Network Automation at AnsibleFest: That’s How We Role

AF-Network-Automation-Blog

I am getting super excited about my first ever AnsibleFest! Despite using Ansible for more than five years now, I have never had the opportunity to attend this famed event. I had coworkers from previous employers attend, and they were always excited and invigorated after the conference. October is fast approaching and the energy around the event is growing every day.

I’m especially excited for AnsibleFest 2018 because it will have an entire track dedicated to my favorite subject: Network Automation. Join us for two days (October 2-3) as Ansible network developers, Ansible experts from around the world, partners and community members showcase new functionality, use cases, stories and paths to production. You will hear from the developers who design, create, test and distribute the code. You’ll also hear from industry experts and network operators who create and deploy Ansible Playbooks to manage a variety of network gear and situations.

I’ll highlight two talks I’m especially excited about, to give you an idea of what you’ll learn in the Network Automation track at AnsibleFest 2018.

First up is one of my favorite coworkers, Trishna Guha, talking about the Network-Engine role. Trishna will highlight how Network-Engine extracts data from network devices Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For August 24th, 2018

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

Images from a far flung galaxy? Nope. It's the mind blowing swirling beauty of ink in motion

 

Do you like this sort of Stuff? Please lend me your support on Patreon. It would mean a great deal to me. And if you know anyone looking for a simple book that uses lots of pictures and lots of examples to explain the cloud, then please recommend my new book: Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. They'll love you even more.

 

  • $10 billion: damages in worlds largest cyberattack; .5%: bitcoins use of all the electricity on earth; 1/200th: Verizon throttling California firefighters for leverage; 4.6%: YC companies reaching $100M+ valuation; 45: ave age of successful startup founder; $250,000: monthly take from browser-based Monero mining; 300+: 3D digitizatized Greek and Roman sculptures; 80: employees are chipped at a company; 100k: bike graveyard from failed startups; 70%: executives think they are block chain experts; $7 billion: Slack valuation; 120: AWS instance types; 27.6 petabytes: Microsoft’s undersea data center webcam of swimming fish; 42%: product is the reason startups fail; $334bn: Continue reading

Introducing ebpf_exporter

Introducing ebpf_exporter

This is an adapted transcript of a talk I gave at Promcon 2018. You can find slides with additional information on our Prometheus deployment and presenter notes here. There's also a video.

Tip: you can click on the image to see the original large version.

Introducing ebpf_exporter

Here at Cloudflare we use Prometheus to collect operational metrics. We run it on hundreds of servers and ingest millions of metrics per second to get insight into our network and provide the best possible service to our customers.

Prometheus metric format is popular enough, it's now being standardized as OpenMetrics under Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It's exciting to see convergence in long fragmented metrics landscape.

In this blog post we'll talk about how we measure low level metrics and share a tool that can help you to get similar understanding of your systems.

Introducing ebpf_exporter

There are two main exporters one can use to get some insight into a Linux system performance.

The first one is node_exporter that gives you information about basics like CPU usage breakdown by type, memory usage, disk IO stats, filesystem and network usage.

The second one is cAdvisor, that gives similar metrics, but drills down to a container level. Instead Continue reading

Fog Computing and Networking

To meet the needs of the emerging applications and networks, the clouds are descending toward the ground and even dispersed among the client devices – forming fog computing and networking or fog. Learn more about fog computing at Fog World Congress 2018.

Check Out Our Newest Collaboration Video!

Do you want to obtain your CCNP Collaboration or perhaps enhance your Cisco Collaboration skills for the real world? The CCNP Advanced Technologies v1 course from INE is targeted at network and voice professionals who want to take their Cisco Collaboration knowledge to the next level.

This course is intended for network and voice professionals looking to further improve their knowledge or prepare themselves for the CIPTV1 exam. In this course we will be looking at CUCM and VCS Dial Plan, Voice + Video Calling, IOS Gateway, Conferencing, QoS, On Cluster Calling with CUCM and Media Resources. This course will be delivered in lecture based format with plenty of hands on practical demonstrations.

