On Applicability of MPLS Segment Routing (SR-MPLS)

Whenever I compare MPLS-based Segment Routing (SR-MPLS) with it’s distant IPv6-based cousin (SRv6), someone invariably mentions the specter of large label stacks that some hardware cannot handle, for example:

Do you think vendors current supported label max stack might be an issue when trying to route a packet from source using Adj-SIDs on relatively big sized (and meshed) cores? Many seem to be proposing to use SRv6 to overcome this.

I’d dare to guess that more hardware supports MPLS with decent label stacks than SRv6, and if I’ve learned anything from my chats with Laurent Vanbever, it’s that it sometimes takes surprisingly little to push the traffic into the right direction. You do need a controller that can figure out what that little push is and where to apply it though.

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Introducing the Event-Driven Ansible developer preview

Today at AnsibleFest 2022, Red Hat announced an exciting new developer preview for Event-Driven Ansible. Most customers are on a journey toward full end-to-end automation and there are many paths you take along this journey.  Event-Driven Ansible is a new way to enhance and expand automation. It improves IT speed and agility, while enabling consistency and resilience. 

By fully automating necessary but routine tasks, you and your team will have more time to focus on interesting engineering challenges and new innovations. For example, what if you no longer needed to pause critical work to manually add technical detail to  a service ticket?  Or address a user password reset request? Or reset a router as a first troubleshooting step? With Event-Driven Ansible, the friction in your day can be dramatically reduced, leaving more time to work on important projects, with some added work-life balance.  

 

Why a developer preview? 

The Event-Driven Ansible technology was developed by Red Hat and is available on GitHub as a developer preview. Community input is essential. Since we are building a solution to best meet your needs, we’re providing an opportunity for you to advocate for those needs. We ask that Continue reading

Getting Started with Event-Driven Ansible

 As one technology advances, it expands the possibilities for other technologies and offers the solutions of tomorrow for the challenges we face today. AnsibleFest 2022 brings us new advances in Ansible automation that are as bright as they are innovative. I am talking about the Event-Driven Ansible developer preview.

Automation allows us to give our systems and technology speed and agility while minimizing human error. However, when it comes to trouble tickets and issues, we are often left to traditional and manual methods of troubleshooting and information gathering. We inherently slow things down and interrupt our businesses. We have to gather information, try our common troubleshooting steps, confirm with different teams, and eventually, we need to sleep. 

Support lifecycle diagram with many manual steps and hand-offs.

 

One application of Event-Driven Ansible is to remediate technology issues before near real-time, or at least trigger troubleshooting and information collection in an attempt to find the root cause of an outage while your support teams handle other issues. 

Event driven automation used in the support lifecycle: fewer steps, faster Mean-Time-To-Resolution.  

 

Event-Driven Ansible has the potential to change the way we respond to issues and illuminates many new automation Continue reading

It takes a community: how partners play a key role in event driven automation

Event-driven automation is increasingly being adopted because of the strong benefits it delivers in managing huge amounts of complexity across multi-clouds, a multi-device remote workforce, and growing edge implementations. In a digital world, maintaining resilience and reliability is essential and event driven automation helps teams meet these needs while working around resource and skills gaps.  

This advanced automation technique can be used to address festering problems before there is a full-blown outage, improve agility and resilience to meet the demands of the business, and maintain consistency to avoid downtime and meet governance requirements. It also frees time spent on routine tasks so IT teams can focus on the innovations that matter.  

 

Partners benefit from enabling end-to-end event-driven automation

For independent software vendors (ISVs), solution providers and service partners, this is a great opportunity to create easy-to-implement solutions for your customers and help them work with modern automation techniques that will truly make an operational impact. Event-driven technologies – including network, security, monitoring tools, observability solutions and workload optimization tools – must be cooperative players in a larger ecosystem. 

Today, we invite ISVs and consulting/service partners to create event driven automation content that makes it easy for Continue reading

Gartner: IT matters more than ever to attract and keep the best talent

As the priorities of IT are driven by the needs to support business goals, one of the increasingly important needs IT leaders must to pay attention to is attracting and retaining high-quality employees.“IT now matters more than ever in the recruitment, retention, employee engagement and high performance of all enterprise employees, not just IT.” said Tina Nunno, Gartner vice president and fellow the opening keynote for the firms IT Symposium/Xpo 2022.A new Gartner survey found that only 31% of employees said that they have the technology they need, so there is an opportunity there for CIO’s to make a difference. “Employers who revolutionize the work and empower their workers with technology will become the employers of choice,” Nunno said.To read this article in full, please click here

Tech Bytes: LiveAction Integrates NDR And Network Visibility (Sponsored)

The Tech Bytes podcast welcomes sponsor LiveAction, which provides network visibility and NDR products for network engineers. We’ll get an overview of LiveAction’s portfolio and take a closer look at new security capabilities in its ThreatEye Network Detection and Response product.

