Describing Network Automation: Automate the Coffee
How to Describe Automation
Cisco Live, Milan, 2014, the place where everyone drinks a caffé! It was this year that Cisco’s DevNet began to grow and my passion for software, automation and networking was in for a roller-coaster ride. I watched various refreshment stands delivering coffee to the endless queues of guests and began to see something special in the thing that I originally called an espresso!
For so long we’ve used pipes and water to describe networking itself and for a long time I was hunting for a good way to talk about network automation. Turns out a caffé is a great way to describe automation and especially network automation. We also feel emotionally about it and understand the process used to have one placed in ones hand.
Annoyingly so, when automation is the topic up for conversation, we start with "Let’s automate the network" and not with what it is we want to automate. If you’ve raised your eyebrow, point in case. Even worse is when you’re asked for a use-case. The answer is nothing more than a reflection: "Tell me what your humans do". This isn’t a product, it’s the deep integration of human process and digitised Continue reading
What Came First: VLANs or VRFs?
One of my friends sent me this question:
Do you remember if VLANs came first or was it VRFs?
I remember VLANs using ISL (pre-802.1q encapsulation) on early Cisco Ethernet switches (mid 90s), the earliest reference I could track down on Wikipedia is from 1988.
Read more ...Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF)
I am currently studying to rectify my CCIE and it is at these times that I realise there is so much I have studied and learnt but forgotten. There are many cool things I come across that I think at the time are useful features that I need to remember, but unfortunately if you don’t have a real world use for them they are soon put to the back of the brain and over time forgotten. The same applies with taking for granted the way things work, be that ARP, DHCP or the process a switch or router goes through when moving traffic. I came across some of my old notes on CEF which I thought worth sharing.
Analyzing data with Pandas Package – An Intro to Pandas
Hi,
Title may sound extremely Hitech for someone who never heard about pandas ;), but what I have written is a simple hello world equivalent program, which I guess should start to help my day to day analysis, as always the aim is to let anyone know the advantage of something than hammering with some theory !
I was going through various python packages available to analyze data and came across pandas package along with numpy package. These are not there by default in Python installation and if you like them to be on your system, you should install them via PIP, I have them installed already hence you can see that it complains in the below image.
Note :
Understand why you need to have something like Pandas / Numpy even if you have never heard of them, that’s the point of this tiny program
Imagine, how you would solve this if you never knew Pandas/Numpy and you will see the power of these
packages, again you don’t have to know these to realize their full power.
Now coming to the requirement, here is a sample spreadsheet that I have below, its a CSV Sheet which contains certain Continue reading
OPL2 Audio Board: an AdLib sound card for Arduino
In a previous article, I presented the OPL2LPT, a sound card for the parallel port featuring a Yamaha YM3812 chip, also known as OPL2—the chip of the AdLib sound card. The OPL2 Audio Board for Arduino is another indie sound card using this chip. However, instead of relying on a parallel port, it uses a serial interface, which can be drived from an Arduino board or a Raspberry Pi. While the OPL2LPT targets retrogamers with real hardware, the OPL2 Audio Board cannot be used in the same way. Nonetheless, it can also be operated from ScummVM and DOSBox!
Unboxing?
The OPL2 Audio Board can be purchased on Tindie, either as a kit or fully assembled. I have paired it with a cheap clone of the Arduino Nano. A library to drive the board is available on GitHub, along with some examples.
One of them is DemoTune.ino. It plays a short tune
on three channels. It can be compiled and uploaded to the Arduino with
PlatformIO—installable with pip install platformio—using the
following command:1
$ platformio ci \ --board nanoatmega328 \ --lib ../.. Continue reading
Found on the Web: Your CLI Should Be a Server
Guess what I found: a software developer trying to persuade his peers that they need an API version of their CLI tool. Yes, I checked and it’s still 2018, and the year CLI dies seems to be a bit further out than some people thought.
I’d guess this proves that the rest of the world is not so far ahead of us lowly network engineers as blabbering pundits and vendor marketers would have us believe.
Needless to say, the engineers architecting Junos knew this almost 20 years ago.
Here’s how NetQ injects S.O.U.L into your network
Our passion at Cumulus is all around networking with S.O.U.L. Simple. Open. Untethered. Linux. These tenants come together to help organizations build a web-scale, modern, automated network that is necessary for the digital age. So it’s no surprise that Cumulus NetQ and networking with S.O.U.L go hand-in-hand. Let’s take a closer look at how Cumulus NetQ builds on these tenants of S.O.U.L.
Simple
NetQ is all about simplifying network operations. The deep visibility achieved through Cumulus NetQ is extremely powerful from a network validation, management and troubleshooting standpoint.
- Simplifying rollout validation: Cumulus NetQ helps reassure networking teams that what they are rolling into production will actually work. Its validation system lets users check their configuration during production rollout. And with NetQ’s powerful tracing capability, you can validate that you have the true end-to-end connectivity you expected. Tracing saves a huge amount of time as you work to ensure that the path of the packet is working as expected. Without Tracing, you have to go box-by-box and validate all the way up and down the stack. Instead, with NetQ, you can see the pathways the packets flow. This network validation works down Continue reading
Ericsson Hired 500 Engineers for 5G
CEO Borje Ekholm’s cost-cutting measures seem to be working. In the first quarter, the company reined in its losses and improved its gross margin.
