Today on the Datanauts podcast, we review the state of Ethernet fabrics in 2018.

Between 2010 and 2012, before SDN became the new marketing hotness, it seemed like vendors were churning out Ethernet fabric products for the data center. Everyone had at least one fabric, and some had two or three.

As time has marched on, many of those Ethernet fabrics have dropped off the map. To catch us up and review what Ethernet fabric means today is Stefan Fouant. Stefan is the Chief Architect at Copper River Technologies, a Juniper Ambassador, a quadruple JNCIE, and author of the book Day One: Junos Fusion Data Center Up and Running.

We look at the status of Ethernet fabric protocols such as TRILL and SPB. We also dig into BGP EVPN, the latest hot fabric.

We also discuss the characteristics of a fabric, look at reasons why a fabric might make sense in your data center, and explore inter-fabric connectivity.

Show Links:

Day One: Junos Fusion Data Center Up and Running – Stefan Fouant

Shortest Path First – Stefan Fouant’s blog

Stefan Fouant on Twitter

Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) – IETF

Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) – Wikipedia

BGP MPLS-Based Ethernet VPN – IETF

Datanauts 011: Understanding Leaf-Spine Networks – Packet Pushers

Show 366: Inside Cisco EVPN (Sponsored) – Packet Pushers

The robotic production facilities on board the Datanauts’ dreadnought cruiser are really great at making scout drones for identifying rich mineral deposits. Sadly, our probe production numbers are fairly low right now, because every single build is done by hand.

Blasphemy! We need a way to simply define the end state of our drone creation and then let an orchestration engine handle all of the building. Plus, if the design changes, we need to make sure all of the existing drones are retrofitted to take advantage of the new improvements! What can be done?!

Our guest today is Ned Bellavance. We pick Ned’s brain about infrastructure as code and his hands-on experience with HashiCorp’s Terraform.

Find Out More About Terraform

Datanauts Episode 71 with Mitchell Hashimoto

https://packetpushers.net/podcast/podcasts/datanauts-071-everything-code-hashicorp/

Datanauts Episode 92 with Brett Johnson

https://packetpushers.net/podcast/podcasts/datanauts-092-microsoft-mcsa-lab-creation-chef/

Hashicorp Training

https://www.hashicorp.com/training

Follow Ned Bellavance

Ned’s Courses On PluralSight

https://www.pluralsight.com/authors/edward-bellavance

Ned’s Blog

https://nedinthecloud.com/

The Buffer Overflow Podcast

https://www.anexinet.com/resources/podcasts/buffer-overflow/

The Anexipod Podcast

https://www.anexinet.com/resources/podcasts/anexipod/

On this episode of Datanauts, we chat with Brandon Olin, the creator of PoshBot, a PowerShell based chatbot for ops teams. What does PoshBot do? How was PoshBot built? How do chatbots impact Brandon’s delivery model?

ChatBots?

Bots have been around for a long time. They’re really handy, too, often being able to answer simple questions by submitting a special command that has some sort of prefix or identifier associated with them. Especially if you’re on Twitch and want to know how long your favorite streamer has been online.

Maybe that isn’t the most helpful thing in the world, but what if we changed the narrative to be all about operations and how talking to a bot (with your peers watching) could actually up-level your day-to-day enjoyment of IT?

That’s our conversation today.

What is PoshBot?

“PoshBot is a chat bot written in PowerShell. It makes extensive use of classes introduced in PowerShell 5.0. PowerShell modules are loaded into PoshBot and instantly become available as bot commands. PoshBot currently supports connecting to Slack to provide you with awesome ChatOps goodness.”

For More Information About PoshBot

PoshBot on GitHub, Home of the PoshBot Project

https://github.com/poshbotio

PoshBot Documentation

http://docs.poshbot.io/en/latest/

PoshBot Demo – PDX PowerShell User Group 2017-05-31

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36fkyKYq43c

Follow Brandon Olin

https://devblackops.io

https://twitter.com/devblackops

 

It turns out you can’t do it all in the cloud. And thus, we have the rise of edge computing, in which data is collected, processed, and analyzed close to the source of its creation and close to where people and systems need it.

The goals of edge computing include improving performance, reducing the costs and time of data transmission, and creating new applications to take advantage of that data.

Our guide to edge computing is Alex Marcham. Alex is a technologist, writer and researcher. You can find his work at NetworkArchitecture2020.com.

We level-set with a working definition of edge computing, examine the notion of locality and what it means for edge computing, and discuss latency issues.

We explore edge computing use cases such as industrial processes and video surveillance, and dive into the infrastructure that drives this technology.

Show Links:

Network Architecture 2020

Alex Marcham on Twitter

The Datanauts travel to a galaxy of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The good ship InfoSight is piloted by sponsor HPE Nimble Storage as we explore automating infrastructure on today’s episode.

Our guest is Ryan Brown, Enterprise Storage Architect and Chief Technologist for Storage in Canada at HPE.

We talk about InfoSight, HPE’s cloud-based predictive analytics platform that works with HPE’s Nimble Storage arrays, and soon to work with other products from HPE. InfoSight applies machine learning and AI to help customers better manage storage resources and predict problems before they affect the business.

