The Fat Pipe - All Packet Pushers Pods

We’ve talked about network automation plenty on Packet Pushers. Many of those conversations have been about little things, like writing a script to do a specific task. But is that really network automation?

Our guest today is Ken Celenza, and he’s here to argue that scripting repeatable tasks is just the beginning of the automation journey. Ken, who is Director of Automation at NetworkToCode, works with customers to build and integrate with automation frameworks that address the entirety of their network automation needs.

Ken and the Packet Pushers have a wide-ranging conversation about automation, including automation principles, data models and schemas, testing code, and more.

While much of today’s discussion revolves around open source software, this is simply a means to convey a message, and by no means not prescribing any specific solution as the best way forward. If a commercial product fits your needs and your budget, go for it.

Sponsor: ThousandEyes

ThousandEyes gives you performance visibility from every user to every app over any network, both internal and external, so you can smoothly migrate to the cloud, transform your WAN, troubleshoot faster and deliver exceptional user experiences. Sign up for a free account at thousandeyes.com/packetpushers and choose a free ThousandEyes t-shirt.

Sponsor: Cumulus Networks

Cumulus Networks presents Networking with S.O.U.L – Simple, Open, Untethered Linux. These 4 tenants enable modern, agile networks be built to support the new demands of the business. Save an average of 45% on CapEx and approximately 74% on OpenEx by adopting these SOULful networking solutions. Learn how to leverage the top 5 automation tips and tricks in your network — head to http://cumulusnetworks.com/ppautomation to download our automation white paper.

Show Links:

Source of Truth – Himawan Nugroho

Device Configurations Are Not A Good Source Of Truth – IP Space

Data Models – IP Space

Continuous Testing For Networks – Matt Oswalt on Packet Pushers Ignition

Model-driven Programmability: The Rise of Network Automation – Cisco Blogs

OpenConfig: Standardized Models For Networking – Packet Pushers

Using Vendor & Platform Neutral Data Models with Ansible – GitHub

NetworkToCode – Slack

Ken Celenza on Twitter

Ken on LinkedIn

Ken on GitHub

Learn why and how you test IPv6 interoperability in the latest episode of the IPv6 Buzz podcast. Our guest is Tim Winters, director of the University of New Hampshire's InterOperability Lab.

Stress is a fairly constant feeling when it comes to piloting a galaxy class battle cruiser around the galaxy. From dealing with personnel requests to battling evil lizard droids in sector 8, the job can weigh you down. What might be done about it?

That’s the topic of today’s Datanauts episode. Our guest is Eric Shanks, a senior solutions architect at Ahead. He also blogs at The It Hollow.

Eric has blogged recently about his own efforts to understand why he’s stressed, and a few things he dug up in researching the subject.

These include a pernicious phenomenon called the Zeigarnik Effect, in which people remember uncompleted tasks better than finished ones.

They also discuss cognitive and memory biases and how they affect recall, and look at techniques to help you manage complex tasks, which can help reduce the Zeigarnik Effect, and, we hope, get your stress levels down.

Sponsor: ITProTV

Join ITProTV to learn the skills to pass the most in-demand IT certs. It’s binge-worthy learning! ITProTV’s extensive course library includes CEH v9, CISA, CompTIA A+, Mac Certified Support Professional, and more!

Visit itpro.tv/data and use code DATANAUTS to try it FREE for 7 days, and receive 30% off your monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription.

Show Links:

The Dark Side of Stress – The IT Hollow

Zeigarnik Effect – Wikipedia

Memory errors and biases – Wikipedia

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

In the latest IPv6 Buzz podcast, Scott and Tom discuss the state of IPv6 in universities and higher education. Additional topics include: * How universities and higher education can benefit from IPv6 adoption * How security differs (and doesn’t) in higher education environments and how that might impact IPv6 deployment * Some IPv6 address planning... Read more »

Today, an update on some compelling projects at IETF 102. Ours guest are Jeff Tantsura and Russ White.

We review the following projects to see what’s new and understand what problems they’re solving:

* RIFT (Routing In Fat Trees)

* BIER (Bit Indexed Explicit Replication)

* PPR (Preferred Path Routing)

* YANG data modeling

We also look at the state of SD-WAN, which is a bit of the Wild West, to look at standards and interoperability efforts underway.

Jeff is the Head of Technology Strategy at Nuage Networks. He’s also deeply involved with the IETF as the Chair of Routing Area Working Group, the Chair of Routing In Fat Trees, a Member of Internet Architecture Board, and a Member of IP Stack Evolution.

Jeff has recorded with us several times before, most recently on Priority Queue 126, where Greg chatted with Jeff about the future of data center fabrics. Jeff, welcome back to Packet Pushers.

Russ White is a network architect, author, and blogger. Rush also chairs the Interface to Routing System and the Babel routing protocol efforts at the IETF, and is a reviewer in the IETF’s Routing Area Directorate.

