Now Boarding: Autumn 2019 Network Automation Online Course

Ladies and gentlemen, our Autumn 2019 Building Network Automation Solutions online course is now ready for boarding. Please make sure you have your boarding passes ready, board at your convenience, and start enjoying the pre-flight perks like over hundred hours of self-study materials.

Our flight will depart on September 3rd with subsequent sessions on September 26th, October 24th and November 12th. The guest speakers will focus on security, inventory managements, and describe their production deployments. More in a few days…

The only thing you have to do at this moment is to register (if you want to get the Enthusiast price… otherwise please feel free to wait ;)

And just in case you’re wondering: yes, I was sitting at an airport while writing this blog post ;))

How to staff the hybrid cloud

The IT team at Perkins+Will used to support a sprawling SAN environment for its complex commercial-building renderings.When the Chicago-based architecture firm – which has 2,500 employees in 30 locations around the world – outgrew its SAN environment, Perkins+Will chose to migrate away from on-premises data centers and edge devices to a cloud-based storage system. Suddenly CIO Murali Selvaraj faced a difficult challenge: How to restructure the firm's 50-person global IT organization to meet the needs of the hybrid cloud?To read this article in full, please click here

How to staff the hybrid cloud

The IT team at Perkins+Will used to support a sprawling SAN environment for its complex commercial-building renderings.When the Chicago-based architecture firm – which has 2,500 employees in 30 locations around the world – outgrew its SAN environment, Perkins+Will chose to migrate away from on-premises data centers and edge devices to a cloud-based storage system. Suddenly CIO Murali Selvaraj faced a difficult challenge: How to restructure the firm's 50-person global IT organization to meet the needs of the hybrid cloud?To read this article in full, please click here

A Sandbox for Learning Pulumi

I recently started using Pulumi, a way of using a general purpose programming language for infrastructure-as-code projects. I’ve been using Pulumi with JavaScript (I know, some folks would say I should question my life decisions), and while installing Pulumi itself is pretty low-impact (a small group of binaries) there are a number of dependencies that need to be installed when using Pulumi with JavaScript. As I’m a stickler for keeping my primary system very “clean” with regard to installed packages and software, I thought I’d create a means whereby I can easily spin up a “sandbox environment” for learning Pulumi.

When creating this sandbox environment, I turned to some tools that are very familiar:

  • I used virtualization (a virtual machine) as the isolation mechanism. The next step is to use a Linux container, like a Docker container, as the isolation mechanism, but I thought I’d start with something a bit simpler at first.
  • Vagrant provides a way of automating the creation/destruction of said VM. Again, Vagrant is well-understood and widely used.
  • Ansible provides the automation to configure the VM with the necessary software (Pulumi and associated dependencies).
  • I also thought that some folks might find it interesting or useful Continue reading

The speed of BGP network propagation

The speed of BGP network propagation