Wow. Where did the spring 2018 go? It’s almost June… and time for a refreshed list of upcoming webinars:

• Christoph Jaggi will run do another free webinar – this time on Ethernet Encryptors– on June 5^th;
• I’ll run an Amazon Web Services Networking workshop in Zurich on June 13^th;
• We had to change the schedule a little bit: the last webinar before the summer break will be an overview of real-life automation wins on June 19^th.

In Moving Complexity to Application Layer I discussed the idea of trying to use all addresses returned in a DNS response when trying to establish a connection with a server, concluding with “I don’t think anyone big enough to influence browser vendors is interested in reinventing this particular wheel.”

I’m really glad to report I was wrong ;) This is what RFC 8305 (Happy Eyeballs v2) says:

BGP is the kitchen-sink of networking protocols, right? Whatever control-plane information you need to transport around, you can do it with BGP… including the battleship coordinates carried in BGP communities.

On the more serious front, it's nice to see at least some ISPs still care enough about the stability of the global Internet to use BGP route flap dampening.

As part of his “how does Avaya implement data center fabrics” presentation, Roger Lapuh talked about use cases for SPB in data center fabrics.

I have no idea what Extreme decided to do with the numerous data center fabric solutions they bought in the last few years, so the video might have just a historic value at this point… but it’s still nice to see what you can do with smart engineering.

Someone left a comment on my Zero-Touch Provisioning post claiming how Big Switch Networks solved ZTP challenge using just IPv6 Link-Local Address and Neighbor Discovery instead of the complicated DHCP/TFTP/whatever sequence.

Here’s what he wrote:

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Every now and then someone asks me “Why are we making so little progress on network automation? Why does it seem so hard?”

There are some obvious reasons:

• Tightly-coupled components and humongous blast radius;
• Lack of good tools and programming interfaces;
• Lack of transactional consistency (in some cases even simple commits);

However, there’s a bigger elephant in the room: every network is a unique snowflake.

Networking engineers familiar with Junos love to tell me how easy it is to configure and operate IBGP EVPN overlay on top of EBGP IP underlay. Krzysztof Szarkowicz was kind enough to send me the (probably) simplest possible configuration (here’s another one by Alexander Grigorenko)

Got this response to my Stretched Layer-2 Revisited blog post. It’s too good not to turn it into a blog post ;)

Recently I feel like it's really vendors pushing layer 2 solutions, rather than us (enterprise customer) demanding it.

I had that feeling for years. Yes, there are environment with legacy challenges (running COBOL applications on OS/370 with emulated TN3270 terminals comes to mind), but in most cases it’s the vendors trying to peddle unique high-priced non-interoperable warez.

Steve Krause created a full-blown network services deployment solution, including post-deployment validation of OSPF and BGP routing, while attending Building Network Automation Solutions online course (I prefer course attendees working on real-life problems instead of artificial ones).

Hope you’ll enjoy exploring it ;)

An attendee of my Building Next-Generation Data Center online course asked me what the best learning path might be for a total (data center) beginner that has to design and install a small leaf-and-spine fabric in a near future.

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