The EXPERIENCE HAS SHOWN THAT Keyword (RFC2915, Rule 4)

The world of information technology is filled, often to overflowing, with those who “know better.” For instance, I was recently reading an introduction to networking in a very popular orchestration system that began with the declaration that routing was hard, and therefore this system avoided routing. The document then went on to describe a system of moving packets around using multiple levels of Network Address Translation (NAT) and centrally configured policy-based routing (or filter-based forwarding) that was clearly simpler than the distributed protocols used to run large-scale networks. I thought, for a moment, of writing the author and pointing out the system in question had merely reinvented routing in a rather inefficient and probably broken way, but I relented. Why? Because I know RFC2915, rule 4, by heart:

Some things in life can never be fully appreciated nor understood unless experienced firsthand. Some things in networking can never be fully understood by someone who neither builds commercial networking equipment nor runs an operational network.

Ultimately, the people who built this system will likely not listen to me; rather, they are going to have to experience the pain caused by large-scale failures for themselves before they will listen. Many network Continue reading

NSX-T Data Center Migration Coordinator – Modular Migration

NSX-T 3.1

For a point release, VMware NSX-T 3.1 is packed with a bunch of major features. One of these is modular migration, which is making its debut with this release. Customers had asked for an automated way to migrate just firewall rules and groups; modular migration, a new feature of Migration Coordinator, addresses exactly that request. 

What’s Migration Coordinator?  

Taking a step back, Migration Coordinator is a tool that was introduced almost 18 months ago, with NSX-T 2.4, to enable customers to migrate from NSX for vSphere to NSX-T Data Center. It’s a free tool built into NSX-T Data Center that enables customers to migrate everything — from edges, to compute, to workloads — in an automated fashion and with a workflow that is similar to an in-place upgrade on existing hardware. This model of migration is called “in-place.” 

From a resource perspective, in-place migration only needs enough resources to host NSX-T manager appliances and edges along with enough capacity per cluster to be Continue reading

Docker and AWS Resources for Developers

AWS re:Invent kicks off this week and if you are anything like us, we are super geeked out to watch and attend all the talks that are lined up for the next three weeks.

To get ready for re:Invent, we’ve gathered some of our best resources and expert guidance to get the most out of the Docker platform when building apps for AWS. Check out these blogs, webinars and DockTalks from the past few weeks to augment your re:Invent experience over the next three weeks:

Expert Guidance from the Docker Team

  • AWS Howdy Partner
    • AWS Howdy Partner Twitch Show: Back in July, I (@pmckee) was a guest on the AWS Howdy Partner show hosted on Twitch. Follow along as we walked through deploying a multi-container application to AWS ECS using the Docker CLI.

Dell launches its first all-flash object storage appliance

Dell Technologies has introduced its first all-flash object storage appliance, saying the perception that object file storage is "slow, cheap and deep" is changing as the massive growth of unstructured data makes enterprises more inclined to use high-performance storage for object-based applications.The company is adding a new appliance, called the EXF900, to the Dell EMC ECS EX-Series lineup. It claims the EXF900 has the highest performance of the ECS range of appliances, but that's because the rest of the lineup – the low-end EX300, the mid-range EX500 and high-end EX3000 arrays – are all disk based. READ MORE: Gartner's top 9 strategic technology trends for 2021To read this article in full, please click here

pygnmi 3. Usage of gNMI Capabilities.

Hello my friend,

Some time ago we’ve started sharing with you the details of pygnmi – our new open-source Python library created to simplify the management of the network elements with gNMI. The library is already almost fully operational and we want to start sharing the usage scenarios with you.



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Don’t you want to automate boring stuff?

Every job, especially network operation, has lots of routing tasks, which are boing and time consuming. Some of such tasks could be already automated in your company, but the vast majority is still waiting you. In our trainings:

  • We explain the advantages and challenges of network automation in multivendor networks (leveraging network operating systems from Cisco, Nokia, Arista, Cumulus).
  • We teach you how to reach quick wins in network automation to fuel your automation projects for a long run.
  • We covers all the details of the automation protocols, data models and teach you how to apply it in real Continue reading

Fifty Shades of High Availability

A while ago we had an interesting exchange of ideas around inserting high-availability network appliance into a public cloud environment (TL&DR: it was really hard until AWS introduced Gateway Load Balancing), and someone quickly pointed out we’re solving the wrong challenge because…

Azure Firewall […] is a fully stateful firewall-as-a-service with built-in high-availability.

Somehow he wasn’t too happy when I pointed out that there’s more to high availability than vendor marketing ;)

Read more …

Fifty Shades of High Availability

A while ago we had an interesting exchange of ideas around inserting high-availability network appliance into a public cloud environment (TL&DR: it was really hard until AWS introduced Gateway Load Balancing), and someone quickly pointed out we’re solving the wrong challenge because…

Azure Firewall […] is a fully stateful firewall-as-a-service with built-in high-availability.

