Most network automation tutorials out there assume you’re running Ansible on your workstation and accessing virtual machines via SSH ports mapped by Vagrant. That’s great if you’re an experienced Ansible/Python user; for a clunky beginner like myself it’s safer to run Ansible within a VM that can be destroyed and recreated in seconds.

Another year swooshed by… it’s time for another what have we been doing in this year blog post.

Most important bit first: ipSpace.net is slowly morphing from a personal project into a (hopefully interesting) learning platform with almost 30 authors creating or participating in ipSpace.net webinars or online courses.

I rarely get OpenFlow questions these days; here’s one I got not so long ago:

I've just spent the last 2 days of my life consuming the ONF 1.3.3 white paper in addition to the $vendor SDN guide to try and reconcile what features it does or does not support and have come away disappointed...

You’re not the only one ;)

High-speed scale-out load balancing is a Mission Impossible. You can get the correct abstraction at the wrong cost or another layer of indirection (to paraphrase the authors of Fastly load balancing solution).

However, once every third blue moon you might get a team of smart engineers focused on optimal solutions to real-life problems. The result: a layer of misdirection, a combination of hardware ECMP and server-level traffic redirection. Enjoy!

The featured webinar in December 2016 is the Network Automation Tools webinar, and in the featured videos you'll find in-depth description of automation frameworks (focusing on Ansible) and open-source IPAM tools (including NSoT recently released by Dropbox).

To view the videos, log into my.ipspace.net, select the webinar from the first page, and watch the videos marked with star.

In Software Gone Wild Episode 52 Katerina Barone-Adesi explained how Igalia implemented 4-over-6 tunnel termination (lwAFTR) with Snabb Switch. Their solution focused on very fast data plane and had no real control plane.

No problem – there are plenty of stable control planes on the market, all we need is some glue.

I got several questions along the lines of “Do I need programming skills to attend the Building Network Automation Solutions course?”

Short answer: No.

One of my readers designing a new data center fabric that has to provide L2 transport across the data center sent me this observation:

While we don’t have plans to seek an open solution in our DC we are considering ACI or VXLAN with EVPN. Our systems integrator partner expressed a view that VXLAN is still very new. Would you share that view?

Assuming he wants to stay with Cisco, what are the other options?

On November 7th SDx Central published an article saying “OpenFlow is virtually dead.” There’s a first time for everything, and it’s a real fun reading a marketing blurb on a site sponsored by SDN vendors claiming the shiny SDN parade unicorn is dead.

On a more serious note, Tom Hollingsworth wrote a blog post in which he effectively said “OpenFlow is just a tool. Can we please find the right problem for it?”

A few days after I published the blog post describing why it might make sense to attend the Building Network Automation Solutions course even when you’re already using a $vendor network management system/platform, I got a surprising email from one of my friends working for a major networking vendor:

Dinesh Dutt was the guest speaker in the second Leaf-and-Spine Fabric Design session. After I explained how you can use ARP/ND information to build a layer-3-only data center fabric that still supports IP address mobility Dinesh described the details of Cumulus Linux redistribute ARP functionality and demoed how it works in a live data center.

Got this comment to one of my L2-over-VXLAN blog posts:

I found the Avaya SPBM solution "right on the money" to build that L2+ fabric. Would you deploy Avaya SPBM?

Interestingly, I got that same question during one of the ExpertExpress engagements and here’s what I told that customer:

Every time I write about network automation in enterprise environments I get the usual set of excuses including:

Some of the environments I am looking at have around 2000-3000 devices and 6-7 vendors for various functions and 15-20 different device platform from those vendors. I am trying to understand what all environments can Ansible scale up to and what would be an ideal environment enterprises should be looking at more enterprise grade automation/orchestration platforms while keeping in mind that platform allows extensibility.

Luckily I didn’t have to write a response – one of the readers did an excellent job:

One of my readers was watching the Building Active-Active Data Centers webinar and sent me this question:

I’m wondering if you have additional info on how to address the ingress traffic flow issue? The egress is well explained but the ingress issue wasn’t as well explained.

There’s a reason for that: there’s no good answer.

A few weeks ago Matt Oswalt wrote an interesting blog post on principles of automation, and we quickly agreed it’s a nice starting point for a podcast episode.

In the meantime Matt moved to StackStorm team so that became the second focus of our chat… and then we figured out it would be great to bring in Matt Stone (the hero of Episode 13).