Recovering from Network Automation Failures

This blog post was initially sent to subscribers of my SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.

One of my readers sent me this question:

Would you write about methods for reverting from expected new state to old state in the case automation went wrong due to (un)predictable events that left a node or network in a limbo state betwixt and between.

Like always, there’s the easy and the really hard part.

Read more ...

Not Your First DockerCon? Join Docker Pals As A Guide

The Docker Pals program matches groups of attendees who are newer to DockerCon (the “Pals”) with an attendee who has been to one or more DockerCons (the “Guide”). Our goal is to help everyone at DockerCon feel comfortable and see what this amazing community has to offer. Both Pals and Guides find the experience rewarding! The first step in being a Guide is registering for DockerCon so if you haven’t yet, register here now!

Here’s what some of our Guides have said about the program:

“Conferences can be lonely if you don’t know anyone, or are the only person from your company. Docker Pals provides stress free opportunity to connect with people and get to know them.”    

 

“A fantastic experience to meet new people and help them to enjoy DockerCon as much as I do.”

 

“It was great meeting the Pals assigned to me. For me it was interesting to learn about the different people and use cases. I also enjoyed walking everyone through the vendor area explaining all the technologies.”

 

“Last DockerCon was my third in a row and the third time I’ve been involved with Docker Pals as a Guide. Continue reading

BrandPost: SD-WAN and Multi-Cloud Digital Transformation, Part 1: Enterprise Reality Check

This is the first in a 3-part blog series that will detail how deploying a business-driven SD-WAN edge platform can help enterprises successfully accelerate multi-cloud digital transformation initiatives.For a growing number of enterprises, a migration to the cloud is not a simple matter of deploying an application or two onto Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or some other hosted service. It’s now a multi-cloud strategy that’s a key part of a digital transformation initiative aimed at modernizing business processes. Using multiple cloud computing services such as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS) in a single unified cloud strategy offers the ability to reduce dependence on any single vendor.To read this article in full, please click here

The Week in Internet News: Facebook Calls for New Internet Regulations

More regulation, please: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in an op-ed in the Washington Post, called on governments to get more involved in Internet regulation, including defining harmful content and making rules on how sites should handle it. Governments should also look at new laws to protect elections, to improve consumer privacy, and to guarantee data portability, Zuckerberg said. His ideas weren’t universally embraced, however. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a blog post, said there were “fundamental problems” with governments policing harmful content, particularly in defining what’s harmful.

Hold my beer: Australia’s parliament didn’t take long to look at new regulations, with lawmakers passing legislation that would create three-year jail terms for social media executives and operators of other websites that do not remove violent content in an “expeditious” manner, NPR reports. Web-based services could also be fined up to 10 percent of their annual revenue for not complying with the law.

Even more laws: Singapore is the latest country to consider legislation attacking fake news. A proposed law there would require online news sites to publish corrections or warnings about stories the government decides are fake news and remove articles in extreme cases, the Straits Times reports. The Continue reading

Breaking Out of the Hadoop Cocoon

The announcement last fall that top Hadoop vendors Cloudera and Hortonworks were coming together in a $5.2 billion merger – and reports about the financial toll that their competition took on each other in the quarters leading up to the deal – revived questions that have been raised in recent years about the future of Hadoop in an era where more workloads are moving into public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) that offer a growing array of services that many of the jobs that the open-source technology already does. …

Breaking Out of the Hadoop Cocoon was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .

BIER Basics

Multicast is, at best, difficult to deploy in large scale networks—PIM sparse and BIDIR are both complex, adding large amounts of state to intermediate devices. In the worst case, there is no apparent way to deploy any existing version of PIM, such as large-scale spine and leaf networks (variations on the venerable Clos fabric). BEIR, described in RFC8279, aims to solve the per-device state of traditional multicast.

