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Getting Over My Fear of Network Automation

People that know me know that I like to be open on sharing thoughts, insights, things I’ve learned, and my struggles. Many people have put their trust in me and I consider it important to show that perceived leaders of the networking industry have the same thoughts and struggles as everyone else.

I wrote this tweet which gained a lot of response and positive comments (thank you).

I have to admit there’s part of network automation that has scared me. I don’t feel that coding comes as naturally to me as design and writing. That’s OK but I’m not going to let that hold me back. Hopefully I’m not too stupid to learn a thing or two.

— Daniel Dib (@danieldibswe) May 30, 2020

I’ve dabbled with Python a couple of times the last couple of years. I know the very basics but I haven’t done much more beyond that. Why haven’t I done more automation? There are some different clues as to why, including the fear of not being very good at it.

Job role – I’m a Network Architect. What I enjoy the most, my passion if you will, is to engage in discussions with customers and create Continue reading

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Dell, VMware Supercharge AI With Bitfusion

The new Dell EMC Ready Solutions use the Bitfusion feature in vSphere 7 to manage and allocate a...

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Everything You Need to Know about Kubernetes Services Networking

As a leading, open-source multi-cluster orchestration platform, Rancher lets operations teams deploy, manage and secure enterprise Kubernetes. Rancher also gives users a set of CNI options to choose from, including open-source Project Calico. Calico provides native Layer 3 routing capability for Kubernetes pods which simplifies the networking architecture, increases networking performance and provides a rich network policy model makes it easy to lock down communication so the only traffic that flows is the traffic you want to flow.

Calico utilizes Kubernetes Services, an abstraction layer which defines a logical set of pods and enables load balancing and service discovery for those pods. Services are one of the key Kubernetes primitives you need to understand to glue microservices together and expose your applications outside of the cluster. The Service resource provides an abstract way to expose an application running on a set of Pods as a network service. Sounds simple, but what’s the difference between a Cluster IP, Node Port, and Load Balancer service? And how do all these abstractions translate to real under the covers networking behavior?

Here is a short 7-minute video that explains all this and more!

In the video you’ll learn:

• How pods consume services within the Continue reading

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Network Break 286: Cisco To Acquire ThousandEyes; The Return Of Follow Up

Take a Network Break! We start with some FU (follow up) from previous Network Break and Heavy Networking episodes, then dive into Cisco's big ThousandEyes acquisition and financial updates.

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Network Break 286: Cisco To Acquire ThousandEyes; The Return Of Follow Up

Take a Network Break! We start with some FU (follow up) from previous Network Break and Heavy Networking episodes, then dive into Cisco's big ThousandEyes acquisition and financial updates.

The post Network Break 286: Cisco To Acquire ThousandEyes; The Return Of Follow Up appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Chipmakers Lobby for $37B in Aid for US Fabs

Lobbyists within the semiconductor industry are pushing for $37 billion in subsidies to support the...

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SDxCentral To No Longer Support FeedBlitz

Starting on July 30, 2020, SDxCentral will no longer support FeedBlitz.

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Is quantum computing ready to leap into the real world?

Market research firm IDC predicts that by 2023, 25% of Fortune 500 companies will gain a competitive advantage from quantum computing.  It’s a bold prediction given the current dearth of real-world examples of quantum computing in action. However, there’s plenty of industry activity to back up IDC’s forecast. In fact, early this year at the Consumer Electronics Show the biggest buzz wasn’t the newest smartphone, wearable device or autonomous-driving technology, but rather unprecedented computing power based on an area of quantum physics Albert Einstein described as "spooky action at a distance."To read this article in full, please click here

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Daily Roundup: What Will the New Normal Look Like?

Dell and Nutanix execs shared their visions of a new normal; Equinix expanded into Canada;...

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Google’s Anthos Expansion Follows Technical Track

The company is targeting Amazon first with its Anthos platform because it has a similar operational...

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OpenPower Puts Open Source Software Guru In Charge

If you want to build a successful hardware ecosystem around a chip architecture that has recently been open sources, as the Power chip instruction set was last August, then it probably makes a lot of sense to put someone at the help of the project who has deep and broad experience participating in the open source software ecosystem. …

OpenPower Puts Open Source Software Guru In Charge was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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To Route or Not?

When you are building a data center fabric, should you run a control plane all the way to the host? This is question I encounter more often as operators deploy eVPN-based spine-and-leaf fabrics in their data centers (for those who are actually deploying scale-out spine-and-leaf—I see a lot of people deploying hybrid sorts of networks designed as “mini-hierarchical” designs and just calling them spine-and-leaf fabrics, but this is probably a topic for another day). Three reasons are generally given for deploying the control plane all on the hosts attached to the fabric: faster down detection, load sharing, and traffic engineering. Let’s consider each of these in turn.

