I Hate Excellent Questions

I was listening to a recent episode of the Packet Pushers Podcast about SD-WAN and some other stuff. At one point, my good friend Greg Ferro (@EtherealMind) asked the guest something, and the guest replied with, “That’s an excellent question!” Greg replied with, “Of course it was. I only ask excellent questions.” I was walking and laughed out loud harder than I’ve laughed in a long time.

This was also a common theme during Networking Field Day. Everyone was asking “great” or “excellent” questions. I chuckled and told the delegates that it was a canned response that most presenters give today. But then I wondered why all our questions are excellent. And why I hated that response so much.

Can You Define “Excellent”?

The first reason why I think people tend to counter with “excellent” praise is because they are stalling for an answer. It’s a time-honored tradition from spelling bees when you don’t know how to spell the word and you need a few more seconds to figure out if this is one of those “i before e” words or not. I get the purpose of defining something of non-native speaker origin. But defining a Continue reading

How Replicated Developers Develop Remotely

How Replicated Developers Develop Remotely

This is a guest post by Marc Campbell and Grant Miller, co-founders of Replicated.

How Replicated Developers Develop Remotely

Replicated is a 5-year old infrastructure software company working to make it easy for businesses to install and operate third party software. We don’t want you to have to send your data to a multi-tenant SaaS provider just to use their services. Our team is made up of twenty-two people distributed throughout the US. One thing that’s different about Replicated is our developers don’t actually store or execute code on their laptops; all of our development happens on remote instances in the cloud.

Our product, KOTS, runs in Kubernetes and manages the lifecycle of 3rd-party applications in the Kubernetes cluster. Building and validating the product requires a developer to have access to a cluster. But as we started to hire more and more engineers it became ridiculous to ask everyone to run their own local Kubernetes cluster. We needed to both simplify and secure our setup to allow every engineer to run their environment in the cloud, and we needed to do it in a way which was seamless and secure.

Previous Dev Environments with Docker for Mac

We started with each developer building Continue reading

The Stupidity of Trying to Be Like Google

Someone recommended me a fantastic book on corporate stupidity. Here’s just one of the million small gems it contains:

For instance, many companies conclude that they need to be more innovative. To increase their rates of innovation, they look at firms well known for being innovative, such as Google, then dispatch their executives to Silicon Valley to visit tech companies’ corporate campuses in the hope that they will learn something.

Not surprisingly, the book authors observed the same behavior in those companies as I did a while ago when I was still teaching SDN workshops:

They often ignore the fact that Google is an entirely different sector to them, and the lessons in view probably of limited value. They also overlook that even if they do learn something, actually implementing it within their organization is likely to be difficult, if not impossible.

Finally a warning: that book will make you laugh or cry hysterically (or both), so take it in small daily doses.

The Stupidity of Trying to Be Like Google

Someone recommended me a fantastic book on corporate stupidity. Here’s just one of the million small gems it contains:

For instance, many companies conclude that they need to be more innovative. To increase their rates of innovation, they look at firms well known for being innovative, such as Google, then dispatch their executives to Silicon Valley to visit tech companies’ corporate campuses in the hope that they will learn something.

Not surprisingly, the book authors observed the same behavior in those companies as I did a while ago when I was still teaching SDN workshops:

They often ignore the fact that Google is an entirely different sector to them, and the lessons in view probably of limited value. They also overlook that even if they do learn something, actually implementing it within their organization is likely to be difficult, if not impossible.

Finally a warning: that book will make you laugh or cry hysterically (or both), so take it in small daily doses.

Remote workers – rapid and cost-effective VPN scale with ZeroTier, OPNSense and FRRouting.

Overview

This would probably be a relevant topic on any given day in the world of IT, but given the current global pandemic due to COVID-19 (aka coronavirus), it’s become especially important.

IT departments are scrambling to figure out how to react with capacity to connect entire companies remotely for extended periods of time.

With a traditional vendor solution that centers around a router or firewall that’s racked in a data center somewhere, this can be difficult to solve for a few reasons.

Challenges:

  • Hardware capacity – most firewalls or routers have a fixed capacity for VPN sessions that must be deployed into a cluster to scale.
  • Software licensing – taking a company of thousands and suddenly extending licensing to account for the entire company is a financial hurdle for most companies.
  • Time to deploy – assuming both hardware and software licensing challenges can be dealt with in a timely manner, it may take weeks or months to deploy the additional capacity.

Luckily, IT is much more focused on software and cloud solutions these days then putting out boxes for everything.

Open source and cloud solutions when used together can provide an incredible amount of scale and performance without a Continue reading

Production-ready automation — the how and why

Last week Cumulus announced the launch of our exciting production-ready solution. This suite of automation scripts provides customers with a quick and validated way to leverage automation for day 1 deployment and day 2 operations. Plus, it’s open source. So it’s completely free to access and use, and it will only expand and improve over time.

Amidst all of the excitement, I wanted to take an opportunity to dive into some of the details of why and how we ended up with such a unique solution. So here we go.

Let’s start with what brought us here

Like most good technology solutions, production-ready automation started with an evaluation of customer challenges.

Challenge #1: First and foremost, we want to produce features and products that help our customers build better networks — networks that are scalable, agile, flexible and efficient. Automation is a huge part of the story and we believe having a feature-rich, Linux-based operating system makes automation even better.

