Packet Pushers - Priority Queue

Today on Packet Pushers Priority Queue, a unified communications (UC) discussion with Sonus Networks, our sponsor for this episode.

While most conversations about UC revolve around performance, we’re going to drill into issues around security and analytics.

We discuss how and why UC is vulnerable and the kinds of threats that can be perpetrated against it (DDoS, toll fraud, exfiltration, espionage, and others).

We also examine at how session border controllers (SBCs) can be used as a kind of firewall to provide a measure of validation and protection against UC-based threats. In addition, we look at the advantages of cloud-based SBCs when it comes to collecting and making use of analytics.

Our guest is Kevin Isacks, VP of Engineering for Sonus Networks.

The Priority Queue returns to the IETF to talk with Kurt Andersen, who’s working on the DMARC initiative.

DMARC is an email authentication and reporting protocol that builds on existing DKIM and SPF authentication standards.

The goal of DMARC is to help domain owners who follow proper authentication protocols ensure that mail gets delivered, and to understand why some mail may not be reaching recipients. Mailing lists and email forwarding services often break the authentication chain, and one of DMARC’s goals is to fix this problem.

You can read all the DMARC documents here.

Thanks to Huawei, which covered travel and accommodations to enable the Packet Pushers to attend IETF 99 and record some shows to spread the news about IETF projects and initiatives.

Today in the Priority Queue channel we’re talking about an IETF project called Interface to Network Security Functions (i2nsf).

The goal of the project is to provide a standard set of software interfaces and data models for service providers that want to provide to customers a mix of security functions (for example, firewalling, malware scanning, etc.) from different vendors.

Greg Ferro talks with Linda Dunbar, a Working Group chair for i2nsf. They discuss the need for the project, outline its major goals, and review examples of how a common model to describe security actions and events across different vendor products would work.

Thanks to Huawei, which covered travel and accommodations to enable the Packet Pushers to attend IETF 99 and record some shows to spread the news about IETF projects and initiatives.

The IETF is an influential standards body that makes significant contributions to networking and other IT disciplines. But it’s also a body in which you can participate.

Greg Ferro attended the IETF 99 meeting in Prauge in July 2017. In this Priority Queue show, he sits down with Kathleen Moriarty, an IETF Security Area Director; Alia Atlas, a Routing Area Director; and Russ White, a co-chair of a variety of working groups and all-around community leader; to discuss opportunities for IT professionals to get directly involved with the IETF in networking, security, and other areas.

Options include new IETF local communities, reviewing drafts, participating in mailing lists, and more.

Thanks to Huawei, which covered travel and accommodations to enable the Packet Pushers to attend IETF 99 and record some shows to spread the news about what the IETF is up to.

Show Links:

IETF Community Hubs Draft

IETF Hub Boston Discussion Archive

Today on the Priority Queue, intent-based networking. What is it? What’s it good for? What’s the technical reality? Is it like, “Alexa, make me a network” and then a network magically appears? Sort of.

In actuality, there’s a lot more to intent-based networking. There are APIs and message busses and abstraction layers and event handling and state enforcement and compliance reporting and so on.

Put another way, intent-based networking is kind of hard, especially when you try to handle complex networks of size and multi-vendor environments.

To talk about intent-based networking today, we have a sponsored show with Apstra. Apstra has brought an intent-based networking product to market and is here to explain the concepts and technologies behind its approach.

Joining Greg Ferro and Ethan Banks are Sasha Ratkovic, Derick Winkworth, and Douglas Gourlay from Apstra.

We talk about why the industry cares about intent, how intent-based networking actually works, and what its impact might be on the careers of network engineers.

Links:

Blog: The Industry Embraces Intent-Based Networking (by Mansour Karam)

Blog: A New Era In Network Operations (by Derick Winkworth on packetpushers.com)

Blog: Intent-based Networking Systems (by Derick Winkworth)

Video: Time Travels with @CloudToad

Video: Networking Field Day 13 – Who We Are (with Derick Winkworth)

Dave McCrory recently published a series of blog posts on the future of networking. What’s compelling about these posts is that Dave isn’t a network engineer.

Dave is CTO of Basho, which builds distributed databases. He was inspired to write his posts because of cloud and distributed systems that struggle with consistency, and how the network might be able to help these problems.

