas this year, I’d like to let you know about my two sessions, both centered around emerging methodologies and technologies in the networking space.
Practical Network Automation With Ansible and Schprokits
This is going to be a 3 hour workshop, aiming to be a practical look into network automation. I picked the two tools that I have been working with most heavily in this space, and I think this workshop will be a great way to get up to speed with some down-to-earth network automation methodologies.
I am going to separate this workshop into three main parts:
- YAML and Jinja2 – These are text-based specifications that allow Ansible and Schprokits to do what they need to do. I will be making the assumption that attendees have little to no experience with either of these things, so I will spend some time exploring how these work. There’s not enough time in the workshop to be totally exhaustive, so I will only be covering the portions of either specification that are totally relevant for use with Ansible and Schprokits.
- Ansible – These days, it’s hard to talk about automation generally without Ansible being Continue reading
Network Automation @Interop Vegas 2015
In case you are planning on attending Interop in Las Vegas this year, I’d like to let you know about my two sessions, both centered around emerging methodologies and technologies in the networking space.
Practical Network Automation With Ansible and Python
This is going to be a 3 hour workshop, aiming to be a practical look into network automation. I picked the topics that I have been working with most heavily in this space, and I think this workshop will be a great way to get up to speed with some down-to-earth network automation methodologies.
I am going to separate this workshop into three main parts. I’m going to start with some of the basics, and move up in “difficulty” from there.
-
YAML and Jinja2 - These are text-based specifications that allows tools like Ansible to do what they need to do. I will be making the assumption that attendees have little to no experience with either of these things, so I will spend some time exploring how these work. There’s not enough time in the workshop to be totally exhaustive, so I will only be covering the portions of either specification that are totally relevant for use with Ansible.
-
Ansible - These Continue reading
Network Automation @Interop Vegas 2015
In case you are planning on attending Interop in Las Vegas this year, I’d like to let you know about my two sessions, both centered around emerging methodologies and technologies in the networking space. Practical Network Automation With Ansible and Python This is going to be a 3 hour workshop, aiming to be a practical look into network automation. I picked the topics that I have been working with most heavily in this space, and I think this workshop will be a great way to get up to speed with some down-to-earth network automation methodologies.Network Automation @Interop Vegas 2015
In case you are planning on attending Interop in Las Vegas this year, I’d like to let you know about my two sessions, both centered around emerging methodologies and technologies in the networking space. Practical Network Automation With Ansible and Python This is going to be a 3 hour workshop, aiming to be a practical look into network automation. I picked the topics that I have been working with most heavily in this space, and I think this workshop will be a great way to get up to speed with some down-to-earth network automation methodologies.Remove Duplicates from Pocket List
One problem I’ve noticed with my Pocket list is that my reading list contains quite a few duplicate entires. Sometimes I forget I saved an article and I save it multiple times, or maybe I save it across-sources (like Twitter or Facebook, or just browsing.
It looks like Pocket has some protective capabilities around this. If I endlessly spam the button provided to me by my Pocket chromecast extension, Pocket only saves the one copy and all is good.
However, take the following example. Many of the articles we read and put into our Pocket list use some kind of URL options for tracking purposes:
?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=1215
If you arrive to an article from different sources, but save both to Pocket, Pocket will treat these as different URLs. This means that if you’re bad about staying caught up with your Pocket list (like I am), it can be very easy to save duplicate articles, making the situation even worse.
Fortunately I have a solution. I wrote this python script to automate the removal of duplicates of entries in your pocket list.
Currently this script works by removing ALL text after a question mark (?) or a hash mark (#) in each Continue reading
Remove Duplicates from Pocket List
One problem I’ve noticed with my Pocket list is that my reading list contains quite a few duplicate entires. Sometimes I forget I saved an article and I save it multiple times, or maybe I save it across-sources (like Twitter or Facebook, or just browsing. It looks like Pocket has some protective capabilities around this. If I endlessly spam the button provided to me by my Pocket chromecast extension, Pocket only saves the one copy and all is good.Remove Duplicates from Pocket List
One problem I’ve noticed with my Pocket list is that my reading list contains quite a few duplicate entires. Sometimes I forget I saved an article and I save it multiple times, or maybe I save it across-sources (like Twitter or Facebook, or just browsing. It looks like Pocket has some protective capabilities around this. If I endlessly spam the button provided to me by my Pocket chromecast extension, Pocket only saves the one copy and all is good.Continuous Integration Pipeline for Networking
Popular development methodologies like Continuous Integration are usually accompanied by some kind of automated workflow, where a developer checks in some source code, which kicks off automated review, testing, and deployment jobs. I believe the same workflows can be adopted by network engineers.
