Red Hat Ansible Network Automation Updates

With the recent success of the largest AnsibleFest to date I wanted to take a minute to reflect with a network automation perspective on the colossal enhancements the engineering team at Red Hat has done for the Ansible Engine 2.6 release, the Ansible Tower 3.3 release and the recent Ansible Engine 2.7 release. As a reminder for all Ansible lovers there is a porting guide for every release to make upgrades as easy as possible!

For this blog post I am going to cover the following topics:

  • The httpapi connection plugin
  • Support for Arista eAPI and Cisco NX-API
  • New network automation modules
    • net_get and net_put
    • netconf_get, netconf_rpc and netconf_config
    • cli_command and cli_config
  • Improved Ansible Tower User Experience
  • Ansible Tower credential management for network devices
  • Custom Ansible Environment Support for Ansible Tower 


    • The HTTPAPI connection plugin

    Connection plugins allow Ansible to connect to target hosts so it can execute tasks on them. With the Ansible 2.5 release the network_cli connection plugin was introduced, removing the requirement for the provider parameter and standardizing network modules to allow playbooks to look, feel and operate just like they do on Linux hosts. This also allowed Red Hat Ansible Tower to Continue reading

    Mapping Factorio with Leaflet

    Mapping Factorio with Leaflet

    The following is a guest post by Jacob Hands, Creator of FactorioMaps.com. He is building a community site for the game Factorio centered around sharing user creations.

    Factorio is a game about building and maintaining factories. Players mine resources, research new technology and automate production. Resources move along the production line through multiple means of transportation such as belts and trains. Once production starts getting up to speed, alien bugs start to attack the factory requiring strong defenses.

    Mapping Factorio with Leaflet
    A Factorio factory producing many different items.

    Mapping Factorio with Leaflet
    A Factorio military outpost fighting the alien bugs.

    Mapping Factorio with Leaflet
    A Factorio map view of a small factory, that’s still too big to easily share fully with screenshots.

    At FactorioMaps.com, I am building a place for the community of Factorio players to share their factories as interactive Leaflet maps. Due to the size and detail of the game, it can be difficult to share an entire factory through a few screenshots. A Leaflet map provides a Google Maps-like experience allowing viewers to pan and zoom throughout the map almost as if they are playing the game.

    Hosting

    Leaflet maps contain thousands of small images for X/Y/Z coordinates. Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage are Continue reading

    Retail IoT: Walmart’s IoT patent filing might be the creepiest ever

    At this point, most people are aware that cameras may be watching them wherever they go in public — especially in retail establishments. But if a recent Walmart patent application becomes reality, watching your every move is far from the most intrusive way shoppers will be monitored.According to the patent, the idea is to put biometric sensors in shopping-cart handles. These sensors would track the shoppers’ heart rates, temperatures, grip strength, and stress levels, not to mention the cart’s weight, speed and idle time. Next, that info would be sent to a server where the data could be analyzed and compared against baselines obtained when the customer first grabbed the cart.To read this article in full, please click here

    Africa Is on a Steady Journey to Digital Transformation

    The world has seen Africa’s digital future advancing by leaps and bounds in the adoption and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the private and public sectors. What makes this more interesting and promising, is the level of investment and growth of women Engineers in recent years making headlines.

    The Gambia has seen much of these developments in recent years with examples of inspiring women Engineers like Mrs Anna Secka Saine who has contributed in building many backbone Networks in Africa such as, Internet eXchange Points (IXPs), National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), and, as well helped trained many young and Professionals engineers.

    We have also seen rise in the number of Computer Science clubs, after school coding, summer coding camps, Robotic clubs among others, which all projects the level of awareness and interest.

