Network Automation or SDN?
With all of the activity going on in the networking industry right now, and all of the new terminology (as well as old re-invented terminology), it’s quite easy to get messages mixed up. After all, there’s no centralized dictionary for all of this stuff. I’d like to address something that has bugged me for a while. I’ve now heard from quite a few folks that SDN to them means the ability to automate network tasks.Glue Networks at ONUG 2014
Glue Networks had a presence at the last ONUG, where Tom Hollingworth was able to get an overview from Glue’s founder, Jeff Gray:
As you can see, Glue’s product targets the WAN, and specifically addresses the difficult provisioning tasks that most shops do manually. These include but are not limited to:
- Provisioning (and deprovisioning) of QoS resources for various applications like SAP and Lync based off of need and time of day.
- Bringing up remote sites in a standardized, cookie-cutter manner
- Creating and changing PfR (performance routing) configurations on the WAN.
Jeff visited our Tech Field Day round table at ONUG 2014 and gave us a more detailed introduction to the product:
First, some things I think this product does (or will do) well. The configuration of PfR or QoS en masse is a low-hanging use case I’ve mentioned before and even if I can do it using scripts today, having a single tool that does it in a simple way will provide value. These specific configurations are difficult and error-prone, so anything that tackles this is going to be useful.
I also did enjoy hearing about the options for getting the config onto the device. Jeff listed three options for Continue reading
Glue Networks at ONUG 2014
Glue Networks had a presence at the last ONUG, where Tom Hollingworth was able to get an overview from Glue’s founder, Jeff Gray: As you can see, Glue’s product targets the WAN, and specifically addresses the difficult provisioning tasks that most shops do manually. These include but are not limited to: Provisioning (and deprovisioning) of QoS resources for various applications like SAP and Lync based off of need and time of day.Glue Networks at ONUG 2014
Glue Networks had a presence at the last ONUG, where Tom Hollingworth was able to get an overview from Glue’s founder, Jeff Gray: As you can see, Glue’s product targets the WAN, and specifically addresses the difficult provisioning tasks that most shops do manually. These include but are not limited to: Provisioning (and deprovisioning) of QoS resources for various applications like SAP and Lync based off of need and time of day.The Evolution of Network Programmability
This post is the “text” version of a talk I gave at Cisco Live US 2014 titled “SDN: People, Process, and Evolution“. While there is certainly some technical details involved here, this topic is really more of a philosophical one, and it is very near and dear to my heart as I talk with more folks about how networking is going to evolve in the years to come.
The Problem with Networking
Most of my readers would consider themselves network engineers – folks that live and breathe networking and everything that’s required to build them. Folks like you and I don’t really need to hear what’s wrong with networking, as we live it every day. However, for the sake of others that may be reading, let me provide a little context here.
Nearly everyone in the industry is hearing about how “networking is slow” with respect to provisioning time. We hear about how virtual machines can be instantiated in a few seconds (hell, application containers can be spun up in less than a second!) yet the really important network stuff like firewall or load balancer policies take forever. They’re not wrong – networking has never really been tightly Continue reading
Pylint Errors – Final Newline Missing
I recently ran into a slew of errors when using Pylint - a sort of “quality checker” for your Python code. If you haven’t used it yourself, I highly recommend you check it out – it WILL make you a better Python coder.(Thanks to Matt Stone for introducing me!)
This particular error is common if you forget to append a newline character to the end of your python script, but I was getting one for every single line of code in my program.
khalis:library Mierdin$ pylint ucs_getwwpns.py No config file found, using default configuration C: 1, 0: Final newline missing (missing-final-newline) C: 2, 0: Final newline missing (missing-final-newline) C: 3, 0: Final newline missing (missing-final-newline) C: 4, 0: Final newline missing (missing-final-newline) C: 5, 0: Final newline missing (missing-final-newline) C: 6, 0: Final newline missing (missing-final-newline) C: 7, 0: Final newline missing (missing-final-newline)
You get the idea.
My code clearly has a newline character of some kind at the end, but perhaps it’s just not the right one. We need to see what newline character our editor is actually appending to the end of our lines.
For this, we’ll use the (*nix) “od” command, which dumps files Continue reading
Pylint Errors – Final Newline Missing
I recently ran into a slew of errors when using Pylint - a sort of “quality checker” for your Python code. If you haven’t used it yourself, I highly recommend you check it out - it WILL make you a better Python coder.(Thanks to Matt Stone for introducing me!) This particular error is common if you forget to append a newline character to the end of your python script, but I was getting one for every single line of code in my program.The Evolution of Network Programmability
This post is the “text” version of a talk I gave at Cisco Live US 2014 titled “SDN: People, Process, and Evolution”. While there is certainly some technical details involved here, this topic is really more of a philosophical one, and it is very near and dear to my heart as I talk with more folks about how networking is going to evolve in the years to come. The Problem with Networking Most of my readers would consider themselves network engineers - folks that live and breathe networking and everything that’s required to build them.Pylint Errors – Final Newline Missing
I recently ran into a slew of errors when using Pylint - a sort of “quality checker” for your Python code. If you haven’t used it yourself, I highly recommend you check it out - it WILL make you a better Python coder.(Thanks to Matt Stone for introducing me!) This particular error is common if you forget to append a newline character to the end of your python script, but I was getting one for every single line of code in my program.The Evolution of Network Programmability
This post is the “text” version of a talk I gave at Cisco Live US 2014 titled “SDN: People, Process, and Evolution”. While there is certainly some technical details involved here, this topic is really more of a philosophical one, and it is very near and dear to my heart as I talk with more folks about how networking is going to evolve in the years to come. The Problem with Networking Most of my readers would consider themselves network engineers - folks that live and breathe networking and everything that’s required to build them.Pylint Errors – Final Newline Missing
I recently ran into a slew of errors when using Pylint - a sort of “quality checker” for your Python code. If you haven’t used it yourself, I highly recommend you check it out - it WILL make you a better Python coder.(Thanks to Matt Stone for introducing me!) This particular error is common if you forget to append a newline character to the end of your python script, but I was getting one for every single line of code in my program.Recap of ONUG Conference 2014
Last week I attended the Open Networking User Group conference. My main reason for attending was to participate in three roundtable discussions put on by Tech Field Day. These sessions were recorded, and I’ll be following up with specific thoughts on each session in later blog posts.
