An excellent post from Eyvonne Sharp highlights one of Cisco’s weakest areas, its enduring passion for too many products, too many options, too much complexity:
With that in mind consider Cisco, a company in love with complexity. They’ve built their business making complex systems. Their culture breeds nerd knobs. They’ve built certification tracks — through which many network engineers have built their careers — to develop expert level understanding of their products.
At the same time, engineers operate in a culture were we believe configuration and operational complexity have inherent value. We unconsciously embrace the following logic: Networks are complex. One must be smart to understand networks. I understand networks. Therefore, I’m smart.
We extrapolate this logic and believe that complexity, for complexity’s sake, makes us superior. In truth, our pride has tied gordian knot with complexity and we don’t know how to unravel it.
Using SD-WAN as a use case to highlight Cisco’s love of its own complex technology instead of radically redefining itself. Cisco has limited traction in SD-WAN space because its current technology is hard to design, harder to operate and lacks features. While the business units are doing their best to make it simple, building on Continue reading
By automating routine tasks, IT engineers can help businesses compete more effectively.
Matthias Luft (a good friend of mine, and a guest speaker in the upcoming Building Next-Generation Data Center course) wrote a great post about the (lack of) security in software development.
The parts I like most (and they apply equally well to networking):
Read more ...Org mode is a package for Emacs to “keep notes, maintain todo lists, planning projects and authoring documents”. It can execute embedded snippets of code and capture the output (through Babel). It’s an invaluable tool for documenting your infrastructure and your operations.
Here are three (relatively) short videos exhibiting Org mode use in the context of network operations. In all of them, I am using my own junos-mode which features the following perks:
Since some Junos devices can be quite slow, commits and remote executions are done asynchronously1 with the help of a Python helper.
In the first video, I take some notes about configuring BGP add-path feature (RFC 7911). It demonstrates all the available features of junos-mode.
In the second video, I execute a planned operation to enable this feature in production. The document is a modus operandi and contains the configuration to apply and the commands to check if it works as expected. At the end, the document becomes a detailed report of the operation.
In the third video, a cookbook has been prepared to execute Continue reading
NSX-V 6.3, released last month, introduced many new features. In my last blog post, NSX-V 6.3: Cross-VC NSX Security Enhancements, I discussed several new Cross-VC NSX security features. In this post I’ll discuss another new feature called Controller Disconnected Operation (CDO) mode which provides additional resiliency for the NSX control plane.
The NSX Controllers already offer inherint resiliency for the control plane by design in several ways:
For the reasons mentioned above, it’s a rare event and unlikely that communication would be lost with the entire NSX Controller Cluster. In NSX-V 6.3, this control plane resiliency is enhanced even further via CDO mode.
CDO mode targets specific scenarios where control plane connectivity is lost, for example, a host losing control plane connectivity, losing control plane connectivity to the controller cluster, or NSX controllers are down. CDO mode enhances control plane Continue reading