Maximize your hybrid cloud mastery with the Ansible validated content

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In today's environment, mastering the hybrid cloud has become a key factor in IT transformation and business innovation. In this context, network complexity can be a nightmare, especially as organizations expand their infrastructure and embrace hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategies. Without automation, monitoring and controlling network routing, infrastructure, and security in a hybrid and multi-cloud environment are difficult to manage. Furthermore, identifying and resolving network performance issues in these infrastructures are quite challenging.

In one of the previous blogs, titled  “Crank up your automation with Ansible validated content”, Nuno Martins highlighted the Ansible validated content included in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.3.

In this blog post, we will show you how to leverage the amazon.aws_troubleshooting Collection for hybrid cloud to troubleshoot network performance issues and maximize your hybrid cloud mastery. In particular, we’ll use the aws_troubleshooting.connectivity_troubleshooter role.

First, let’s take a look at  the amazon.aws_troubleshooting Collection.

 

Deep dive on cloud.aws_troubleshooting

Let’s take a deep look at  the amazon.aws_troubleshooting Collection. This Collection includes a variety of Ansible Roles to help troubleshoot AWS resources. The Collection includes the following roles:

  • cloud.aws_troubleshooting.troubleshoot_rds_connectivity - A role to troubleshoot RDS Continue reading

3 things network pros need to tell developers about why the network matters

Of the 47 enterprises I chatted with in December, guess how many were NOT users of hybrid cloud. Zero. Guess how many ever used another cloud model. Zero. Guess how many believe they will "move everything to the cloud". Zero. OK, I realize that you may not have read this sort of thing very often or at all, but I think it demonstrates just how important hybrid cloud is and how little we really know about it. That’s bad in that it’s always a bad thing when something critical is hardly understood, but it could be a good thing for network professionals looking to engage again with their company IT planning process.To read this article in full, please click here

Who Are The Most Overpaid Tech CEOs?

This post originally appeared in the Packet Pushers’ Human Infrastructure newsletter. You can get the newsletter for free here. Or don’t. That’s fine too. The tech sector has recently gone through a spasm of layoffs. Tens of thousands of jobs have been cut at companies such as Microsoft, Google, Cisco, and Salesforce. The cuts are […]

The post Who Are The Most Overpaid Tech CEOs? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

War tests Ukrainian telecom, internet resilience

One year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the country’s overall resilience and defiance has been inspiring, but telecommunications and internet connectivity has grown much more difficult.Initially the country’s internet network mostly withstood with some outages and slowdowns, but that has changed over time as the aggressors devote more effort in destroying physical locations and deploying malware and other cybersecurity weapons.For example, researchers at Top10VPN recently reported some distressing analysis including:To read this article in full, please click here

War tests Ukrainian telecom, internet resilience

One year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the country’s overall resilience and defiance has been inspiring, but telecommunications and internet connectivity has grown much more difficult.Initially the country’s internet network mostly withstood with some outages and slowdowns, but that has changed over time as the aggressors devote more effort in destroying physical locations and deploying malware and other cybersecurity weapons.For example, researchers at Top10VPN recently reported some distressing analysis including:To read this article in full, please click here

Automation 22. How to Use NetBox Scripts To Add Value To Your Network Source of Truth

Dear friend,

Source of Truth plays crucial role in network automation as this is the basis we are automating our IT and network infrastructure against. It doesn’t mean to be monitoring system in any capacity. At the same time, it may be useful to quickly do some checks against your network infrastructure and to update some metadata in the Source of Truth.

Oh, Are You Talking About NetBox Again?

Yes, we are. NetBox is a leading tool in the source of truth framework. Being open-source, it by far outpaces all other open-source and commercial tools existing worldwide in this area. On top of its wide built-in capabilities, it is highly extensible via plugins and scripts.

The good news is that we covered NetBox in our Zero-to-Hero Network Automation Training, and you can benefit from learning it from the context of network automation with integrations to Python and Ansible tools, which you create during our training.

We offer the following training programs for you:

During these trainings you will learn the following topics:

What’s Next For DPUs? – Packet Pushers Livestream With Dell Technologies – Video

How will the Data Processing Unit (DPU) market evolve? Are there new use cases for this infrastructure platform? Greg Ferro from the Packet Pushers and Joseph White, Fellow at Dell Technologies, look into the crystal ball to see where DPUs might go. This video is sponsored by Dell Technologies. You can subscribe to the Packet […]

The post What’s Next For DPUs? – Packet Pushers Livestream With Dell Technologies – Video appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Using Python Logging to Figure Out What You Did Wrong

As a warning to everyone, I am not a developer. I am a network engineer who is trying to do some automation stuff. Some of what I’m doing sounds logical to me, but I would not trust my own opinions for production work. I’m sure you can find a Slack channel or Mastodon instance with people who can tell you how to do things properly.

I use too many print statements to figure out what’s going on. Get an object and print it to screen to make sure it’s right. Do a calculation and print the result. There are so many print statements in my code that I had to start using a debug variable to tell it when to print stuff. I even use that technique in my functions.

# Don't do stuff like this
def myFunc(string_to_return, debug=False):
    if debug:
        print(f"Returning \"{string_to_return}\"")
    return string_to_return

local_debug = True
string_to_send = "Aaron wastes a lot of time with print statements."

if local_debug:
    print(f"I'm sending \"{string_to_send}\"")
myString = myFunc(string_to_send, debug=True)
print(myString)

It’s painful to look at this code. I need a better solution, and I found Python’s logging module.

