The Everything Feed - All Packet Pushers Pods

Juniper Networks came back for a second day at Network Field Day 17. This time around the company focused on:

* An Appformix demo showing analytics and visibility – a topic that we say is critical to the future network strategy

* Contrail diverging from OpenContrail to embrace public clouds, hybrid clouds, and Kubernetes. It aims to be a single platform to unify all network orchestration (with some companies pursuing multiple controllers)

* Contrail as the configuration engine, AppFormix as the analytics and automation layer

* Adopting P4 across its fleet as a general abstraction for forwarding packets

* Open/R on its current control plane inside devices (and contrail vRouter)

Juniper outlined its idea of how network automation will evolve:

* Day 0:  Human-Driven Automation

* Day 1:  Event-Driven Automation

* Day N: Machine-Driven Automation

Juniper also demonstrated PeerBot – a Contrail application for automating BPG configuration across dozens of routers for IXP environments. PeerBot:

* Dramatically simplifies BGP configuration

* Targets a narrow market, but this makes it useful. A general-purpose solution might struggle to be useful to specific people

* Is just one of a handful of bots that Juniper has announced. The company plans to build more bots this year

Extreme Networks presented at Network Field Day 17 and focused on automation via StackStorm and Workflow Composer.

Extreme also discussed its ability to run a VM and applications on certain SLX models.

StackStorm Is Unique Because…

* A vendor is delivering this and supporting it

* A moderately competent network engineer will be able to do something useful with this

* The workflow helps you do something reliable

* Mean time to pay rise is drastically reduced

* Effort to achieve pay rise is reduced

Workflow Composer

Workflow Composer builds on Stackstorm to provide cross domain automation changes the way you operate the network.

It speeding up the operations lifecycle, reducing the time spent on deployment, troubleshooting, and implementation so you can focus on remediation. The vendor can help with these three; only you can handle the last part.

Check out the NFD videos to see Workflow Composer demos.

VM On A Switch

* Redirect a 10G interface to VM running on the switch

* Isolated from the control plane

Workflow Composer And VM Demo

* Using the VM on a switch

* Slack integration for ChatOps

* Capture packets on multiple switches

* Upload PCAP to cloushark and then link appears in the Slack

ThousandEyes presented at Network Field Day 17. The company started out monitoring the Internet “as a network” and has extended into monitoring the customer’s digital experience.

* ThousandEyes is moving from visibility into a more useful representation of the customer experience

* Internet visibility needs new tools for the networks that you don’t own when you use SD-WAN, hybrid cloud, SaaS, etc.

* User agents reporting to ThousandEyes improve troubleshooting

* The on-premises agent, which can be deployed on user machines or a server, gathers data from your private network and uploads it to ThousandEyes, which combines private and public network into a single view

* Product future: a) Routing anomalies such as BGP hijacks or leaks b) DDOS detection c) app outages

Today on this sponsored episode of Priority Queue: making the transition from Skype for Business to Teams, a chat and collaboration platform from Microsoft. Teams runs on Azure and integrates with Office 365.

Our sponsor is Ribbon Communications, which is the new name of the combined companies Sonus Networks and Genband.

Brad Chapin, Director of Strategic Alliances at Ribbon Communications, joins us to get nerdy about voice, collaboration, Skype, and Microsoft Teams.

We discuss the differences between Skype for Business and Teams, how Ribbon’s Session Border Controllers (SBCs) can help you integrate the two platforms even in a hybrid cloud environment, and how organizations can move from one platform to another while keeping existing phone numbers.

Show Links:

Ribbon Communications

Ribbon Communications on Twitter

Microsoft Teams – Group Chat software – Microsoft

PQ 124: Cloud SBC Security & Analytics With Sonus Networks (Sponsored) – Packet Pushers

PQ Show 102: Sonus Networks & Migrating To Microsoft Cloud PBX (Sponsored) – Packet Pushers

Fresh from a two-hour Network Field Day session at Juniper on its OpenContrail transition to the Linux Foundation, Greg and Drew do a hot take on what we saw and what it means.

