PowerShell is a great scripting environment if your vendor provided PowerShell libraries to control their software or devices… but what if all you got is REST API (example: Nexus switches)?

We’ll conveniently ignore the challenges of managing devices that use 30-year-old non-scriptable CLI.

A month ago I told you how dr. Olivier Bonaventure starts his networking course with IPv6. But there’s more: the full textbook for the undergraduate course (Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols and Practice) is open-sourced and available (in source form) on GitHub.

You might wonder why I’m so enthusiastic, so let me tell you another story…

The featured webinar in September 2017 is the Ansible for Networking Engineers webinar, and in the featured videos you'll learn what Jinja2 is and how you can use it to generate network device configurations with Ansible.

If you already have an trial subscription, log into my.ipspace.net, select the Ansible webinar from the first page, and watch the videos marked with star. To start your trial subscription, register here.

I got several questions along the lines of “why is Cisco pushing LISP instead of using EVPN in VXLAN-based Enterprise campus solutions?”

Honestly, I’m wondering that myself (and maybe I’ll get the answer in a few days @ NFD16). However, let’s start at the very beginning…

In June 2017, we concluded the Building Next Generation Data Center online course with a roundtable discussion with Andrew Lerner, Research Vice President, Networking, and Simon Richard, Research Director, Data Center Networking @ Gartner.

During the first 45 minutes, we covered a lot of topics including:

VMware started talking about VMware Cloud on AWS a while ago, and my first response was “yeah, it’s just vCloud Air but they wanted to get rid of CapEx, so it’s running on someone else’s servers”

Last week Frank Denneman published a technical overview of the solution and I was mostly correct.

Plenty of new stuff was added to the Ansible for Networking Engineers online course and webinar since the last update.

Fun things first: I needed adjustable check mode behavior and change tracking in some playbooks, and documented these features in two new videos (online course and webinar).

It all started with a realistic response I got to my automation and orchestration blog post (here’s a unicorn-driving-a-DeLorean one in case you missed it):

Maybe you could also add the “intent-based network” which is also not so far from orchestration?

It got me thinking. The way I understand intent-based whatever, it’s an approach where I tell a system what I want it to do, not how to do it.

There are two reasonable ways of building a layer-2 leaf-and-spine fabric: use VXLAN (the direction almost everyone in the industry is taking at the moment), or routing-on-layer-2 technology like TRILL or SPB.

My friend Christoph Jaggi published new versions of his Metro- and Carrier Ethernet Encryptor documents:

• Technology introduction, including an overview of encryption mechanisms, Carrier Ethernet connectivity models, typical deployments, and key management challenges.
• Market overview, including standards, control- and data plane considerations, key- and system management, and network integration.

Enjoy!