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Cisco Brings Webex Collaboration to SD-WAN Cloud Program

The dramatic shift to remote work brought on two years ago by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced companies to almost overnight not only adapt their business models but also to focus on technologies that would allow them and their employees to operate productively and securely. That included embracing connectivity solutions to ensure access to the applications and data critical for getting the job done and collaboration tools to enable employees to more easily work together even if they were located many miles apart. All that has accelerated the growth in such markets at software-defined networking (SD-WAN) and video conferencing and remote communications offerings like Microsoft Teams, Cisco System’s Webex and Zoom. Reliance on such technologies will only grow, given that many companies expect to continue a hybrid work environment even after the pandemic lifts. blog post this week pointed to numbers from Gartner that showed that 48% of employees are expected to work remotely post-pandemic and that hybrid workplaces will become commonplace. “In this new norm, seamless communication and collaboration will be the bare minimum for enterprises to achieve workforce productivity Continue reading

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How and why to adopt SDN despite its dark side

Five enterprise network operations managers told me they were very concerned about recent cloud outages. Why? Because every one of the outages were caused by network problems. Four of the five managers admitted that in their own containerized data centers, their problems came more often from networks than from servers. Why is this happening? Answer, according to enterprises: more isn’t better.Complexity is the enemy of efficient operations and management. The sheer volume of things going on can swamp management centers and even management tools. If you add in multiple vendors and multiple technologies that create differences in operations practices, you get something very messy. But it’s more than just size or technology scope that’s making network operations complicated, it’s the way networks work.To read this article in full, please click here

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Top 10 outages of 2021

The biggest outages of 2021 had one thing in common: they affected major infrastructure or services providers and, as a result, affected large numbers of enterprises and end users. The lesson? Companies need to be careful about putting all their infrastructure eggs in one basket, or, if they must, to prepare for downtime if that particular service goes down."There needs to be a plan in place," says Angelique Medina, head of product marketing at ThousandEyes, a Cisco-owned network intelligence company that tracks internet and cloud traffic. "Organizations don't need to be at the mercy of the availability of any one particular service."To read this article in full, please click here

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My Journey to Getting AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty Certified

Last week I took and passed the AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty exam on my first attempt. In this post I will describe the study materials that I used and talk about my experience of taking this test.

What type of skills does this exam test? This is a quote from AWS:

Earning AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty validates expertise in designing and maintaining network architecture for the breadth of AWS services.

The key here I think is “for breadth of AWS services”. It’s not enough to only understand general networking in AWS, you need to understand how to do networking for different AWS services such as S3, WorkSpaces, Lambda, storage gateway, and so on. There is no actual prerequisite to take the exam but it definitely doesn’t hurt if you already have the Solutions Architect Associate (this was previously a prereq) as it will help you in understanding what services are available.

The following is also listed as recommendations for who should take this exam:

• Professional experience using AWS technology, AWS security best practices, AWS storage options and their underlying consistency models, and AWS networking nuances and how they relate to the integration of AWS services.
• Knowledge Continue reading

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Sample Lab: SR-MPLS on Junos and SR Linux

Last week I published a link to Pete Crocker’s RSVP-TE lab, but there’s more: he created another lab using the same topology that uses SR-MPLS with IS-IS to get the job done.

Jeroen Van Bemmel did something similar for SR Linux: his lab topology has fewer devices (plus SR Linux runs in containers), so it’s easily deployable on machines without humongous amount of memory.

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Sample Lab: SR-MPLS on Junos and SR Linux

Last week I published a link to Pete Crocker’s RSVP-TE lab, but there’s more: he created another lab using the same topology that uses SR-MPLS with IS-IS to get the job done.

Jeroen Van Bemmel did something similar for SR Linux: his lab topology has fewer devices (plus SR Linux runs in containers), so it’s easily deployable on machines without humongous amount of memory.

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Cisco DCAUTO exam study resources

I just passed the Cisco DevNet DCAUTO (300-635) exam (Yay!). This is my 3rd Cisco exam on network automation after NPDESI in 2018 (replaced now by the DevNet program), and DevNet CORE (DEVCOR) in 2020. But this time, I documented everything I read, so I could report it here and build a Cisco DCAUTO exam study resources. By doing this, I hope to help anyone who wants to study for this certification. And, as I have already passed the DevNet CORE exam, I am now Cisco certified DevNet Professional.  …

The post Cisco DCAUTO exam study resources appeared first on AboutNetworks.net.

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What’s an “Address”?

Currently, there are discussions in the IETF's Internet Area on the topic of architectural evolution of the Internet and its implications for the changing role of IP addresses, and I'd like to share some of my thoughts on this topic here.

