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.

If you would be kind enough, there is a link to a survey below that asks a few questions pertaining to network automation and programmability.  No personal information is required.

Network Automation & Programmability Survey 

If you wish to see the results, please fill the survey out :)


Thanks in advance,
Jason

Twitter: @jedelman8

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.

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.