That said, no matter what type of operating system you’re running, most engineers have to piece together scripts and playbooks to build something custom that will hopefully (fingers crossed!) work with their new operating system. This is tedious at Continue reading

Building Your Own Junos Router With cRPD and LinuxKit

Lately I’ve been looking at some tools to make it easier to package containerized applications as lightweight virtual machines, to get the best of both worlds: the developer experience of a Dockerfile with the added protection of a hypervisor. As part of this process, I’ve been digging into Juniper’s containerized routing stack called cRPD, and trying to get that into a virtual form factor, so that I can effectively have a Linux router that happens to use the Junos routing stack.

An Update on the Tokyo Assignment

Right at the end of 2019 I announced that in early 2020 I was temporarily relocating to Tokyo, Japan, for a six month work assignment. It’s now March, and I’m still in Colorado. So what’s up with that Tokyo assignment, anyway? Since I’ve had several folks ask, I figured it’s probably best to post something here.

First, based on all the information available to me, it looks like Tokyo is still going to happen. It will just be delayed a bit—although the exact extent of the delay is still unclear.

Why the delays? A few things have affected the timing:

  1. As part of an acquisition at work, some new folks got involved that hadn’t been previously involved, and it took them some time to understand what this assignment was all about. This is totally understandable, but we hadn’t accounted for the extra time to bring the new stakeholders up to speed.
  2. The finance folks got involved and made everyone do some necessary legwork that hadn’t previously been done in properly allocating costs to the appropriate budgets. So, that took some time.
  3. Finally, there’s this virus thing going around…

It looks like #1 and #2 have been sorted, but it’ll still Continue reading

Daily Roundup: Coronavirus Cancels Dell, Other Events

Coronavirus cancelled Dell and other events; Cisco won big in Telia SD-WAN deal; and HPE delivered...

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How to Build a Highly Productive Remote Team (or Team of Contractors) with Cloudflare for Teams

How to Build a Highly Productive Remote Team (or Team of Contractors) with Cloudflare for Teams

Much of IT has been built on two outdated assumptions about how work is done. First, that employees all sit in the same building or branch offices. Second, that those employees will work full-time at the same company for years.

Both of these assumptions are no longer true.

Employees now work from anywhere. In the course of writing this blog post, I opened review tickets in our internal JIRA from my dining table at home. I reviewed internal wiki pages on my phone during my commute on the train. And I spent time reviewing some marketing materials in staging in our CMS.

In a past job, I would have suffered trying to connect to these tools through a VPN. That would have slowed down my work on a laptop and made it nearly impossible to use a phone to catch up on my commute.

The second challenge is ramp-up. I joined Cloudflare a few months ago. As a member of the marketing team, I work closely with our product organization and there are several dozen tools that I need to do that.

I’m hardly alone. The rise of SaaS and custom internal applications means that employees need access to all Continue reading

Video: Writing to Enhance your Networking Career.

David Coleman talks about how writing boosted his career in this 30 minute presentation. He chose a path of writing books that led him into bigger career with vendors and wider communities. He had some excellent tip on grammar and style which is rarely discussed. I wrote an ebook about the mechanics of writing blog […]

The post Video: Writing to Enhance your Networking Career. appeared first on EtherealMind.

COVID-19 Pushes Microsoft, Dell, Red Hat to Virtualize Events

All three of those vendors have shifted planned events from a physical setting to a virtual one in...

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Telia Taps Cisco Viptela SD-WAN

The operator says the ability to remotely provision Viptela on customer's existing WAN hardware...

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Mighty Morphin HPE Unleashes Container Platform

Tom Phelan, a fellow for big data and storage organization at HPE, said the container platform’s...

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Tech Bytes: Measuring End User Experience Of SaaS And Web Apps With ThousandEyes (Sponsored)

Today's Tech Bytes podcast explores end user experience with sponsor ThousandEyes. ThousandEyes offers end point agents that measuring application experience and network performance from the end-user perspective. These agents capture real-time session data or run scheduled synthetic tests to provide visibility into the performance of SaaS applications as well as local network conditions.

Tech Bytes: Measuring End User Experience Of SaaS And Web Apps With ThousandEyes (Sponsored)

Today's Tech Bytes podcast explores end user experience with sponsor ThousandEyes. ThousandEyes offers end point agents that measuring application experience and network performance from the end-user perspective. These agents capture real-time session data or run scheduled synthetic tests to provide visibility into the performance of SaaS applications as well as local network conditions.

The post Tech Bytes: Measuring End User Experience Of SaaS And Web Apps With ThousandEyes (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Helping Developers Simplify Apps, Toolchains, and Open Source

It’s been an exciting four months since we announced that Docker is refocusing on developers. We have spent much of that time listening to you, our developer community, in meetups, on GitHub, through social media, with our Docker Captains, and in face-to-face one-on-ones. Your support and feedback on our refocused direction have been helpful and positive, and we’re fired-up for the year ahead!

What’s driving our enthusiasm for making developers successful? Quite simply, it’s in recognition of the enormous impact your creativity – manifested in the applications you ship – has on all of our lives. Widespread adoption of smartphones and near-pervasive Internet connectivity only accelerates consumer demand for new applications. And businesses recognize that applications are key to engaging their customers, partnering effectively with their supply chain ecosystem, and empowering their employees.

As a result, the demand for developers has never been higher. The current worldwide population of 18 million developers is growing approximately 20% every year (in contrast to the 0.6% annual growth of the overall US labor force). Yet, despite this torrid growth, demand for developers in 2020 will outstrip supply by an estimated 1 million. Thus, we see tremendous opportunities in helping every developer to Continue reading

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