Faster Down Detection. There’s no simple way for ToR switches to determine when the connection to a host has failed, whether the host is single or dual-homed. Somehow the set of routes reachable through the host must be related to the interface state, or some underlying fast hello state (such as BFD), so that if a link fails the ToR knows to pull the correct set of routes from the routing table. It’s simpler to just let the host itself advertise the correct reachability information; when the link fails, the routing session will Continue reading

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Finding Nuance In A Time Of Negative Noise

I am put off by the mainstream media, the American president, and Twitter these days. We’re living in a media world that lacks nuance. Nearly all discussions are polarized. That polarization results in a mockery of clear thought. A polarized world views issues as binary. Good or evil. Red or blue. Masks or freedom. Shelter at home or open it all up.

No more anger, agendas, or simple-minded retweets for me. I want facts without bias and reflection on what that data might mean. I want difficult conversations with no clear answers today, in the hopes of progressing towards a decent answer eventually.

Thankfully, I’ve discovered a few folks having nuanced, engaging discussions that attempt to analyze the difficulties of our world honestly and thoroughly. If these sorts of conversations might be interesting to you, here’s what I’ve found so far.

Eric Weinstein’s The Portal Podcast

On this long-form podcast, Eric interviews heterodox thinkers about both current events and goings-on in the scientific community, physics especially. Eric is a brutal interviewer at times, refusing to let folks go down obvious trains of thought, instead forcing them to get to the point with haste. This tactic, although often uncomfortable to listen Continue reading

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Tech Bytes: Improving NPM And Threat Management With Enriched Flow From VIAVI Solutions (Sponsored)

Today's Tech Bytes podcast dives into using enriched flow--that is, flow records enhanced with logs and data from sources such as firewalls and directories--to improve your network performance monitoring and threat management. Our guest is Warren Caron, Sales Engineer at VIAVI Solutions. VIAVI is our sponsor for today's episode.

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Tech Bytes: Improving NPM And Threat Management With Enriched Flow From VIAVI Solutions (Sponsored)

Today's Tech Bytes podcast dives into using enriched flow--that is, flow records enhanced with logs and data from sources such as firewalls and directories--to improve your network performance monitoring and threat management. Our guest is Warren Caron, Sales Engineer at VIAVI Solutions. VIAVI is our sponsor for today's episode.

The post Tech Bytes: Improving NPM And Threat Management With Enriched Flow From VIAVI Solutions (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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What is Network Segmentation?

With this blog we answer the question, what is network segmentation? In simple terms, network segmentation is defined as the practice...

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How to Navigate NSX-T Policy APIs for Network Automation

According to the Gartner blog post, 2019 Network Resolution: Invest in Network Automation, the top network resolution of 2019 was network automation. This isn’t surprising since traditional automation of networking and security has always been a challenge due to the cumbersome processes, lack of governance, and limited or non-existent management tools.

Organizations that automate more than 70% of their network change activities will reduce the number of outages by at least 50% and deliver services to their business constituents 50% faster

VMware NSX-T Data Center solves this by enabling rapid provisioning of network and security resources with layered security and governance. By using various network automation tools, you can quickly and effectively keep up with the demands of your developers and application owners who expect a quick turnaround on resource requests. In this blog post we’ll look at how NSX-T Policy APIs simplifies network automation.

What Are NSX-T Policy APIs?

At the center of NSX network automation lies the single point of entry into NSX via REST APIs. Just like traditional REST APIs, NSX-T APIs support the following API verbs: GET, PATCH, POST, PUT, DELETE. The table below shows the usage:

 

A New API Object Model

Introduced in Continue reading

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Equinix Plots Canadian Expansion With $750M BCE Buy

The deal in Canada follows a flurry of activity for Equinix aimed at bolstering its hyperscale...

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Using Unison Across Linux, macOS, and Windows

I recently wrapped up an instance where I needed to use the Unison file synchronization application across Linux, macOS, and Windows. While Unison is available for all three platforms and does work across (and among) systems running all three operating systems, I did encounter a few interoperability issues while making it work. Here’s some information on these interoperability issues, and how I worked around them. (Hopefully this information will help someone else.)

The use case here is to keep a subset of directories in sync between a MacBook Air running macOS “Catalina” 10.15.5 and a Surface Pro 6 running Windows 10. A system running Ubuntu 18.04.4 acted as the “server”; each “client” system (the MacBook Air and the Surface Pro) would synchronize with the Ubuntu system. I’ve used a nearly-identical setup for several years to keep my systems synchronized.

One thing to know about Unison before I continue is that you need compatible versions of Unison on both systems in order for it to work. As I understand it, compatibility is not just based on version numbers, but also on the Ocaml version with which it was compiled.

With that in mind, I already had Continue reading

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How Blurry Will the Post-Pandemic New Normal Look?

Dell and Nutanix executives say the future of work will be more flexible — and will further blur...

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