BGP Communities part 4: Active/Active datacenter

If you read part 2 of this series and came out wondering this is great but:

How do I connect to the internet?

Does this breakdown once I need to have connections?

What else do I have to do to manage state?

We’ll set out to answer these questions and show how it works. There are some dependancies such as your provider supporting customer BGP TE communities as laid out in part 3.

This seems to be the elusive grail in enterprise networking that everyone wants but is unsure of where to start. Hopefully, a few of those questions have been answered throughout this series but be sure to understand what you’re getting into and that your team can support it before and after you leave.

The overall topology

We’ve got data center 1 (DC1) and data center 2 (DC2). They each have a connection to an internal router in ASN 60500. A lot of networks I come across have dedicated routers coming out of the DC to terminate internet connections and support full tables. These router usually only pass a default internally. I don’t have the full tables but instead copy the topology and pass a default into the Continue reading

Is Automation A Full-Time Career?

This post originally appeared on the Packet Pushers’ now-defunct Ignition site on September 17, 2019.   I have a lot of respect for people who focus on network automation and the people at Network To Code are top notch at helping and giving to open source. However, I do mostly disagree with this take on […]

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Privacy And Networking Part 4: Logging

In the last post on this topic, I concluded that IP addresses are protected information—operators should handle users’ IP addresses according to privacy best practices. But I also concluded that because IP addresses used for forwarding— Are collected (or carried through the network) only for forwarding The user cannot reasonably expect the network to forward […]

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Kubernetes For Network Engineers – Lesson 5: Ingress And Service Mesh – Video

This video offers a brief introduction to essential Kubernetes networking constructs: ingress and service mesh, including product examples. Ingress is a proxy that manages access to services within a Kubernetes cluster. A service mesh connects applications or services within the cluster. Host Michael Levan brings his background in system administration, software development, and DevOps to […]

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All Problems Are Hardware Problems

When I was a lad in high school I worked for Walmart. I learned quite a bit about retail at my early age but one of the fascinating things I used in the late 1990s was a wireless inventory unit, colloquially known as a Telxon. I was amazed by the ability to get inventory numbers on a device without a cable. Since this was prior to the adoption of IEEE 802.11 it was a proprietary device that only worked with that system.

Flash forward to the 2020s. I went to Walmart the other day to look for an item and I couldn’t find it. I asked one of the associates if it was in stock. They said they could check and pulled out their phone. To my surprise they were able to launch an app and see that it was in stock in the back. As I waited for them to return with the item I thought about how 25 years of progress had changed that hardware solution into something software focused.

Hardware Genesis

All problems start as hardware problems. If there’s a solution to an issue you’re going to build something first. Need to get somewhere fast? Trains Continue reading

Technology Short Take 157

Welcome to Technology Short Take 157! I hope that this collection of links I’ve gathered is useful to someone out there. In particular, the “Career/Soft Skills” section is a bit bigger than usual this time around, as is the “Security” section.

Networking

  • Interested in understanding how NAT Traversal works? David Anderson’s post on how NAT Traversal works should help.
  • This happened a couple of months ago, but I don’t think I’ve linked to it in a Technology Short Take: the Envoy Proxy open source project announced Envoy Gateway, a “new member of the Envoy Proxy family aimed at significantly decreasing the barrier to entry when using Envoy for API Gateway (sometimes known as ’north-south’) use cases”.
  • This is a slightly older article from Ivan Pepelnjak on using netsim-tools to build Vagrant boxes, but let’s be real—his stuff is kind of timeless anyway, right?

Security

Heavy Networking 639: Juniper Cloud Metro Boosts Metro Performance, Efficiency And Sustainability (Sponsored)

In today’s sponsored Heavy Networking podcast we dive into Juniper Cloud Metro, which includes new appliances, software, and integrations with other Juniper services to address the entire business of ownership and operations. Our guests are Kanika Atri, Sr. Director, Product Management; and Tim Pennell, Sr. Director, Product Management.

Heavy Networking 639: Juniper Cloud Metro Boosts Metro Performance, Efficiency And Sustainability (Sponsored)

In today’s sponsored Heavy Networking podcast we dive into Juniper Cloud Metro, which includes new appliances, software, and integrations with other Juniper services to address the entire business of ownership and operations. Our guests are Kanika Atri, Sr. Director, Product Management; and Tim Pennell, Sr. Director, Product Management.

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Network automation, SASE, 5G rank among enterprise priorities

From incorporating cloud services to keeping the hybrid workforce humming, network execs and architects face myriad challenges every day.The main goals of large organizations are to prioritize those challenges, adjust the network architecture to handle widely distributed applications, services and users, and keep corporate resources secure, according to Neil Anderson, area vice president with World Wide Technology, a $14.5 billion global technology services provider. Read more: SSE is SASE minus the SD-WANTo read this article in full, please click here

Ansible For Network Automation Lesson 7: Templating With Ansible – Video

In this lesson, instructor Josh Vanderaa explores how to work with templates to build configuration stanzas. You’ll also see various methods for working with Jinja2 templates, including: Template from a file to a file Template from a file to an IOS device You can subscribe to the Packet Pushers’ YouTube channel for more videos as […]

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Intel, other chipmakers warn of price hikes

Major chip vendors including Intel are telling customers that they’re set to begin hiking chip prices in the fourth quarter as they deal with increasing costs and supply shortages.The rumor initially started with Intel. Now Qualcomm and Marvell Technologies have also begun informing customers of price increases, according to a report from Taiwanese publication DigiTimes.“On its Q1 earnings call, Intel indicated it would increase pricing in certain segments of its business due to inflationary pressures. The company has begun to inform customers of these changes,” an Intel spokesperson said in a statement to me.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel, other chipmakers warn of price hikes

Major chip vendors including Intel are telling customers that they’re set to begin hiking chip prices in the fourth quarter as they deal with increasing costs and supply shortages.The rumor initially started with Intel. Now Qualcomm and Marvell Technologies have also begun informing customers of price increases, according to a report from Taiwanese publication DigiTimes.“On its Q1 earnings call, Intel indicated it would increase pricing in certain segments of its business due to inflationary pressures. The company has begun to inform customers of these changes,” an Intel spokesperson said in a statement to me.To read this article in full, please click here

Kubernetes Unpacked 005: Serverless Kubernetes In Azure

Since the inception of Kubernetes, the goal has been to make our lives as engineers easier. But with great power comes great responsibility---which in this case is the need to manage a bunch of control planes and worker nodes! Host Michael Levan catches up with Jason Haley, Microsoft MVP and independent consultant to talk about serverless Kubernetes with Azure Container Apps.

Kubernetes Unpacked 005: Serverless Kubernetes In Azure

Since the inception of Kubernetes, the goal has been to make our lives as engineers easier. But with great power comes great responsibility---which in this case is the need to manage a bunch of control planes and worker nodes! Host Michael Levan catches up with Jason Haley, Microsoft MVP and independent consultant to talk about serverless Kubernetes with Azure Container Apps.

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