Networking Field Day – Afterwards – Cisco ACI
I first need to give a shout out to @_vCarly and her amazing skills at the white board, I only wish my white boarding design were half clean as that! If @_vCarly were to a host a white boarding session at CLUS this year I would most likely attend! I suppose we should discuss the […]
Carrier Supporting Carrier – CSC
CSC Carrier Supporting Carrier is a hierarchical MPLS VPN architecture between the Service Providers. Service is an MPLS VPN service mostly but doesn’t have to be as you will see throughout the post. Customer carrier ( Provider ) receives an MPLS VPN service from the Core/Backbone carrier. Although CSC architecture is not common in real… Read More »
The post Carrier Supporting Carrier – CSC appeared first on Network Design and Architecture.
Getting Inside the Loop
Metadata doesn’t just apply to data science or protocols — it applies to engineering life. Think about the concept of epistomology — the study of how we know what we know — or the concept of hermeneutics — the study of how we understand communication — and you can quickly see that stepping outside what we are doing to examine how we are doing it is a common human experience (see Lewis’ Meditation in a Tool Shed as another instance).
But how does this apply to the engineering life? It’s called process — now, before you click off the page, scurrying away in shock, process isn’t a bad thing. In fact, process can be a good set of “guard rails” in the way we live our lives, something to remind us not to run off the road (like positive thinking signs), or even physically/mentally “bump” us in the right direction.
This week I’d like to kick off a short series on one process I learned in the US Air Force, and have used in many ways over the years — the OODA Loop. Originally developed by USAF Colonel John Boyd, and designed to help pilots deal with Continue reading
SSL Week Means Less Weak SSL
I'm excited to announce that today kicks off SSL Week at CloudFlare. Over the course of this week, we'll make a series of announcements on what we're doing to improve encryption on the Internet.
Inherently, for encryption to be the most effective, it has to meet three criteria: 1) it needs to be easy and inexpensive to use; 2) it needs to be fast so it doesn't tax performance; and 3) it needs to be up to date and ahead of the latest vulnerabilities.
Easy, Fast & Secure
Throughout CloudFlare's history, these priorities have guided our approach to encryption. Last September, we announced Universal SSL and brought world class encryption to every CloudFlare customer, even those on our Free service plan. While that effort doubled the size of the encrypted web, our work is far from done. This week we're announcing a series of initiatives that further our efforts to ensure we provide the easiest, fastest, and most secure encryption.
While Universal SSL made it easy to ensure that the connection from a device to CloudFlare was secure, this week we're going to begin the process of making it easy (and free) to ensure the connection from CloudFlare back to Continue reading
BGP Configuration Made Simple with Cumulus Linux
BGP is without doubt the most scalable routing protocol, which made it a popular choice for large-scale deployments from service provider networks to enterprise WAN/VPN networks and even data centers. Its only significant drawback is the tedious configuration process (which almost reminds me of writing COBOL programs decades ago).
Read more ...Network Automation with Cisco Nexus Switches & Ansible
Over the past few years, I’ve written quite a bit about SDN and more recently more about what can be done today with existing products, APIs, and tools in terms of improving operational efficiencies. Most of the examples have leveraged modern network devices that have some type of API because it streamlines how to integrate with 3rd party systems be it a custom application or a platform like Ansible (a platform that I’ve written about frequently). I’ve posted examples here and there on GitHub on these topics, but nothing that starts from the ground up.
With that in mind, I’ve recently created a new GitHub project that walks through step by step on how to get Ansible installed and specifically up and running ready to automate Cisco Nexus switches. Note: In full transparency, I was compensated by Cisco for this particular project. It was a no-brainer since I was already doing similar work over the past several months. That said, going forward it would be great to get others involved in any capacity from writing docs to writing code.
Network Automation with Cisco Nexus & Ansible
The README in the GitHub project repository outlines exactly how to get started. There Continue reading
Getting started with Ansible
The easiest way to describe Ansible is that it’s a simple but powerful it-automation tool. In the words of its creator Michael DeHaan “I wanted a tool that I could not use for 6 months, come back later, and still remember how it worked.” and it really feels like riding a bike. Even years from now when I take a look at an Ansible Playbook I’m sure I will immediately see what it does. Playbooks, which allows you to run several tasks together, are writting in YAML making them easy to read.
This guide is too short to teach you everything about Ansible. Instead the aim is to give you an idea of how you can use Ansible, and how it can help you manage your IT environment. Even if you don’t end up using Ansible, learning tools like it as Chef or Puppet can help you to think differently about how you operate your network.
Continue readingLife is busy
I’ve had zero time to update the blog recently. As some of you may know, I recently started a new job with Google. I’ve moved my family and I over from the UK to Dublin, Ireland. To say I’m busy right now is an understatement. Not only is there a ton of reading for me […]Getting started with Ansible
The easiest way to describe Ansible is that it’s a simple but powerful it-automation tool. In the words of its creator Michael DeHaan “I wanted a tool that I could not use for 6 months, come back later, and still remember how it worked.” and it really feels like riding a bike. Even years from now when I take a look at an Ansible Playbook I’m sure I will immediately see what it does. Playbooks, which allows you to run several tasks together, are writting in YAML making them easy to read.
This guide is too short to teach you everything about Ansible. Instead the aim is to give you an idea of how you can use Ansible, and how it can help you manage your IT environment. Even if you don’t end up using Ansible, learning tools like it as Chef or Puppet can help you to think differently about how you operate your network.
Continue reading