One of the most important aspects of the introductory part of my Building Network Automation Solutions online course is the question should I buy a solution or build my own?
I already described the arguments against buying a reassuringly-expensive single-blob-of-complexity solution from a $vendor, but what about using point tools?
Read more ...Starting next weekend, the Internet Engineering Task Force will be in London for IETF 101, where about 1000 engineers will discuss open internet standards and protocols. The week begins on Saturday, 17 March, with a Hackathon and Code Sprint. The IETF meeting itself begins on Sunday and goes through Friday.
As usual, we’ll write our ‘Rough Guide to the IETF’ blog posts on topics of mutual interest to both the IETF and the Internet Society:
More information about IETF 101:
Here are some of the activities that the Internet Society is involved in during the week.
Catch up on the world of the IETF and open Internet standards by reading the IETF Journal. The November issue marked the final printed version; now we plan to share longer-form articles online and via our Twitter and Facebook channels. Our two most recent articles are “Big Changes Ahead for Core Internet Protocols” by Mark Nottingham and “QUIC: Bringing flexibility to the Internet” Continue reading
Ever wondered who manages to produce deja-moo like this one and why they’d do it?
We unveiled a vision to create an intuitive system that anticipates actions, stops security threats in their tracks, and continues to evolve and learn. It will help businesses to unlock new opportunities and solve previously unsolvable challenges in an era of increasing connectivity and distributed technology.
As Erik Dietrich explains in his blog post, it’s usually nothing more than a lame attempt to pretend there are some clothes hanging on the emperor.
Just in case you’re interested: we discussed the state of Intent-Based Majesty’s wardrobe in Network Automation Use Cases webinar.
Of the three pillars of the datacenter – compute, storage, and networking – the one that consistently still has some margins and yet does not dominate the overall system budget is networking. While these elements affect each other, they are still largely standalone realms, with their own specialized devices and suppliers. And so it is important to know the trends in the technologies.
Until fairly recently, the box counters like IDC and Gartner have been pretty secretive about the data they have about the networking business. But IDC has been gradually giving a little more flavor than just saying Cisco …
Drilling Down Into Ethernet Switch Trends was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Sunday marks the beginning of the DNSSEC activities at the ICANN 61 meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico. As per usual there will be a range of activities related to DNSSEC or DANE. Two of the sessions will be streamed live and will be recorded for later viewing. Here is what is happening.
All times below are Atlantic Standard Time (AST), which is UTC-4.
On Sunday, March 11, we’ll have our “DNSSEC For Everybody: A Beginner’s Guide” session that will include our usual skit where a bunch of engineers act out how DNS and DNSSEC work! Yes, it’s a good bit of fun and people have told us it has helped tremendously.
Please come with your questions and prepare to learn all about DNSSEC!
Our big 6-hour workshop will take place on Wednesday, March 14, from 09:00 – 15:00 in Room 208-BC. Lunch will be included. Thank you to our lunch sponsors: Afilias, CIRA, and SIDN.
The very full agenda includes:
If you’re considering evaluating Red Hat Ansible Tower, you might also be curious about what sort of support is included with a trial key. This post will explain what sort of help is available while you conduct a PoC, along with information to assist you with errors and more.
After you download a trial of Ansible Tower and request a license key, there is more than just documentation and reading materials to help guide you through errors. Once you and your team are connected with Ansible and want to start working on an evaluation or proof of concept installation, there are a boatload of resources to help you on your automation journey:
Sales Representatives: Provide support from day one, helping you understand what Ansible Engine and Ansible Tower can do for you and your environment.
Getting Started Team: The product field engineering team (known colloquially as the "Getting Started" team) helps with the installation, configuration and integration of Ansible Engine and Ansible Tower.
Solution Architects: For cases that delve into deeper understanding of all things Ansible Automation, writing playbooks, or consultation/screenshared demos to ensure success of the project, a Solutions Architect can save Continue reading
The community hospital said Dell EMC's environment was a bit complicated.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission could soon crack down on unregulated cryptocurrency trading platforms after the agency sent a strongly worded warning to them this week.
The SEC warned that unregulated online trading platforms may be misleading investors by calling themselves “exchanges,” which implies federal oversight. An SEC-related securities exchange, among other safeguards, has rules designed to prevent fraud and other manipulative practices, the SEC said in an advisory issued Wednesday.
The SEC advisory served as much as a warning to investors using cryptocurrency trading platforms as to the platforms themselves.
“The SEC staff has concerns that many online trading platforms appear to investors as SEC-registered and regulated marketplaces when they are not,” the advisory said. “Many platforms refer to themselves as ‘exchanges,’ which can give the misimpression to investors that they are regulated or meet the regulatory standards of a national securities exchange.”
The SEC does not review the trading protocols used by unregulated trading platforms, it said. “Although some of these platforms claim to use strict standards to pick only high-quality digital assets to trade, the SEC does not review these standards or the digital assets that the platforms select, and the so-called standards should Continue reading
The National Center for Atmospheric Research developed its own container platform.
The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) team is proud of the data centers and network we are building for the next generation of cloud users and, in the spirit of transparency, we want to share with our users tools to better evaluate and measure the performance they will experience on our cloud. Today, we are pleased to announce two new network tools available in the Console to help you measure and analyze network performance.
OCI Market Performance is an interactive visualization tool that displays network performance metrics from OCI regions to cities around the globe. Performance is measured over time to a carefully curated set of endpoint IP addresses within the top providers in each market, providing the user with aggregated performance data for markets and providers over the last day, week, month or three months. This latency data from our Phoenix, Ashburn, and Frankfurt regions can help you predict and manage network performance. We will be adding metrics for more of our regions as they come online (including our twelve recently announced regional data centers).
OCI Market Performance can also assist in planning for growth, as you extend your footprint into new global markets. For FastConnect customers, this tool can help to predict performance between an OCI region and a specific Continue reading
Telefónica and China Unicom enter IoT agreement; The Pentagon slashes deal with AWS partner; Dropbox leverages Equinix.
If you're upgrading your network, it's worthwhile asking others for input in order to avoid a poor or costly design that doesn't serve the needs of your business.
Don’t forget to watch Keith Bogart’s live CCNA/CCNP Q&A session TODAY at 1pm!
During this live Q&A Keith bogart will answer all of your questions about the Cisco CCNA and CCNP Routing and Switching exams. Check back at 1 pm (EST) to get all of your questions answered by an industry expert.
Here’s something I’ve been working on recently: Ansible modules for Extreme SLX switches & routers. Ansible is a popular automation framework, and with good reason: it has a low barrier to entry. Time to usefulness is short. But you need device-specific modules to work with networking devices. Finally we have some modules for SLX. Read on for how to use them.
This blog is not an intro to Ansible in general. There’s plenty of good intros out there. This is specifically about demonstrating Ansible with SLX switches.
Ansible is an agent-less configuration management system. It uses “playbooks”, written in YAML, to define desired configuration state. “modules” written in Python translate this into whatever is needed to configure the system, application, database or network device.
Ansible has been making great strides in adding network automation capabilities. But we haven’t had any modules for working with ~Brocade~ Extreme devices. That is now changing.
PaulQuack has contributed MLXe (Ironware) modules, which will go GA in Ansible 2.5 (due for release in March 2018). And I’ve been working on modules for the SLX, with my colleagues. These have not yet been merged upstream, but it’s Open Source, so you can grab Continue reading
