Nokia + Alcatel-Lucent Means Q1 Revenue Decline
Q2 is likely to disappoint as well.
Ansible as Automation Glue
Throughout my time at Ansible, I have endeavoured to put together pertinent demos for customers - when I was 'on the other side of the fence' I always preferred it when a vendor asked about the challenges we faced and prepared the product to show how it would help me.
A few months back a customer told us about their challenge of getting code from development into production, and how it was taking almost a third of a year. They wanted to see how Ansible could help accelerate that workflow.
Since giving that demo I've not stopped asking customers about their challenges, but nine times out of ten they come back with the same answer these days - development to production workflow acceleration. That's when I show the same demo.
After running through this so many times, I thought it might be useful to record it as a screencast to share it publicly - along with all the Ansible playbooks used to put it together. The demo runs to 18 minutes in total, but covers many aspects of how powerful and flexible Ansible is as a tool - from machine provisioning to configuration management to code deployment to interacting with various Continue reading
ONF & iSDX Webinar Q&A: Solving Internet Routing Problems with Software-Defined Internet Exchange Points
iSDX further discusses the power of SDN to Internet exchange points in this post webinar Q&A post.
Book Review: Deep Work by Cal Newport
Deep Work by Cal Newport is highly recommended if you are an information worker who is less productive than you wish you were. I recommended Deep Work even more highly if you feel you are productive, but are not producing the sort of work you desperately want to be.DR versus DIS: What’s the Diff?
OSPF and IS-IS, both link state protocols, use mechanisms that manage flooding on a broadcast link, as well as simplify the shortest path tree passing through the broadcast link. OSPF elects a Designated Router (or DR) to simplify broadcast links, and IS-IS elects a Designated Intermediate System (or DIS—a topic covered in depth in the IS-IS Livelesson I recently recorded). Beyond their being used in two different protocols, there are actually subtle differences in the operation of the two mechanisms. So what is the difference?
Before we dive into differences, let’s discuss the similarities. We’ll use the illustration below as a basis for discussion.
Q1 and Q2 illustrate the operation of a link state protocol without any optimization on a broadcast network, with Q1 showing the network, and Q2 showing the resulting shortest path tree. Q3 and Q4 illustrate link state operation with optimization over a broadcast link. It’s important to differentiate between building a shortest path tree (SPT) across the broadcast link and flooding across the broadcast link—flooding is where the primary differences lie in the handling of broadcast links in the two protocols.
Let’s consider building the SPT first. Both protocols operate roughly the same in this Continue reading