Juniper Jumps On the Automation Bandwagon With EngNet
The company says its approach is different from Cisco’s because it is focused on training the engineers behind the technology, not just releasing new products.
Red Hat Ansible Network Automation Updates
For this blog post I am going to cover the following topics:
- The httpapi connection plugin
- Support for Arista eAPI and Cisco NX-API
- net_get and net_put
- netconf_get, netconf_rpc and netconf_config
- cli_command and cli_config
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
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.
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
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
Too Many Choices! Picking the Right PoE for Your Application
Selecting a PoE power source for a powered device can be challenging since there are many options. Here is a brief overview to help you narrow down your choices and make the right decision.
Leaf-and-Spine Fabric Myths (Part 2)
The next set of Leaf-and-Spine Fabric Myths listed by Evil CCIE focused on BGP:
BGP is the best choice for leaf-and-spine fabrics.
I wrote about this particular one here. If you’re not a BGP guru don’t overcomplicate your network. OSPF, IS-IS, and EIGRP are good enough for most environments. Also, don’t ever turn BGP into RIP with AS-path length serving as hop count.
Read more ...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
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
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
HPC File Systems Fail for Deep Learning at Scale
Now that deep learning at traditional supercomputing centers is becoming a more pervasive combination, the infrastructure challenges of making both AI and simulations run efficiently on the same hardware and software stacks are emerging. …
HPC File Systems Fail for Deep Learning at Scale was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .
The release of Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.7
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