Troubleshooting connectivity problems in leaf and spine fabrics
Unlike traditional hierarchical network designs, where a small number of links can be monitored to provide visibility, a leaf and spine network has no special links or switches where running CLI commands or attaching a probe would provide visibility. Even if it were possible to attach probes, the effective bandwidth of a leaf and spine network can be as high as a Petabit/second, well beyond the capabilities of current generation monitoring tools.
Fortunately, industry standard sFlow monitoring technology is built into the commodity switch hardware used to build leaf and spine networks. Enabling sFlow telemetry on all the switches in the network provides centralized, real-time, visibility into network traffic.
Intent-Based Network Automation with Ansible
The latest in all the networking buzz these days is Intent-Based Networking (IBN). There are varying definitions of what IBN is and is not. Does IBN mean you need to deploy networking solely from business policy, does IBN mean you must be streaming telemetry from every network device in real-time, is it a combination of both? Is it automation?
This article isn’t meant to define IBN, rather, it’s meant to provide a broader, yet more practical perspective on automation and intent.
Intent isn’t New
One could argue that intent-based systems have been around for years, especially when managing servers. Why not look at DevOps tools like CFEngine, Chef, and Puppet (being three of the first)? They focused on desired state–their goal was to get managed systems into a technical desired state.
If something is in its desired state, doesn’t that mean it’s in its intended state?
These tools did this eliminating the need to know the specific Linux server commands to configure the device–you simply defined your desired state with a declarative approach to systems management, e.g. ensure Bob is configured on the system without worrying about the command to add Bob. One major difference was those tools used Continue reading
Intent-Based Network Automation with Ansible
The latest in all the networking buzz these days is Intent-Based Networking (IBN). There are varying definitions of what IBN is and is not. Does IBN mean you need to deploy networking solely from business policy, does IBN mean you must be streaming telemetry from every network device in real-time, is it a combination of both? Is it automation?
This article isn’t meant to define IBN, rather, it’s meant to provide a broader, yet more practical perspective on automation and intent.
Intent isn’t New
One could argue that intent-based systems have been around for years, especially when managing servers. Why not look at DevOps tools like CFEngine, Chef, and Puppet (being three of the first)? They focused on desired state–their goal was to get managed systems into a technical desired state.
If something is in its desired state, doesn’t that mean it’s in its intended state?
These tools did this eliminating the need to know the specific Linux server commands to configure the device–you simply defined your desired state with a declarative approach to systems management, e.g. ensure Bob is configured on the system without worrying about the command to add Bob. One major difference was those tools used Continue reading
Intent-based Networking: What’s Real and What’s Hype?
“Better to be onboard than be left behind.”
Anuta Networks Brings Orchestration to Tata’s SD-WAN
Anuta’s NCX has helped Tata configure, deploy, and manage more than 10,000 instances of its SD-WAN.
Worth Reading: The rise of fourth wave computing
The post Worth Reading: The rise of fourth wave computing appeared first on rule 11 reader.
Breaking the Internet: Swapping Backhoes for BGP
The term “break[ing] the Internet” has taken hold over the last few years – it sounds significant, and given the role that the Internet has come to play in our daily lives, even a little scary. A Google search for “break the Internet” returns 14.6 million results, while “broke the Internet” returns just under a half million results.
Interestingly, Google Trends shows a spike in searches for the term in November 2014 (arguably representing its entry into mainstream usage), coincident with Kim Kardashian’s appearance in Paper Magazine, and on the magazine’s Web site. (Warning: NSFW) To that end, Time Magazine says “But in the context of viral media content, ‘breaking the Internet’ means engineering one story to dominate Facebook and Twitter at the expense of more newsworthy things.” Presumably in celebration of those efforts, there’s even now a “Break the Internet” Webby Award.
“Breaking the Internet” in this context represents, at best, the failure of a website to do sufficient capacity planning, such as using a content delivery network (CDN) to help improve the scalability and performance of the Web site in the face of increased traffic from a flash crowd from the viral Continue reading
Sprint Adds Color to NFV Plans That are ‘Essential’ for 5G Deployment
Metaswitch and Mavenir added to ranks of ecosystem vendors.
HPE Buys Cloud Technology Partners, Expands Consulting Biz
HPE continues its buying spree.
The History of Networking: BABEL
On this edition of the Network Collective’s History of Networking, Juliusz Chroboczek sits down to discuss the origins of the BABEL routing protocol. You can see the original post over on the Network Collective here.
The post The History of Networking: BABEL appeared first on rule 11 reader.
Ericsson Expands 5G NR Platform to Include FDD
T-Mobile is testing FDD at three sites in Baltimore.
StackPointCloud Merges Kubernetes, Serverless Management
Bitnami serverless architecture continues to gain vendor support.
Fly be free: introducing Cumulus in the Cloud
I get really excited watching people use the technology that we develop at Cumulus Networks, and we’re always looking to make it easier for people get their heads and hands wrapped around our products and tools. Our first product, Cumulus Linux, is pretty easy; a curious techie can download our free Cumulus VX virtual machine and use it standalone or in concert with other virtual machines. If they want to see the rubber meet the road with a physical experience, they can buy a switch/license and experiment in a live network.
The introduction of Cumulus NetQ and Cumulus Host Pack upped the ante in demonstrability. These products work together to allow for high scale, operationally sane infrastructure. We wanted the curious to be able to explore all of our products in a comfortable setting. Thus was born a project we call Cumulus in the Cloud.
The awesome team here at Cumulus leveraged modern technology to set up a personal mini data center infrastructure complete with four servers and a multi-rack leaf/spine network. Then we put that technology to work in infrastructure related architectures that are meaningful to customers.
Our first personalization is a container deployment leveraging Mesos and Docker. An Continue reading