Very simply, you associate your messages with one of five logging levels (debug, info, warning, error, Continue reading

Using Python Logging to Figure Out What You Did Wrong

As a warning to everyone, I am not a developer. I am a network engineer who is trying to do some automation stuff. Some of what I’m doing sounds logical to me, but I would not trust my own opinions for production work. I’m sure you can find a Slack channel or Mastodon instance with people who can tell you how to do things properly.

I use too many print statements to figure out what’s going on. Get an object and print it to screen to make sure it’s right. Do a calculation and print the result. There are so many print statements in my code that I had to start using a debug variable to tell it when to print stuff. I even use that technique in my functions.

# Don't do stuff like this
def myFunc(string_to_return, debug=False):
    if debug:
        print(f"Returning \"{string_to_return}\"")
    return string_to_return

local_debug = True
string_to_send = "Aaron wastes a lot of time with print statements."

if local_debug:
    print(f"I'm sending \"{string_to_send}\"")
myString = myFunc(string_to_send, debug=True)
print(myString)

It’s painful to look at this code. I need a better solution, and I found Python’s logging module.

Very simply, you associate your messages with one of five logging levels (debug, info, warning, error, Continue reading

Weekend Reads 022423


A decade ago, waferscale architectures were dismissed as impractical. Five years ago, they were touted as a fringe possibility for AI/ML. But the next decade might demonstrate waferscale as one of only a few bridges across the post-Moore’s Law divide, at least for some applications.


This is not a ‘silver bullet’, however. In comparison to the sophisticated deception available in traditional IT security, deception in ICS still faces some challenges.


As a numbers guy, I’m always intrigued by the Ookla Speedtest Global Index since it provides an interesting look at broadband speeds in the U.S. and around the world.


Two new separate sets of research released this month underscore real, hidden dangers to physical operations in today’s OT networks from wireless devices, cloud-based applications, and nested networks of programmable logic controllers (PLCs) — effectively further dispelling conventional wisdom about the security of network segmentation as well as third-party connections to the network.


As organizations strengthen their defenses and take a more proactive approach to protection, attackers are adapting their techniques and increasing the sophistication of their operations.


As the security of the Android Platform has been steadily improved, some security researchers have shifted their focus towards other Continue reading

Building A Turnkey DPU Solution – Packet Pushers Livestream With Dell Technologies – Video

Dell Technologies and VMware have partnered on a turnkey HCI-based VxRail solution that integrates VMware’s vSphere Distributed Services Engine and DPU hardware from NVIDIA and AMD Pensando. In this video, Ethan Banks from the Packet Pushers and Joseph White, Fellow at Dell Technologies, discuss how the software and hardware come together to take advantage of […]

The post Building A Turnkey DPU Solution – Packet Pushers Livestream With Dell Technologies – Video appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Creating a Talos Linux Cluster on AWS with Pulumi

Talos Linux is a Linux distribution purpose-built for running Kubernetes. The Talos web site describes Talos Linux as “secure, immutable, and minimal.” All system management is done via an API; there is no SSH access, no shell, and no console. In this post, I’ll share how to use Pulumi to automate the creation of a Talos Linux cluster on AWS.

I chose to write my Pulumi program in Go, but you could—of course—choose to write it in any language that Pulumi supports (JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, one of the .NET languages, Java, or even YAML). I’ve made the Pulumi program available via this GitHub repository. It’s based on these instructions for standing up Talos Linux on AWS.

The Pulumi program has four major sections:

  1. First, it creates the underlying base infrastructure needed for a Talos Linux cluster to run. This includes a VPC (and all the assorted other pieces, like subnets, gateways, routes, and route tables) and a load balancer. The load balancer is needed for the Kubernetes control plane, which we will bootstrap later in the program. This portion also creates the EC2 instances for the control plane.
  2. Next, it uses the Talos Pulumi provider to generate the Talos Continue reading

Heavy Networking 667: Broadcom’s NetOps Delivers End-User Visibility Into SD-WAN (Sponsored)

In today’s Heavy Networking show with sponsor Broadcom we go deep into network management and Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM). At its heart, DEM is about understanding the user experience of the network. Network monitoring and management products that incorporate user experience, such as Broadcom's DX NetOps, can provide visibility into network and application performance to help inform troubleshooting efforts and speed resolution.

Heavy Networking 667: Broadcom’s NetOps Delivers End-User Visibility Into SD-WAN (Sponsored)

In today’s Heavy Networking show with sponsor Broadcom we go deep into network management and Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM). At its heart, DEM is about understanding the user experience of the network. Network monitoring and management products that incorporate user experience, such as Broadcom's DX NetOps, can provide visibility into network and application performance to help inform troubleshooting efforts and speed resolution.

The post Heavy Networking 667: Broadcom’s NetOps Delivers End-User Visibility Into SD-WAN (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Deleting Stuff from Netbox with Pynetbox

As a warning to everyone, I am not a developer. I am a network engineer who is trying to do some automation stuff. Some of what I’m doing sounds logical to me, but I would not trust my own opinions for production work. I’m sure you can find a Slack channel or Mastodon instance with people who can tell you how to do things properly.

We’ve added stuff and updated stuff, so let’s delete some stuff. “Hey, man…you already did that,” you say? You’re right! When we started creating API tokens based on user/pass, we made sure to delete the token at the end. That means we should all be professional pynetbox deleters, then, right? 🙂

When using pynetbox, we mostly deal with object. When updating, we get the object, make changes, then save it back to Netbox. We don’t say “update object 38718 with a new widget”; you actually manipulate an object. When we delete something, we do the same thing…get the object and delete it. Here’s a snippet of the token cleanup script to show that.

<SNIP>
all_tokens = nb_conn.users.tokens.all()

for token in all_tokens:
    <SNIP>
    token.delete()

<SNIP>

Don’t think on the logic of Continue reading

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