Time for Another Summer Break?

I can confirm that an old saying is true: the older you are, the faster years pass. Can’t believe it’s time for another summer break. I hope you’ll manage to get away from work, turn off the Internet, and enjoy a few days in your favorite spot with your loved ones!

I also promise I won’t be annoying you with boring stuff like EVPN next hops or pointers to AI myth-busters (I have to admit it: I was cleaning my Inbox this week). However, I probably won’t be able to resist publishing a few lightweight netlab-related blog posts, or links to interesting content.

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Python Working With NAPALM

Python Working With NAPALM

At the end of the last part, we looked at the multi-vendor problem. Every time you support a new vendor with Netmiko, you have to remember its command syntax, keep track of the differences, and add more branching logic to your scripts. It works, but it gets messy fast.

NAPALM (Network Automation and Programmability Abstraction Layer with Multivendor support) is a Python library that solves exactly this problem. Instead of sending vendor-specific commands and dealing with the differences yourself, you use NAPALM's standard set of methods, and NAPALM figures out what to do for each platform behind the scenes. Ask NAPALM to get_config(), and it will send the right command to a Cisco IOS device, the right command to a Juniper device, and the right command to an Arista device, all through the same Python method call.

NAPALM currently supports Cisco IOS, Cisco IOS-XR, Cisco NX-OS, Arista EOS, Juniper Junos, and a few others. It is not as broad as Netmiko in terms of vendor coverage, but for the vendors it does support, the abstraction it provides is well worth it.

There is one more thing worth understanding upfront. NAPALM is not a replacement for Netmiko, it actually uses Continue reading

N4N059: Twisted Pair Cabling

Copper twisted pair cabling serves as a fundamental component of Ethernet infrastructure and Ethan and Holly are here to break down how it works. They discuss the technical differences between cabling categories, how wire twisting cancels out electromagnetic interference, and share practical guidance on installation standards and testing methodologies. Episode Links: Watch this episode on... Read more »

IPB203: The Death of NAT

Network Address Translation (NAT), a foundational element of IPv4, faces critical reassessment as IPv6 deployment shifts the landscape. Ed and Tom evaluate the evolving role of NAT, questioning whether traditional translation models remain necessary when stateful packet inspection offers more robust, transparent security solutions. Episode Links: “Fanboy” series – IPv6 and NATs – YouTube

How we built saga rollbacks for Cloudflare Workflows

Cloudflare Workflows allows you to build durable, multi-step applications with built-in retries and state persistence across long-running processes. When a Workflow executes, each step can call external systems, retry failures, and persist state across restarts. But if one step fails, it may leave earlier work from completed steps in an inconsistent or partial state.

Today we’re shipping saga rollbacks for Workflows, allowing you to declare rollback logic within the step itself, in case of failure.

For example, consider a workflow for transferring funds between accounts at two different banks:

  1. Debit from account at Bank A

  2. Credit to account at Bank B

  3. Send email confirmation to both account owners

What happens if Step 2, the credit to account at Bank B, fails? Once the debit succeeds at Bank A, the transaction is committed and the money has left its system. As the orchestrator of the transaction, you cannot simply “undo” the operation in Bank A's system. Instead, the money must be credited back to the account at Bank A through a new operation that semantically reverses the first one.

This pairing of an operation and its compensation logic is called the saga pattern.

Before today, developers had to implement their own Continue reading

Python Working with Files

Python Working with Files

Almost every Python script eventually needs to read from or write to a file. You might want to save the output of a command for later, back up device configs to disk, load a list of devices from a text file instead of hardcoding them, or write a log of what your script did. Python makes all of this straightforward once you know how it works.

In this part, we will start with reading text files, cover the proper way to open files using context managers, and then move on to writing and appending. Once we have the basics down, we will build a small config backup script that connects to devices, pulls the running config, and saves each one to its own file on disk.

Reading a Text File

To read a file in Python, you use the built-in open() function. It takes the path to the file as the first argument and returns a file object that you can read from.

Let's say you have a file called devices.txt in the same folder as your script, with the following contents.

192.168.202.101
192.168.202.102
192.168.202.103

Here is the most basic Continue reading

D2DO305: Scaling Human Connection in Tech Communities

Kyler and Ned are joined by former AWS Community Program Manager Jason Dunn to discuss what it takes to build and maintain a thriving tech community. Jason shares his “benevolent dictatorship” philosophy on community management, emphasizing the importance of authentic human connections. They also explore how AI can empower non-technical individuals to build custom solutions... Read more »

Worth Reading 062426


As the development of data centers in the U.S. faces intense criticism from local communities and legal action, project supporters are claiming “foreign influence” could be fueling the fire.

 


In this bingecast installment of the Mind Matters News podcast, host Robert J. Marks welcomes economics professor and author Gary Smith to discuss the hype around artificial intelligence and its impact on the market.

 


In the DNS name resolution space queries are free. To what extent do we see over-querying on the part of recursive resolvers in the DNS?

 


Over the past year, the Ethernet community has examined 400Gbps‑per‑lane signaling from many angles: AI network use cases, modulation options, channel limitations, and technology feasibility. Those discussions have been necessary, but they now need to converge into decisions that allow the industry to move forward.