CIPTV1 – Implementing Cisco IP Telephony & Video’ will cover professional to advanced level concepts and demonstrations around a large portion of the Cisco Unified Communications portfolio, including some of the below products and topics:

  • Cisco Unified Communications Manager Dial Plan and Media Resources
  • Cisco VCS Dial Plan
  • IOS Gateways – Digital Voice, Dial-Peers, Translation Rules
  • Conferencing with Cisco Conductor and Cisco Telepresence Server
  • Quality of Service
About The Instructor:

Dean Babbage is a Voice and Network Professional actively working in the Cisco Partner community. He carries Continue reading

Fixing My Twitter

It’s no surprise that Twitter’s developers are messing around with the platform. Again. This time, it’s the implementation of changes announced back in May. Twitter is finally cutting off access to their API that third party clients have been using for the past few years. They’re forcing these clients to use their new API structure for things like notifications and removing support for streaming. This new API structure also has a hefty price tag. For 250 users it’s almost $3,000/month.

You can imagine the feedback that Twitter has gotten. Users of popular programs like Tweetbot and Twitterific were forced to degrade client functionality thanks to the implementation of these changes. Twitter power users have been voicing their opinions with the hashtag #BreakingMyTwitter. I’m among the people that are frustrated that Twitter is chasing the dollar instead of the users.

Breaking The Bank

Twitter is beholden to a harsh mistress. Wall Street doesn’t care about user interface or API accessibility. They care about money. They care are results and profit. And if you aren’t turning a profit you’re a loser that people will abandon. So Twitter has to make money somehow. And how is Twitter supposed to make money in today’s Continue reading

The Internet Society and Global Scribes Work Together to Amplify Young Voices

On International Youth Day, the Internet Society and Global Scribes partnered to connect youth around the world to let their voices be heard, allowing them to become empowered and engaged global citizens, striving toward a more united and sustainable digital future.

As local and international actors innovate to solve the most pressing issues that we face in the world today, young people are often left out of the equation with little or no participation in important discussions and decision-making processes.

Youth across the world are often overlooked as a potential resource to solving global challenges, such as climate change, migration, health, and unemployment, despite being directly impacted by these issues and having opinions on how to solve them.

This also happens in the Internet ecosystem, where young people often do not have a place at the table when it comes to decisions that shape the Internet’s future.

While youth are recognized as “the future generation” and perceived as key to a more sustainable tomorrow, they are seldom given adequate platforms to let their voices be heard or allow them to contribute to their societies in a meaningful way, in their own right as youth.

Young people are often deprived of the opportunity to serve as catalysts for a more united and sustainable world Continue reading

Dell EMC rolls out future-proofed high-performance servers

Dell EMC has launched a new line of high-performance servers called the PowerEdge MX that the company said is designed to support a wide variety of traditional and emerging data center workloads, such as artificial intelligence.PowerEdge MX offers the first modular infrastructure architecture designed to easily adapt to future technologies and offers what Dell calls “server disaggregation.” What that means is customers can tailor configurations to their needs from shared pools of disaggregated resources, which can be changed as needed. If a company needs more or less compute, it can reprovision that resource on the fly to avoid overprovisioning and wasted assets.To read this article in full, please click here

Dell EMC rolls out future-proofed high-performance servers

Dell EMC has launched a new line of high-performance servers called the PowerEdge MX that the company said is designed to support a wide variety of traditional and emerging data center workloads, such as artificial intelligence.PowerEdge MX offers the first modular infrastructure architecture designed to easily adapt to future technologies and offers what Dell calls “server disaggregation.” What that means is customers can tailor configurations to their needs from shared pools of disaggregated resources, which can be changed as needed. If a company needs more or less compute, it can reprovision that resource on the fly to avoid overprovisioning and wasted assets.To read this article in full, please click here