We explore Dave’s posts and explore the insights he brings to thinking about network hardware design and networking challenges.

Show Links:

The Future of the Network – McCrory’s Blog

The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing

Istio

Envoy: C++ L7 proxy and communication bus

To many engineers, standards are the stone tablets handed down from the mountain by the technology deities, telling us what’s what and how we’re going to do it. Only that’s not really how that works, at least not in the IETF.

The IETF draws people from across the industry to collaborate on drafts that might eventually become standards. And anyone can take part in this process. Most don’t, however—especially folks from the enterprise.

One organization, the Enterprise Data Center Operators Group (EDCO), wants to change that. EDCO’s goal is to get enterprises engaged with the standards process to ensure their concerns are heard and their feedback incorporated into drafts.

Joining us to talk about EDCO is Nalini Elkins. Nalini is CEO and founder of Inside Products and an EDCO leader.

We discuss the motivation behind EDCO’s founding, why it’s important for the enterprise voice to be heard in the standards process, how EDCO can serve as a proxy for organizations that don’t participate directly, and how you can get involved (IETF 99 is this July).

Show Links:

Enterprise Data Center Operators

Grass-Roots Collaboration: Enterprise Data Center Operators Group – IETF Journal

Inside Products

IETF 99

On today’s Priority Queue we’re getting nerdy on containers and container networking. We’re joined by Sai Chaitanya, Senior Product Manager with VMware’s NSBU. VMware is sponsoring today’s episode.

While it’s still early days for containers in most enterprises, they do bring benefits for application modernization, and those benefits are likely to spur more widespread adoption. And just like any other application platform, containers need network connectivity and security.

We’ll discuss the networking and security challenges with containers, including a lack of a native container networking framework, and then explore how VMware’s NSX can address those challenges.

And of course, you can’t talk about containers without talking about orchestration tools such as Kubernetes or Docker Swarm. Chaitanya and the Packet Pushers will examine how NSX can provide a consistent network fabric that can support multiple orchestration tools.

If you’re curious about container networking, give this one a listen.

Today’s Priority Queue continues our discussions about network modeling and programmability. Our guest Michael Kashin has been working with YANG models, python, and a variety of supporting tools to programmatically install network device configurations, spending time with both Junos and IOS XE.

In his detailed series of posts on networkop.co.uk, Michael has painstakingly explored and explained how to work with network models, showing how they tie to the future of network configuration. In this episode, we discuss many of Michael’s discoveries.

If you skipped it, you might want to listen to Priority Queue episode 111 first, where I discuss YANG, NETCONF, and network model standardization efforts in the IETF with Benoit Claise. That would be a good foundation for today’s episode.

Show Links:

Getting Started With NETCONF and YANG on Cisco IOS XE – NetworkOp

Introduction to YANG Programming and RESTCONF on Cisco IOS XE – NetworkOp

Configuring Cisco IOS XE With YDK and OpenDaylight – NetworkOP

Configuring Cisco IOS XE With YANG-based YAML Files – NetworkOp

Using YANG Models in Ansible to Configure and Verify State of IOS-XE and JUNOS Devices – NetworkOP

PQ Show 111: YANG Models & Telemetry At IETF 98 – Packet Pushers

Today’s Priority Queue dives into three IETF draft projects around routing:

* BIER (Bit Index Explicit Replication), which describes a new mechanism for multicast forwarding

* RIFT (Routing In Fat Trees), a dynamic routing protocol for Clos and Fat Tree topologies

* BGP+SFC (BGP + Service Function Chaining), which describes the use of BGP as a control plane for service function chaining using a new address family

Ethan Banks is joined by Alia Atlas, a Distinguished Engineer at Juniper and a Routing Area Director at the IETF; and Antoni (Tony) Przygienda, a Distinguished Engineer at Juniper and chair of the IETF’s BIER project.

Alia and Tony will provide overviews of each project, discuss the problems they’re designed to solve and how they work, and update us on the status of each effort.

Strap in, because it’s going to get nerdy!

This podcast was recorded on site at the IETF 98 conference in March 2017 in Chicago. Thanks to Huawei, which covered travel and accommodations to enable the Packet Pushers to attend and record some shows and spread the news about what the IETF is up to.