There are many resources for network automation with Ansible. Most of them only expose the first steps or limit themselves to a narrow scope. They give no clue on how to expand from that. Real network environments may be large, versatile, heterogeneous, and filled with exceptions. The lack of real-world examples for Ansible deployments, unlike Puppet and SaltStack, leads many teams to build brittle and incomplete automation solutions.
We have released under an open-source license our attempt to tackle this problem:
Here is a quick demo to configure a new peering:
This work is the collective effort of Continue reading
Do you know someone who has made an outstanding and sustained contribution in service to the Internet community? Nominate them.
The post Nominations Open! Jonathan B. Postel Service Award 2021 appeared first on Internet Society.
Every now and then I stumble upon an article or a comment explaining how Network Function Virtualization (NFV) introduces new data center fabric buffering requirements. Here’s a recent example:
For Telco/carrier Cloud environments, where NFVs (which are much slower than hardware SGW) get used a lot, latency is higher with a lot of jitter due to the nature of software and the varying link speeds, so DC-level near-zero buffer is not applicable.
It seems to me we’re dealing with another myth. Starting with the basics:
In one of his recent posts, Ivan raises a question: “I can’t grasp why Cumulus releases a Vagrant box, but not a Docker container”. Coincidentally, only a few weeks before that I had managed to create a Cumulus Linux container image. Since then, I’ve done a lot of testing and discovered limitations of the pure containerised approach and how to overcome them while still retaining the container user experience. This post is a documentation of my journey from the early days of running Cumulus on Docker to the integration with containerlab and, finally, running Cumulus in microVMs backed by AWS’s Firecracker and Weavework’s Ignite.
One of the main reason for running containerised infrastructure is the famous Docker UX. Containers existed for a very long time but they only became mainstream when docker released their container engine. The simplicity of a typical docker workflow (build, ship, run) made it accessible to a large number of not-so-technical users and was the key to its popularity.
Virtualised infrastructure, including networking operating systems, has mainly been distributed in a VM form-factor, retaining much of the look and feel of the real hardware for the software processes running on top. However it Continue reading
This week's Network Break covers new firewalls & other security products from Palo Alto Networks, discusses Arista's lowest-latency switch (now with EOS), reviews financial results from Cisco and Palo Alto, and explains why Microsoft is making Internet Explorer go away (just not entirely).
The post Network Break 334: Palo Alto Unveils New Security Gear; Arista Saves Time With Lowest-Latency Switch appeared first on Packet Pushers.
I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard someone ask these two questions—
While these questions have always bothered me, I could never really put my finger on why. I ran across a journal article recently that helped me understand a bit better. The root of the problem is this—what does best common mean, and how can following the best common produce a set of actions you can be confident will solve your problem?
Bellman and Oorschot say best common practice can mean this is widely implemented. The thinking seems to run something like this: the crowd’s collective wisdom will probably be better than my thinking… more sets of eyes will make for wiser or better decisions. Anyone who has studied the madness of crowds will immediately recognize the folly of this kind of state. Just because a lot of people agree it’s a good idea to jump off a cliff does not mean it is, in fact, a good idea to jump off a cliff.
Perhaps it means something closer to this is no worse than our competitors. If that’s the meaning, though, it’s a pretty cynical Continue reading
Today's Tech Byte explores a digital sandbox for fabric emulation. This unique feature is part of Nokia's Fabric Services System for automating and operating a data center fabric. Our Nokia guest is Phani Koganti, Senior Director of Product Management. This is a sponsored episode.
The post Tech Bytes: Nokia’s Fabric Services System Simplifies Data Center Operations (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Recruiting issue: Companies in some areas of the rural U.S. are trying to hire workers, but the lack of quality broadband service is hurting their efforts, the New York Times reports. The story looks at a manufacturer of asphalt paving equipment in rural Iowa that paid to have fiber laid to its factory, but there’s […]
The post The Week in Internet News: Rural Areas Need Broadband to Attract Workers appeared first on Internet Society.
Today Pluribus announced the release of the State of the Data Center Networking 2021 Annual Report. This groundbreaking original research, conducted with Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), not only confirms many of the trends we have discussed recently, it reveals just how strong they are.
The post The State of Data Center Networking 2021: Long Live Private Cloud appeared first on Pluribus Networks.