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Figuring Out Link Speed Using the Windows Command Prompt

Using the command line allows you to write a script or batch file to standardize troubleshooting so a user or technician can run it.

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Automaton 11. Data Models for NVIDIA Cumulus 5.0. Collecting Config and Operational Data via REST API with Ansible.

Hello my friend,

Right before the New Year we have posted an article, where we introduced a new approach to manage Cumulus Linux, which became available in the latest release to the date Cumulus Linux 5.0. This approach relies on REST API, which makes the automation of this platform very comfortable. Today we’ll cover how to collect the configuration and ope data with the most popular network and infrastructure automation tools these days: Ansible and Python.

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No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a 

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any 

means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission of the author.

Ansible or Python? Python or Ansible?

To be absolutely frank, there is no “or”. There is only “and” in such a question. Both Ansible and Python play crucial role in network and infrastructure automation. Both of them are widely used in various companies from small enterprise to gigantic tier-1 web companies (e.g., Google, Amazon, etc). We see different usage patterns, such as Ansible + AWX being a main toolkit, or Python + Stackstorm or Apache Airflow Continue reading

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Worth Reading: The Network Does Too Much

Tom Hollingsworth published a more eloquent version of what I’ve been saying for ages:

• Complexity belongs to the end nodes;
• Network should provide end-to-end packet transport, not a fix for every stupidity someone managed to push down the stack;
• There’s nothing wrong with being a well-performing utility instead of pretending your stuff is working on unicorn farts and fairy dust.

Obviously it’s totally against the vested interest of any networking vendor out there to admit it.

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Worth Reading: The Network Does Too Much

Tom Hollingsworth published a more eloquent version of what I’ve been saying for ages:

• Complexity belongs to the end nodes;
• Network should provide end-to-end packet transport, not a fix for every stupidity someone managed to push down the stack;
• There’s nothing wrong with being a well-performing utility instead of pretending your stuff is working on unicorn farts and fairy dust.

Obviously it’s totally against the vested interest of any networking vendor out there to admit it.

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To eBGP or not to iBGP — that is the query (please with me ;)

To eBGP or not to iBGP — that is the query (please 🐻 with me ;)

BGP EVPN with VXLAN to the multi-tenant hosts (using SR Linux and SR OS)

There are many ways to do things, and some ways are subjectively better than others. Sometimes, things that may have been a Bad Idea™ in the past become a Not_So_Bad_After_All(maybe, provided X and not Y) option in light of new developments or concerns. To tell which one is which, we’ll just have to give it a go and see where we end up. And whatever happens — 🤞 chances are we’ll learn some things in the process regardless!

The evolution of BGP-to-the-host (how the … did we end up here?)

“Accelerating waves of change to open (2021)” paints a picture of how we can see things evolving over time. From hardware to software, from L2 to static L3 to dynamically signaled L3 with BGP to VXLAN (L2-over-L3) — it all follows a similar pattern of evolutionary change, building on technology from the past to create the future, following the path of the adjacent possible. The terminology and acronyms we humans Continue reading

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Worth Exploring: Christoph Jaggi’s New Web Site

Christoph Jaggi, the author of Ethernet Encryption webinar and ethernet encryptor market overviews launched a new site in which he collected tons material he created in the past – the network security and news and articles sections are definitely worth exploring.

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Worth Exploring: Christoph Jaggi’s New Web Site

Christoph Jaggi, the author of Ethernet Encryption webinar and ethernet encryptor market overviews launched a new site in which he collected tons material he created in the past – the network security and news and articles sections are definitely worth exploring.

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Which CCIE is most demanded in 2022?

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CCIE Salary – How much you can get if you pass Cisco CCIE Certification?

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Heavy Networking 615: Optimize User Experience With Palo Alto Networks’ ADEM (Sponsored)

How do you know your remote workers are having good performance--a good experience--using the applications they need to get their work done? Today we drill into Autonomous Digital Experience Management (ADEM) with sponsor Palo Alto Networks, including how ADEM works, the benefits of real-time and synthetic monitoring, how ADEM integrates with SASE, and more.

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Heavy Networking 615: Optimize User Experience With Palo Alto Networks’ ADEM (Sponsored)

How do you know your remote workers are having good performance--a good experience--using the applications they need to get their work done? Today we drill into Autonomous Digital Experience Management (ADEM) with sponsor Palo Alto Networks, including how ADEM works, the benefits of real-time and synthetic monitoring, how ADEM integrates with SASE, and more.

The post Heavy Networking 615: Optimize User Experience With Palo Alto Networks’ ADEM (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Rust Notes: Variables

Variables in Rust are defined with the let keyword and values are assigned with the = operator. Constants have a similar syntax except they are defined with the const keyword. Considerations Variables are defined in snake_case by convention. Constants are defined in...continue reading