Datanauts 132: Unit Testing For Fun And Profit
While performing a routine sensor sweep of the Gargleblaster nebula, the crew of the Datanauts starship noticed that many of the tasks are manual in nature and could, with a little effort, be automated with some scripting.
However, every time we moved on from one part of the nebula to another, a different error would crop up with the script s code. Isn t there some way that we can automatically test our code to make sure that more time is spent drinking a frothy ale instead of all this debugging?
On today’s episode with talk with Adam Bertram, a Microsoft MVP and author of The Pester Book.
He is currently a Senior Systems Automation Engineer working with PowerShell, Desired State Configuration, and various other DevOps tools to coordinate reliable software deployments for a biotech company. You can find his work at adamtheautomator.com.
We start by defining a unit test for scripts, and how unit testing differs from integration, functional, regression tests, and others.
Then we dive into why you’d want to test your scripts (testing isn’t just for developers!), and how to create these tests.
We also talk about the notion of test-driven development, and dive Continue reading
The State of Broadband Connectivity in Canada’s Rural and Remote Regions
In April, the Canadian Standing Committee on Industry, Science, and Technology presented the “Broadband Connectivity in Rural Canada: Overcoming the Digital Divide” to the House of Commons in order to make public their findings and recommendations from a study on broadband connectivity. (In May 2016, the committee adopted a motion to do a study on broadband connectivity, with the primary purpose of developing a plan to improve rural broadband and demonstrate the Internet’s effect on rural economies.) To create the report, the committee used information and conversations from seven meetings, as well as 50 oral and written submissions. Participants in this process represented businesses, small and large service providers, experts, and on-the-ground rural providers. The Internet Society applauds the committee’s use of a consultative process and its effort to provide concrete recommendations to the House of Commons to connect Canada’s rural and remote citizens.
In 2016, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications (CRTC) declared Internet access an essential service and set the minimum performance standard at 50 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload. At the same time, it estimated that it will take between 10 and 15 years for the remaining 18% of Canadians to reach those Continue reading
Update: Automatic EVPN Route Targets in EBGP Environments
After I posted the EVPN Route Target Considerations section of BGP in Data Center Fabrics document Lukas Krattiger pointed out another option available with Cisco Nexus-OS: it can rewrite ASN portion of EVPN Route Target in incoming EBGP updates. Updated version of the affected section is already online.
Andromeda: performance, isolation, and velocity at scale in cloud network virtualization
Andromeda: performance, isolation, and velocity at scale in cloud network virtualization Dalton et al., NSDI’18
Yesterday we took a look at the Microsoft Azure networking stack, today it’s the turn of the Google Cloud Platform. (It’s a very handy coincidence to have two such experience and system design report papers appearing side by side so that we can compare). Andromeda has similar design goals to AccelNet: performance close to hardware, serviceability, and the flexibility and velocity of a software-based architecture. The Google team solve those challenges in a very different way though, being prepared to make use of host cores (which you’ll recall the Azure team wanted to avoid).
We opted for a high-performance software-based architecture instead of a hardware-only solution like SR-IOV because software enables flexible, high-velocity feature deployment… Andromeda consumes a few percent of the CPU and memory on-host. One physical CPU core is reserved for the Andromeda dataplane… In the future, we plan to increase the dataplane CPU reservation to two physical cores on newer hosts with faster physical NICs and more CPU cores in order to improve VM network throughput.
High-level design
Both the control plane and data plane use a hierarchical structure. The control Continue reading
Dell’s Jeff Clark Debuts Super-Fast, Super-Smart Storage at Dell Technologies World
The new NVMe-based storage array has built-in machine learning that uses predictive analytics and pattern recognition to improve storage performance.
Gluware Q&A: Software Enable your Brownfield Network
Thanks to all who joined us for the Gluware DemoFriday: Software Enable your Brownfield Network – Automate Multi-Vendor QoS on Routers and NAC.
Martin Casado on SDN, IBN, and the API Economy
At Interop ITX, SDN pioneer talks about how software-defined networking has influenced the industry and other trends.
Cisco Tucks Kubernetes Support Into CloudCenter, AppDynamics
Enterprises are balking at moving Kubernetes into production environments because of too many choices. It "makes them basically an open source aggregator."
OPNFV’s 6th Release Brings Testing Capabilities That Orange Is Already Using
ONAP had started to run tests for various components it was developing. But it wanted to store test results and run tests more often. Meanwhile, OPNFV had already solved that problem.
Paysafe Finds Solace in Full Mesh Connectivity From Cato SD-WAN
The online payments company said it is paying half of what it paid to have six sites outfitted with MPLS to deploy Cato SD-WAN on 14 sites at a higher bandwidth.
Red Hat Frames CoreOS’ Picture of Managing Kubernetes Native Apps
The open source Operator Framework moves closer to automating the deployment and management of Kubernetes clusters.
Is vRAN a Natural Fit For a Linux Foundation Project?
Groups like the ORAN Forum, Cisco’s Open vRAN initiative, and TIP’s OpenRAN Group are all working to virtualize the RAN. The Linux Foundation has kept its distance, so far.