The Fat Pipe - All Packet Pushers Pods

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)

The Datanauts’ “Found On The Internet” series continues with a discussion about Nutanix and the cloud focus of its Next 2017 conference. Chris Wahl attended the conference and he and Ethan Banks dig into the big announcements coming out of the show. They include:

* A hybrid cloud partnership with Google Cloud Platform

* A deal with Aviatrix and Cisco for connecting private data centers with public cloud infrastructure

* Announcements around Nutanix’s CALM and Xi initiatives

Tune in to get details on Nutanix’s hybrid cloud strategy and to hear a broader conversation about the challenges of moving workloads from your premises into the world of clouds.

Networking in the cloud isn’t just VLANs. On today’s Datanauts episode we explore the ins and outs of building networks in cloud services such as AWS.

Our guest is Anthony Miloslavsky, a network engineer in the finance industry. He’s been leading his company’s AWS networking efforts and wanted to share what he’s been learning.

The first point to understand? Instead of the layer 2 domains that engineers traditionally work with, public cloud networking is basically all layer 3. The provider presents you with its overlay and gives you tools and services to work with it.

Anthony and the Datanauts explore the basic constructs in AWS networking, including Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and security groups, and how these constructs will affect your architectural choices.

They also discuss how your AWS networks interact with the rest of the world, including load balancers and NAT gateways. They also drill into the automation capabilities that are on offer, and how those capabilities could influence your premises infrastructure.

Rob Hirschfeld joins the Datanauts to talk about the term Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) and what it means for IT operations.

Rob explores how the SRE designation is an effort to put operations teams on a more equal footing with developers within an organization. Rob and the Datanauts also discuss how SREs line up with other industry trends such as the cloud native and DevOps movements.

This episode was inspired by Rob’s talk at DevOps Days Austin.

Rob is CEO of RackN, which makes the Digital Rebar platform. He also joined the Datanauts in episode 72 to talk about OpenStack, Kubernetes and infrastructure automation.

Show Links:

Site Reliability Engineering – Google

Datanauts 65: Cloudy With A Chance Of Ops with Charity Majors – Packet Pushers

SRE vs Cloud Native vs DevOps”? Why do they conflict with one another? – Rob Hirschfeld

DevOps Days Austin

RackN

Digital Rebar

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

This is the first in an occasional Datanauts series we’re calling “Found On The Internet.” The idea is to gather up things that we’ve read online that maybe don’t make up a full show, but that we want to talk about.

Today’s topics include the Future of Ops, CockroachDB, and OpenStack growing up.

Our guest to help us discuss these subjects is Rebecca Fitzhugh, Technical Marketing Engineer at Rubrik. She’s also an author and blogger.

Sponsor: Incapsula

Incapsula is a cloud-based service from Imperva that protects and accelerates your Web sites with services including DDoS and bot protection, traffic inspection, load balancing, and CDN. Incapsula protects over 4 million Web properties, from individual bloggers to the Fortune 50. Datanauts listeners can try Incapsula free! Just go to incapsula.com/packetpushers.

Show Notes:

The Future of Ops – Tyler Treat

Cockroach Labs demos CockroachDB at OpenStack Summit – Cockroach Labs

CockroachDB In Comparison – Cockroach Labs

Hello World – Cockroach Labs

OpenStack isn’t dead. It’s boring. That’s a good thing. – Major.io

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 episode the Datanauts rocket ventures into the treacherous asteroid field that is IT security.

And like an asteroid field, security is constantly in flux. We defend, and the attackers change tactics. We figure out the new attacks, and the rules change yet again. And so it is that the security architectures of old are not the security architectures of today. And the security architectures of today are not likely to be the security architectures of tomorrow.

Our guests are James Holland, a systems engineer; and Aaron Miller, a systems engineer manager. Both work for Palo Alto Networks, but this isn’t a sponsored show. The discussion traces the evolution of security architectures and approaches, the importance of application awareness, and the impact of virtualization, which can both create new risks and provide new opportunities.

We also look at where security is going, how cloud and virtualization will continue to shape your security infrastructure, and how skill sets will have to adapt to support more automation.

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.

This episode of the Datanauts examines Identity and Access Management (IAM) in the context of AWS. A proper IAM framework is essential to ensure that the right people access the right resources in AWS, but setting up and managing policies can be…daunting.

The Datanauts are joined by Cole Morrison, a lead engineer at Fieldboom, who wrote a detailed series of posts on how to get a handle on IAM in AWS. They talk about why you want IAM in the first place, how it works, and then drill into setting up policies for AWS infrastructure.

Sponsor: ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer

ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer is agentless log analytics and configuration management software that supports up to 50 different firewall appliances. It helps network administrators to centrally collect, archive, and analyze their security device logs, and generate forensic reports. For more information and a free 30-day trial, check out www.fwanalyzer.com/packetpushers.

Sponsor: Incapsula

Incapsula is a cloud-based service from Imperva that protects and accelerates your Web sites with services including DDoS and bot protection, traffic inspection, load balancing, and CDN. Incapsula protects over 4 million Web properties, from individual bloggers to the Fortune 50. Datanauts listeners can try Incapsula free! Just go to incapsula.com/packetpushers.

Show Links:

Available Global Condition Keys – AWS

AWS Service Actions and Condition Context Keys for Use in IAM Policies – AWS

AWS IAM Policies in a Nutshell – Cole Morrison

AWS IAM Policies in a Nutshell: The Principal – Cole Morrison

AWS IAM Policies in a Nutshell: The Action – Cole Morrison

AWS IAM Policies in a Nutshell: The Resource – Cole Morrison

AWS IAM Policies in a Nutshell: The Condition – Cole Morrison