Building network automation solutions

After deciding to take a slightly longer coffee break I went through the list of outstanding projects trying to figure out which ones I could complete in first half of 2021, which ones I’ll get to “eventually” and what’s a lost cause.

Guest Speakers

Irena is telling me that I should stop inviting guest speakers – our calendar is full until June 2021. Here’s what we have planned:

• Deep dive into NSX-T Federation by Jerome Catrouillet. That session will conclude the NSX-T 3.x update process.
• Two more sessions of Kubernetes Deep Dive
• Several sessions of Cisco ACI Deep Dive
• Rachel Traylor will be back with an intensive course on reliability theory
• Jason Belk will redo the NETCONF/YANG material and add RESTCONF to the mix
• Dinesh Dutt will talk about IP routing in 3-tier leaf-and-spine topology

Webinar Updates

There are a few things I simply have to update to feel good:

• First on the list: introduction to cloud networking section for Introduction to Cloud Computing webinar.
• Ansible webinar will get updated material on task includes, roles, and collections. I won’t waste any more time describing their N+1-st attempt to get networking modules right.
• The network automation curriculum is pretty well rounded, what’s missing is a deep dive into network automation concepts (infrastructure-as-code, data models, data stores, single source of truth, intent-based networking…). I will try to get the material done before the summer break, and might have to run a few sessions in autumn
• Gateway Load Balancer has to be added to AWS webinar.
• Miha Markočič has developed tons of AWS new automation examples – they will be published in late January and February.
• I have to add more recommended design information to Designing Active-Active and Disaster Recovery Data Centers webinar
• The description of configuration and state management automation tools is out of date – an update is planned for late spring

Long-term Projects

I will keep working on How Networks Really Work webinar. The current plan is to cover the details of routing protocols including fun stuff like LFA, rLFA, TI-LFA, PIC, NSF, SSO..

I will also add HTTP/2, HTTP/3 and QUIC to the TCP, HTTP and SPDY webinar. I will get it done – I just don’t know when it might happen.

Potential Update Candidates

These webinars would deserve an update, but I won’t make any promises:

• VXLAN Technical Deep Dive would need a major rewrite. It still mentions NSX-MH and Nexus 1000v
• Introduction to Virtualized Networking is in no better shape
• Network Function Virtualization webinar would need an update on fast packet switching in Linux. If only I’d be able to persuade Thomas Graf to do it ;)
• Data Center Infrastructure for Networking Engineers needs an update of the Network Reference Architecture section (and no, I will not touch the storage part of it)

What I can promise is that I WILL NOT spend any more time going through the vendor data sheets to update the product overview parts of Data Center Fabric Architectures. Creating those updates was one of the worst content creation experience I ever had.

Not Going to Happen

I had a few more ideas on the back burner. They might happen in another lifetime ;)

• OpenStack Networking
• Open Networking on Linux
• BGP Security and MANRS

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