The Fat Pipe - All Packet Pushers Pods

Today on the Datanauts, Chris Wahl undertakes an away mission to the Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando, FL. (Don’t worry, he’s not wearing a red shirt.)

He’s beamed into Microsoft’s Podcast Center to record a live episode with Jeffrey Snover, Technical Fellow at Microsoft and Chief Architect for Azure Infrastructure and the creator of Powershell.

Chris and Jeffrey delve into the latest developments in PowerShell and PowerShell Core, explore features and use cases for Azure Stack (which was just released to general availability), and review key announcements from Ignite for Azure, SQL Server 2017, and more. Ethan Banks pipes in remotely to offer his takeaways.

Show Links:

Monad Manifesto – Jeffrey Snover

Datacenter transformation – a roadmap for platforms, processes, and people – Jeffrey Snover (Microsoft Ignite presentation)

Azure Stack – Microsoft

Configuring and Operating Microsoft Azure Stack – Microsoft Course

Packet capture and analysis tools are powerful things. Capturing real data lets you peer into the soul of your network.

That power can be enhanced with machine learning. It’s everywhere these days, but if there’s one area where machine learning can be very useful, surely it’s packet analysis.

That brings us to ExtraHop, the subject of today’s sponsored show. ExtraHop is a protocol decoder, packet analysis engine, threshold management system, alerting tool, flow record collector, and application health dashboard all in one.

We’ve spoken with ExtraHop before, and today we’re returning with news of product updates and ExtraHop’s “Addy” machine learning.

Our guests from ExtraHop are Isaac Roybal, Director of Product Marketing; and Matt Cauthorn, VP of Security.

We discuss the release of ExtraHop 7.0 to understand what’s in the newest version (including Live Activity Maps and SSL/TLS decryption), and then drill into its Addy machine learning technology to see how it can be used to analyze reams of data to produce actionable insights.

 

Show Links:

ExtraHop

ExtraHop on Twitter

ExtraHop Blog

 

In distributed storage systems and hyperconverged environments, storage is scattered across a bunch of hosts all over the network. So does performance suffer if a workload’s data is across the network somewhere?

Should workloads have local data to perform as well as they ought? In other words, does data locality matter?

The Datanauts beam aboard storage expert Howard Marks to dive into the issue of data locality. Howard is a well known writer, speaker, consultant and Chief Scientist at DeepStorage. He’s also co-host of the Greybeards on Storage podcast.

Howard and the Datanauts discuss the basics of data locality and storage networking; explore the myriad bottlenecks and latency sources that can affect an application’s interaction with a storage system; and delve into the issues around hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), data locality, and replication and resiliency.

Sponsor: Datadog

This week’s show is sponsored by Datadog. Built by engineers, for engineers, Datadog is a SaaS-based monitoring platform for cloud-scale infrastructure and applications. Sign up for a free trial and get a free T-shirt at datadog.com/datanauts.

Show Links:

DeepStorage

HCI And Data Locality – DeepStorage

Evaluating Nutanix’ original & unique implementation of Data Locality – Josh Odgers

Looking for the silver bullet that’s not there? My (and Datrium) response to the Data Locality debacle – Andre Leibovici

Today’s Priority Queue returns to the IETF to explore the concept of path-aware networking. Currently, end points on a network have little control over or information about the path over which their traffic is carried.

Efforts are under way, both by vendors and within standards bodies, to develop technologies and protocols to both provide more information about links (i.e. performance, trust, cost, and so on) and enable end points to select the most appropriate path to meet certain criteria.

For example, SD-WAN gateways can connect to multiple links and then direct traffic across one or more of those links based on customer-defined policies.

Greg Ferro and guests from the IETF’s Path Aware Networking Research Group discuss the concepts of path aware networking and examine the work being done by the group.

Our guests are Brian Trammell, co-chair of the Path Aware Networking Research Group and a researcher at ETH Zurich; and Jen Linkova, also a co-chair of the research group and a network engineer at Google.

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.

Show Links:

Path Aware Networking Research Group – IETF

Standards – XKCD

In this episode the Datanauts bust the ultimate silo: the executive suite.

We delve into the role of the CIO to understand the priorities and job functions of this position. We also want to learn how engineers, operators, and technologists can work with these and other executives to meet goals and align with business needs.