These round-tables only occupied a portion of the two-day conference, so I spent the remainder of the time speaking with some of the vendors and sitting in a few of the sessions.
Sessions
I wasn’t permitted to attend a large chunk of ONUG sessions, and I’ll get to that in the next paragraph. I did manage to see a good friend Kyle Mestery present on two of my favorite topics – OpenDaylight and OpenStack. The sessions at ONUG were not recorded, but I’ll again direct you to this video for a reasonably close approximation:
Kyle is the embodiment of the passion and energy found in great communities like OpenStack and OpenDaylight, and if you ever have the opportunity to hear him present, I encourage you to take it.
I also finally got to meet Brad Hedlund in meatspace:
@mestery and @bradhedlund at #ONUG workshop. pic.twitter.com/t775QPavTw
— Gideon Tam (@mfmahler) May Continue reading
Recap of ONUG Conference 2014
Last week I attended the Open Networking User Group conference. My main reason for attending was to participate in three roundtable discussions put on by Tech Field Day. These sessions were recorded, and I’ll be following up with specific thoughts on each session in later blog posts. These round-tables only occupied a portion of the two-day conference, so I spent the remainder of the time speaking with some of the vendors and sitting in a few of the sessions.Recap of ONUG Conference 2014
Last week I attended the Open Networking User Group conference. My main reason for attending was to participate in three roundtable discussions put on by Tech Field Day. These sessions were recorded, and I’ll be following up with specific thoughts on each session in later blog posts. These round-tables only occupied a portion of the two-day conference, so I spent the remainder of the time speaking with some of the vendors and sitting in a few of the sessions.Open Networking User Group Conference 2014
Today I’m off to NYC for Open Networking User Group 2014. Tech Field Day was at the last ONUG back in October, 2013 and they were kind enough to invite me out to this one. Here’s a quick intro video of ONUG for those that aren’t aware of it – Tom Hollingsworth interviews ONUG creator Nick Lippis:
We have a good group of vendors lined up for similar round-table discussions. I happen to LOVE this format of conversation, especially with the smart folks we’ve seen from vendors like Nuage and Cumulus. I am really looking forward to sitting down and talking tech.
My original outsider’s perspective was that ONUG in general (not counting nerdy Tech Field Day round table discussions) wasn’t really aimed towards the technical folks, but rather at executives, and at other IT decision makers looking for additional choices in networking infrastructure. While there’s certainly a lot of that, I’d like to call out a few sessions/events that really interest the nerd in me (as if I’m not 100% nerd).
Back in February, I had the pleasure of sitting in Kyle Mestery’s presentation on integration with OpenDaylight and OpenStack at the OpenDaylight Summit:
Aside from a few Continue reading
Open Networking User Group Conference 2014
Today I’m off to NYC for Open Networking User Group 2014. Tech Field Day was at the last ONUG back in October, 2013 and they were kind enough to invite me out to this one. Here’s a quick intro video of ONUG for those that aren’t aware of it - Tom Hollingsworth interviews ONUG creator Nick Lippis: We have a good group of vendors lined up for similar round-table discussions.Open Networking User Group Conference 2014
Today I’m off to NYC for Open Networking User Group 2014. Tech Field Day was at the last ONUG back in October, 2013 and they were kind enough to invite me out to this one. Here’s a quick intro video of ONUG for those that aren’t aware of it - Tom Hollingsworth interviews ONUG creator Nick Lippis: We have a good group of vendors lined up for similar round-table discussions.Networking and the Consumption Model
I’ve talked with all kinds of IT professionals in the past year or so about building an organization of various IT disciplines that are truly service-oriented towards each other and to the other parts of the business. While I will never claim to be an expert in business development and will always claim allegiance to the nerdy technical bits, it’s easy to see the value in such an organizational model, and very interesting to explore the changes that technical people can make to push for such an approach. Let’s bring this down to earth a bit.
Compute
Server Virtualization is old news now, so lets go back about 15 years before it was even really on the scene. You’ve heard the arguments for server virtualization, and the description of this “ancient age” – servers were provisioned on a 1:1 basis with applications, they took weeks to provision or replace, and the capex/opex costs were way too high because on the one hand, the sheer amount of hardware necessary to run your apps was outrageously expensive, and on the other hand, the power and cooling required to constantly run them was no better.
Lets think about the kind of resources Continue reading