The Fat Pipe - All Packet Pushers Pods

Today's IPv6 Buzz episode peers into RFC 6555, aka 'Happy Eyeballs,' which helps dual-stack clients select a v6 or v4 address faster. Our guest is Dan Wing, a co-author of Happy Eyeballs.

Metadata is data about data, and metadata matters to your company’s business.

Getting your metadata correct means you have more power and control over the information that drives your organization.

For example, metadata influences where data gets stored, and at what performance tier; or when data should be moved to optimize a business process. It tells you who’s accessing the data, and how often the data is being accessed, which has implications for security, compliance, and legal discovery.

Yep, that’s all tied up in metadata, the topic of our discussion on the Datanauts. Our guest is Karen Lopez, Senior Product Manager and Architect at InfoAdvisors.

We work through a definition of metadata, examine why it’s essential across IT, and why you might want to think about metadata as a love note to yourself in the future.

We also examine different metadata storage models and the associated tradeoffs and benefits, and dive into metadata use cases in enterprise storage.

Sponsor: Packet Pushers Virtual Design Clinic 3

Register now for the Packet Pushers’ Virtual Design Clinic on December 19th. This live, online event includes deep-dive technical presentations for network engineers, Ask Me Anything sessions with expert panelists, and a sponsored presentation from Apcela. It’s free to sign up. Register here.

Show Links:

Karen Lopez on Twitter

Karen Lopez on LinkedIn

Data Model.com – Karen Lopez’s Blog

InfraGeeks.com

Datanauts 074: Understanding Data Models & Why They Matter – Packet Pushers

Parallel NFS Home Page

Metadata is data about data, and metadata matters to your company’s business.

Getting your metadata correct means you have more power and control over the information that drives your organization.

For example, metadata influences where data gets stored, and at what performance tier; or when data should be moved to optimize a business process. It tells you who’s accessing the data, and how often the data is being accessed, which has implications for security, compliance, and legal discovery.

Yep, that’s all tied up in metadata, the topic of our discussion on the Datanauts. Our guest is Karen Lopez, Senior Product Manager and Architect at InfoAdvisors.

We work through a definition of metadata, examine why it’s essential across IT, and why you might want to think about metadata as a love note to yourself in the future.

We also examine different metadata storage models and the associated tradeoffs and benefits, and dive into metadata use cases in enterprise storage.

Sponsor: Packet Pushers Virtual Design Clinic 3

Register now for the Packet Pushers’ Virtual Design Clinic on December 19th. This live, online event includes deep-dive technical presentations for network engineers, Ask Me Anything sessions with expert panelists, and a sponsored presentation from Apcela. It’s free to sign up. Register here.

Show Links:

Karen Lopez on Twitter

Karen Lopez on LinkedIn

Data Model.com – Karen Lopez’s Blog

InfraGeeks.com

Datanauts 074: Understanding Data Models & Why They Matter – Packet Pushers

Parallel NFS Home Page

On today’s Tech Bytes, sponsored by HPE and Intel, we talk with Garth Reid about HPE’s Composable Fabric.

Composable Fabric, which came from HPE’s Plexxi acquisition, combines top-of-rack switches and automation software to pool networking resources and help your data center scale.

We also talk about how Composable Fabric integrates with HPE’s Simplivity hyperconverged infrastructure portfolio, and how it can complement other network overlays.

Garth Reid is Senior Strategist – Enterprise Portfolio at HPE.

Show Links:

Composable Fabric

Simplivity

HPE Discover

On today’s Tech Bytes, sponsored by HPE and Intel, we talk with Garth Reid about HPE’s Composable Fabric.

Composable Fabric, which came from HPE’s Plexxi acquisition, combines top-of-rack switches and automation software to pool networking resources and help your data center scale.

We also talk about how Composable Fabric integrates with HPE’s Simplivity hyperconverged infrastructure portfolio, and how it can complement other network overlays.

Garth Reid is Senior Strategist – Enterprise Portfolio at HPE.

Show Links:

Composable Fabric

Simplivity

HPE Discover

Today's Network Break podcast analyzes the latest rounds of trouble for Huawei, new silicon from Barefoot Networks, two service mesh announcements from F5 and VMware, and more. Denise Donohue joins as guest analyst.

The following is a transcript of the audio report you can listen to in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary. I’m Ethan Banks, it’s December 7, 2018. Automation and sources of truth are on my mind.

Sources Of Truth

In Weekly Show 402, Ken Celenza from NetworkToCode came on to discuss network automation frameworks. In that conversation, he shared the idea of sources of truth, where automation tools need to go to a single source of truth for any aspect of the infrastructure we needed to know about. You might have several truth sources, one for each kind of information, but for a given kind of information, there’s only going to be one truth source.

BlueCat Networks, DDI, And Automation

In the last month, I’ve chatted with BlueCat Networks a couple of times. You can see some of those sessions by searching for BlueCat and Tech Field Day on YouTube. They are a DDI company. That is, DNS, DHCP, and IPAM services combined into a unified platform. DDI by itself isn’t exciting, but BlueCat grabbed my interest because of the capabilities they wrap around their DDI information. The platform is automation-friendly, making BlueCat a great candidate to be one of the sources of truth that automation tooling needs.

BlueCat is an API-capable product. That is, there’s a full API that developers can leverage to get information in and out of BlueCat. That’s good and even necessary for a modern IT shop, but BlueCat has gone ever further.

