ANSIBLE COMMUNITY – 2017 YEAR IN REVIEW

2017 Community Post

It's time again for the annual Ansible community review. Let's start again, as we do every year, with a quick look at the numbers.

Debian Popcon

Debian’s Popularity Contest is an opt-in way for Debian users to share information about the software they’re running on their systems.

As with every year, caveats abound with this graph -- but even though it represents only a small sample of the Linux distro world, it’s useful because it’s one of the few places where we can see an apples-to-apples comparison of install bases of various automation tools. Because Ansible is agentless, we compare the Ansible package to the server packages of other configuration management tools. (Chef does not make a Debian package available for Chef server.)

We see that Ansible has continued its steady growth in 2017, increasing its user base here by approximately 50% in the past year.

GitHub Metrics

2017 was a busy year for Ansible on the GitHub front, and in 2017 we caught the notice of GitHub itself. Ansible now has its own top level topic for GitHub searches, and that search reveals over 5000 repositories of Ansible content. We also made the 2017 GitHub Octoverse report, placing Continue reading

BrandPost: Manufacturer improves app performance, productivity with SD-WAN

IMMI is an Indiana-based manufacturer of safety products, such as seat belts, car seats, and other specialized vehicle safety devices. It has more than 1,600 employees in six countries across the Americas, Europe, and Asia.IMMI has invested heavily in computer-assisted manufacturing for its main plant locations. In addition, it relies on Oracle ERP and Microsoft Office 365 in hosted locations for day-to-day productivity.The company continues to expand through acquisition and requires agile WAN to facilitate communications between its locations and to ensure optimal user experience with cloud-based applications.Deployment details IMMI had been using Cisco ASA firewalls to provide secure IP VPN connections to its 12 main locations (headquarters, main data centers, and manufacturing plants). WAN connectivity is provided by a mix of high-speed broadband Internet, private links, and 4G LTE (as back up). IMMI found the Cisco ASAs complex and time consuming to manage, especially in remote locations. Application performance across the company was negatively affected by high latency and occasional brownouts due to reliance on Internet connectivity from distant locations (e.g., China).To read this article in full, please click here

Private Equity Amps Up Arm Servers With Applied X86 Techies

The Carlyle Group, the publicly traded investment firm that has invested in nearly 300 companies that have a net worth of $170 billion and which itself could make around $4 billion in management fees and income from those investments for 2017, does not invest in any technology lightly.

So the fact that it has acquired the X Gene server processor assets that were created over many years by Applied Micro and briefly owned last year by Chinese IT supplier MACOM means that Carlyle believes Arm servers have a shot in the datacenter and that its investors want to get a …

Private Equity Amps Up Arm Servers With Applied X86 Techies was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Ubuntu 16.04 git lfs broken install

When something simple goes wrong, frustration is never proportionate to the anticipated ease.

On Ubuntu 16.04 on a Fresh install, I came across this cracker.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:git-core/ppa
Cannot add PPA: 'ppa:~git-core/ubuntu/ppa'.
ERROR: '~git-core' user or team does not exist.

Ok. Must be a typo. After spending twenty seconds or so on this, which is still way too long to be looking for typos on something so simple, it isn’t a typo.
This information comes straight out of the 

git
community. Pun intended; what a git.

After cracking some knuckles and blowing warm air on my finger tips, I went on the hunt for a fix.

Most of the Google results for this issue gravitates around proxy devices interfering with the traffic. Being on corporate wifi, this is entirely possible.
After tethering to my cell phone, rebooting the OS and clearing out some caches, the issue persisted. Adding the sources to 

apt
manually also failed.

There is always more than one way to skin a cat and in my case, installing via package cloud worked.

curl -s https://packagecloud.io/install/repositories/github/git-lfs/script.deb.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt-get install git-lfs

In this world of virtualisation and micro-services, things like this are Continue reading

Using EVPN in Very Small Data Center Fabrics

I had an interesting “how do you build a small fabric without throwing every technology in the mix” discussion with Nicola Modena and mentioned that I don’t see a reason to use EVPN in fabrics with just a few switches. He disagreed and gave me a few good scenarios where EVPN might be handy. Before discussing them let’s establish a baseline.

The Setup

Assume you’re building two small data center fabrics (small because you have only a few hundred VMs and two because redundancy and IT auditors).

Read more ...