    In August, two brilliant young Gambian High School science students, Sera Momodou Ndure and Ajie Isatou Ceesay from Marina International School (MIS) and West African International School (WAIS) respectively represented The Gambia at the Africa Girls Can Code Initiative (AGCCI2018) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

    The Africa Girls Can Code Initiative (AGCCI) 2018-2022 is an Africa Wide Initiative being developed and implemented by the U Continue reading

    How to boost Wi-Fi performance: Experts talk planning, troubleshooting

    With wireless now the preferred, default, and increasingly only access in the majority of in-building, campus, metro-scale hotspot and wide-area settings, achieving optimal performance is a key objective for IT departments.Since radio-frequency (RF) propagation always involves a high degree of variability, it’s often difficult to predict the precise behavior of a given installation. Variables include operating conditions, user and application traffic demands, and the capabilities and settings of individual vendor products. When mobility, Wi-Fi testing and verification are also taken into consideration, performance evaluation can become very complex indeed.To read this article in full, please click here

    5 best practices to boost Wi-Fi performance

    Wi-Fi experts from Cisco, Aruba, Ekahau, Extreme Networks and Mist Systems talked with Craig Mathias, principal with advisory firm Farpoint Group, about Wi-Fi performance optimization. Based on those interviews, a few best practices for establishing and maintaining optimal WLAN performance clearly jump out.For more details see our feature: Experts offer tips for boosting Wi-Fi performance  Perform WiFi needs analysis Start with an initial needs analysis, with a careful enumeration of requirements relating to throughput, applications and coverage. Experiment with potential equipment in the production freespace environment to establish a baseline for initial performance expectations and evaluation. Add in the impact of any planned or even anticipated infrastructure additions, new applications and growth in numbers of users and devices.To read this article in full, please click here

    How to boost Wi-Fi performance: Experts talk planning, troubleshooting

    With wireless now the preferred, default, and increasingly only access in the majority of in-building, campus, metro-scale hotspot and wide-area settings, achieving optimal performance is a key objective for IT departments.Since radio-frequency (RF) propagation always involves a high degree of variability, it’s often difficult to predict the precise behavior of a given installation. Variables include operating conditions, user and application traffic demands, and the capabilities and settings of individual vendor products. When mobility, Wi-Fi testing and verification are also taken into consideration, performance evaluation can become very complex indeed.To read this article in full, please click here

    Detecting spacecraft anomalies using LSTMs and nonparametric dynamic thresholding

    Detecting spacecraft anomalies using LSTMs and nonparametric dynamic thresholding Hundman et al., KDD’18

    How do you effectively monitor a spacecraft? That was the question facing NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as they looked forward towards exponentially increasing telemetry data rates for Earth Science satellites (e.g., around 85 terabytes/day for a Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite).

    Spacecraft are exceptionally complex and expensive machines with thousands of telemetry channels detailing aspects such as temperature, radiation, power, instrumentation, and computational activities. Monitoring these channels is an important and necessary component of spacecraft operations given their complexity and cost. In an environment where a failure to detect and respond to potential hazards could result in the full or partial loss of spacecraft, anomaly detection is a critical tool to alert operations engineers of unexpected behavior.

    Anomaly detection systems deployed today typically consist of tiered alarms indicating when values fall outside of pre-defined limits. There are also limited instances of expert systems and nearest-neighbour based approaches being tried, but their limitations prevented widespread adoption. A more accurate and scalable approach to anomaly detection that makes better use of limited engineering resources is required.

    Any such system needs to work with data that is highly Continue reading

    Docker Certified Plugins From Networking Partners

    Certified-Badges@2x.png

    The Docker Certified Technology Program is designed for ecosystem partners and customers to recognize Containers and Plugins that excel in quality, collaborative support and compliance. Docker Certification gives organizations enterprises an easy way to run trusted software and components in containers on the Docker Enterprise container platform with support from both Docker and the publisher.  

    In this review, we’re looking at Docker Network Plugins. Networking has long been a vertical in the enterprise cloud and data center that has no shortage of complexity. Just as an overarching goal of Docker Enterprise is to make deploying and operating containers as simple as possible, the same goal applies to making Swarm networking as simple as possible. This powerful abstraction of complexity, is applicable regardless of whether in the customers data center or spread across multiple clouds. In some cases Docker Enterprise solves customer problems by shipping built-in plugins and in other scenarios the user’s needs are solved by innovations from the extensive Docker ecosystem. These solutions are validated by both Docker and the partner company and integrated into a seamless support pipeline that provide customers the world class support they have become accustomed to when working with Docker.