We also quickly review Juniper’s ambitions for its commercial Contrail product.

* Moving OpenContrail to be fully open source is harder than it looks

* The move is customer driven (as we hinted previously)

* OpenContrail will diverge from Contrail

* Contrail wants to bridge your private and public clouds, with support for AWS, Google, etc.

* Juniper is building a network platform and moving past products

* Emphasizing security because you can control the network correctly

Using open source software on a variety of hardware platforms is old news on the compute side of the IT house. Now, whitebox hardware and open source software are challenging incumbent network vendors and demonstrating new operational models for network engineers.

Web-scale giants have blazed the trail for whitebox/open source networking, and the tools and technologies these giants use are finding their way into the enterprise.

What does all of this mean for enterprise infrastructure going forward? We ponder these questions on the Datanauts podcast.

Our guest is Peyton Maynard-Koran, currently working at a stealthy blockchain startup.

We talk with Peyton about the problems that exist with big networking vendors (feature bloat, tightly coupled software and hardware, and other issues), and how these problems create challenges for network operators.

We also explore how disaggregation, open source, and an emphasis on software offer a different vision for how to build, buy, and operate networks.

Show Links:

Peyton Maynard-Koran – Twitter

Peyton Maynard-Koran – Blog

future:net 2017 – The Impacts of Cloud Computing and Open Source on the Networking Industry – YouTube

Fixing the Internet for Real-Time Applications: Part III – Riot Games Engineering

I had a briefing with netYCE on January 8, 2018. In this briefing, netYCE gave me an overview of their platform and shared some of the latest capabilities they’ve baked in. Listen to the audio in the embedded player above to hear what stuck out to me.

Who’s netYCE?

NetYCE is a maker of vendor agnostic network automation software. They play in the same space as Anuta Networks, Glue Networks, Tail-F and other big, grown up packages that hide messy, manual configuration from operators while preventing them from shooting themselves in the foot during complex network changes.

For More Information

Visit netyce.com. Note that netYCE has been selling to European markets and Asia primarily, but is planning to come to North America in 2018 once they have their support infrastructure in place.

Today the Datanauts get sorted about the world of database administrators, a.k.a DBAs.

There’s a chasm between infrastructure ops and DBAs, especially when it comes to running data center workflows. This show aims to build some bridges.

We also focus on Microsoft SQL Server, one of the most widely deployed database applications in the enterprise.

Our guide to the DBA life is Mike Fal, a database solutions engineer at Rubrik. Mike blogs at Art Of The DBA. We’ll delve into the intricacies of relational databases and how applications interact with them.

Then Mike walks us through the day in the life of a DBA, and we conclude with a conversation on how infrastructure ops and DBAs can work better together.

Show Links:

Art Of The DBA – mikefal.net

PASS: A Non-profit organization for data professionals

Mike Fal on Twitter

The Full Stack Journey podcast dives into Kubernetes, the orchestration platform that's taking the container world by storm. Guest Sebastien Goasguen explores the origins of Kubernetes and discusses use cases and how to get started

On today’s episode, the Datanauts starship traverses time and space via VXLAN tunnels. VXLAN is an overlay networking technology for the data center that augments and extends traditional VLANs.

VXLAN helps data center operators support multitenancy, enables ECMP (Equal Cost Multi-Pathing) to make full use of available paths, and avoids the perils of Spanning Tree. VXLAN works by adding a header to an Ethernet frame that makes it routable across an IP network.

Our guest is Lukas Krattiger, Principal Engineer at Cisco Systems. Lukas and the Datanauts discuss how VXLAN works, explore use cases, and examine the tradeoffs of encapsuation and de-encapsulation in software vs. hardware.

We also delve into how hosts inside a VXLAN network communicate with end points outside that network.

Show Links:

Lukas Krattiger on Twitter

Show 256 – Design & Build 6 – VXLAN Use Cases – Packet Pushers

Show 66 – VXLAN and NVGRE with Ken Duda – Packet Pushers