MPLS 101 – Label Distribution Protocol (LDP)

In our last post, we saw a glimpse of what MPLS was capable of.  We demonstrated how routers could forward traffic to IP end points without looking at the IP header.  Rather, the routers performed label operations by adding (pushing), swapping, or removing (popping) the labels on and off the packet.  This worked well and meant that the core routers didn’t need to have IP reachability information for all destinations.  However – setting this up was time consuming.  We had to configure static paths and operations on each MPLS enabled router.  Even in our small example, that was time consuming and tedious.  So in this post we’ll look at leveraging the Label Distribution Protocol (LDP) to do some of the work for us.  For the sake of clarity, we’re going to once again start with a blank slate.  So back to our base lab that looked like this…

Note: I refer to the devices as routers 1-4 but you’ll notice in the CLI output that their names are vMX1-4.

Each device had the following base configuration…

interfaces {
    ge-0/0/0 {
        enable;
        unit 0 {
            family inet {
                address 10.2. Continue reading

Dell EMC Expands Server Capabilities for Software-defined, Edge and High-Performance Computing

Dell EMC Expands Server Capabilities for Software-defined, Edge and High-Performance Computing Launches highly capable enterprise-class single- and dual-socket servers Breaks down the cost barrier for deployment of emerging workloads Offers up to 20% better TCO per four-node cluster for vSAN deployments at the edge and are now available as vSAN Ready Nodes Dell EMC announced three new servers designed for software-defined environments, edge and high-performance computing... Read more →

Tune Into Our CCIE SPv4.1 Advanced Technologies Course This Wednesday and Thursday!

Join 5 time CCIE Rohit Pardasani for our new online live sessions, CCIE Service Provider v4.1 Advanced Technologies. These live sessions are available to All Access Pass members via our live classroom interface, which you can access through your members account. For those who are not All Access Pass members, you can view and purchase AAP packages here. Read on to learn more about this online live class.

When: Wednesday, February 7th & Thursday, February 8th at 8 am PDT

Why You Should Watch: This SPv4.1 class will complete the SPv4.1 courses and bring us current for the Cisco Service Provider Blueprints.

Instructor info: Rohit Pardasani, CCIE #21282, CCSI #34999

About the Instructor:

Rohit has been in the networking industry for more than 17 years, with a focus on Cisco networking for the past 15 years. Rohit not only brings his years of teaching experience to the classroom, but also years of real-world enterprise and service provider experience. Rohit has assisted hundreds of engineers in obtaining their CCIE certification, and has been conducting CCIE RS, CCIE SEC, CCIE SP and CCIE Collaboration for Cisco Systems worldwide. Rohit currently holds 5xCCIE’s (Routing Switching, Service Provider, Security, Voice and Continue reading

Cisco says almost all workloads will be cloud based within 3 years

In its latest Cisco Global Cloud Index (2016-2021), the networking giant predicts that by 2021, 94 percent of all workloads will run in some form of cloud environment and that dedicated servers will be a distinct minority.That 94 percent covers both public and private cloud scenarios, which means even in an on-premises scenario, almost all workloads are going to be run in a virtualized environment. The days where a server is dedicated to one workload are rapidly drawing to a close.“We use the definition of one workload or instance with one physical server,” said Thomas Barnett, director, Cisco Service Provider forecast and trends. “In virtual scenarios, we’re seeing one workload with multiple virtual machines and containers. Based on growth in public cloud, we’ve overcome some of the barriers of adoption, such as cost and security and simplicity of deploying of these services.”To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco says almost all workloads will be cloud based within 3 years

In its latest Cisco Global Cloud Index (2016-2021), the networking giant predicts that by 2021, 94 percent of all workloads will run in some form of cloud environment and that dedicated servers will be a distinct minority.That 94 percent covers both public and private cloud scenarios, which means even in an on-premises scenario, almost all workloads are going to be run in a virtualized environment. The days where a server is dedicated to one workload are rapidly drawing to a close.“We use the definition of one workload or instance with one physical server,” said Thomas Barnett, director, Cisco Service Provider forecast and trends. “In virtual scenarios, we’re seeing one workload with multiple virtual machines and containers. Based on growth in public cloud, we’ve overcome some of the barriers of adoption, such as cost and security and simplicity of deploying of these services.”To read this article in full, please click here

