Packet Pushers - Datanauts

This is, sadly, the final episode of the Datanauts podcast. Chris Wahl and I had an extraordinary adventure busting IT silos, comparing notes, lobbing things over the wall at each other, and trying to sort out what the new IT stack looks like. Why? We’ll get there. Read on.

But There Was So Much More To Talk About!

For all of us in IT, the changes over the last five years have complicated our lives and introduced us to new tradeoffs.

* Automation abstracts away important details while speeding configuration.

* Orchestration enables application elasticity, but only if the app has been architected to function that way.

* Cloud postulates that you don’t need infrastructure design anymore, but very public outages, along with common sense, have busted the #noops myth.

In other words, we’re still figuring it out. All of us. Engineers. Architects. Developers. End users. Vendors. Open source groups. Standards bodies. Consortiums. Training companies. Resellers. The Datanauts mission isn’t really over, at least not in principle. Chris and I could keep podcasting indefinitely, having great conversations with people from all over the industry. There is much silo busting yet to be done.

Reality’s Cold, Fishy Slap To The Face

Reality sometimes gets in the way of what we’d like to do, though. That reality has, in the best possible way, intruded on Chris’ world. He’s got new opportunities both personal and professional that make it impossible for him to keep going as the Datanauts co-host.

And so, that’s it. We’re aiming our infrastructure rocket into the IT universe and heading “out there.” That-a-way. Chris explains more in the recording for those who want the details.

Filling The Void In Your Heart

Over the years, many of you told us that Datanauts was a favorite. And now, we’re taking that favorite away from you. Perhaps you’re angry…or weeping uncontrollably. Maybe you just threatened a pet. A coworker cubicles away might have felt your stress ball land on their head as you hurled it over the top.

Don’t be like that. Sure, Datanauts is leaving a void in your heart, but we hope to fill that void with the Day Two Cloud podcast. Author and PluralSight course creator Ned Bellavance has been running this show on the Packet Pushers network since the start of 2019, and I have now joined him as co-host.

Day Two Cloud will be a weekly podcast starting in November 2019, and we’re covering cloud operations of all kinds. Private. Hybrid. Multi. And of course, public. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, serverless. Automation. Orchestration. Security. Conversations with vendors, engineers, and industry friends–all with a healthy dose of humor and cynicism.

Datanauts Forever!

We won’t be taking the catalog of Datanauts shows away. The archive of published shows will remain available here. And of course, Chris is still a social human you can interact with! If you want to keep up with Chris, you can follow him on Twitter or check out his blog at Wahl Network.

Our deepest thanks to all of you that subscribed and listened. Datanauts was one of the most downloaded channels on the Packet Pushers podcast network. We’ll miss it as much as you will.

In Datanauts episode 80, we bemoaned the state of network automation. In the many comments we received on that episode, one especially stuck out to me.

Here’s a paraphrase. “Tools like Cisco Network Services Orchestrator can automate an entire network, and not just push config changes box by box. You tell the tool what your network is, and the tool computes the changes needed throughout the network for you.”

Today, we’re going to chat with sponsor Cisco about Network Services Orchestrator, and see how network automation has improved in the last couple of years.

Our guest is Carl Moberg, Technology Director at Cisco Systems.

Carl provides background on Network Services Orchestrator and delves into key issues including:

* NSO support for Cisco and non-Cisco physical and virtual gear

* The NSO architecture and configuration workflows

* NSO use cases

* The service developer role and how it fits into NSO

* Network automation challenges

* New features and capabilities

* More

Show Links:

Cisco Network Services Orchestrator – Cisco Systems

Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO): The Bridge To Automation – Cisco Systems (PDF)

Carl Moberg on Twitter

PQ Show 116: Practical YANG For Network Automation – Packet Pushers

In the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, the phrase “Don’t Panic” is written across the front to help the reader keep a cool head when facing the dangers of galactic hitchhiking. This may sound like dealing with IT problems–especially when the root cause is a cryptic error or unexpected failure.

Turning to technical folks and their blogs is a good way to “not panic” when it comes to dealing with the trough of woe. In this episode, we’ll talk to prolific technical blogger & VMware employee William Lam to get an insider’s view of what happens to generate such delightful content.

