Network automation as network architecture
I spent a very large part of my professional life as a network engineer working on automation. A journey that started back in 1996 when I and a few colleagues engineered Bloomberg’s first global IP WAN. That WAN evolved into the most recognized (and agile) WAN in the financial services industry. And that automation which started small, over the years evolved into a very lean and flexible model-based provisioning library, with the various programs (provisioning, health-checking, discovery, etc) that were built on top. The automation library drove a high function multi-service network with less than 15K of OO code, and with support for 6+ different NOS and 100+ different unique packet forwarding FRUs. It was quite unique in that I have yet to see some of its core concepts repeated elsewhere.Over the thousands of hours I spent evolving and fine tuning that network automation engine, I’ve learned quite a lot along the way. I hope to write about some of my high level learnings over the next year. In this blog entry, I want to share my perspective on the foundational basis of any proper network automation — this is network Continue reading
BiB 067: Custom APIs For Business Logic With BlueCat Gateway
BlueCat Networks offers a free add-on product to their DDI (DNS, DHCP, IPAM) product called Gateway. Gateway is a platform customers can use to create their own custom APIs that make sense for their business. Put another way, Gateway provides a REST API endpoint for other applications within the business to talk to. That makes for some interesting workflow capabilities.
The post BiB 067: Custom APIs For Business Logic With BlueCat Gateway appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Ampere Targets Hyperscalers, Challenges Intel With Arm-Based Chips
The year-old startup, founded by former Intel president Renee James, is also partnering with Packet, Cloudflare, and other companies on 5G and edge computing proof of concepts.
SDxCentral’s Weekly Roundup — December 7, 2018
Sprint names its first 5G markets for 2019; Telco Systems and Arm work on uCPE; and IBM sells software assets to HCL Technologies for $1.8 billion.
AT&T Taps Synergies Between Its 5G and FirstNet Build-Outs
Both FirstNet and 5G require the company to "touch the towers," so a lot of the network upgrades help both initiatives.
Cumulus Linux in the enterprise campus.
As most know, Cumulus Linux was originally intended for data center switching and routing but over the years, our customer base has requested that we expand into the enterprise campus feature set too. Slowly, we’ve done just that.
With this expansion though, there are a few items that IT managers tend to take for granted in an all Cisco environment that may need some extra attention when using Cumulus Linux as a campus switch. This is especially the case when it comes to IEEE 802.1x, desk phones, etc.
Most of the phones we inter-operate with have been of the Cisco variety and quite often, those phones are connected to Cisco switches. There are a few tweaks from the default Cumulus settings that need to be called out in this environment and we’ll now go over what those are and how you can tweek them.
Cisco IP Phones TLV change
Cisco IP phones may revert to a different VLAN after initial negotiation. One of our enterprise customers found that according to a Cisco tech note on LLDP-MED and CDP, CDP should be disabled on non-Cisco switches connecting to Cisco phones.
To eliminate this behavior, make the following adjustment to the Continue reading
How to Keep Your Staff Current on Emerging Network Technologies
Preparing your network team to get the most out of new tools and services requires patience and understanding. Here's how to make training and education pay off for your organization.
Weekly Show 419: Benchmarking Public Cloud Network Performance With ThousandEyes (Sponsored)
You need to know a cloud provider's network performance before you spin up workloads because the end user impact is measurable. On today's Weekly Show, sponsor ThousandEyes breaks down latency, jitter, and performance numbers for AWS, Azure, and GCP.
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Short Take – Recent Changes In LSR Protocols
In this Network Collective Short Take Russ White shares some recent changes being made in link-state routing protocols.
Russ White
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Future Thinking: Orla Lynskey on Data in the Age of Consolidation
Last year, the Internet Society unveiled the 2017 Global Internet Report: Paths to Our Digital Future. The interactive report identifies the drivers affecting tomorrow’s Internet and their impact on Media & Society, Digital Divides, and Personal Rights & Freedoms. We interviewed Orla Lynskey to hear her perspective on the forces shaping the Internet’s future.
Orla Lynskey is an associate professor of law at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her primary area of research interest is European Union data protection law. Her monograph, The Foundations of EU Data Protection Law (Oxford University Press, 2015), explores the potential and limits of individual control over personal data, or “informational self-determination’” in the data protection framework. More recently, her work has focused on collective approaches to data protection rights and mechanisms to counterbalance asymmetries of power in the online environment. Lynskey is an editor of International Data Privacy Law and the Modern Law Review and is a member of the EU Commission’s multistakeholder expert group on GDPR. She holds an LLB from Trinity College, Dublin, an LLM from the College of Europe (Bruges) and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Before entering academia, she worked as a competition lawyer in Brussels Continue reading
Hair-pining in a Wide Area Network – Simple Design Scenario
In this post we will discuss how hair-pining is occurring in some topologies in the Enterprise branch sites, when connecting to 2 Service Providers, while the 2 Service Providers are not directly connected to each other and don’t have any MPLS/VPN Inter-AS Option (A,B,C,..) with each other. From the customer side, some of the remote …
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The post Hair-pining in a Wide Area Network – Simple Design Scenario appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.
It’s The Change Freeze Season
Everyone’s favorite time of the year is almost here! Is it because it’s the holiday season? Perhaps it’s the magic that happens at the end of the year? Or maybe, it’s because there’s an even better reason to get excited!
Change Freeze Season!
That’s right. Some of you reading this started jumping up and down like Buddy the Elf at the thought of having a change freeze. There’s something truly magical about laying down the law about not touching anything in the system until after the end-of-year reports are run and certified. For some, this means a total freeze of non-critical changes from the first of December all the way through the New Year until maybe even February. That’s a long time to have a frozen network? But why?
The Cold Shoulder
Change freezes are an easy thing to explain to the new admins. You simply don’t touch anything in the network during the freeze unless it’s broken. No tweaking. No experimenting. No improvements. Just critical break/fix changes only. There had better be a ticket. There should be someone yelling that something’s not right. Otherwise you’re in for it.
There are a ton of reasons for this. The first is Continue reading
Managing a Chaotic Heterogeneous Network? You’re Not Alone
Today’s reality is multi-vendor, hybrid environments that are hard to manage and secure. Those who can overcome these challenges can deliver greater performance and enhanced functionality for end users.
Using Virtual Labs When Developing Network Automation Solutions
One of the fundamentals I always emphasize in introductory parts of my network automation workshops and online courses is the fact that we’re about to develop software that will control the most-mission-critical part of IT infrastructure, and should therefore use software development methodologies like version control, testing…
However, there’s a “small” glitch. While it’s perfectly possible to test most software in some virtual environment you can spin up on-the-fly using Vagrant, Docker, Jenkins, Travis, or some other CI/CD tool, testing a network automation solution requires access to network devices.
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