DARPA’s $200 Million JUMP Into Future Microelectronics

DARPA has always been about driving the development of emerging technologies for the benefit of both the military and the commercial world at large.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been a driving force behind U.S. efforts around exascale computing and in recent years has targeted everything from robotics and cybersecurity to big data to technologies for implantable technologies. The agency has doled out millions of dollars to vendors like Nvidia and Rex Computing as well as national laboratories and universities to explore new CPU and GPU technologies for upcoming exascale-capable systems that hold the promise of 1,000 …

DARPA’s $200 Million JUMP Into Future Microelectronics was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Using Ansible to manage RHEL 5 yesterday, today and tomorrow

Ansible and RHEL

With the release of Ansible 2.4, we now require that managed nodes have a Python version of at least 2.6. Most notable, this leaves RHEL 5 users asking how to manage RHEL 5 systems in the future - since it only provides Python 2.4.

Background

With the release of Ansible 2.4 in September 2017, we have moved to support Python 2.6 or higher on the managed nodes. This means previous support for Python-2.4 or Python-2.5 is no longer available:

Support for Python-2.4 and Python-2.5 on the managed system's side was dropped. If you need to manage a system that ships with Python-2.4 or Python-2.5, you'll need to install Python-2.6 or better on the managed system.

This was bound to happen at some point in time because Python 2.6 was released almost 10 years ago, and most systems in production these days are based upon 2.6 or newer version. Furthermore, Python 3 is getting more and more traction, and in the long term we need to be able to support it. However, as the official Python documentation shows, code that runs on both Python 2. Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: How to overcome infrastructure firefighting and other distractions

As an IT professional, you were hired for a certain, specialized job. But why can’t you seem to get it done? Maybe you’ve been busy “fighting fires.” For anyone responsible for network infrastructure, that’s a leading culprit. But there are others.On the theory that to solve a problem first you need to identify it, we’ve listed a number of obstacles that may be keeping you and your team from the mission-critical parts of your jobs. Taking note of these distractions can be a first step toward fashioning solutions that lead to better outcomes for you and your organization.Infrastructure firefighting When things don’t go according to plan and you have to trade your strategic IT roadmap for tactical reactionary decisions - that’s infrastructure firefighting. The network may not be working as intended; capacity planning may be off mark; production issues could be causing outages, requiring in-depth explanation and research to mitigate repeat outages in the future. Outages may require special actions, as we discuss in this article. You may not have signed on to extinguish unwanted fires, but like it or not, that has become part of your job.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How to overcome infrastructure firefighting and other distractions

As an IT professional, you were hired for a certain, specialized job. But why can’t you seem to get it done? Maybe you’ve been busy “fighting fires.” For anyone responsible for network infrastructure, that’s a leading culprit. But there are others.On the theory that to solve a problem first you need to identify it, we’ve listed a number of obstacles that may be keeping you and your team from the mission-critical parts of your jobs. Taking note of these distractions can be a first step toward fashioning solutions that lead to better outcomes for you and your organization.Infrastructure firefighting When things don’t go according to plan and you have to trade your strategic IT roadmap for tactical reactionary decisions - that’s infrastructure firefighting. The network may not be working as intended; capacity planning may be off mark; production issues could be causing outages, requiring in-depth explanation and research to mitigate repeat outages in the future. Outages may require special actions, as we discuss in this article. You may not have signed on to extinguish unwanted fires, but like it or not, that has become part of your job.To read this article in full, please click here

Response: The Need For Stretched VLANs (@ioshints)

A recent post from Ivan Pepelnjak entitled Revisited: The Need For Stretched VLANs made me smile rather bitterly as Ivan dug into the apparent continued desire for stretched layer 2 networks and the reasons people give for the solution’s requirement and validity. I love a good bit of snark as much as the next nerd, so as you can imagine, I’m all over that post.

John Herbert, Expressing Extreme Disbelief At The Horror He Is Reading

However, I confess I did wince slightly – in the way one might do when an old wound is poked with a sharp stick – as Ivan made a passing sarcastic reference to Microsoft’s amazing Network Load Balancing technology:

ipspace.net: Revisited: The Need For Stretched VLANs

My mind was thrown back to the heady days of 2009 when I stumbled across another post from Mr Pepelnjak, this time entitled Turn a switch into a hub … the Microsoft Way which bemoaned the unadulterated stupidity of Microsoft’s attempt to use layer 2 network flooding to accomplish clustering. I had discovered the nature of this behavior at a previous client and had my mind blown by the very stupid and non-standards-compliant way in which this had been implemented.

The reason my mind went to that post, however, is because if I recall correctly it’s Continue reading

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