BlueCat Gateway For Customized Business APIs

BlueCat offers a free add-on product to their DDI platform called Gateway. Gateway is a platform customers can use to create their own custom APIs that make sense for their business. Put another way, Gateway provides a REST API endpoint for other applications within the business to talk to.

The full BlueCat API is heavy and capable–lots of features and parameters, requiring a decent understanding of how DNS, DHCP, and so on actually work. Gateway enables a business-centric interaction with BlueCat DDI data, streamlining the process.

Figure out how your company executes a process, and use Gateway to build an API that exposes just the parameters required to get the BlueCat-related part of that process done. For example, you might create an API called “MoveServer” that might do a bunch of different things within BlueCat like free up the old IP, assign a new IP, and update the DNS hostname. The custom Gateway API shares just the minimum number of parameters required to kick off a process that will get those steps done.

You might think of Gateway as an abstraction between business intent and specific execution. I wouldn’t call it intent based networking, but there are comparisons we could make.

Building Business Workflows

Upon the foundation of customized, business logic driven APIs, Gateway builds workflows. That is, as information flows into and out of BlueCat via the Gateway APIs, Gateway can also populate other systems. For instance, it’s possible to integrate with ServiceNow so that steps of the process can be reviewed and approved if needed.

That workflow can also include validation–querying the infrastructure to be certain that the request was fulfilled as intended. BlueCat mentioned that auditing is a use case frequently cited by customer–sanity checking that deployments are compliant to a set of business rules.

Enabling Automation Adoption

For many engineers, APIs & business logic sounds intimidating. BlueCat recognizes this and offers several resources to help folks get started with Gateway.

The following is a transcript of the audio report you can listen to in the player above.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary. I’m Ethan Banks, it’s December 7, 2018. Automation and sources of truth are on my mind.

Sources Of Truth

In Weekly Show 402, Ken Celenza from NetworkToCode came on to discuss network automation frameworks. In that conversation, he shared the idea of sources of truth, where automation tools need to go to a single source of truth for any aspect of the infrastructure we needed to know about. You might have several truth sources, one for each kind of information, but for a given kind of information, there’s only going to be one truth source.

BlueCat Networks, DDI, And Automation

In the last month, I’ve chatted with BlueCat Networks a couple of times. You can see some of those sessions by searching for BlueCat and Tech Field Day on YouTube. They are a DDI company. That is, DNS, DHCP, and IPAM services combined into a unified platform. DDI by itself isn’t exciting, but BlueCat grabbed my interest because of the capabilities they wrap around their DDI information. The platform is automation-friendly, making BlueCat a great candidate to be one of the sources of truth that automation tooling needs.

BlueCat is an API-capable product. That is, there’s a full API that developers can leverage to get information in and out of BlueCat. That’s good and even necessary for a modern IT shop, but BlueCat has gone ever further.

BlueCat Gateway For Customized Business APIs

BlueCat offers a free add-on product to their DDI platform called Gateway. Gateway is a platform customers can use to create their own custom APIs that make sense for their business. Put another way, Gateway provides a REST API endpoint for other applications within the business to talk to.

The full BlueCat API is heavy and capable–lots of features and parameters, requiring a decent understanding of how DNS, DHCP, and so on actually work. Gateway enables a business-centric interaction with BlueCat DDI data, streamlining the process.

Figure out how your company executes a process, and use Gateway to build an API that exposes just the parameters required to get the BlueCat-related part of that process done. For example, you might create an API called “MoveServer” that might do a bunch of different things within BlueCat like free up the old IP, assign a new IP, and update the DNS hostname. The custom Gateway API shares just the minimum number of parameters required to kick off a process that will get those steps done.

You might think of Gateway as an abstraction between business intent and specific execution. I wouldn’t call it intent based networking, but there are comparisons we could make.

Building Business Workflows

Upon the foundation of customized, business logic driven APIs, Gateway builds workflows. That is, as information flows into and out of BlueCat via the Gateway APIs, Gateway can also populate other systems. For instance, it’s possible to integrate with ServiceNow so that steps of the process can be reviewed and approved if needed.

That workflow can also include validation–querying the infrastructure to be certain that the request was fulfilled as intended. BlueCat mentioned that auditing is a use case frequently cited by customer–sanity checking that deployments are compliant to a set of business rules.

Enabling Automation Adoption

For many engineers, APIs & business logic sounds intimidating. BlueCat recognizes this and offers several resources to help folks get started with Gateway.

You need to know a cloud provider's network performance before you spin up workloads because the end user impact is measurable. On today's Weekly Show, sponsor ThousandEyes breaks down latency, jitter, and performance numbers for AWS, Azure, and GCP.

When you choose among the Big 3 public cloud providers, is network performance all the same? No.

Public cloud and multi-cloud buyers need to be aware of network performance characteristics before they start spinning up workloads because the end user impact is measurable.

Sponsor ThousandEyes joins us to explain public cloud network performance. We discuss the company’s new multi-cloud monitoring service, and then review the “2018 Public Cloud Performance Benchmark Report” that breaks down the network latency and jitter numbers for AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Our ThousandEyes guests are Archana Kesavan, Senior Product Marketing Manager; and Ameet Naik, Senior Technical Marketing Manager.

*Please note that at the time we recorded the podcast, Google was the first of the big three public cloud providers to offer a tiered network service that leveraged its own private backbone. After the recording, AWS announced Global Accelerator, an add-on service that uses AWS’s own network to “intelligently route traffic to the endpoint that provides the best application performance.”

Show Links:

2018 Public Cloud Performance Benchmark Report – ThousandEyes

ThousandEyes on Twitter

ThousandEyes Network Intelligence Blog