In one of the previous blog posts I described the playbook I use to collect SSH keys from network devices. As I use it quite often, it became tedious to write ansible-playbook path-to-playbook every time I wanted to run the collection process.
Ansible playbooks are YAML documents, and YAML documents use # to start comments, so I thought “what if I’d use a YAML comment to add shebang and turn my YAML document into a script”
TL&DR: It works. Now for the longer story…
Read more ...![]() |
Fig 1.1- Sample QSFP+ to SFP+ Connectivity |
There’s a lot of angst in the networking community about programming, SDN, automation, and what it means for networking careers. Plenty of people will tell you don’t worry about it, focus on the fundamentals, there’s plenty of work, you will be fine.
There is some truth in that. There are still lots of jobs in networking. People with solid skillsets should have no problem finding a good job.
But.
Don’t fool yourself. Things are changing.
I’ve seen some research from Gartner that indicates that organisations have been steadily decreasing their Network Operations teams over the last five years. They have also been reducing their Data Networks spend. (Sadly I don’t have publication rights for this research, so you’ll just have to take my word for it).
This is going to put pressure on networking engineers. Your role will be forced to change, if for no other reason than that you are going to have less budget, and fewer people to do the work.
So you’d better think about what that means for how your role might change.
Do you need to change jobs today? No. You don’t have to outrun the lion’ - but you do want to make Continue reading
Enterprises have seen automation success, but not enough to justify further investments.
In 2015, I was lucky enough to give an invited keynote at the 20th anniversary of the Ethicomp conference. I found that many of the issues up for discussion were ones in which the Internet Society also has a keen interest: for example — responsible innovation, the ethics of autonomous systems, and what do in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about pervasive state monitoring of the Internet. The conference has now produced a special edition of the Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society (JICES), specifically to report on a global set of surveys on the responses to Snowden. I was invited to write a paper for this special edition, to accompany the more traditional academic analyses of the surveys. My full article, “After Snowden – the evolving landscape of privacy and technology” is now available.
Writing the paper gave me a chance to step back and look at how the privacy advocacy community’s work has changed since Snowden – one of those rare moments in which the frog gets to hop out of the rapidly warming water and contemplate the saucepan. Here are a few of the trends I noted.
First, there has been Continue reading
With P4 developers can program the forwarding plane.
The startup emerged from stealth mode and closed a $9.3 million Series A funding round.
Dell's IoT Division will develop products and incorporate AI and machine learning.
Thanks to all who joined us for the Dell EMC Webinar: SDN: The Foundation for Software-Defined Storage. During the webinar Dell EMC discussed benefits of software defined networking for SDS solutions. After the webinar, we took questions from the audience. Read the full SDN: The Foundation for Software-Defined Storage Q&A below. Does big switch work with... Read more →