 


For most of the internet era, distribution was scarce and content was abundant. Platforms that controlled distribution captured the majority of value.

Unlocking the Cloudflare app ecosystem with OAuth for all

Cloudflare provides services that help run 20% of the web, but we don’t do it alone. Developers on our platform use a myriad of tools and services from other companies too. Cloudflare provides a rich API for our platform that enables developers to create automations, CI/CD, and integrations that glue together the various parts of their infrastructure. Earlier this month, we announced self-managed OAuth, making it easier for customers to create and manage their own OAuth clients for delegated access to the Cloudflare API.

Cloudflare isn’t new to OAuth. If you’ve used Wrangler, or used integrations from partners like PlanetScale, then you’ve already used it. However, until now, third-party OAuth was only available through a small number of manually onboarded integrations, and was not available to developers more broadly. That meant developers building their own integrations had to rely on API tokens, which are harder to manage and a poor fit for many delegated application flows. 

Over the last year, we onboarded a growing number of early partners while improving the consent, revocation, and security model behind Cloudflare OAuth. But as our Developer Platform grew and agentic tools drove demand for delegated access, it became clear that opening Continue reading

HS136: How AI Is Changing Enterprise Software Development (Sponsored)

AI can generate working code quickly. Building reliable software to run infrastructure platforms is still a multi-year engineering challenge. In this sponsored episode, BlueCat chief strategy officer Andrew Wertkin joins John Burke and Scott Robohn to talk through the difference between code generation and enterprise software development, and the challenges and opportunities of engineering reliability... Read more »

The post-quantum EO is an important milestone. Now it’s time to get to work

On June 22, 2026, President Trump signed Executive Order 14409, "Securing the Nation Against Advanced Cryptographic Attacks." The order sets a December 31, 2030, deadline for federal agencies to transition their most sensitive systems to post-quantum encryption, and a December 31, 2031, deadline for post-quantum authentication. The EO also directs federal contractors to comply with post-quantum Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) by the end of 2030.

We welcome this executive order. The U.S. government has a long track record of using federal leadership and procurement to drive adoption of new technologies across the broader industry. We've seen this work with IPv6, with routing security and the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), and with DNSSEC, and we’re glad to see this tradition continue with post-quantum cryptography.

The EO is especially important at this moment because the timeline for Q-Day, the day that quantum computers can break the public-key cryptography used across the Internet, has been accelerated. In April 2026, Cloudflare moved our own target for full post-quantum security to 2029, following research breakthroughs from Google and Oratomic. This EO updates guidance from 2024, when the National Institute of Standards Continue reading

PP115: Palo Alto Networks: Reality of 109 to 1: Securing Machine Identities and AI Agents (Sponsored)

Machine identities now outnumber human identities in the enterprise 109 to 1 — and most of them are running without the governance controls you’d never skip for a human employee. Service accounts, API keys, tokens, workload credentials, and a fast-growing population of autonomous AI agents: all of them need access, all of them can be... Read more »

Chapter 2: Installing SONiC NOS

 

ONIE-Based SONiC Installation

Many switch vendors have added SONiC NOS support to at least part of their switch portfolio. Depending on the vendor and switch model, customers may be able to order a switch with a vendor-customized SONiC version that is supported at the same level as the vendor's own network operating system. Some vendors also allow customers to run the community-based SONiC distribution.

The support model for Community SONiC depends on the vendor. Some hardware vendors provide full support, while others provide no support at all. Compared with vendor-specific SONiC distributions, Community SONiC provides greater flexibility because it can be customized, rebuilt, and adapted to customer requirements. However, running a Community SONiC deployment without vendor support or in-house expertise is generally not a recommended operating model.

Community SONiC is typically installed by using ONIE (Open Network Install Environment) [1], a small open-source installation environment that provides a standardized method for installing network operating systems on supported switches. Figure 2-1 illustrates a conceptual ONIE-based Community SONiC installation process.

If the switch is delivered with a vendor-specific SONiC distribution already installed, it may boot directly into that operating system without requiring a separate ONIE installation workflow. For Community SONiC deployments, Continue reading

Python Parsing Command Output with TextFSM

Python Parsing Command Output with TextFSM

So far, whenever we have run a command with Netmiko, the output has come back as one big string. That is fine when you just want to print it or eyeball it, but the moment you want to actually do something with the output, filter interfaces that are down, count the number of routes in the table, extract the software version from a show version, you hit a wall. Raw text is hard to work with.

You could split it, use string methods, write clever slicing logic, or reach for regular expressions. Some people do this including myself, and it works, but it is not ideal. The moment the output format changes even slightly, your parsing breaks. And every command needs its own custom parsing code, which quickly becomes a maintenance nightmare.

This is where TextFSM comes in. It is a small library that turns messy device output into clean, structured data, usually a list of dictionaries. Instead of one big blob of text, you get proper Python objects you can loop through, filter, and index. And you do not have to write the parsing logic yourself, because there is a huge community-maintained library of ready-made templates called ntc-templates Continue reading

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