Show Links:

Jeff Tantsura IETF work – IETF

Russ White’s IETF work – IETF

RIFT NANOG presentation – NANOG via YouTube

RIFT Working Group – IETF

BIER Working Group – IETF

Preferred Path Routing (PPR) drafts – IETF

SD-WAN service model draft – IETF

YANG Explorer – Cisco DevNet

Priority Queue 126 – The Future of Data Center Fabrics from IETF 99 – Packet Pushers

Rule11.tech – Russ White’s blog

Computer Networking Problems and Solutions: An innovative approach to building resilient, modern networks – Russ White and Ethan Banks

Today's Weekly Show podcast explores what's new in Free Range Routing (FRR), the open source routing stack. Our guest is Donald Sharp.

The Packet Pushers explore open and open-source networking and their potential impact on network operations and design in the latest installment of the Future Of Networking series. Our guest is Arpit Joshipura of the Linux Foundation.

How’d that lift and shift to the cloud go? Pretty good? Workloads spun up in AWS? Getting used to Azure? Management happy because IT is all cloud-i-fied?

Excellent. That was day 1. Now it’s day 2, and you’ve got some new problems to solve. Cost issues. Security issues. Operations issues. On today’s Datanauts episode, we dig into your Day 2 cloud.

Our guest is Maish Saidel-Keesing, Cloud & DevOps Architect at CyberArk. He also blogs at Technodrone.

We talk about understanding and managing cloud costs and how your application infrastructure affects those costs. We also drill into cloud security and how to audit your controls. Last but not least, we look at the operational impacts of cloud, including team organization, skills, and training.

Sponsor: ITProTV

Join ITProTV to learn the skills to pass the most in-demand IT certs. It’s binge-worthy learning! ITProTV’s extensive course library includes CEH v9, CISA, CompTIA A+, Mac Certified Support Professional, and more!

Visit itpro.tv/data and use code DATANAUTS to try it FREE for 7 days, and receive 30% off your monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription.

Show Links:

5 AWS Certifications in 237 Days – Technodrone

The Cloud Walkabout AWS – Maish’s book

About Maish Saidel-Keesing – Technodrone

Maish’s Technodrone Blog

Maishsk on Twitter

Maish on GitHub

Agentless automation. This is key to why networking likes Ansible instead of similar products. Because just about all network devices cannot have network agents installed. (that is a feature of whitebox though)

I can’t sell you automation, it has to come from within. (kind of spiritual but true)

Anisible should be simple, its shouldn’t turn into something complex. At the same time people are doing unlikely things here,

Used for multiple systems – ie. works for Linux, Windows, as well firewalls, switches, appliances etc etc. Also used to manage SDN controllers.

Ansible has an enthusiastic community, with a lot participation. For open source projects this is important.

Ansible is not a programming language, its an automation language. Important differentiator. Its also not a SDN controller (implying that you are likely to have an SDN controller and Ansible can work that as a configuration destination, since Ansible is licensed per IP address (end node) – an SDN controller is not a single node for licensing, its still every device in the network

Ansible is geared towards team efforts – a playbook can bridge network/server/storage silos and bring them together. This is behind the fundamental intention of the product.

Automation changes the work of a network engineer to be better work by removing tedious work.

Ansible Network Engine

group of prepared playbooks that are widely used. They are packaged into a default distribution.

these are part of the supported solution in licensed product.

Loosely, what CVD is to Cisco products, Ansible Network Engine is a set of playbooks that are universal to most organisations.

the playbooks are opinionated through curation based on an understanding of what is widely used. Instead of everyone writing playbooks for configuration backups of well known devices, just ship them as part of a default set. Build them to a level of best practices,

bi-weekly recurring release cycle, ship early, ship often.

Nyansa is taking performance management and network assurance is relatively unknown sub-genre of network analytics. First generation analytics companies tend to focus on simpler things like visibility into applications, or replay, or reaction purposes. Many analytics products just focus on these limited functions but scale them up to something very large. As you scale up you can’t actually

They apply intelligence to the analysis. The early versions of the product were focussed on understanding performance in Wireless Networks. naturally this extended to Campus (they were catching the Campus trend early)

Today they extending their assurance functions in the WAN. Because they rely on synthetic testing via agents that you install around the network edge, they can be technology independent.

Why ? Lets say that you have a WAN in migration – legacy physical plus SD-WAN. And for some reason your vendor has decided that your first generation SD-WAN product needs to be replaced with a 2nd generation product.

Stop nodding your head over there Cisco IWAN customers.

Use Software Client Agent – running synthetic tests is is good idea. The challenge has always been getting the agent installed onto user nodes i.e. desktops,

Agents are necessary if you want to get deep detail, and accurately represent real traffic. Most analytics companies are using flow export, useful for working at scale but lacks granular data. Its difficult to accurately determine real application performance from a flow, (you aren’t seeing the TCP headers).