We look at the kind of information that InfoSight gathers, how it collects that information and ships it to the cloud, and how it’s protected.

We also delve into the value that InfoSight can provide for resource allocation and operational benefits such as preventing outages, maintaining uptime, and improving performance.

Show Links:

HPE InfoSight

HPE InfoSight at Tech Field Day

Whether by choice or circumstance, it’s inevitable you’ll find yourself looking for a new job.

On today’s Datanauts episode we break down the job hunt process to help you understand what you want, what you have to offer, and how to make the most of your application.

Our guest is Doug Lane, a tech/ops professional who’s been working in IT for 25 years. He’s also recently gone through the process of finding and getting a new job.  You can follow him on Twitter at @debuggist.

Doug shares his experiences and tips about how he approached the job search. We start by talking about honestly understanding your own strengths and weaknesses, and then thinking about what kind of job it is you really want.

We also discuss how to evaluate job descriptions, and how to nail the application process.

While performing a routine sensor sweep of the Gargleblaster nebula, the crew of the Datanauts starship noticed that many of the tasks are manual in nature and could, with a little effort, be automated with some scripting.

However, every time we moved on from one part of the nebula to another, a different error would crop up with the script’s code. Isn’t there some way that we can automatically test our code to make sure that more time is spent drinking a frothy ale instead of all this debugging?

On today’s episode with talk with Adam Bertram, a Microsoft MVP and author of The Pester Book.

He is currently a Senior Systems Automation Engineer working with PowerShell, Desired State Configuration, and various other DevOps tools to coordinate reliable software deployments for a biotech company. You can find his work at adamtheautomator.com.

We start by defining a unit test for scripts, and how unit testing differs from integration, functional, regression tests, and others.

Then we dive into why you’d want to test your scripts (testing isn’t just for developers!), and how to create these tests.

We also talk about the notion of test-driven development, and dive into Pester, which is a testing framework for PowerShell.

Show Links:

Adam Bertram on Twitter

Adam The Automator.com

The Pester Book – Adam Bertram

Today on the Datanauts podcast, we land on planet Mentorship to drive around in our exploratory rovers. Why? Mentoring came up on Twitter a while back.

Some of you are for it. You invest in your co-workers and your organization by sharing with others what you know. Some of you are against mentoring, arguing that you don’t have the time and aren’t getting paid to teach other people.

And then the Twitterverse connected us to Don Jones, who wrote a book called, “Be The Master.” Seems like a great excuse to fire up the microphone on our rovers and explore planet Mentorship in more detail.

Besides being an author, Don is an an IT pro and PowerShell expert who has created a variety of PowerShell training materials.

We talk about how a master/apprenticeship approach can be more effective than formal education, selfish reasons for being a mentor, how to address imposter syndrome, and how to get support for mentorship at work.

Show Links:

Don Jones.com

Be The Master.com

Don Jones on Twitter

Become The Master Or Go Away – Don Jones.com

Be the Master with Don Jones – RunAsRadio

If you work for a Value Added Reseller (VAR) as an engineer, the value being added is YOU.

What is VAR life? Projects, customer meetings, deadlines, bills of materials, RFP responses, and trying to turn the promises of sales unicorns into an actual design you can install for the customer.

We’ve worked for VARs at one time or another, as has our guest Eric Gullickson, who is now Enterprise Architect at Vortex Optics. We thought we’d run down the good, the bad, and the ugly of the VAR life on this episode of the Datanauts podcast.

We start the show by distinguishing the different roles a VAR can have. Then we dive into the good, which includes access to new technology, paid certifications, a flexible work schedule, and exposure to a wide variety of businesses and operating environments.

For the bad, the Datanauts and Eric discuss the blunt reality that you have to generate profit, and you may find yourself having to navigate the competing interests of manufacturers, sales, distributors, and customers.

On the ugly side, we swap stories about greasy salespeople, bad project management, and other nightmares.

Show Links:

Eric Gullickson.com

Eric Gullickson on Twitter

Today the Datanauts explore three key concepts to make cloud management and operations more bearable: automation, understanding new services and capabilities, and security.

Our guest is Kenneth Hui, Technical Marketing Engineer at Rubrik. Ken blogs at Cloud Architect Musings. While our conversation focuses primarily on AWS, many of the principles discussed will apply to any cloud platform.

In part one we parse automation, infrastructure-as-code, and DevOps to understand how these concepts are related, how they differ, and why culture and human behavior matter more than labels.

Part two explores the latest offerings in AWS including serverless, container support, and machine learning.

Part three tackles cloud security essentials including encryption, not exposing S3 buckets, and best practices.

Show Links:

Infrastructure as Code: A Reason to Smile – Thoughtworks.com

DevOps Culture (Part 1) – IT Revolution

The AWS Love/Hate Relationship with Data Gravity – Cloud Architect Musings

Data Encryption in the Cloud, Part 1: Why You Should Care – Cloud Architect Musings

Last Week In AWS – Newsletter

Unsecured server exposed thousands of FedEx customer records – ZDNet

Vault Project – Vault.io

AWS Blogs – Amazon

AWS Security – Amazon

AWS Security Best Practices – Amazon

AWS Faragate – Amazon

AWS Lightsail – Amazon