Pete Lumbis concluded his ASICs for Networking Engineers presentation with a brief overview of types of switching ASICs and a wrap-up.

You can watch his entire 90-minute presentation (sliced into shorter videos) with Free ipSpace.net Subscription.

Tom Ammon sent me his thoughts on choosing the right level of abstraction in your network automation solution as a response to my What Is Intent-Based Networking blog post, and allowed me to publish them on ipspace.net.

I totally agree with your what vs how example with OSPF. I work on a NOS team where if we wanted, we could say, instead of “run OSPF on these links”, do this:

I wrote dozens of blog posts debunking disaster recovery fairy tales (mostly of the long-distance vMotion and stretched clusters variety) over the years. They are collected and sorted (and polished a bit) in the new Disaster Recovery Resources page. Hope you’ll find them useful.

I attended ITNOG 7 last week, and thoroughly enjoyed a full day of interesting presentations, including how do you run Internet services in a war zone by Elena Lutsenko and Milko Ilari.

The morning was focused primarily on BGP:

containerlab release 0.41.0 that came out a few days ago changed a few topology attributes with no backward compatibility, breaking netlab for anyone doing a new installation. The only way out of that conundrum was to push out a new netlab release that uses the new attributes and requires containerlab release 0.41.0 (more about that in a minute).

On a more positive note, netlab release 1.5.3 brings a few interesting features, including:

• Support for public libvirt networks that can be used to connect your labs to the outside world, and reuse of existing libvirt networks
• ‘unknown’ device type that can be used to deploy devices not yet supported by netlab
• MPLS/VPN support on Nokia SR-OS

Roman Dodin wrote an article describing Nokia’s Ansible collection for SR Linux. Although I don’t use SR Linux (even though it was the first container supported by netlab ;), it was still very interesting to read about the design tradeoffs they had to make:

Nicola Modena had an interesting presentation describing how you can use BGP FlowSpec for traffic steering and service insertion during the recent ITNOG 7 event (more about the event in a few days).

One of the slides explained how to use three different aspects of BGP (FlowSpec, MPLS/VPN and multipathing), prompting me to claim the presentation title should be “BGP is the answer, what was the question?” 😉 Hope you’ll enjoy the PDF version of the presentation as much as we did the live one.

Ready for more Kubernetes details? How about Container Networking Interface (CNI) described by Stuart Charlton as part of Kubernetes Networking Deep Dive webinar?

Notes:

• You REALLY SHOULD watch Kubernetes SDN architecture and Sample Kubernetes SDN Implementations videos first
• The video (and a large portion of Kubernetes Networking Deep Dive webinar) is available with Free ipSpace.net Subscription.

With the widespread deployment of Ethernet-over-something technologies, it became possible to build MLAG clusters without a physical peer link, replacing it with a virtual link across the core fabric. Avaya was one of the first vendors to implement virtual peer links with Provider Backbone Bridging (PBB) transport, and some data center switching vendors (example: Cisco) offer similar functionality with VXLAN transport.

I got this comment on one of my ChatGPT-related posts:

It does save time for things like converting output to YAML (I do not feed it proprietary information), or have it write scripts in various languages, converting configs from one vendor to another, although often they are not complete or correct they save time so regardless of what we think of it, it is an efficiency multiplier.

I received similar feedback several times, but found that the real answer (as is too often the case) is It Depends.