Micro-segmentation Starter Kit
Micro-segmentation Starter Kit Traditional security solutions are designed to protect the perimeter. As applications and data are becoming increasingly distributed, they are often spanning not only multiple sites, but also multiple clouds. This is making it harder to identify where the perimeter actually is in order to secure it. But even if the perimeter can... Read more →
Micro-segmentation Starter Kit
Traditional security solutions are designed to protect the perimeter. As applications and data are becoming increasingly distributed, they are often spanning not only multiple sites, but also multiple clouds. This is making it harder to identify where the perimeter actually is in order to secure it. But even if the perimeter can be reliably identified, securing it alone is not enough. The east-west traffic inside of the environment must be secured as well. VMware NSX makes security an intrinsic part of the infrastructure that applications and data live on, rather than a bolted-on afterthought; security is built in Day 0.
VMware created a Micro-segmentation Starter Kit to help you get started with securing your network from Planning to Enforcement to Troubleshooting. Each kit includes 6 CPUs of both NSX ADV and vRealize Network Insight ADV at 25% off the global list price.
- Plan: Take the manual and subjective process out of determining what security policies to put in place and where. vRealize Network Insight provides a comprehensive net flow assessment and analysis to model and recommend security groups and firewall rules across your physical, virtual, and cloud environments.
- Enforce: Micro-segmentation, the implementation of security policy Continue reading
Link Propagation 115
Welcome to Link Propagation, a Packet Pushers newsletter. Link Propagation is included in your free membership. Each week we scour the InterWebs to find the most relevant practitioner blog posts, tech news, and product announcements. We drink from the fire hose so you can sip from a coffee cup. Blogs On Old Configs and Automation […]We’ve Added a New Serverless Computing Course to Our Video Library!
Tired of creating and maintaining server instances for every app, language, and framework you use? Want to focus on pure function code, instead of wasting time on server management? Learn how to run your functions as a service, in a DevOps-free environment, with our Introduction to Serverless Computing.
In This Course You’ll Learn:
- What Serverless Computing is, and how it differs from conventional server hosting
- How to save on operational costs by reducing DevOps, and only paying when your functions are active
- Ways to easily run functions as microservices, which automatically scale as load increases
- How to create serverless functions in AWS Lambda, Azure functions, Google Cloud Functions, and
Algorithmia
About The Instructor:
Jon Peck is a full-stack developer, consultant, teacher, and startup enthusiast. With a Computer Science degree from Cornell University and two decades of industry experience, he now focuses on bringing scalable, discoverable, and secure machine-learning microservices to developers across a wide variety of platforms.
Speaker (conferences): DeveloperWeek, SeattleJS, Global AI Conf, AI Next, Nordic APIs, DeveloperWeek, ODSC
Speaker (tech schools): Galvanize, CodeFellows, Metis, Epicodus, Alchemy
Organizer: Seattle Building Intelligent Applications Meetup
Educator: Cascadia College, Seattle C&W, independent instruction
Lead Developer: Empower Engine, Giftstarter, Mass General Hospital, Continue reading
Call for Participation – ICANN DNSSEC Workshop at ICANN62, Panama City
The DNSSEC Deployment Initiative and the Internet Society Deploy360 Programme, in cooperation with the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC), are planning a DNSSEC Workshop during the ICANN62 meeting held from 25-28 June 2018 in Panama City, Panama.
If you are interested in participating, please send a brief (1-2 sentence) description of your proposed presentation to [email protected] by Friday, 4 May 2018
The DNSSEC Workshop has been a part of ICANN meetings for several years and has provided a forum for both experienced and new people to meet, present and discuss current and future DNSSEC deployments. For reference, the most recent session was held at the ICANN Community Forum in San Juan, Puerto Rico on 14 March 2018. The presentations and transcripts are available at:
- Part 1: https://61.schedule.icann.org/meetings/647563
- Part 2: https://61.schedule.icann.org/meetings/647564
- Part 3: https://61.schedule.icann.org/meetings/647565
As this is the shorter “Policy Forum” format for ICANN meetings, the DNSSEC Workshop Program Committee is developing a 3-hour program. Proposals will be considered for the following topic areas and included if space permits. In addition, we welcome suggestions for additional topics either for inclusion in the ICANN62 workshop, or for consideration for Continue reading
Show 386: Building Trusted Network Infrastructure With IOS XR (Sponsored)
If you were a black hat hacker considering targets of opportunity, a service provider network might seem very interesting. The infrastructure is critical for commerce and governmental operations. The data carried is potentially interesting and valuable. And indeed, we know that carrier networks are highly targeted.
In this sponsored show with Cisco, we discuss how to think deeply about security on mission critical networks and protecting routers and other devices not behind a firewall.
That means making certain that the network operating system is running exactly the code we think it is. That the devices on the network are devices we know and can trust. And then once we ve secured the network, how we can use it as a platform to deliver additional security services.
Our guests are Dan Backman and Kaarthik Sivakumar of Cisco. Dan is a Technical Marketing Engineer on the Service Provider team, and Kaarthik is a Security Architect for IOS XR Engineering.
We discuss the general risks service providers face and why trusted network devices are essential. Then we dive into technical details on how Cisco protects IOS XR, including the Trust Anchor Module, how to audit trusted networks, and how to build Continue reading
If 5G Is Coming, Why Are Operators Touting 4G Upgrades?
Many of the big benefits of 5G, such as low latency and higher speed broadband, may not be that noticeable to consumers, analysts say.
Big Switch Networks Q&A: Next-Gen Networking for Hybrid and Multi-Cloud
Thanks to all who joined us for the Big Switch Networks 2018 Next-Gen Data Center Networking Report Webinar: Next-Gen Networking for Hybrid and Multi-Cloud.
Pivotal Raises $555 Million, Makes New York Stock Exchange Debut
It claims 50 of the Fortune 500 companies use Pivotal Cloud Foundry software.