Our guide into the mind of the CIO is Tim Crawford, a principal at strategic consulting firm AVOA. Tim is a former CIO, and he now advises CIOs and other executives on transforming their IT organizations.

We talk with Tim about the role of the CIO and that person’s job function within an organization, and examine the differences between traditional and transformational CIOs. In essence, a CIO’s role, while focused on the business, is to understand how to take advantage of technology to drive the organization.

Tim also shares his insights into what keeps CIOs up at night, and the appeal of the cloud for executives. And for those with an eye for the executive suite, he offers advice on the skillsets and knowledge required to move up the ladder.

Show Links:

The difference between the Traditional CIO and the Transformational CIO – Tim Crawford (AVOA)

On Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners and Theft – Bits or pieces?

Recorded live at IETF 99, this Priority Queue episode is a roundtable conversation on new and emerging ideas for data center fabrics.

Greg Ferro is joined by Jeff  Tantsura, a chair of the routing working group at IETF; Russ White, a network architect at LinkedIn; and Tony Przygienda, who works for a vendor and claims to be the only grownup in this conversation. (You be the judge!)

They discuss why efforts such as TRILL and SPB failed to gain traction, and then dive into BGP EVPN, Routing In Fat Trees (RIFT), and other protocols.

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.

Show Links:

RIFT: Routing In Fat Trees (PDF) – Juniper Networks

Routing Area Working Group – IETF

PQ Show 115: BIER, RIFT & BGP+SFC At IETF 98 – Packet Pushers

The Datanauts celebrate their 100th episode with an Ask Me Anything-style show.

Chris Wahl and Ethan Banks answer questions about the future of object storage; VXLAN, VTEP and getting traffic out of the data center (nice to know people didn’t hold back); and how to become a full-stack engineer.

Listeners also wanted to know what advice the hosts would give themselves if they could travel back in time to the start of their podcasting journeys, which episodes they’re most proud of, and unexpected or surprising things they’ve learned.

Thanks to everyone who tuned in for the first hundred shows and offered encouragement, constructive criticism, and show ideas. Let us know what you want to hear in the next batch!

Sponsor: ITProTV

ITProTV brings you the most current IT training with over 2,000 hours of content and more than 125 hours added weekly. ITProTV is the resource to keep you and your IT team’s skills up to date. Visit itpro.tv/datanauts​ ​and use code DATANAUTS30​ ​to get a FREE 7-day trial and 30% off a monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription.

Show Links:

Datanauts 001 – Hyper Convergence with Scott D. Lowe – The very first episode

Datanauts 058: Kubernetes – A Deep-Dive Introduction – Ethan’s favorite episode

Datanauts 065: Cloudy With A Chance Of Ops – Chris’s favorite episode

EthanCBanks.com

WahlNetwork.com

Today’s Priority Queue explores In-situ OAM (IOAM), an IETF initiative to enable per-packet telemetry information to be collected and extracted from the network. OAM stands for Operations, Administration, and Maintenance.

IOAM provides real-time data to understand how traffic is performing and to track the path packets take. IOAM adds a tag to each packet, and every node through which the packet passes can write metadata to the tag, such as the node’s identity, the interface and egress ports, and other details.

Greg Ferro is joined by Cisco engineers Shweta Bhandari, Frank Brockner, and Carlos Pignataro, all of whom are contributing to the IOAM project. They discuss the details of IOAM,  how it works, and potential use cases.

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.

Show Links:

Data Fields for In-situ OAM – IETF

Encapsulations for In-situ OAM Data – IETF

Requirements for In-situ OAM – IETF

Active and Passive Metrics and Methods (RFC 7799) – IETF

Microservices is an application architecture that assembles applications from discrete components and services that are loosely coupled. These components and services are linked together over a network and interact via APIs.

By working with decoupled components, you can change and update individual elements without having to update the entire application stack. This can speed up release cycles and enable more flexible operations.

At the same time, however, distributed systems can be vulnerable to issues such as latency and connectivity problems.

The Datanauts drill into the pros and cons of microservices to help you understand if this is the right approach for your organization.

They also look at the infrastructure impacts of this architecture, and discuss ways to transition to microservices without blowing up your applications. They also look at the relationship between microservices and cloud native applications.

Our guest is Bryan Boreham, Director of Engineering at Weaveworks.

Show Links:

Microservices.io

Weaveworks

Datanauts 016: The Realities Of Hybrid Cloud

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.