Sponsor: Tufin

Tufin has pioneered a policy-based approach to network security management using automation and analytics. As a result, you can make network changes in minutes instead of days, reliably and securely. Tufin. The Security Policy Company. Find out more at tufin.com.

Just Some Of The Questions We Discuss

1. Most of your written content looks at things you’ve learned or dealt with (workarounds, hacks, unique takes on features or technology). How do you prioritize your technology focus areas?

2. How do you engage with your community and customers? What information do you suggest gathering to help make a case back to your product and engineering teams?

3. You have a reputation as someone who listens to the community and customers, and then champions their needs internally. What is this experience like? What advice can you share with folks on how to communicate their needs to a vendor?

4. Do certifications play a role in your career? Have they played a role in the past? Do you feel that certifications are a necessary evil, learning blueprint, or something in between?

5. Describe your current lab environment to the audience. What devices, software, clouds, and platforms are you consuming or considering?

6. How would you advise an an engineer building out a lab with today’s options? Should they build a low wattage home lab? A cloud lab? What about simulated learning environments such as Codecademy?

Links, Links, Links!

* William’s Blog: VirtuallyGhetto.com

* William’s Twitter: @lamw

* William’s Home Lab Page – a collection of articles to help you with your own home lab builds

* More of William’s excellent articles we referenced in the show…

* 64GB memory on the Intel NUCs?

* Thunderbolt3 to 10GbE NICs

* Update on running ESXi on Intel NUC Hades Canyon (NUC8i7HNK & NUC8i7HVK)

There’s a flurry of activity around network automation, lots of discussion about its impacts, and a host of open-source and commercial tools available.

But actual adoption? Not so much.

Today’s Datanauts podcast explores NRE Labs, a free site to train network engineers in basic automation concepts and tools. NRE stands for “Network Reliability Engineering”.

As guest Matt Oswalt describes it, the goal of NRE Labs is to help network engineers take that first automation step, get unstuck, and get started. Matt is an “engineer in marketing clothing” at Juniper Networks.

While NRE Labs is a Juniper-sponsored project, you don’t have to be a Juniper customer. You don’t even have to sign up and hand over any information to use it. The site is entirely free.

You just go to the homepage, find a lesson or topic that looks interesting, and get started. The site is designed to work within a browser so there’s no software to download and no complicated virtual environment to configure.

The code that powers NRE Labs is open-source so you can grab it for yourself. The project also welcomes contributions and lessons from the community.

In today’s podcast, Matt walks Chris Wahl through NRE Labs, describes how it works, explains a couple of lessons, and shares how the community can get involved.

Sponsor: Quest Software

Quest Software is your go-to for everything Microsoft. Migrate to a new SharePoint or Office 365 environment, move to OneDrive for Business, consolidate Active Directory and Exchange, secure your AD from insider threats, and much more! Learn more at Quest.com/DatanautsPod, and join Quest at The Experts Conference this August for Active Directory and Office 365 training and earn up to 7 CPEs. Get details here.

Show Links:

NRE Labs

NRE Labs on GitHub

Introduction To Antidote

Antidote Platform Architecture

Network Reliability Engineering Community

Network Reliability Engineering Meetup UK – MeetUp.org

NRE Labs Curriculum – GitHub

Working with Network APIs – GitHub

PQ 158: Introducing NRE Labs For Network Automation Training – Packet Pushers

Matt Oswalt on Twitte...

If you’re a modern sort of infrastructure engineer, you’re likely interested in APIs.

Structured data, everybody. That’s a big win. RESTful APIs are the most common you’re likely to run into when managing infrastructure, and on today’s show I interview Chris all about RESTful API fundamentals.

Your buzzword bingo list includes automation, abstraction, pagination, idempotent, JSON, YAML, swagger, and versioning. Drink!

We discuss:

* What is a REST and how provides a set of definitions for how APIs can share data

* How APIs work

* How APIs tie into automation

* The anatomy of an API conversation

* Key subjects including authorization, pagination, versioning, and idempotent requests

* Education and training available from Rubrik Build

Sponsor: Quest Software

Quest Software is your go-to for everything Microsoft. Migrate to a new SharePoint or Office 365 environment, move to OneDrive for Business, consolidate Active Directory and Exchange, secure your AD from insider threats, and much more! Learn more at Quest.com/DatanautsPod, and join Quest at The Experts Conference this August for Active Directory and Office 365 training and earn up to 7 CPEs. Get details here.

