Heavy Networking 611: Data Center Networking And Observability In 2022 (Sponsored)
As we approach the end of 2021, it's informative to look back at how much change has gone on in the industry. One of the biggest transitions we've seen in enterprise networking has taken place in the data center. Software-defined approaches that emerged over the past decade have matured and are being deployed in production. On today's Heavy Networking, we talk with Juniper Networks in a sponsored episode about its Apstra Intent-Based Networking (IBN) platform and how Apstra is transforming the enterprise data center.
The post Heavy Networking 611: Data Center Networking And Observability In 2022 (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Silicon Valley Scandals
The Theranos scandal has rocked Silicon Valley. Once considered a visionary billionaire, Elizabeth Holmes is now facing up to 20 years in prison for numerous charges of fraud and false representation. This may be the final nail in the coffin that changes how startups are funded and what type of entrepreneur Silicon Valley will back moving forward.
Who Is Elizabeth Holmes?
Elizabeth Holmes is one of the most famous names in the Silicon Valley. She attended the University of Stanford and dropped out at a young age to launch her company Theranos. The goal was simple: create a technology that would make blood testing much more efficient for doctors and patients alike. In 2003 she registered as a medical device manufacturer and by 2004 raised $25 million from venture capitalists. By 2014 their valuation reached $50 billion dollars making Elizabeth Holmes youngest self-made billionaire ever on paper before it all came crashing down in 2018.
How Did It All Fall Apart?
The hype around Theranos began building back in 2013 when a journalist at the Wall Street Journal was contacted by an anonymous source who claimed Theranos’ testing machines were faulty and inaccurate. The company had been receiving FDA Continue reading
Experiment with Calico BGP in the Comfort of Your Own Laptop!
Yes, you read that right – in the comfort of your own laptop, as in, the entire environment running inside your laptop! Why? Well, read on. It’s a bit of a long one, but there is a lot of my learning that I would like to share.
I often find that Calico Open Source users ask me about BGP, and whether they need to use it, with a little trepidation. BGP carries an air of mystique for many IT engineers, for two reasons. Firstly, before its renaissance as a data center protocol, BGP was seen to be the domain of ISPs and service provider networks. Secondly, many high-profile and high-impact Internet outages have been due to BGP misuse or misconfiguration.
The short answer to the question is that in public cloud Kubernetes deployments, it is almost never necessary to configure or use BGP to make best use of Calico Open Source. Even in on-premise Kubernetes deployments, it is only needed in certain scenarios; you shouldn’t configure BGP unless you know why you need it. It is even less common to require complex BGP setups involving route reflectors and the like.
If you’re unsure what you need, the best plan is Continue reading
That’s It for 2021
It’s hard to believe, but another year has swooshed by, and it’s time to shut down my virtual office and disappear until mid-January. Of course I’ll be around in case of urgent support problems – I will read my email, but won’t reply to 90% of the stuff coming in.
I hope you’ll be able to find a few days to disconnect from the crazy pace of networking world and focus on your loved ones. I would also like to wish you all the best in 2022!
That’s It for 2021
It’s hard to believe, but another year has swooshed by, and it’s time to shut down my virtual office and disappear until mid-January. Of course I’ll be around in case of urgent support problems – I will read my email, but won’t reply to 90% of the stuff coming in.
I hope you’ll be able to find a few days to disconnect from the crazy pace of networking world and focus on your loved ones. I would also like to wish you all the best in 2022!
Hedge 112: The TME with Pete Lumbis
The Technical Marketing role is often misunderstood—or simply forgotten—in the vendor world. What does the TME do, and why? What value does the TME bring to the development and release of new products? Pete Lumbis joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the importance and value of the TME.
IPv6 Buzz 91: Thanks For Listening To IPv6 Buzz In 2021!
In this episode we discuss presentations at the recent UK IPv6 Council meeting. More importantly, we say thanks to you, our listeners, for keeping IPv6 Buzz in your IT podcast playlist this tumultuous year---as well as for all the great listener questions and feedback. We'll see you again in 0x7e6 (2022, that is) for even more adventures in the 128-bit IPv6 wormhole!IPv6 Buzz 91: Thanks For Listening To IPv6 Buzz In 2021!
In this episode we discuss presentations at the recent UK IPv6 Council meeting. More importantly, we say thanks to you, our listeners, for keeping IPv6 Buzz in your IT podcast playlist this tumultuous year---as well as for all the great listener questions and feedback. We'll see you again in 0x7e6 (2022, that is) for even more adventures in the 128-bit IPv6 wormhole!
The post IPv6 Buzz 91: Thanks For Listening To IPv6 Buzz In 2021! appeared first on Packet Pushers.
What’s new: network automation using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.1
A financial customer explained his first automation priority in the most visual and understandable way: “I want to paint all of my network devices with the color of the company.” What I like about that analogy is that it clearly describes the first rule for automation: customers must define their golden configurations (the color to paint) to be able to automate configurations and later assess compliance, and remediate any issues accordingly.
A “golden configuration” usually refers to a Day 1 configuration, and covers the minimal settings needed for a network device to be configured after a fresh network operating system installation. This usually includes common services such as NTP, DNS, AAA, Syslog, SNMP, and ACLs for management connectivity.
As part of this blog, I will provide an overview for new automation capabilities available to achieve some of these Day 1 configuration activities. In addition to the enhancements for network configuration management, I will cover new Ansible Automation Platform capabilities that are frequently required by our network customers, such as:
- Detailing common operational benefits of Ansible Automation Platform.
- Measuring the value of automation use cases.
- Leveraging execution environments and automation mesh.
Certified Collections available in Ansible automation hub
From 0 to 20 billion – How We Built Crawler Hints
In July 2021, as part of Impact Innovation Week, we announced our intention to launch Crawler Hints as a means to reduce the environmental impact of web searches. We spent the weeks following the announcement hard at work, and in October 2021, we announced General Availability for the first iteration of the product. This post explains how we built it, some of the interesting engineering problems we had to solve, and shares some metrics on how it's going so far.
Before We Begin...
Search indexers crawl sites periodically to check for new content. Algorithms vary by search provider, but are often based on either a regular interval or cadence of past updates, and these crawls are often not aligned with real world content changes. This naive crawling approach may harm customer page rank and also works to the detriment of search engines with respect to their operational costs and environmental impact. To make the Internet greener and more energy efficient, the goal of Crawler Hints is to help search indexers make more informed decisions on when content has changed, saving valuable compute cycles/bandwidth and having a net positive environmental impact.
Cloudflare is in an advantageous position to help inform Continue reading
Fast Failover: Marketing and Reality
I wanted to cover fast failover (at least the basics and Prefix Independent Convergence – PIC) in another live session of How Networks Really Work webinar in 2021, but unfortunately I ran out of time.
As a teaser, you might want to watch the recording of Fast Failover: Marketing and Reality presentation I had at the Seventh RSNOG Conference.