In this network, assume A has some packet that needs to be delivered to T, V, and X. A could generate three packets, each one addressed to one of the destinations—but replicating the packet at A is wastes network resources on the A->B link, at least. Using PIM, these three destinations could be placed in a multicast group (a multicast address can be created that describes T, V, and X as a single destination). After this, a reverse shortest path tree can be calculated from each of the destinations in the group towards the source, A, and the correct forwarding state (the outgoing interface list) be installed at each of the routers in the network (or at least along the correct paths). This, however, adds a lot of state to the network.
Continue reading

From bare-metal to Kubernetes

 

This is a guest post by Hugues Alary, Lead Engineer at Betabrand,  a retail clothing company and crowdfunding platform, based in San Francisco. This article was originally published here.

 

Beyond SD-WAN: VMware’s vision for the network edge

VeloCloud is now a Business Unit within VMware since being acquired in December 2017. The two companies have had sufficient time to integrate their operations and fit their technologies together to build a cohesive offering. In January, Neal Weinberg provided an overview of where VMware is headed with its reinvention. Now let’s look at it from the VeloCloud SD-WAN perspective.I recently talked to Sanjay Uppal, vice president and general manager of the VeloCloud Business Unit. He shared with me where VeloCloud is heading, adding that it’s all possible because of the complementary products that VMware brings to VeloCloud’s table.To read this article in full, please click here

[Sponsored] Short Take – Network Reliability Engineering

In this Network Collective Short Take, Matt Oswalt joins us to talk about the value of network reliability engineering and the unique approach Juniper is taking to empower engineers to learn the tools and techniques of automation with NRE Labs.

Thank you to Juniper Networks for sponsoring today’s episode and supporting the content we’re creating here at Network Collective. If you would like to take the next steps in your automation journey, NRE Labs is a no-strings-attached resource to help you in that journey. You can find NRE Labs at https://labs.networkreliability.engineering.

 

Matt Oswalt
Guest
Jordan Martin
Host

The post [Sponsored] Short Take – Network Reliability Engineering appeared first on Network Collective.

How to quickly deploy, run Linux applications as unikernels

Building and deploying lightweight apps is becoming an easier and more reliable process with the emergence of unikernels. While limited in functionality, unikernals offer many advantages in terms of speed and security.What are unikernels? A unikernel is a very specialized single-address-space machine image that is similar to the kind of cloud applications that have come to dominate so much of the internet, but they are considerably smaller and are single-purpose. They are lightweight, providing only the resources needed. They load very quickly and are considerably more secure -- having a very limited attack surface. Any drivers, I/O routines and support libraries that are required are included in the single executable. The resultant virtual image can then be booted and run without anything else being present. And they will often run 10 to 20 times faster than a container.To read this article in full, please click here

How to quickly deploy, run Linux applications as unikernels

Building and deploying lightweight apps is becoming an easier and more reliable process with the emergence of unikernels. While limited in functionality, unikernals offer many advantages in terms of speed and security.What are unikernels? A unikernel is a very specialized single-address-space machine image that is similar to the kind of cloud applications that have come to dominate so much of the internet, but they are considerably smaller and are single-purpose. They are lightweight, providing only the resources needed. They load very quickly and are considerably more secure -- having a very limited attack surface. Any drivers, I/O routines and support libraries that are required are included in the single executable. The resultant virtual image can then be booted and run without anything else being present. And they will often run 10 to 20 times faster than a container.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Performance-Based Routing (PBR) – The gold rush for SD-WAN

BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is considered the glue of the internet. If we view through the lens of farsightedness, however, there’s a question that still remains unanswered for the future. Will BGP have the ability to route on the best path versus the shortest path?There are vendors offering performance-based solutions for BGP-based networks. They have adopted various practices, such as, sending out pings to monitor the network and then modifying the BGP attributes, such as the AS prepending to make BGP do the performance-based routing (PBR). However, this falls short in a number of ways.The problem with BGP is that it's not capacity or performance aware and therefore its decisions can sink the application’s performance. The attributes that BGP relies upon for path selection are, for example, AS-Path length and multi-exit discriminators (MEDs), which do not always correlate with the network’s performance.To read this article in full, please click here

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