Location-Based Tech: NFC, WiFi, and BLE
A look at the wireless technologies used for location-based services.
When the Network Knows All
With the internet of things, there can such a thing as too much data.
New in Ansible for Networking Engineers Online Course
Plenty of new stuff was added to the Ansible for Networking Engineers online course and webinar since the last update.
Fun things first: I needed adjustable check mode behavior and change tracking in some playbooks, and documented these features in two new videos (online course and webinar).
Read more ...Troubleshooting connectivity problems in leaf and spine fabrics
Unlike traditional hierarchical network designs, where a small number of links can be monitored to provide visibility, a leaf and spine network has no special links or switches where running CLI commands or attaching a probe would provide visibility. Even if it were possible to attach probes, the effective bandwidth of a leaf and spine network can be as high as a Petabit/second, well beyond the capabilities of current generation monitoring tools.
Fortunately, industry standard sFlow monitoring technology is built into the commodity switch hardware used to build leaf and spine networks. Enabling sFlow telemetry on all the switches in the network provides centralized, real-time, visibility into network traffic.
Intent-Based Network Automation with Ansible
The latest in all the networking buzz these days is Intent-Based Networking (IBN). There are varying definitions of what IBN is and is not. Does IBN mean you need to deploy networking solely from business policy, does IBN mean you must be streaming telemetry from every network device in real-time, is it a combination of both? Is it automation?
This article isn’t meant to define IBN, rather, it’s meant to provide a broader, yet more practical perspective on automation and intent.
Intent isn’t New
One could argue that intent-based systems have been around for years, especially when managing servers. Why not look at DevOps tools like CFEngine, Chef, and Puppet (being three of the first)? They focused on desired state–their goal was to get managed systems into a technical desired state.
If something is in its desired state, doesn’t that mean it’s in its intended state?
These tools did this eliminating the need to know the specific Linux server commands to configure the device–you simply defined your desired state with a declarative approach to systems management, e.g. ensure Bob is configured on the system without worrying about the command to add Bob. One major difference was those tools used Continue reading
Intent-Based Network Automation with Ansible
The latest in all the networking buzz these days is Intent-Based Networking (IBN). There are varying definitions of what IBN is and is not. Does IBN mean you need to deploy networking solely from business policy, does IBN mean you must be streaming telemetry from every network device in real-time, is it a combination of both? Is it automation?
This article isn’t meant to define IBN, rather, it’s meant to provide a broader, yet more practical perspective on automation and intent.
Intent isn’t New
One could argue that intent-based systems have been around for years, especially when managing servers. Why not look at DevOps tools like CFEngine, Chef, and Puppet (being three of the first)? They focused on desired state–their goal was to get managed systems into a technical desired state.
If something is in its desired state, doesn’t that mean it’s in its intended state?
These tools did this eliminating the need to know the specific Linux server commands to configure the device–you simply defined your desired state with a declarative approach to systems management, e.g. ensure Bob is configured on the system without worrying about the command to add Bob. One major difference was those tools used Continue reading
Intent-based Networking: What’s Real and What’s Hype?
“Better to be onboard than be left behind.”
Docker in the Enterprise Showcased at VMworld 2017
Last week, in the blistering heat of Las Vegas, Docker had a chance to interact with thousands of VMworld attendees to talk about containers. The message we heard again and again was that those in charge of infrastructure and virtualization are now being asked to manage containers. Sometimes it is being driven by developer teams that are already using Docker, but sometimes it is the infrastructure teams who recognize the benefits of moving applications to containers for easier maintenance and operations as well as cost savings. With Docker Enterprise Edition (EE), we have a solution that is designed to let IT secure and manage containerized applications.
Learn More About Docker for VMware Admins
If you’re interested in learning more about how Docker EE allows IT to improve operations, move workloads to the cloud and increase application agility all while saving costs, we’re happy to be partnering with the VMware User Group (VMUG) to deliver a webcast tomorrow. Register now to see how Docker EE is being used by some of the world’s largest container deployments, how Docker works with Windows applications or to clarify any confusion you may have about how Docker containers and VMs work together.
Anuta Networks Brings Orchestration to Tata’s SD-WAN
Anuta’s NCX has helped Tata configure, deploy, and manage more than 10,000 instances of its SD-WAN.
Coming Soon: Networking Features in Ansible 2.4
Wow, how time flies! Here we go with another Ansible Project release packed full of updates for automating network infrastructure. After spending the last year heavily focused on building much of the foundation for Ansible network integration, this release represents the beginning of the journey towards building more application-aware, declarative-based Ansible modules. This is an exciting time and on behalf of the entire Ansible community, including the Ansible network engineering team. I’m very pleased to share with you the enhancements and updates to network integration included with the forthcoming Ansible 2.4 open source release.
The initial introduction of network support was originally conceived to help operators focus on being able to execute configuration changes on network devices with a set of imperative-based configuration modules.
Today, the Ansible network modules are focused on pushing configuration statements to network devices. It was a small step, but an important one in the journey towards full configuration management of physical network devices.
Since then, we have turned our attention towards how to better help organizations become more agile in actively managing network configurations. Over the course of the Ansible 2.4 release, we have been phasing in a more intelligent approach to building Continue reading
Worth Reading: The rise of fourth wave computing
The post Worth Reading: The rise of fourth wave computing appeared first on rule 11 reader.
Future Interconnects: Gen-Z Stitches A Memory Fabric
It is difficult not to be impatient for the technologies of the future, which is one reason that this publication is called The Next Platform. But those who are waiting for the Gen-Z consortium to deliver a memory fabric that will break the hegemony of the CPU in controlling access to memory and to deepen the memory hierarchy while at the same time flattening memory addressability are going to have to wait a little longer.
About a year longer, in fact, which is a bit further away than the founders of the Gen-Z consortium were hoping when they launched …
Future Interconnects: Gen-Z Stitches A Memory Fabric was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Breaking the Internet: Swapping Backhoes for BGP
The term “break[ing] the Internet” has taken hold over the last few years – it sounds significant, and given the role that the Internet has come to play in our daily lives, even a little scary. A Google search for “break the Internet” returns 14.6 million results, while “broke the Internet” returns just under a half million results.
Interestingly, Google Trends shows a spike in searches for the term in November 2014 (arguably representing its entry into mainstream usage), coincident with Kim Kardashian’s appearance in Paper Magazine, and on the magazine’s Web site. (Warning: NSFW) To that end, Time Magazine says “But in the context of viral media content, ‘breaking the Internet’ means engineering one story to dominate Facebook and Twitter at the expense of more newsworthy things.” Presumably in celebration of those efforts, there’s even now a “Break the Internet” Webby Award.
“Breaking the Internet” in this context represents, at best, the failure of a website to do sufficient capacity planning, such as using a content delivery network (CDN) to help improve the scalability and performance of the Web site in the face of increased traffic from a flash crowd from the viral Continue reading