Network Engineer Persona: Part Three
Part three! Let’s get straight to business and carry on where we left off from part two.
Key Skill One
Thinking about automation in an agnostic way is your first footstep. Automation is about data flowing through building blocks that do things and decision points, allow you when to do things.
Removing CLI and replacing it with an abstraction layer isn’t much of a win. For instance, I regularly talk about the process of creating a VLAN and applying it to an Ethernet switch-port on a tagged interface. This somewhat simple ‘workflow’ creates more conversational friction than imagine-able. Let’s work through it.
Task: Create a VLAN
This task requires domain-specific parameters to a VLAN. These are: ‘VLAN_Number’ and ‘VLAN_Description’.
Task: Apply VLAN to Switchport
This task requires domain-specific parameters to a switchport. These are: ‘Port_Name’ and ‘VLAN_Number’.
Note how the inputs flow through the actions within the workflow?
The green arrows descending illustrate the ‘success transition path’ for each action component.
So, what about these questions?
1. Is the VLAN in use?
We can be more specific here, but it adds complications to the answer. Version two is: “Is the VLAN in use in the network zone that the device Continue reading
He played a key role in moving HPE into the SDN and NFV space.
Company executives had touted its cloud business as part of its Q2 results.
The data center software also integrates with Kubernetes.
The new book should be out around the 29th of December, give or take a few days. For readers interested in what Ethan and I (and Ryan, and Pete Welcher, and Jordan Martin, and Nick Russo, and… the entire list is in the front matter), the general idea is essentially grounded in RFC1925, rule 11. There is really only a moderately sized set of problems computer system needs to solve in order to carry data from one application to another. For instance, in order to transport data across a network, you need to somehow format the data so everyone can agree on how to write and read it, ensure the data is carried without errors, ensure neither the sender nor the receiver overrun or underrun one another, and find some way to allow multiple applications (hosts, etc.), to talk over the same media. These four problems have somewhat proper names, of course: marshaling, which involves dictionaries and grammars; error control; flow control; and multiplexing. So the first step in understanding network engineering is to figure out what the problems are, and how to break them apart.
The company’s virtualization effort is Project Ocean.