Russ White wrote a great response to my “Do You Really Want to Write that Book?” blog post and I couldn’t agree more with what he wrote. Unfortunately, he seems to be a bit over-idealistic when analyzing why the market for high-end content is so small.

You know I usually have a cynical explanation handy, so here it is: too many people calling themselves engineers for no particular reason simply don’t care. It’s way easier to Google-and-paste your way around than to invest time in understanding the fundamentals.

Oliver Steudler from Juniper sent me a link to an interesting Juniper blog post describing zero-bandwidth traffic engineering.

Read the blog post first and then come back for some opinionated rambling ;)

Is the problem real? Yes.

A few months ago I met a number of great engineers from Avaya and they explained to me how they creatively use Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) to create layer-2, layer-3, L2VPN, L3VPN and even IP Multicast fabrics – it was clearly time for another deep dive into SPB.

It took me a while to meet again with Roger Lapuh, but finally we started exploring the intricacies of SPB, and even compared it to MPLS for engineers more familiar with MPLS/VPN. Interested? Listen to Episode 54 of Software Gone Wild.

During one of my Network Automation workshops one of the attendees said: “Why are you using open-source software? It’s so poorly documented and impossible to set up.”

I totally understood what he was trying to say (I’ve seen too many examples of just read the code approach), but fortunately there are still people who understand the value of documentation.

Continuing our routing-on-hosts discussions, Enno Rey (of the Troopers and IPv6 security fame) made another interesting remark “years ago we were so happy when we finally got rid of gated on Solaris” and I countered with “there are still people who fondly remember the days of running gated on Solaris” because it’s a nice solution to host-to-network multihoming problem.

After I told you that I’m not going to Interop, I got numerous emails along the lines of “but I was really looking forward to attending your workshop” so I started looking for a solution that would combine the best of online and classroom worlds.

Here’s my first attempt: an interactive online course combining topics from two of my Interop workshops. I’m still working on the detailed agenda and plan to have it ready around May 1st. In the meantime, I’d really appreciate your feedback – leave a comment or send me an email.

Luka Manojlovič, a networking engineer with strong focus on Windows and IPv6 sent me a short status update on an enterprise IPv6 deployment:

Moved a whole enterprise network (central location + 17 remote locations) to dual-stack today. So far everything works.

While that sounds pretty easy, there was a lot of work going on behind the scenes. Here are some of the highlights:

Russ White made an excellent remark while discussing the news that the CloudRouter pushed 650 Gbps through commodity hardware: “If this is software defined networking, then we’ve been doing this since sometime in the 1990’s, perhaps even earlier…”

He’s absolutely right – the first routers (like AGS or IGS from Cisco) did all packet forwarding in software, so as I explained during the Introduction to SDN webinar while reaching dozens of gigabits with software-based packet forwarding is exciting, calling it SDN doesn’t make much sense.

Everyone loves to talk about business critical applications that require extremely high availability, but it’s rare to see someone analyze the whole application stack and identify the weakest link.

If you start mapping out the major components of an application stack, you’ll probably arrive at this list (bottom-to-top):

The organizers of Troopers 16 conference published the video of my Real-Life Software Defined Security talk. The slides are available on my web site.

Hope you’ll enjoy the talk; for more SDN use cases watch the SDN Use Cases webinar.

A while ago Christer Swartz explained how a Palo Alto firewall integrates with VMware NSX. In the meantime, Palo Alto announced integration with Cisco ACI and OpenStack, and it was time for another podcast with Christer deep-diving into the technical details of these integrations.

Spoiler: It’s not OpFlex. For more details, listen to Episode 53 of Software Gone Wild

It’s amazing how interesting questions come in batches: within 24 hours two friends asked me what I think about writing books. Here’s a summary of my replies (as always, full of opinions and heavily biased), and if you’re a fellow book author with strong opinions, please leave them in the comments.

I’ve been telling you to build small-to-midsized data center with two switches for years ;) A few weeks ago I’ve turned the presentation I had on that topic into a webinar and the first video from that webinar (now part of Designing Private Cloud Infrastructure) is already public.

Some people conflate SDN with whitebox switches preferably running Linux. So what exactly is software-hardware disaggregation, and how do whitebox switches and third-party network operating systems fit into the bigger picture?

I tried to answer these questions in the SDN is not whitebox switching part of (free) Introduction to SDN webinar.

One of my readers sent me this question:

Considering I know nothing about anything SDN-related (and considering it seems "SDN" means something different depending to whom you are asking), where should someone with no knowledge of SDN start?

The obvious answer: sdn.ipSpace.net. On a more serious note: