Facebook recently wrote about the network architecture they are using in their new Altoona data center facility. If you haven’t read through their article yet, it’s definitely worth the read.

I gave a presentation at Interop last month and tried to make two major points about network automation. One, network automation is so much more than just “pushing configs” and two, network automation is still relevant in Software Defined Network environments that have a controller deployed as part of the overall solution. And I’m referring to controllers from ANY vendor including, but definitely not limited to Cisco’s APIC, NSX Controllers, Nuage Controller/Director, Juniper Contrail, Plexxi Control, OpenDaylight, and Big Switch’s Big Cloud Fabric.

Over the past few months I’ve written about Ansible and the intersection of DevOps and Networking quite a few times. As network vendors continue to develop better APIs on network devices (switches, routers, FWs, etc.) there is no doubt going to be an emergence of new tools for the network industry. One of these emerging tools is [Schprokits](http://www.schprokits.com/. Schprokits (company name and product name), still in stealth, was founded by Jeremy Schulman, who previously worked at Juniper and did the initial work for integrating Junos with Puppet, Chef, and Ansible, and on top of that developed the Juniper PyEZ Python framework. Schprokits seems to be the outcome of Schulman’s experiences working with existing DevOps automation platforms and building one now purpose built for networking. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been fortunate to be able to be part of the first Schprokits user-test group.

It’s been some time since I wrote about Cisco’s onePK. In this post, I’ll look at some of the good and the bad of onePK and also show an example of how to add a route to a device running onePK to help make a few points along the way.

With other acquisition rumors floating around, I figured I would add my own 2 cents and do some speculating. It’s not uncommon to hear that VMware might acquire Cumulus.

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at Interop in NYC. It wasn’t the best turn out for a conference, but all of the sessions that were about automation, APIs, DevOps, and programmability seemed to do fairly well. For those that didn’t attend, the title of the presentation was A Practical Look at Network Automation — the deck is posted below.

Many vendors collect their own data that is more than likely a little skewed and biased. As I prepare for a few upcoming presentations, I thought it would be great to get some REAL data from REAL people doing great things or even those just starting on their automation journey.

Cumulus Networks has been talking a lot about Prescriptive Topology Manager (PTM). A great overview of PTM can be found here, but the high level is that PTM ensures “wiring rules are followed by doing a simple runtime verification of connectivity.” This means that as a user, you can define what the physical topology, or wiring, is supposed to be and compate it against what it really is by leveraging LLDP. The PTM daemon (PTMd) is what does this analysis on each switch running Cumulus Linux. There is even integration with routing protocols such that if two switches are improperly cabled, no routing adjacencies will be permitted on that link. You can check out the PTM code since it is available under the Eclipse Public License (EPL).

Last month I wrote about using the Cisco Nexus NX-API to extract stats from a Nexus switch while using Ansible. For some reason, last night I finally went on to tackle how to integrate with the Twitter API and then integrated the two together. Integrating with Twitter has always been top of mind, but just put it on the back burner. Funny enough though, it was a pretty quick integration thanks to the great people at Google.

I’ve spent the last few days getting briefed by several vendors in Silicon Valley. They include A10, Big Switch, Brocade, Cisco, Gigamon, Nuage, Pluribus, Spirent, and Thousand Eyes. Over the next few weeks, I’ll try and get a few posts out about the briefings, but for the first one I wanted to focus on Spirent. Many are probably aware that Spirent provides packet generators and while that’s what they sell and are really good at, it’s the strategy, vision, and software integration with their products that was extremely intriguing.

At the end of the day, any announcement that is NON networking focused NEEDS a networking focus. I just attended the UCS Grand Slam launch where there were a few announcements for UCS including the new UCS mini, capacity optimized UCS, and the UCS modular chassis (M series). The latter was of the most interest to me. The new M series de-couples CPU and memory from other peripherals on board including networking and storage. CPU and memory exist on a replaceable / upgradeable cartridge and can be upgraded without touching the network or SSDs on board. This smells and feels like the disaggregation happening in the Open Compute Project (OCP), but of course, the Cisco solution can be managed with all existing and new UCS systems via UCS Manager. This could definitely be the start of a new computing paradigm for the Enterprise.

With some downtime this weekend, I was able to watch a few documentaries on NetFlix. There were a few great ones on Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffet, Mark Cuban, and Steve Jobs. Many of them came from the Bloomberg Game Changers series, but for Steve Jobs, I watched the Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview that was filmed in 1995, lost for almost two decades and then was released in 2012. I highly recommend all of them, but for this post, I want to highlight something Jobs said nearly 20 years ago.

It’s an interesting time in networking, isn’t it? I can probably quote myself saying that for as long as I’ve been blogging and about a year before that. Supposedly 2015 is the year of POCs, bakeoffs, and seeing which startups continue to get funding, and which ones slowly dissolve. As we start to see who the winners and losers may be, I thought it would be good to highlight the last 7 years and where the major focuses areas have been and see what could be next.

I had a conversation recently with someone who has more of a sysadmin background. We started talking about the intersection of DevOps and networking and while his environment wasn’t large, there was one pain point he talked about – he doesn’t have access to the network switches to ensure they are configured properly for “his” servers and to ensure packets aren’t being dropped, etc. when there are issues with the application, server, or network. And by the way, he really doesn’t want access to the data center switches, because after all, many fear logging into network devices that are in production.

There was a recent blog by Mark Burgess, founder and creator of CFEngine. It is a must read (on his personal blog). He really makes you think where we are as an industry, question if we are on the right path, and quite frankly calling out certain technologies as pity attempts compared to what is needed. Regardless of all that, we cannot forget one key point, the industry is in fact moving forward right now.

Over the past few months, I’ve been posting on using Ansible for network automation. Changing things up a bit, this post will cover using Ansible for server automation and I’ll share a few Ansible playbooks that I’ve built and have been using to bootstrap servers and prep them for various applications such as OpenStack and NSX deployments.

Over the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with the best and the brightest in the industry. The reach started with my co-workers, partners, and vendors, but gradually expanded due to the likes of maintaining a blog and occasionally being on Twitter. In a recent exchange with someone who gave me a massive pivot and jump start in my career almost 10 years ago, it reminded me of a presentation this same person gave back then.

In my previous post about Docker, I focused on an introduction to networking with Docker. That post had a fair amount of traction mainly due to it being #dockercon the week it was published, and seemingly, people had an interest in learning more about it. Following the post, there were a few folks (@hartley and others) that pointed me to some great links about more advanced concepts in Docker and a site that validated what I was speculating with leveraging overlay tunnels as means for connectivity between nodes running Docker.

There has been a ton of information out there on Docker over the last week. Because the impact on networking is often overlooked for new technologies, I figured I’d get a head start to understand the basics of Docker Networking. This post documents the steps I took to test docker analyzing the network constructs that are automatically configured during container creation.

Automating the configuration, provisioning, and management of particular workflows for cloud gets a lot of attention these days. While automation makes perfect sense for deploying workloads faster, there are also other areas where automation can be leveraged to improve the overall operational efficiency of the IT Ops team.