Somehow he wasn’t too happy when I pointed out that there’s more to high availability than vendor marketing ;)

Read more …

Fetching Linux system details with screenfetch and neofetch

Two very useful tools for extracting essential details on your Linux system OS and hardware are screenfetch and geofetch.Each of these tools is actually a lengthy bash script that fetches the information from your system for you and presents it in an attractive manner with the distribution logo on the left and details on the right--essentially "screen shots" of your system. Neither is likely to be installed on your system by default, but each can be installed with a single command.screenfetch You can install screenfetch with sudo apt install screenfetch or sudo yum install screenfetch. Screenfetch is a script with nearly 6,500 lines. It will automatically detect your distribution and display the distribution, kernel, uptime, number of packages installed, shell you're using, overall and available disk space, CPU, GPU and memory (in use and available). It also displays an ASCII art rendition of the logo related to whatever distribution it's run on, but you can turn this off if you want to see just the list of details.To read this article in full, please click here

The Redemption Of AMD In HPC

Many of the technologists at AMD who are driving the Epyc CPU and Instinct GPU roadmaps as well as the $35 billion acquisition of FPGA maker Xilinx have long and deep experience in the high performance computing market that is characterized by the old school definition of simulation and modeling workloads running on federated or clustered systems. …

The Redemption Of AMD In HPC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

A Python learning path for network engineers

Python programming is now a required skill for network engineers. I recorded videos of myself as I learned and practiced Python programming. I think these videos, along with the links to learning resources associated with each video’s topic, serve as a good learning guide for network engineers getting started with Python programming.

This post collects links to all ten videos I created. Over the course of these videos, I wrote a program called Usermapper that reads a configuration file and builds an XML authentication file for the Guacamole web proxy. I also used the Git version control system and posted the code in my Usermapper GitHub repository

Topics I need to learn

I learned some programming during my Electrical Engineering degree program many years ago. After I graduated, except for some basic scripting, I’ve not had to do any programming.

These videos do not cover the basics of Python. I strongly suggest you read a book about Python, or watch some video training (see suggestions below) before you start working through these videos. Before I started recording this first video, I read the O’Reilly book, Learning Python, and wrote a blog post about what I learned in the first Continue reading

Cisco’s Nightingale: Cloud-neutral orchestration and automation are primary goals for 2021

While Todd Nightingale has been Cisco’s Enterprise Networking & Cloud business chief since March, some of the directions he wants to take the company’s biggest business unit—namely superior cloud-neutral orchestration and automation—are already evident.The COVID-19 pandemic and the enterprise response to it are big drivers for near-future enterprise networking technology. But the ideas of cloud  connectivity and pushing simplicity and agility in the network, while they are already important, implementation has accelerated for most customers, Nightingale said in a recent interview.To read this article in full, please click here

Full Stack Journey 048: Where Is IT Headed In 2021?

On today's episode of the Full Stack Journey podcast, host Scott Lowe is joined by fellow Packet Pusher podcast host Drew Conry-Murray for a lively discussion on the trends they see on the horizon in the industry, and how IT professionals can prepare themselves for those trends, including network automation and orchestration, emerging tools, and more.

Full Stack Journey 048: Where Is IT Headed In 2021?

On today's episode of the Full Stack Journey podcast, host Scott Lowe is joined by fellow Packet Pusher podcast host Drew Conry-Murray for a lively discussion on the trends they see on the horizon in the industry, and how IT professionals can prepare themselves for those trends, including network automation and orchestration, emerging tools, and more.

The post Full Stack Journey 048: Where Is IT Headed In 2021? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Assigning Node Labels During Kubernetes Cluster Bootstrapping

Given that Kubernetes is a primary focus of my day-to-day work, I spend a fair amount of time in the Kubernetes Slack community, trying to answer questions from users and generally be helpful. Recently, someone asked about assigning node labels while bootstrapping a cluster with kubeadm. I answered the question, but afterward started thinking that it might be a good idea to also share that same information via a blog post—my thinking being that others who also had the same question aren’t likely to be able to find my answer on Slack, but would be more likely to find a published blog post. So, in this post, I’ll show how to assign node labels while bootstrapping a Kubernetes cluster.

The “TL;DR” is that you can use the kubeletExtraArgs field in a kubeadm configuration file to pass the node-labels command to the Kubelet, which would allow you to assign node labels when kubeadm bootstraps the node. Read on for more details.

Testing with Kind

kind is a great tool for testing this sort of configuration, since kind uses kubeadm to bootstrap its nodes. If you aren’t familiar with kind, I encourage you to visit the kind website; in Continue reading

Network Break 312: AWS Kneecapped By Kinesis; Linux Unlikely For Apple M1

The latest Network Break episode explores AWS's pre-Thanksgiving outage and the lack of fallout, discusses a new AWS firewall service, reports on why Linus Torvalds isn't holding his breath on seeing Linux run on Apple's new M1 SoC, covers the latest tech financial results, and more.

The post Network Break 312: AWS Kneecapped By Kinesis; Linux Unlikely For Apple M1 appeared first on Packet Pushers.

How To Improve Your Negotiation Skills

Strong negotiation skills are extremely important no matter at what level you are in your life. Not only are they needed in the workplace, but they will also help you in other aspects of life as well. This is why you should focus on improving your negotiation skills.

Although improving negotiation skills are essential, a lot of us keep delaying it. We find the idea so overwhelming that we delay taking the necessary steps that are needed to improve our negotiation skills. 

So, if you are also one of those people, then you do not need to worry anymore. You can now improve your negotiation skills just by following the tips mentioned below. Let’s take a look at them.

Prepare Yourself

The first and important step for negotiating successfully is preparing yourself in advance for negotiation. You need to fully understand the situation that you will be facing. Go through all the possible scenarios that might take place at the meeting. When you are prepared in advance for the negotiation, it will give you a clear idea of the things at stake. This is why it is important to prepare yourself in advance.

Do Not Be Afraid To Make Continue reading

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