Let’s say you are the Senior Network Engineer for your entire company, which boasts a huge network. You don’t have time to touch every device, so you have a team of junior-level network engineers that help you out. Let’s say you want to offload the creation/deletion of DHCP reservations to these junior engineers, but you still want to be able to approve all changes, just as a last line of defense, and a sanity check.
For this, I’m gong to show you how I’m managing my own home DHCP server (ISC) with Gerrit, Jenkins, and Ansible.
Config Review and Versioning with Git and Gerrit
I mentioned in a previous post that version control is an important component of efficiently managing network infrastructure. I’m going to take it a step further than what most are doing with RANCID, which is traditionally used at the end of a Continue reading
Continuous Integration Pipeline for Networking
Popular development methodologies like Continuous Integration are usually accompanied by some kind of automated workflow, where a developer checks in some source code, which kicks off automated review, testing, and deployment jobs. I believe the same workflows can be adopted by network engineers. Let’s say you are the Senior Network Engineer for your entire company, which boasts a huge network. You don’t have time to touch every device, so you have a team of junior-level network engineers that help you out.Continuous Integration Pipeline for Networking
Popular development methodologies like Continuous Integration are usually accompanied by some kind of automated workflow, where a developer checks in some source code, which kicks off automated review, testing, and deployment jobs. I believe the same workflows can be adopted by network engineers. Let’s say you are the Senior Network Engineer for your entire company, which boasts a huge network. You don’t have time to touch every device, so you have a team of junior-level network engineers that help you out.2014 Recap and 2015 Goals
When I started this post, the following mental image popped into my head, and I found it an apt description of 2014:
Doing the year-end recap post. 2014 was all: pic.twitter.com/aXtC2sjN8l
— Matt Oswalt (@Mierdin) December 30, 2014
Oh well…..let’s give this a try anyways.
2014 Recap
I’ll list off the goals I set in my post one year ago, and reflect upon how they were pursued in 2014:
Write Code – I knew when I made this goal that it was going to be hard to quantify; I just knew that writing code was something I had been passionate about. Though I have always maintained this skillset in some form or another, I knew I wanted more, and a year ago, I made the goal of increasing my involvement with software development.
In 2014 I made two more contributions to OpenDaylight, specifically pertaining to the Unit Testing and Integration Testing efforts of the OVSDB project (much thanks to Madhu Venugopal and Dave Tucker for their unrelenting patience while I stumbled through Junit fundamentals). I also did a lot of work on various projects, like Ansible and Schprokits extensions, as well as standalone projects, all of which are Continue reading
2014 Recap and 2015 Goals
When I started this post, the following mental image popped into my head, and I found it an apt description of 2014: Doing the year-end recap post. 2014 was all: pic.twitter.com/aXtC2sjN8l — Matt Oswalt (@Mierdin) December 30, 2014 Oh well…..let’s give this a try anyways. 2014 Recap I’ll list off the goals I set in my post one year ago, and reflect upon how they were pursued in 2014:2014 Recap and 2015 Goals
When I started this post, the following mental image popped into my head, and I found it an apt description of 2014: Doing the year-end recap post. 2014 was all: pic.twitter.com/aXtC2sjN8l — Matt Oswalt (@Mierdin) December 30, 2014 Oh well…..let’s give this a try anyways. 2014 Recap I’ll list off the goals I set in my post one year ago, and reflect upon how they were pursued in 2014:Automation Isn’t Just About Speed
In talking with folks about automation, the conversation almost always come around to “speed, speed, speed”. It’s easy to see why this is the first benefit that pops into mind – we’ve all spent gratuitous amounts of time doing repetitive, time-consuming tasks. It’s obvious why the prospect of automating these tasks and getting the time back is such an attractive one, even though most of us that have tried know that this is an absolute reality:
All kidding (but some…..seriousing?) aside, is speed the only benefit? In the realm of IT infrastructure, should we pursue automation only when this other piece of brilliance tells us it’s worth it?
Consider a small deployment of a few switches, a router, maybe some servers. Using manual methods to configure the relatively small amount of infrastructure isn’t really sexy, but it’s also not a huge time suck either. There’s just not a lot of infrastructure in these small deployments, and manual configuration doesn’t really impact the rate of change.
As a result, when discussing automation concepts with small, and even medium-size shops, I’m usually met with understandable skepticism. There’s a huge part of IT industry that assumes that all of our Continue reading