More Ansible Modules for Extreme

We published Ansible modules for Extreme SLX devices earlier this year. Now we have modules covering all the main Extreme Switching & Routing product families - SLX, VDX, MLX, EXOS, VSP.

Available Modules

  • SLX - slxos_command, slxos_config, slxos_facts, slxos_interface, slxos_l2_interface, slxos_l3_interface, slxos_linkagg, slxos_lldp, slxos_vlan
  • VDX - nos_command, nos_config, nos_facts
  • EXOS - exos_command, exos_config, exos_facts
  • VOSS - voss_command, voss_config, voss_facts
  • MLX - ironware_command, ironware_config, ironware_facts

All modules are available in the current GA version of Ansible (2.7), except for voss_config. That one proved a bit trickier for me to write, and I didn’t get it done in time for the 2.7 cutoff. That one is an open Pull Request against the Ansible devel branch. That should get reviewed and merged soon. It will then make its way into the next GA release. You can of course use the code direct from my branch in the meantime.

All modules use the network_cli plugin. See Platform Options for general information about how to use this connection type.

Thanks to Continue reading

How High Can The CCIE Go?

Congratulations to Michael Wong, CCIE #60064! And yes, you’re reading that right. Cisco has certified 30,000 new CCIEs in the last nine years. The next big milestone for CCIE nerds will be 65,536, otherwise known as CCIE 0x10000. How did we get here? And what does this really mean for everyone in the networking industry?

A Short Disclaimer

Before we get started here, a short disclaimer. I am currently on the Cisco CCIE Advisory Board for 2018 and 2019. My opinions here do not reflect those of Cisco, only me. No insider information has been used in the crafting of this post. Any sources are freely available or represent my own opinions.

Ticket To Ride

Why the push for a certified workforce? It really does make sense when you look at it in perspective. More trained people means more people that know how to implement your system properly. More people implementing your systems means more people that will pick that solution over others when they’re offered. And that means more sales. And hopefully also less support time spent by your organization based on the trained people doing the job right in the first place.

You can’t fault people for wanting Continue reading

What’s the IoT doing to your data center?

Much of the hype around the Internet of Things is centered on a decentralized model of deployment – edge computing, where specialized devices sit close to the endpoints they’re managing or monitoring, is very much the flavor of the month.Yet the cloud and the data center are still critical parts of the infrastructure, and the huge growth in IoT deployments is having an effect on them, as well. Even deployments that lean heavily on edge compute can stream data back to a central hub for more detailed analysis. So it’s tough to argue that rise of IoT hasn’t changed requirements and expectations in the data center.To read this article in full, please click here

netdev 0x12 Update on Software Gone Wild

In recent years Linux networking started evolving at an amazing pace. You can hear about all the cool new stuff at netdev conference… or listen to Episode 94 of Software Gone Wild to get a CliffsNotes version.

Roopa Prabhu, Jamal Hadi Salim, and Tom Herbert joined Nick Buraglio and myself and we couldn’t help diverging into the beauties of tc, and the intricacies of low-latency forwarding before coming back on track and started discussing cool stuff like:

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RobinHood: tail latency aware caching – dynamic reallocation from cache-rich to cache-poor

RobinHood: tail latency aware caching – dynamic reallocation from cache-rich to cache-poor Berger et al., OSDI’18

It’s time to rethink everything you thought you knew about caching! My mental model goes something like this: we have a set of items that probably follow a power-law of popularity.

We have a certain finite cache capacity, and we use it to cache the most frequently requested items, speeding up request processing.

Now, there’s a long tail of less frequently requested items, and if we request one of these that’s not in the cache the request is going to take longer (higher latency). But it makes no sense whatsoever to try and improve the latency for these requests by ‘shifting our cache to the right.’

Hence the received wisdom that unless the full working set fits entirely in the cache, then a caching layer doesn’t address tail latency.

So far we’ve been talking about one uniform cache. But in a typical web application one incoming request might fan out to many back-end service requests processed in parallel. The OneRF page rendering framework at Microsoft (which serves msn.com, microsoft.com and xbox.com among others) relies on more than 20 backend Continue reading

The Top 6 Questions You Asked on Containerizing Production Apps

We recently hosted IDC research manager Gary Chen as a guest speaker on a webinar where he shared results from a recent IDC survey on container and container platform adoption in the enterprise. IDC data shows that more organizations are deploying applications into production using containers, driving the need for container platforms like Docker Enterprise that integrate broad management capabilities including orchestration, security and access controls.

The audience asked a lot of great questions about both the IDC data and containerizing production applications. We picked the top questions from the webinar and recapped them here.

If you missed the webinar, you can watch the webinar on-demand here.

Top Questions from the Webinar

Q: What are the IDC stats based on?

A: IDC ran a survey of 300+ container deployers from companies with more than 1,000 employees and have primary responsibility for container infrastructure in the US and modeled it from a variety of data sources they collect about the industry. 

Q: IDC mentioned that 54% of containerized applications are traditional apps. Is there is simple ‘test’ to see if an app can be containerized easily?

Source: IDC, Container Infrastructure Market Assessment: Bridging Legacy and Cloud-Native Architectures — User Survey Continue reading

BrandPost: Top Ten Reasons to Think Outside the Router – No. 10: It’s Getting Cloudy

Borrowing from the iconic David Letterman Top Ten List segment from his former Late Show, this new blog series will countdown the Top Ten Reasons to Think Outside the Router.The #10 reason it’s time to retire traditional routers at the branch: It’s getting cloudy! In fact, it’s already cloudy. In November 2017, Forrester projected that 2018 would be the year that more than 50% of enterprise applications would be hosted in public and private clouds. Here we are in 2018, and  96% of 997 SMB and enterprise companies surveyed now use cloud services. The migration to cloud-based applications and infrastructure continues to accelerate and is happening faster than anyone predicted. The challenge: enterprise router-centric WAN architectures weren’t designed for the cloud.To read this article in full, please click here

Rackspace launches disaster recovery as a service program

Give managed cloud computing provider Rackspace points for timing. Coming right after the Uptime Institute issued a warning for data center operators to improve their environmental disaster plans, the company announced it is broadening its existing disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) program for on-premises, colocation, and multi-cloud environments.The expansion utilizes Zerto’s disaster recovery software, which is specifically designed to provide business continuity and disaster recovery in a cloud and virtualized environment.To read this article in full, please click here

Rackspace launches disaster recovery as a service program

Give managed cloud computing provider Rackspace points for timing. Coming right after the Uptime Institute issued a warning for data center operators to improve their environmental disaster plans, the company announced it is broadening its existing disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) program for on-premises, colocation, and multi-cloud environments.The expansion utilizes Zerto’s disaster recovery software, which is specifically designed to provide business continuity and disaster recovery in a cloud and virtualized environment.To read this article in full, please click here

OpenStack Foundation releases software platform for edge computing

The OpenStack Foundation, the joint project created by NASA and Rackspace to create a freely usable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform, has announced the initial release of StarlingX, a platform for edge computing.StarlingX is designed for remote edge environments, offering node configuration in host, service management, and perform software updates remotely. It can also warn operators if there are any issues with the servers or the network.The foundation says the platform is optimized for low-latency, high-performance applications in edge network scenarios and is primarily aimed at carrier networking, industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and Internet of Things (IoT).To read this article in full, please click here

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