The post Tech Bytes: LiveAction Integrates NDR And Network Visibility (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Gartner: 10 tech trends you need to know for 2023

IT executives must look beyond cost savings to new forms of operational excellence and seek technologies that can help them optimize resilience, scale industry-specific solutions and product delivery, and pioneer new forms of engagement, according to the 10 top strategic technology trends for 2023 unveiled at Gartner’s IT Symposium/Xpo 2022.These include multiple forms of wireless, artificial intelligence, and sustainability, according to Frances Karamouzis, distinguished vice president and analyst at Gartner, and external events are making IT pros’ decisions about them even more difficult.“Depending on what region of the world you are in there are lots of looming issues such as a potential recession, supply chain concerns, the war in Ukraine and that impact, as well as energy-related issues,” Karamouzis said.To read this article in full, please click here

Network Break 403: Startup Hedgehog Fuses SONiC And Kubernetes; Google, Intel Launch Mount Evans SmartNIC

Take a Network Break! This week we cover a lot of news including a new SONiC startup, Cisco and Microsoft teaming up on collaboration, new hardware from Google and Intel, a new SOC from Palo Alto Networks, space networking, and more.

The post Network Break 403: Startup Hedgehog Fuses SONiC And Kubernetes; Google, Intel Launch Mount Evans SmartNIC appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Startup promises SD-WAN service with MPLS reliability, less complexity

Startup Graphiant emerged from stealth mode last month with what it describes as an enterprise-grade network service that provides the privacy, security, and reliability of MPLS but with the cost effectiveness, agility, and scalability of broadband internet.In addition, the service, called Graphiant Network Edge, is simpler to deploy and manage than the hybrid SD-WAN/MPLS networks that many enterprises wind up with when they adopt SD-WAN, according to Graphiant CEO Khalid Raza.To read this article in full, please click here

netlab Router-on-a-Stick Example

In early June 2022 I described a netlab topology using VLAN trunks in netlab. That topology provided pure bridging service for two IP subnets. Now let’s go a step further and add a router-on-a-stick:

  • S1 and S2 are layer-2 switches (no IP addresses on red or blue VLANs).
  • ROS is a router-on-a-stick routing between red and blue VLANs.
  • Hosts on red and blue VLANs should be able to ping each other.
Lab topology

Lab topology

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netlab Router-on-a-Stick Example

In early June 2022 I described a netlab topology using VLAN trunks in netlab. That topology provided pure bridging service for two IP subnets. Now let’s go a step further and add a router-on-a-stick:

  • S1 and S2 are layer-2 switches (no IP addresses on red or blue VLANs).
  • ROS is a router-on-a-stick routing between red and blue VLANs.
  • Hosts on red and blue VLANs should be able to ping each other.
Lab topology

Lab topology

Read more …

Linear Regression Rough Notes

Introduction

xkcd

When it comes to stats, one of the first topics we learn is linear regression. But many people don’t realize how deep the linear regression topic is. Below are my partial notes on Linear Regression for anyone who may find this helpful.

Linear Model

A basic statistical model with single explanatory variable has equation describing the relation between x and the mean $\mu$ of the conditional distribution of Y at each value of x.

$ E(Y_{i}) = \beta_{0} + \beta_{1}x_{i} $

Alternative formulation for the model expresses $Y_{i}$

$ Y_{i} = \beta_{0} + \beta_{1}x_{i} + \epsilon_{i} $

where $\epsilon_{i}$ is the deviation of $Y_{i}$ from $E(Y_{i}) = \beta_{0} + \beta_{1}x_{i} + \epsilon_{i}$ is called the error term, since it represents the error that results from using the conditional expectation of Y at $x_{i}$ to predict the individual observation.

Least Squares Method

For the linear model $E(Y_{i}) = \beta_{0} + \beta_{1}x_{i}$, with a sample of n observations the least squares method determines the value of $\hat{\beta_{0}}$ and $\hat{\beta_{1}}$ that minimize the sum of squared residuals.

$ \sum_{i=1}^{n}(y_{i}-\hat{\mu_{i}})^2 = \sum_{i=1}^{n}[y_{i}-(\hat{\beta_{0}} + \hat{\beta_{1}}x_{i})]^2 = \sum_{i=1}^{n}e^{2}_{i} $

As a function of model parameters $(\beta_{0} , \beta_{1})$, the expression is quadratic in $\beta_{0},\beta_{1}$

$ Continue reading

Linear Regression Notes

Introduction

xkcd

When it comes to stats, one of the first topics we learn is linear regression. But most people don’t realize how deep the linear regression topic is, and observing blind applications in day-to-day life makes me cringe. This post is not about virtue-signaling(as I know some areas I haven’t explored myself), but to share my notes which may be helpful to others.

Linear Model

A basic stastical model with single explanatory variable has equation describing the relation between x and the mean $\mu$ of the conditional distribution of Y at each value of x.

$ E(Y_{i}) = \beta_{0} + \beta_{1}x_{i} $

Alternative formulation for the model expresses $Y_{i}$

$ Y_{i} = \beta_{0} + \beta_{1}x_{i} + \epsilon_{i} $

where $\epsilon_{i}$ is the deviation of $Y_{i}$ from $E(Y_{i}) = \beta_{0} + \beta_{1}x_{i} + \epsilon_{i}$ is called the error term, since it represents the error that results from using the conditional expectation of Y at $x_{i}$ to predict the individual observation.

Least Squares Method

For the linear model $E(Y_{i}) = \beta_{0} + \beta_{1}x_{i}$, with a sample of n observations the least squares method determines the value of $\hat{\beta_{0}}$ and $\hat{\beta_{1}}$ that minimize the sum of squared residuals.

$ \sum_{i=1}^{n}(y_{i}-\hat{\mu_{i}})^2 = \sum_{i=1}^{n}[y_{i}-(\hat{\beta_{0}} + Continue reading

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