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Network Engineer Persona: Part Three

Part three! Let’s get straight to business and carry on where we left off from part two.

Key Skill One

Thinking about automation in an agnostic way is your first footstep. Automation is about data flowing through building blocks that do things and decision points, allow you when to do things.

Removing CLI and replacing it with an abstraction layer isn’t much of a win. For instance, I regularly talk about the process of creating a VLAN and applying it to an Ethernet switch-port on a tagged interface. This somewhat simple ‘workflow’ creates more conversational friction than imagine-able. Let’s work through it.

Task: Create a VLAN
This task requires domain-specific parameters to a VLAN. These are: ‘VLAN_Number’ and ‘VLAN_Description’.

Task: Apply VLAN to Switchport
This task requires domain-specific parameters to a switchport. These are: ‘Port_Name’ and ‘VLAN_Number’.

Note how the inputs flow through the actions within the workflow?

The green arrows descending illustrate the ‘success transition path’ for each action component.

So, what about these questions?
1. Is the VLAN in use?

We can be more specific here, but it adds complications to the answer. Version two is: “Is the VLAN in use in the network zone that the device Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Designing a content delivery strategy

Technologies like content delivery networks, cloud compute and storage, container schedulers, load balancers, web application firewalls, DDoS mitigation services and many more make up the building blocks that serve the online applications of organizations today. But the entry point to every one of those applications is an often-ignored bit of infrastructure: DNS. As the internet has mushroomed in size and traffic, DNS has adapted to become a critical factor in application delivery. Organizations that rely on content delivery networks (CDNs) can work with their DNS provider(s) to create a CDN strategy that best serves them and their customers.CDN: the what and the why A CDN’s job is what it sounds like: deliver content such as images, video, html files and javascript from a network of distributed systems to end-users. CDNs have been around for about as long as Managed DNS companies. Akamai is usually considered the first serious CDN player, and the company rose to prominence during the first dot-com boom. Generally, CDNs deliver content over HTTP or HTTPS, the web protocols, although there are occasionally use cases like video delivery where other protocols come into play.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Designing a content delivery strategy

Technologies like content delivery networks, cloud compute and storage, container schedulers, load balancers, web application firewalls, DDoS mitigation services and many more make up the building blocks that serve the online applications of organizations today. But the entry point to every one of those applications is an often-ignored bit of infrastructure: DNS. As the internet has mushroomed in size and traffic, DNS has adapted to become a critical factor in application delivery. Organizations that rely on content delivery networks (CDNs) can work with their DNS provider(s) to create a CDN strategy that best serves them and their customers.CDN: the what and the why A CDN’s job is what it sounds like: deliver content such as images, video, html files and javascript from a network of distributed systems to end-users. CDNs have been around for about as long as Managed DNS companies. Akamai is usually considered the first serious CDN player, and the company rose to prominence during the first dot-com boom. Generally, CDNs deliver content over HTTP or HTTPS, the web protocols, although there are occasionally use cases like video delivery where other protocols come into play.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please Continue reading

More Accurate IT Acronyms

IT is flooded with acronyms. It takes a third of our working life to figure out what they all mean. Protocols aren’t any easier to figure out if it’s just a string of three or four letters that look vaguely like a word. Which, by the way, you should never pronounce.

But what if the acronyms of our favorite protocols didn’t describe what the designers wanted but instead described what they actually do?

  • Sporadic Network Mangling Protocol

  • Obscurity Sends Packets Flying

  • Expensive Invention Gets Routers Puzzled

  • Vexing Router Firmware

  • Really Intensive Protocol

  • Someone Doesn’t Worry About Networking

  • Somewhat Quixotic Language

  • Blame It oN DNS

  • Cisco’s Universal Call Misdirector

  • Some Mail’s Thrown Places

  • Mangles Packets, Looks Silly

  • Amazingly Convoluted Lists

  • ImProperly SECured

  • May Push Lingering Sanity To Expire

Are there any other ones you can think of? Leave it in the comments.


