Software Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) is bubbling up to be one of the prime use cases of SDN. The vendors that fall into the SD-WAN bucket often include Glue Networks, Nuage, Viptela, CloudGenix, VeloCloud, etc. As you dive into each of the solutions from the vendors, you may realize that some are truly unique technologically and some may just be offering a better way to manage existing wide area networking equipment (which is still a huge value add).

If you are a frequent reader of my blog, you know that last year I left my job to do something that I was intrinsically motivated to do.  Unfortunately, because of this, I haven’t been able to write as much as I normally would.  I do hope that changes.  But, time is money now – literally.  My time has been spent driving business, negotiating, writing Scopes of Work, building a website, managing finances, and producing quality work for customers, and I hope all of that continues.

One of the harder things to do when it comes to network automation is work with the majority of the install base that exists out there. This is true even if we focus purely on data extraction, i.e. issuing show commands and getting the results in an automated fashion. The reason for this is that most devices do not support returning structured data in formats such as JSON or XML, and this often times makes automation a non-starter for network engineers. 

Over the past few years, I’ve written quite a bit about SDN and more recently more about what can be done today with existing products, APIs, and tools in terms of improving operational efficiencies.  Most of the examples have leveraged modern network devices that have some type of API because it streamlines how to integrate with 3rd party systems be it a custom application or a platform like Ansible (a platform that I’ve written about frequently).  I’ve posted examples here and there on GitHub on these topics, but nothing that starts from the ground up.

If you have ever worked with Ansible, it’s almost a guarantee that you have used their online docs to figure out what parameters a given module supports, how they should be used, or what their defaults are.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a few custom modules and was trying to find a way to generate web docs for them, and have them locally accessible or easily posted to GitHub.  

The way in which networks are configured, deployed, and managed is changing.  The network industry is in a shift from managing devices box by box via the CLI to having more centralized ways to manage and deploy devices.  While the CLI isn’t going away anytime soon, we can look at the two operational models that are gaining traction within the network community.

We’ve heard a lot of Software Defined Networking (SDN), Open Networking, APIs, and policy models over the past few months (and years).  There are days where it’s sickening to hear the term SDN, but even on those darkest days, the reality is that the network industry has a bright and open future.  In this post, I’m going to share a list of networking projects that I’m aware of that are not only open, but also open source.  It is definitely eye opening and extremely positive to see so much open source activity in the network industry.

In previous posts, I’ve written about using Ansible for network automation.  Few of them can be found here, here, here, and here.  In one of the posts, I had a video that was automating Cisco routers with Ansible, and was using onePK as the API to communicate to the device.  In this post, I’ll be focusing on automating Nexus switches – this means each of the Ansible modules will be using NX-API to communicate with the device.  This also eliminates the need for the users of these modules to know Python as they’ll be using the Ansible platform for their specific automation needs.

I've posted a few times in the past about Cisco's NX-API and realized I hadn't provided any guidance on how to get started using the API itself.  In this post, I share two videos that are meant to serve as a quick start to those who don't have a development background and are looking to test NX-API.

The first video looks at the NX-API sandbox and how you map the data represented in the sandbox back into objects that you can use while working in Python.

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.

They have a few diagrams that outline the architecture.  One of them is in 3-D.  3-D diagrams are always more difficult for my brain to conceptualize (maybe it's just me), so I re-drew it in a more typical 2-D fashion.

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.  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.  

In this article, I’m going to explore not only working with Schprokits, but also working with AutoNetkit.  AutoNetkit, part of the PhD thesis work of Simon Knight, is an application and framework for modeling network devices, both from a configuration and visualization/diagramming standpoint.  Some of you may also realize AutoNetkit is used in the Cisco VIRL and Juniper Junosphere products too.

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.  Like others, it’s one acquisition that I’ve speculated about for a while.  There is already an interesting dynamic between Cisco and VMware, but as both companies continue to go to market with their Software Defined Networking (SDN), or controller based solutions, VMware still needs to run over a physical data center network.  The physical network market is still largely dominated by Cisco though.  Does VMware want or need to control the physical network?

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.

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.

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.  

Could DevOps and network automation help here?

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.