Network Automation: 7 Basic Steps
Automation can reduce the time spent on tedious network tasks. Here’s how to get started.
Automation can reduce the time spent on tedious network tasks. Here’s how to get started.
Salman left an interesting comment on my Running BGP on Servers blog post:
My prior counterparts thought running OSPF on Mainframes was a good idea. Then we had a routing blackhole due to misconfiguration on the server. Twice! The main issue was the Mainframe admins lack of networking/OSPF knowledge.
Well, there’s a reason OSPF is called Interior Routing Protocol.
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Kubernetes offers several different authentication mechanisms or plugins. The goal of this post is to review each of them and provide a brief example of how they work. In addition, we’ll talk about the ‘kubeconfig’ file and how it’s used in association with authentication plugins.
Note: In theory there’s no requirement to use any of these authentication plugins. With the proper configuration, the API server can accept requests over HTTP on any given insecure port you like. However – doing so is insecure and somewhat limiting because some features of Kubernetes rely on using authentication so it’s recommended to use one or more of the following plugins.
Kubernetes offers 3 default authentication plugins as of version 1.0. These plugins are used to authenticate requests against the API server. Since they’re used for communication to the API, that means that they apply to both the Kubelet and Kube-Proxy running on your server nodes as well as any requests or commands you issue through the kubectl CLI tool. Let’s take a look at each option…
Client Certificate Authentication
This is the most common method of authentication and is widely used to authentication node back Continue reading
Over the past few years, I’ve seen (and contributed to) a rise of real network engineers taking on the new and sometimes challenging world of network automation. Every time I check in on Jason Edelman’s Network Automation Slack channel, I’m very happy to see the sheer number of folks asking questions, trying to get the the concepts and tools of network automation working in their own environment.
For many, this is all very new, and there’s a lot to soak up. Linux networking has broken onto the scene in a big way. We’ve started using text formats like YAML and Jinja2 to template out network configurations to make more consistent network changes. We’ve started using tools like Ansible to drive those changes in a meaningful way to our network infrastructure. It’s clear that these ideas are useful, and are taking hold in a big way.
At this point, I’d like to ask you this question; with all of this tooling, which admittedly helps us achieve consistency of change, does it really ensure the success of a change? How do we even define success? At what point can we sit back and be able to truly say, “that change did not Continue reading
Over the past few years, I’ve seen (and contributed to) a rise of real network engineers taking on the new and sometimes challenging world of network automation. Every time I check in on Jason Edelman’s Network Automation Slack channel, I’m very happy to see the sheer number of folks asking questions, trying to get the the concepts and tools of network automation working in their own environment.
For many, this is all very new, and there’s a lot to soak up. Linux networking has broken onto the scene in a big way. We’ve started using text formats like YAML and Jinja2 to template out network configurations to make more consistent network changes. We’ve started using tools like Ansible to drive those changes in a meaningful way to our network infrastructure. It’s clear that these ideas are useful, and are taking hold in a big way.
At this point, I’d like to ask you this question; with all of this tooling, which admittedly helps us achieve consistency of change, does it really ensure the success of a change? How do we even define success? At what point can we sit back and be able to truly say, “that change did not Continue reading