Forthcoming: Computer Networking Problems and Solutions

The new book should be out around the 29th of December, give or take a few days. For readers interested in what Ethan and I (and Ryan, and Pete Welcher, and Jordan Martin, and Nick Russo, and… the entire list is in the front matter), the general idea is essentially grounded in RFC1925, rule 11. There is really only a moderately sized set of problems computer system needs to solve in order to carry data from one application to another. For instance, in order to transport data across a network, you need to somehow format the data so everyone can agree on how to write and read it, ensure the data is carried without errors, ensure neither the sender nor the receiver overrun or underrun one another, and find some way to allow multiple applications (hosts, etc.), to talk over the same media. These four problems have somewhat proper names, of course: marshaling, which involves dictionaries and grammars; error control; flow control; and multiplexing. So the first step in understanding network engineering is to figure out what the problems are, and how to break them apart.

Once you understand the problems, then you can start thinking about solutions. As Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Are you choosing to lose in a data-driven world?

The Economist has a series of articles right now on the impact of data on business, and pointing out how new data driven companies are rapidly not simply transforming sectors but eliminating competitors. Their argument is that these internet giants are going to require regulators to look at new ways to avoid monopolies and anti-competitive practices. It describes data as a more valuable resource than oil in the modern world.When we look at firms like Amazon, Lyft, Google and what they have done to retail, taxi firms and advertising it is hard to understate just what a dramatic impact these firms have had. Yet fifteen years ago the idea that Amazon would be one of the world’s largest data center service providers would have seemed ridiculous, Amazon are a retailer, what has that to do with data centers? Google are a search engine with some adverts, what have they to do with mobile phones? Apple make some shiny laptops and computers, but mobile phones and speech recognition? Not their thing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

History Of Networking – Radia Perlman – Spanning Tree

Radia Perlman joins Network Collective to talk about the history of the Spanning Tree Protocol. Love it or hate it, it’s been a fundamental part of every Ethernet network for the past 30 years and isn’t likely to fade away any time soon.

Radia Perlman
Guest
Jordan Martin
Host
Donald Sharp
Host
Russ White
Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post History Of Networking – Radia Perlman – Spanning Tree appeared first on Network Collective.

History Of Networking – Radia Perlman – Spanning Tree

Radia Perlman joins Network Collective to talk about the history of the Spanning Tree Protocol. Love it or hate it, it’s been a fundamental part of every Ethernet network for the past 30 years and isn’t likely to fade away any time soon.

Radia Perlman
Guest
Jordan Martin
Host
Donald Sharp
Host
Russ White
Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post History Of Networking – Radia Perlman – Spanning Tree appeared first on Network Collective.

Worth Reading: GDPR and Personal Data

With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) becoming effective May 25, 2018, organizations (or rather, organisations) seem to be stressing a bit. Most we speak with are asking, “where do we even start?” or “what is included as personal data under the GDPR?” It is safe to say that these are exactly the questions organizations should be asking, but to know where to start, organizations first need to understand how the GDPR applies to their organization within this new definition for personal data. Without first understanding what to look for, an organization cannot begin to perform data discovery and data mapping exercises, review data management practices and prepare the organization for compliance with the GDPR. —Chris Lippert @ Cloud Security Alliance

The post Worth Reading: GDPR and Personal Data appeared first on rule 11 reader.

My Lexicon: Fexen

Fexen (noun, pl.; pronounced Fex-uhn)

Usage

“Do we have any copper FEXen on those switches?”

Explanation

Fexen is the plural of FEX (the Cisco Nexus Fabric Extender modules). Oh, I know, “FEXes” is just as easy to say, but somehow FEXen seems to work better. Try and use this word in conversation today and see how it feels.

“We have about 20 FEXen distributed around the data center.”

I think you’ll like it.

If you liked this post, please do click through to the source at My Lexicon: Fexen and give me a share/like. Thank you!

What the IoT industry can learn from Apple’s revival of the Mac

This post is an excerpt from a talk I gave at the Reality Virtually Hackathon that makes a similar comparison between virtual reality and augmented reality and the Mac. It holds true for the Internet of Things (IoT) and every emerging technology.Many IoT devices makers build on proprietary platforms. Proprietary hardware is an advantage during the emergence of a new platform — until it is not. A proprietary platform protects intellectual property from reverse engineering because the software is tied to the hardware and it can be tuned for performance.Custom-designed hardware performs better — until it doesn’t. For example, when supercomputers, video bridges and CAD simulators were first introduced, all took advantage of custom, proprietary hardware to gain time to market. Now mature products, almost all the supercomputer, video bridge and CAD simulator suppliers use x86 and Nvidia platforms because these they have open ecosystems that add capabilities and value while reducing cost. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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