    Check out the Continue reading

    802.11: Wi-Fi speeds and standards explained

    In the world of wireless, the term Wi-Fi is synonymous with wireless access in general, despite the fact that it is a specific trademark owned by the Wi-Fi Alliance, a group dedicated to certifying that Wi-Fi products meet the IEEE’s set of 802.11 wireless standards.These standards, with names such as 802.11b (pronounced “Eight-O-Two-Eleven-Bee”, ignore the “dot”) and 802.11ac, comprise a family of specifications that started in the 1990s and continues to grow today. The 802.11 standards codify improvements that boost wireless throughput and range as well as the use of new frequencies as they  become available. They also address new technologies that reduce power consumption.To read this article in full, please click here

    802.11: Wi-Fi speeds and standards explained

    In the world of wireless, the term Wi-Fi is synonymous with wireless access in general, despite the fact that it is a specific trademark owned by the Wi-Fi Alliance, a group dedicated to certifying that Wi-Fi products meet the IEEE’s set of 802.11 wireless standards.These standards, with names such as 802.11b (pronounced “Eight-O-Two-Eleven-Bee”, ignore the “dot”) and 802.11ac, comprise a family of specifications that started in the 1990s and continues to grow today. The 802.11 standards codify improvements that boost wireless throughput and range as well as the use of new frequencies as they  become available. They also address new technologies that reduce power consumption.To read this article in full, please click here

    Salt Use Cases for Cumulus Linux

    A talking point I often lean on when speaking to customers is, “It’s Linux, so use whatever tool you like.” This approach can be especially paralyzing for customers that are just getting started with automating their network and compute infrastructure in a uniform way. In those particular situations, diving into the numerous articles that pit the various automation tools against each other can be counterproductive. Instead, I often find the most value in looking at a few examples of a particular tool in action that is addressing a use case which is relevant to me, while following along hands-on.

    Salt frequently comes up as one of the options in the infrastructure configuration management conversation, however its main differentiator is the message bus architecture and the ability to react to events in real time. While that sounds a bit abstract, the main question we should be asking ourselves is how will this simplify the day to day management of my infrastructure? In this post, we’ll step through getting the configuration on a couple Cumulus switches under full management with Salt, and end with a practical event-based workflow for adding and replacing devices in our infrastructure.

    Configuration Management

    In a previous Continue reading

    Tapping the brakes on 802.11ac wave 2

    802.11ac wave 2 is the splashy new kid in the wireless technology pool, but some experts caution that you might not want to let it play without lifeguards present just yet.Wave 2 access points are now available from major wireless vendors, and have started to make inroads into the enterprise. The technology has been gaining ground in sales statistics recently, to the point where it’s starting to undercut sales of first-gen 802.11ac gear.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Study shows 802.11ac wave 2 APs gaining sales ground + US lawmakers question police use of facial recognition techTo read this article in full, please click here

    Why 802.11ax is the next big thing in Wi-Fi

    I know, I know, I’ve heard it before. A new technology comes along, and it promises to be the next big thing. Consumers and businesses buy it, and what happens? It fails to live up to the hype. In my opinion, almost every iPhone release over the past five years has been that way. Sure there were some cool new features, but overall it’s not something I’d say was game changing. One technology that does promise to live up to the hype is 802.11ax, the next standard for wireless LANs. I say that because this next generation of Wi-Fi was engineered for the world we live in where everything is connected and there’s an assumption that upload and download traffic will be equivalent. Previous generations of Wi-Fi assumed more casual use and that there would be far more downloading of information than uploading. To read this article in full, please click here

    The release of Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.7

    RedHat-Ansible-Engine

    Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.7 is now available, featuring improved stability, speed and performance.

    Preparing for the Future

    Ansible Engine 2.7 continues to improve compatibility with modern versions of Python. As a result of changes to support newer versions of Python, support for running Ansible Engine with Python 2.6 has been removed. Management of systems with Python 2.6 installed is still possible, though the system Ansible Engine is running from must have Python 2.7 or Python 3.5 or later. This means if ansible-pull is being used the system running ansible-pull will need Python 2.7 or Python 3.5 or later.

    A new file locking feature is designed to prevent race conditions when delegating to a central resource. For example, if a play calls for several hosts to write to a single file on a remote host it is likely multiple hosts would attempt to write to the file at the same time. This can now be done in Ansible Engine 2.7.

    Deprecating use of features is often a challenging task. This task can be even more challenging when it involves multiple Ansible core modules. In Ansible Engine 2.7, several modules have Continue reading

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