EVPN might be the next big thing in networking… or at least all the major networking vendors think so. It’s also a pretty complex technology that still faces some interoperability challenges (I love to call it SIP of networking).

To make matters worse, EVPN can easily become even more confusing if you follow some convoluted designs propagated on the ’net. The best antidote to that is to invest time into understanding the fundamentals and slowly work through more complex scenarios after mastering the basics.

I always wondered why it’s so hard to accept that someone might not find your preferred solution beautiful but would call it complex or even harmful (or from the other side, why someone could not possibly appreciate the beauty of your design)… and then stumbled upon this blog post by Scott Adams describing cognitive dissonance (the actual topic they’re discussing in the mentioned video doesn’t matter – look for the irrational behavior).

You might say “but we could politely agree to disagree” but unfortunately that implies that at least one of us is not fully rational due to Aumann’s Agreement Theorem.

More and more network devices support REST API as the configuration method. While it’s not as convenient as having a dedicated cmdlet, it’s possible to call REST API methods (and configure or monitor network devices) directly from a PowerShell script, as Mitja Robas demonstrated during the PowerShell for Networking Engineers webinar.

You’ll need at least free ipSpace.net subscription to watch the video.

This blog post was initially sent to the subscribers of my SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.

We’ve been told for years how we’re over-complicating networking, and how the software-defined or intent-based whatever will remove all that complexity and remove the need for networking engineers.

What never ceases to amaze me is how all these software-defined systems are demonstrated: each one has a fancy GUI that looks great in PowerPoint and might even work in practice assuming you’re doing exactly what they demonstrated… trying to be creative could result in interesting disasters.

When the Spring 2018 Building Network Automation Solutions online course started, we didn’t know whether we’d run another course in 2018, so we offered engineers who wanted to get an early start Believer price.

The wait is over: the autumn 2018 course starts on September 18^th. The schedule of the live sessions is already online, and we also have the first guest speakers. We’ll announce them in early June at which time you will no longer be able to get the Enthusiast price, so register ASAP.

A friend of mine who had the unfortunate “pleasure” of being exposed to one of the open-source controller platforms sent me this after reading my snarky take on bragging about what you’re doing at Something-Open-Something-Something conferences.

After documenting the basic challenges of using EBGP and 4-byte AS numbers with EVPN automatic route targets, I asked my friends working for various vendors how their implementation solves these challenges. This is what Krzysztof Szarkowicz sent me on specifics of Junos implementation:

David Barroso was sick-and-tired of using ZX Spectrum of Network Automation and decided to create an alternative with similar functionality but a proper programming language instead of YAML dictionaries masquerading as one. The result: Nornir, an interesting network automation tool formerly known as Brigade we discussed in Episode 90 of Software Gone Wild.

Listening to the networking vendors it seems that zero-touch provisioning is a no-brainer … until you try to get it working in real life, and the device you want to auto-configure supports only IP address assignment via DHCP, configuration download via TFTP, and a DHCP option that points to the configuration file.

As Hans Verkerk discovered when he tried to implement zero-touch provisioning with Ansible while attending the Building Network Automation Solutions course you have to:

Not long after I published the blog post arguing against physical appliances, Oven wrote a very valid comment: "But then you'd have 20 individual systems to manage, add licenses to for additional features, updates etc."

Even though the blog post (and the comment) was written in 2013, not much has changed in the meantime.

You probably know that fantastic feeling when you think your newly-discovered tool is a Hammer of Thor, capable of solving every problem (or at least crashing through it). I guess you’re also familiar with that sinking feeling when you’re trying to use your beloved hammer to whitewash a bikeshed.

Not surprisingly, the cruder the tool is, the quicker you’ll hit its limits, like when you try to do data processing in Jinja2 (hint: don’t).

I was listening to a very interesting Future of Networking with Fred Baker a long while ago and enjoyed Fred’s perspectives and historical insight until Greg Ferro couldn’t possibly resist the usual bashing of traditional routing protocols and praising of intent-based (or flow-based or SDN or…) whatever.

Here’s what I understood he said around 35:17

A while ago Greg Ferro invited me for another fireside chat on Packet Pushers podcast. Hope you’ll enjoy our discussion.

The network automation evangelists love to tell you that automation is more than just device configuration management. They’re absolutely right… but it’s nonetheless amazing how much good you could do with simple tools solving simple problems.

Here’s what I got from Nicky Davey:

Another month has swooshed by and it’s time for a refreshed list of upcoming webinars:

• Mitja Robas will explain the basics of NSX and ACI planning and design on April 24th. He has tons of material on this topic – expect to see him quite often in the autumn/winter timeframe;
• Dinesh Dutt will continue the EVPN Technical Deep Dive saga on May 3^rd;
• Christoph Jaggi will run a free webinar on the basics of transport (layer-1/2) and network (layer-3) security on May 10^th;
• We’ll run another SDDC webinar on May 22^nd. More details later…
• On June 5^th Christoph will be back with Ethernet Encryptors Deep Dive;
• The last webinar before the summer break will be Data Center Fabric Troubleshooting with Dinesh Dutt on June 19^th.

All you need to have to attend all these live sessions is a current ipSpace.net webinar subscription.