Show Links:

Stripe

Swagger – GitHub

Rubrik Build – Rubrik

Roxie at Rubrik: GitHub Repositories for Learning – GitHub

Roxie Workshop Automation (PDF of slides)

Your Hosts:

Ethan Banks

Chris Wahl

Hello, IT architect. Business person here. We have this huge new project for you. We have an idea for this new system that’s going to make us all sorts of money.

It can never go down, because it’s going to be SO IMPORTANT. It’s got to be super secure, too, obviously. Your budget is…three dollars!

Right. Okay, that’s a somewhat silly scenario, but it represents a problem many of us in IT face. The organization needs a technology solution to a business problem. There are objectives and constraints.

How do you design the solution? If your answer was “on a napkin at the bar!” Hey, not a bad idea, but we’re going to discuss a more formal approach today on the Datanauts podcast.

Our guest is Adam Post, a principal consultant at IT Partners, with a focus on virtualization and cloud technologies.

We discuss:

* The bad things that can happen without a design or design process

* The absolute necessity of information-gathering from stakeholders

* Similarities and differences when designing for the data center and the cloud

* VMware’s recommended design process and its general principles

* The AWS Well Architected Framework and general principles

* The role of documentation

* More

Sponsor: Quest Software

Quest Software is your go-to for everything Microsoft. Migrate to a new SharePoint or Office 365 environment, move to OneDrive for Business, consolidate Active Directory and Exchange, secure your AD from insider threats, and much more! Learn more at Quest.com/DatanautsPod, and join Quest at The Experts Conference for Active Directory and Office 365 training and earn up to 7 CPEs. Get details here.

Show Links:

Adam Post on Twitter

Semi-Technical.com – Adam’s blog

Adam Post on LinkedIn

Breaking down the conceptual design, RCARs and AMPRS …. VCDX style (Primer on the VMware-recommend design process) – JeffreyKusters.nl

Virtual Design Master: Conceptual, Logical, Physical – Technicloud

The 5 Pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework – AWS

Somewhere in your network, there’s at least one exploitable vulnerability. Maybe it’s a really bad one. Maybe it’s not that bad.

Do you know what the vulnerability is? Do you have a way to explain to the business the risk it represents? Do you have a strategy to fix it or otherwise mitigate the risk?

Climb aboard with the Datanauts as we fly the good ship Vulnerability Management to Planet Security on today’s episode.

Our guest is Zoë Rose, an ethical hacker and cyber security consultant.

Zoë, Chris, and Ethan discuss:

* Setting a baseline on what we mean by vulnerabilities

* The value of the CVSS

* Different kinds of tools for finding vulnerabilities

* Assigning risk levels in your organization

* How risk levels should influence patching

* The use of compensating controls

* Whether it’s worth patching ephemeral containers

* More

Sponsor: Netrounds

Netrounds software performs active testing and monitoring to ensure your business-critical applications and services are running as expected. Get real-time insights for testing, troubleshooting, and SLA monitoring. Find out more at netrounds.com/packetpushers.

Show Links:

Zoë Rose on Twitter

Rose Security And Intelligence

Common Vulnerability Scoring System – Wikipedia

I hear about companies that create net new DevOps roles and hire “DevOps Engineers” to fill them.

And then those DevOps people fail in their roles, because no one wants to deal with the additional processes they tend to create.

I’ve wondered if hiring specific DevOps roles is doing it wrong. Is a transformative approach a better idea?

That is, take the people you’ve got and retrain, retool, and reorganize. Foster a different culture that’s DevOps-ian in nature. Then, you might be successful.

Am I right? We explore this idea of hiring DevOps on the Datanauts podcast with guest Matt Stratton. Matt is a DevOps advocate at PagerDuty.

We discuss:

* Core DevOps principles and how to separate out marketing nonsense

* Why every IT professional in an organization needs to understand the business

* Whether there are costs to an IT team to moving to DevOps, and costs for not moving

* DevOps success stories

* Dealing with the inevitable people problems

* Iterative steps you can take to creating a DevOps culture

Sponsor: Tufin

Tufin has pioneered a policy-based approach to network security management using automation and analytics. As a result, you can make network changes in minutes instead of days, reliably and securely. Tufin. The Security Policy Company. Find out more at tufin.com.

Sponsor: Quest Software

Quest Software is your go-to for everything Microsoft. Migrate to a new SharePoint or Office 365 environment, move to OneDrive for Business, consolidate Active Directory and Exchange, secure your AD from insider threats, and much more! Learn more at Quest.com/DatanautsPod.

Show Links:

Matt Stratton on Twitter

Matt Stratton on LinkedIn

Arrested DevOps Podcast

The “Matt’s hair” tweet

Old Geeks Yell at Cloud with Andrew Clay Shafer & Bryan Cantrill – Arrested DevOps

DevOps Culture Change With Bill Joy – Arrested DevOps

Principal Engineering With Silvia Botros – Arrested DevOps

Matt’s Favorite DevOps Definitions

“DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users.” – Donovan Brown http://donovanbrown.com/post/what-is-devops

“A culture where people, regardless of title or background, work together to imagine, develop, deploy and operate a system.” – Ken Mugrage https://kenmugrage.com/2017/05/05/my-new-definition-of-devops/

“A cultural and professional movement, focused on how we build and operate high velocity organizations, born from the experiences of its practitioners.” – Adam Jacob https://github.com/chef/devops-kungfu

Matt’s Favorite DevOps Resources

Greg Ferro, Packet Pushers podcast network co-founder, has commandeered the Datanauts bridge to take over today’s episode.

At the recent Google Next 19 conference, Greg sat down for a far-ranging roundtable conversation with three IT professionals who shared their expertise on chaos engineering, why cloud networking is hard, and cloud migration, among other topics.

Ethan Banks beams in after the fact to introduce the show and provide the takeaways.

Greg’s guests are Ana Medina, Chaos Engineer at Gremlin; Leticia Kemp, Head of Business Intelligence at Crunch Simply Digital; and Marisabel Rodriguez, Tech Director at Globant.

They discuss:

* The pros and cons of breaking things on purpose (chaos engineering)

* How business intelligence tackles metrics and reporting

* Lift-and-shift vs. incremental movement to the cloud

* Whether there’s a skills gap in enterprise IT

* Service meshes

* More

Sponsor: Open Systems

Open Systems brings security, automation, and expert management to SD-WAN. Get visibility, flexibility, and control combined with performance, simplicity and security with SD-WAN from Open Systems. To find out more, go to Open-systems.com/packetpushers and get a free beanie and a Gartner report on the economics of SD-WAN.

Sponsor: Quest Software

Quest Software is your go-to for everything Microsoft. Migrate to a new SharePoint or Office 365 environment, move to OneDrive for Business, consolidate Active Directory and Exchange, secure your AD from insider threats, and much more! Learn more at Quest.com/DatanautsPod.

Show Links:

Ana Medina on Twitter

Ana Medina on LinkedIn

Leticia Kemp on Twitter

Leticia Kemp on LinkedIn

Marisabel Rodriguez on Twitter

Marisabel Rodriguez on LinkedIn

Today’s Datanauts episode springs from a deeply personal blog post written by our guest, Al Rasheed.

Al talks about the costs of an IT career; how the long hours and the stress can eat away at your personal and family life, negatively affect your health, and make you feel like a failure.

We discuss regrets for the good jobs that got away, the bad jobs we stayed in too long, and how to decide when it’s time to walk away.

Al also shares his experiences about how he’s coped with the ups and downs of life in IT, how his passion for technology and learning continues to drive him, and the vital role that community plays.

We explore why the human connections of community can be more vital than the tech tips and goofy means that get passed around.

If you’ve ever sat at your desk and wondered “What am I doing here?” then this episode is for you.

Sponsor: Quest Software

Quest Software is your go-to for everything Microsoft. Migrate to a new SharePoint or Office 365 environment, move to OneDrive for Business, consolidate Active Directory and Exchange, secure your AD from insider threats, and much more! Learn more at Quest.com/DatanautsPod.

Show Links:

You Can Call Me Al – Al Rasheed’s blog post

Al Rasheed – A personal Blog about IT related subjects – Al Rasheed

My trudge through IT Burnout and the fight to keep it at bay – Eric Lee

Let’s Talk About ‘Imposter Syndrome’ – Cody De Arkland

Al on Twitter

Al on LinkedIn